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The lights in Richie's room were dimmed so that his parents didn't see him and Eddie awake. If either of them had any social knowledge whatsoever, they would realize that his parents definitely realized, they just didn't care.
Still, their hushed whispers carried across the sparse room. Eddie and Richie were pretty much each other's only friends, and their weekly sleepovers had gotten increasingly less violent and increasingly more horny.
Tonight's event was calling up their crushes. Richie went first. The phone rung for nearly 40 seconds, before a groggy Samantha Wiggins picked up the phone.
"Who is this and what do you want?"
"Hello, baby!" Richie raised his eyebrows at Eddie, who gave a halfhearted smile back. He had never been as enthusiastic about girls, especially when Richie was talking to them and not him.
"Oh god. It's you." Richie made a lewd gesture with his hips, and Eddie rolled his eyes. In the dark, it wasn't visible, but it was hard not to see anyway. "What do you want, Richard?" Samantha Wiggins' voice was clearly barely holding back a barrage of insults. The only reason she wasn't is that his best friend was the only one in the school willing to punch a girl.
"Well... I just wanted to see how my blossoming flower is doing." This was clearly too much for Eddie, who gestured taking a piss, and slipped out of the room.
"What the fuck." The girl's voice was deadpan. "Don't call me." She hung up.
"God, Eddie, these birds. Am I right?" Richie clearly had missed Eddie's poor communication tactics, and spent the next 10 minutes alone in his room, wondering if Eddie would come back.
---
Eddie sat in Richie's bathtub. At his house, it was where he went to get away. In a two bedroom flat with three sisters, it wasn't exactly easy to find a relaxing environment.
He wasn't at home all that often, anyway. After he met Richie, he'd started spending more time there, until half of Richie's wardrobe was Eddie's laundry. Richie never asked about Eddie's home life. He mostly wanted to talk about girls, which was a topic that Eddie wasn't all that enthusiastic about.
So on this night, with Richie probably having passionate phone sex with the girl of his dreams in the other room, Eddie sat in his crush's bathtub and tried not to cry.
---
"Jesus, where've you been?" Richie whisper-shouted, when Eddie finally returned. He was grateful that the lights were now completely out, so that Richie couldn't see his puffy eyes and wet cheeks.
"Taking a massive shit."
"Ooh, was it a floater? Doesn't matter. It's your turn!"
"Oh." Eddie frowned. He didn't pay much attention to girls, let alone have crushes on them.
"But first I'm going to tell you how my call with Samantha went. We had passionate phone sex and she told me she loved me." Richie grinned, hiding a sheepish look behind his wavering blue eyes.
"Not a surprise." Eddie knew Richie was lying. But Eddie also knew that Richie may not entirely realize he was lying. And he didn't really know what to do with that.
"Anyway. Go ahead! Call your crush!"
"Well, I... Um... You see..."
"Yes?" Richie turned to him inquisitively. The clouds outside shifted just slightly, so that a beam of moonlight shined directly on Richie's face. Eddie's insides compressed into the size of a kidney bean, and then exploded into a whole galaxy of gay anxiety.
"I also. Um. Like Samantha."
"Well, matey, you're too late! You've missed the train! And I don't do threesomes unless it's two women." He raised an eyebrow. Eddie hated that he found this disgusting whore cute.
Pressure was building up inside of Eddie's chest, and after a few minutes of awkward silence, it finally bubbled out in the form of a sob.
Richie immediately turned to him. "Edward? What's wrong, Eddie? Oh, boy, I'm sorry. It's not my fault I'm so amazingly attractive to every chick ever."
What left did he have to lose? Besides his best friend, of course. But what use was a best friend if you couldn't tell him your best secret?
"I'll call my crush now." Eddie choked down tears.
"I thought-"
"Just shut up. For once in your life, shut up."
Richie shut up. After a moment of silence, the phone in the living room began to ring.
"Huh! What a crazy coincidence! Such wacky stuff happens around here. I'll go get it!" Richie announced.
Eddie, barely holding it together, put the receiver up to his ear. When he heard the click, before Richie could speak, he whispered the two words he'd been thinking for months.
"It's you."
---
Eddie had gone home after that. Before Richie could even enter his room again, Eddie's bags were packed and he had one foot out the door. It was almost another week before Eddie even looked up in class, and their weekly sleepover was out of the question. It wasn't until the tuesday two weeks after the fateful event that he even uttered Richie's name.
He would have been perfectly happy never thinking of the boy again, but something about his wispy golden hair, his obnoxious sneer, his poorly washed face, everything about him, just made it impossible for Eddie to get him out of his mind.
The first thing Eddie heard Richie say before Richie kissed him was what he'd been thinking for months.
"It's you."