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Steve gets straight up squirrely the first time Eddie hops up on the bathroom counter after he’s done brushing his teeth. “You need the bathroom?” Steve asks skeptically, still standing at the sink, dental floss dangling from his finger.
“Yeah Steve, I wanna piss in your sink.” Eddie answers flippantly, knocks his heels against the cabinet doors under the sink.
Steve rolls his eyes, goes back to flossing his pearly whites like the family dentist might be waiting in his bedroom to inspect his work. Eddie likes the fastidious way Steve goes about this evening routine, respects it as a fellow guy who hasn’t yet cracked getting ready in the morning in under twenty minutes.
Still, Steve keeps shooting little glances Eddie’s way, expression somewhere between suspicious and surprised. Which, you know, rude. Eddie hasn’t exactly been playing hard to get these last couple of weeks or anything, so there’s no reason for Steve to be acting like Eddie’s up to something now.
“There something I should know?” Steve says finally, pivoting his body towards Eddie, hip leaning against the powder blue countertop.
“Definitely,” springs the immediate smartass response straight out of Eddie’s mouth, accompanied by a teasing grin, because Eddie knows better than to throw stones in glass houses. Steve’s gotten it in his head that Eddie’s smart because he hangs around Henderson and his other children who are all freaky little geniuses, but the truth is that between the two of them, Steve managed to graduate on his first attempt. (“I only pulled Cs ‘cause I wouldn’t have been able to play if I dropped any lower. And those were definitely pity grades. You, like, read and shit.” “Sure but it’s not like Hawkins High ever asked me about Frodo’s thematic journey. They wanted me to know geometry. Which I don’t.”)
A fleeting panicked look flicks across Steve’s face, so Eddie leans forward, smacks a minty kiss against his cheek. “Relax, you look like I’m about to tell you I’m pregnant.” Eddie jokes, leaning back on his hands before adding, “Which I’m not by the way. You can rest easy.”
Steve squints, unconvinced. “Sorry. People tend to drop all kinds of truth bombs on me in bathrooms.”
Eddie can’t imagine what that means. He wonders if it has anything to do with Steve’s rough and tumble introduction to the world of secret government lab experiments run amok. There are so many gaps in the stories he’s heard about everything that happened before he ever fell into the story. Someday, Eddie thinks, he’s going to get everyone to write down their part of the story from fucked up beginning to the bitter end, sit and read it all in the hopes of making sense of what it is that happened to him and around him in March of 1986. The thought appears and disappears in a blink, floats away to wherever these types of ideas go, sure to reappear the next time the inspiration strikes.
Eddie tilts his head. “You’ve really lived a wild and interesting life, Steve Harrington.”
Steve’s whole face speaks volumes, his eyebrows rising and the corner of his mouth tips upward, apparently pleased by the comment. Still, he flicks Eddie hard in the kneecap with his pointer finger, a powerful concentrated thwack that cuts right through Eddie’s borrowed sweatpants.
“Oh yeah, I’m the life of the party.” Steve mumbles, goes to grab a bar of soap, entirely separate from the liquid soap dispenser that sits next to the sink tap and pauses.
“Are you really just going to sit there? Watching me?” Steve asks. He doesn’t sound annoyed though, not like he gets when Eddie and Dustin hog the television in the living room or when Robin vetoes his movie pick, again. Instead, there’s something nervy to Steve’s eyes, like when Henderson tells him off for asking a question with an “obvious” answer.
“I finished my book.” Eddie says with a shrug, “Besides, I just want in on your beauty secrets. Henderson swears by them. What are you up to in here Harrington?” He nearly makes a joke about bathing in virgins’ blood but it’s less funny after you’ve seen a guy actually drenched in blood, most of it his own.
Eddie bites the inside of his cheek. He grins big instead.
Steve shakes his head, ears faintly pink under the spherical light fixtures mounted over the mirror at the sink.
“Listen, not all of us can just splash water on our faces and have perfect skin.” He says primly, finally takes up the bar of translucent green soap.
“I haven’t made up my mind about whether or not that’s a creepy thing to tell someone.” Eddie replies, looking over his shoulder to glance at himself in the mirror. Perfect is the last word he would use to describe any part of himself, not before and certainly not now, considering the giant scar on the left side of his face, curving over his jawbone and up his cheek. He’s not even thinking about all the other scars under his clothes.
“There’s vague Leatherface energy to it, is all I’m saying.”
Steve snorts, “I told you and Robin that movie was fucked up.” And it was.
Steve turns on the hot water tap, rubs the soap over his palm under the running water until a lather builds up. It lets off a mild herbal smell, sort of minty, immediately pings in Eddie’s head as the scent he catches whiffs of from time to time when he sniffs along Steve’s jawline in bed. He’d sort of thought it was remnants of his mouthwash.
Eddie still has a vague memory of someone wiping his limbs down with a lukewarm washcloth, remembers Wayne washing his hair in the little sink in the bathroom attached to Eddie’s hospital room, parting it in sections so he could squeeze the extra water out of it, running a wide tooth comb through it from the ends up to the roots until it was without tangles. Eddie’s pretty sure Wayne knew it wasn’t sink water on his face by the time he was done, his eyes running over as the full blunt-force of Spring Break rammed into him all over again while Wayne silently worked.
“You just showered. Why are you washing your face again?” Eddie points out, feeling the quiet in the bathroom a little too heavily on his shoulders. Is it weird to be here for this? Is it weird to want to be near Steve even when all he’s doing is washing his face? Probably. But Steve sometimes sits and watches Eddie dick around on his guitar for no reason, or like, will hang out with him even when Eddie’s buried in his notes for a future game session.
That’s kind of how this whole thing between them got started back in the late spring. Back when Eddie was skittish and felt like all his insides were still hanging out of him even under all the stitches and bandages the doctors had used. Steve was someone easy to be with, constant and seemingly unflappable, easy company when Eddie didn’t want to be alone, never asking questions Eddie didn’t want to answer, seemingly content to waste hours sitting with Eddie—in his hospital room, in the trailer, in the middle of the woods when he finally felt brave enough to venture that far. Steve was just there.
And now Eddie gets to be here, in Steve’s too big house, in his bedroom, his bathroom, peeking into these spaces where Steve feels at ease enough to be a version of himself he doesn’t get to be outside.
Out in the world Steve is a guy who does stupid shit like dive into monster-filled dark waters or take an axe to a murder’s face. But in here Steve’s the guy who brushes Eddie’s hair after he washes it the nights they spend together. It’s become the sort of thing Eddie looks forward to, something warm in his stomach that comes from knowing that Steve will sit behind him on the bed and brush his hair, whether they’re arguing about which movie they should watch or bemoaning the latest asshole thing Henderson said.
“Because I didn’t wash my face in the shower.” Steve replies calmly, like when he’s telling Lucas something about making a basket from the n-zone or whatever.
It seems counter intuitive to not wash your face when you’re already doing everything else in the shower, but Steve’s also the kind of person who owns shampoo and conditioner, so Eddie doesn’t poke at that logic gap too hard.
Eddie settles in with his hands braced on the counter under him, watches Steve massage soap into his cheeks and forehead vigorously. “Dude you’re going to rub off your beauty marks.” Eddie says a little worriedly, because he has a thing for those funky little dots that live on Steve’s skin.
“Believe me the moles aren’t going anywhere.” Steve mumbles through his hands, eyes clenches closed now that he’s got soap all over his face.
“Well, good. ” Eddie’s glad Steve can’t see him right now as heat climbs up his neck. ’Cause I like them where they are. He doesn’t tack on, swinging his legs a little, the cabinet door thudding under his heels.
Somedays it feels like Steve and him are doing this all out of order. They went from strangers to accomplices in record time, then from teammates to friends—with a brief pit stop in accessories to crime—and then they were something else, something that bypassed anything like any friendship Eddie’s ever known. And now. They’re this.
Boyfriends Buckley teases them, and that’s true, sure. Eddie wants to hold Steve’s hand and make out with him in the back row of the auditorium at the movies and, like, make him a dozen mix tapes with all the best love songs ever put to magnetic tape. But there’s another part of him, a part that exists deep inside his chest cavity, a part that wants to spend every single minute of every day with Steve, that wants to do ridiculous shit like ask him about what he dreams of for the future and spend time with Steve while he’s awake and while they sleep, that looks forward to those moments when he comes awake in the middle of the night and reaches out and finds Steve right beside him.
Eddie is twenty years old and feels ancient in so many ways he never expected, not least of which is this, the feeling he gets when he looks at Steve and sees a whole lifetime ahead of him.
It's a scary feeling to carry. And definitely not the sort of thing you tell a guy in a bathroom.
He watches Steve bend over the sink and rinse his face with water from the cold tap. “Can you pass me that towel?” Steve says, pointing at one of the hand towels hanging from a hook by the sink without looking up.
“What’s the magic word, Stevie?” Eddie jokes, twisting so he can grab the towel in question and place it in Steve’s waiting hand.
“Dick?”
“Depends on the context.” Eddie answers, pleased by Steve’s little chuckle as he pats his face dry.
Steve smiles shyly as he opens up the medicine cabinet, reaches for a squat white jar with a green lid. He covers the label before Eddie can get a good look at it, but he definitely recognizes it from the drug store. Oh, Eddie thinks, leaning forward a little bit as Steve dabs small amounts of the thick white lotion on his cheeks and chin and nose, inhales the crisp clean smell that sometimes clings to Steve’s skin in the mornings and at night, when he comes to bed after Eddie’s already dozed off.
“That smells nice.” Eddie says, because there’s no point in denying it.
“Yeah.” Steve agrees, oddly quiet as he begins to use his fingertips to rub the lotion in, spreads it out in a thin glossy layer. “My mom, she, uh, she turned me on to this stuff when I started swimming. The pool really dried out my skin, y’know. It was getting pretty, uh, bad. She said that her mom had sworn by this and well, I—I still use it. As you can see.” Steve’s cheeks are rosy and his nose faintly pink though it’s hard to say if it’s from what he’s just shared or from the constant chafing of his hands over his face. "I used to get shit from the guys in the locker room. Especially after, y'know, everything went down." Steve shrugs, the single motion referencing everything that caused whatever the hell it was that toppled Steve Harrington from the top of the social hierarchy at Hawkins High. One of those unsolved mysteries that Eddie's going to need Steve to write out for him in full someday.
“If it ain’t broke.” Eddie offers lamely, watching Steve as he runs his palms down over his neck, sweeping lotion over the scar still faintly visible around his throat.
“Can I have some?” Eddie asks, feeling shy himself, and Steve, who’s lost some of that caginess from before, nods, steps between Eddie’s spread knees until he’s got no choice but to open them wider, let Steve come right up against the counter.
His hands are warm, slippery with left over lotion—it’s thick alright, even though there can’t be that much left over on Steve’s hands—and Steve starts by sweeping his thumbs over Eddie’s cheeks, then lightly under his eyes. He drags his middle and pointer fingers over Eddie’s jaw, kneading gently at the hinge of his jawbone and the muscles there, trailing carefully over Eddie’s scar before both of Steve’s thumbs meet side by side on Eddie’s chin, the ball of his thumb pressing just barely against his bottom lip. Steve only uses his left hand to massage down Eddie’s neck, his thumb rubbing up and down on the right side, his pinkie disappearing under the collar of Eddie’s t-shirt for a moment, resting against his collarbone. Everything smells powdery and soft.
Eddie feels soft too, not fragile, but delicate, like a pane of stained glass, pieced together to capture something as fleeting as ray of light. It's such a ridiculous feeling he wants to laugh, happy and overwhelmed by the enormity of it. He needs to put it somewhere else before his ribs crack open under the force of it.
Steve’s mouth is soft under Eddie’s when he leans forward, Steve’s thumb still pressing against the column of Eddie’s neck, Eddie’s knees coming to a gentle close against Steve’s hips. There’s a slightly bitter mineral taste on the tip of Eddie’s tongue when he licks at Steve’s bottom lip, but Steve’s skin is soft against Eddie’s, as soft as the sigh Steve exhales when Eddie’s hand comes to rest against the small of Steve’s back.
“I do have something to tell you.” Eddie declares when he pulls back, cringing slightly at the aftertaste of cold cream in his mouth. Steve’s eyebrows crease, a hint of confusion creeping back into his face before Eddie says, “You’re really pretty.” He cracks a grin but the damage is done, his whole heart doing that crazy magic trick where it feels like it’s blossoming like a flower in the spring. The sickening truth is that Eddie’s gone on this guy, head-over-heels in a topsy-turvy way that poets and philosophers write about ad nauseum.
Steve’s mouth pinches, twists, his eyes bright when Eddie wraps both his arms around his waist and keeps him close. He laughs, “Okay Romeo, let’s get to bed.” His hands are light at Eddie’s shoulders.
“No Steve, I mean it, I would proudly wear your face.”
Steve groans, palm smacking lightly against the center of Eddie’s forehead, pushing him back.
“Shut up or you’re sleeping on the couch, Munson.” Steve extracts himself from Eddie’s arms and starts off towards his bedroom.
“Steve, you’d wear my face, right?” Eddie calls after him, jumping off the counter, “Steve? You would, right? Steve?”
Eddie walks into the bedroom and is immediately hit in the face by a pillow.