Chapter Text
Even back when Eddie and Stevie were friends, Eddie had never been to her house. It was kind of understood that even if they were on a different continent, the Harringtons would never allow a boy like him to step foot inside their house. And he hadn’t - at least, not until she had started to throw parties and his services were requested by a freshman that her clique sent. Stevie had never had to get her own weed, but she remembered some low-rank jocks going to her guest bathroom and coming back with overpriced joints.
The point was that Eddie, with his chains and unwashed jeans and tattoos, looked incredibly out of place in the middle of her pristine and white living room. They were on the big couch simply because all of the other seats were white and Stevie wasn’t getting near those with food. Eddie had brought burgers and milkshakes from that diner that Stevie thought was mildly unhygienic, but she was grateful for the food anyway.
“So…”
She stirred her strawberry shake with the straw. Though she was kind of freaking out inside considering Eddie was sitting right across from her after all those years, casually eating dinner, she knew how to conceal it.
“So?” he asked through a mouthful. Ugh. She was disgusted by how not-disgusted she was.
“You’re the one that wanted to talk,” she reminded.
“Jeez, okay. No ‘Thank you for the dinner, Eddie, even if I’m richer than you could possibly dream of.’ with you, is there?”
She glared. She wasn’t the rich one, her parents were, but there was no way for him to know that. She sipped her overly-sweet shake. “Thanks for the dinner, Eddie,” she deadpanned. “You gonna tell me why you’re here now?”
He wiped his hands on his jeans.
“I’m repeating a year,” he said bitterly.” I didn’t graduate.”
“Oh. I’m… sorry?”
He shrugged, but Stevie could see the hurt in the tense way he was holding himself. Eddie had always prided himself in his intelligence, even if it didn’t really show through his schoolwork. He probably had been counting days until he could leave Hawkins, too.
“Whatever. But we’re gonna be sharing a lot of classes, and we need to clear the air about what happened in New Years. Are we still pretending that you blacked out?”
“I did!”
“No the fuck you didn’t,” he snapped. “I’ve seen you drink your weight in peach schnapps and come to school the next day with no hangover.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but realized she had no comeback. She let out an indignant huff.
“Fine. I remember that night. But if months of avoidance didn’t give it away, I don’t wanna talk about it.”
She crossed her arms. On the coffee table, their burgers were going cold and their milkshakes were sweating. Eddie seemed at the end of his rope.
“Too bad, cause you are!”
“What do you want me to say? We spent years fighting, can’t you just ignore me for one more?”
“God, you are such a brat,” he gritted out, then reached over and kissed her.
It was all clashing teeth and slick spit. His hands were braced on her thighs, his rings digging meanly into her skin. She reached up to rest her hands on his shoulders, but the moment she touched him, he pulled back as if he was burned.
They stared at each other, wide eyed. “Shit,” he said.
“What the fuck,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure what for. The entire situation, maybe.
“Shit, fuck, shit,” Eddie said, then bolted out of the living room. A moment later, she heard the front door being slammed. As she sat frozen, he started his van and drove off.
“What the fuck ?”
***
“The steering wheel isn’t going anywhere,” Robin told her from the passenger's seat. Stevie looked down to see that she was white knuckling the wheel and loosened her grip.
“Yes, thank you Robin,” she grumbled.
“You know you could have just gone to his place or called him, right? You didn’t need to wait till today.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stevie said as she finally pulled into a parking spot in the school’s parking lot. It was the first day of the fall semester, and Robin knew her well enough to guess Stevie was going to try cornering Eddie at the first chance.
“Just saying, you could have gotten it over with without all this.” Robin waved a hand at the school building as they got out of the Beemer.
Stevie knew where Robin was coming from: School had always been a source of anxiety for a band geek like her. But Stevie, despite the growing distance between her and her friends, was the queen of all these people rushing into the building for their first classes. This was her element. She flicked her thick hair over her shoulder and grabbed her backpack.
“Yeah, well, we’re here now, aren’t we? Let’s go,” she said, and started walking to class.
***
Eddie Munson was not a hard man to locate. He was, however, a hard man to catch alone. He always had some part of his group of outcasts surrounding him. By the time lunch break was almost over and he got up to leave, Stevie had had enough. She got up to follow him to wherever he was going.
She followed him from a distance as he walked to the back of the school, trying not to feel like a creep. As he walked closer to the woods, the last of the crowds petered out.
“Munson,” she called out. He jumped around at the sound of her voice.
“Jesus H. Christ! Oh - it’s you.” He seemed nervous, almost displeased at her presence. Did he still hate her that much?
“Yeah,” she said, crossing her arms, suddenly defensive. “You came over to talk, but we never got around to that.”
“Do we need to do this? You were so eager to forget about it.”
“Well, I changed my mind.”
He silently looked at her for a second before deflating. “Fucking - fine. Walk with me, we’re too exposed here.”
Stevie followed Eddie deeper into the woods.
***
By the time they climbed into the Beemer, Robin was almost visibly vibrating. She and Stevie hadn’t seen each other since lunch, and Stevie could tell she was dying to ask about it.
“So?” Robin asked the moment both of the car doors were shut. Stevie considered for a moment pretending not to know what she was asking, just to be a bitch. But she was also kind of dying to talk about it. The conversation with Eddie had been… confusing.
“He promised to forget that I tried to climb him on New Year’s if I forget he kissed me. He also said he can handle my mom. He wants to be friends again.”
Robin gave her an incredulous look. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” She started the car.
“You’re both obviously into each other though!”
“I mean…” Stevie sighed. “I think he’s hot, I have eyes. He probably had a crush on me when we were kids, so he thought he might still be into me. But honestly, Robbie, I missed him so bad. I’m not gonna risk losing him by trying a relationship, now that he’s back in my life.”
They sat quietly for a while, only the radio breaking the silence. Stevie kept driving.
“You’re amazing, you know,” Robin said unexpectedly. “People have all these ideas about you and all of them are wrong.”
Embarrassingly, Stevie had to blink a few times to not burst into tears. Her voice was only a little broken when she said “Thank you, Robs. I’m glad you’re my friend.”
“Okay, don’t get sappy on me,” Robin complained, though Stevie could feel her smiling. She lifted a hand off the wheel to give Robin’s knee an affectionate squeeze.
It was rare that things went this well in Stevie’s life. She hoped that nothing disrupted this newfound peace.
She had no idea she would be meeting Billy Hargrove the next day.