Opposite Ends

Eddie | March 1986

I didn't walk around Hawkins with the intention of having my guard up all the time against almost everyone, it had just happened. When the entitled, judgemental residents of the town had taken one look at my ripped jeans, listened to the metal music blasting from my van and watched the fantasy game that my DnD club played that they deemed as 'satanic', and decided that I wasn't worth more than the dirt beneath their shoes, it hadn't exactly shaped me into a model citizen.

But the feeling of being an outcast my entire life had sat fine with me; I had no interest in anyone in the small town I'd grown up in. They were all carbon copies of their parents, and their parents before them, there wasn't anyone worth being interested in.

Until she came along.

Henderson had strutted into my life like I didn't have a choice, knocking down every single solid wall I'd spent years building up like they were made of feathers, even before she turned them into dust with each glance of her bright eyes and a hint of her sweet smile that she threw in my direction, she had been unconsciously destroying them with every death stare and exasperated sigh, breaking me down with every addictive movement of her.

She was meant for me, every hate filled eyeroll and love filled smile was ingrained on my soul in marks that would last a lifetime.

I'd never stood a chance.

I never thought I would find myself completely and utterly consumed by another until I found her, or perhaps it was the other way around and she'd found – no saved - me.

She'd taken my hand and led me out of the darkness of my own corruption and showed me that, whatever our souls are made of, however they were shaped from the loud, hurtful world around us...

...hers and mine were the same, broken halves of the same blooming whole.

I'd loved her from the moment I'd met her, I just hadn't known it yet.

And now I was never going to be able to tell her.

_________________________

In the three months since running into her at the Hideout, when we had both been trying to drown our sorrows over each other, we'd spent almost every day inseparable from each other. There had been a regular post-school afternoon once at my trailer when I had almost told her I loved her, and then I had been dying to tell her every day since.

"You're an idiot Eddie Munson." She laughed, smacking her hands against my bare chest as I nestled into the crook of her neck, tickling her through the thin sheets twisted between us.

"Unfortunately for you, I'm your idiot." She wriggled under my arms as I found her sweet spot, making her beg for mercy as I rolled over and pulled her on top of me. The setting sun that shone through my bedroom window sparkled magnificently in her hair, bringing out vibrant colours that weren't usually there. The glittering sunlight brightened around her silhouette as a light breeze ruffled the stray whispers of hair falling into her face, furthering my suspicion that she was an angle.

As she laid naked, pressed against me, she certainly had the angelic look to pull it off.

"And I am entirely okay with that." Resting her chin forward on my chest so that I had to tuck mine to still stare into her eyes, she pouted attractively.

"How did we get here?" I breathed into the warm air, my thoughts falling back to us in our first Calculus class at the beginning of my third and her first senior year. "I used to hate you; you know." I couldn't ever remember or even fathom myself feeling any type of way that wasn't absolute reverence towards the perfect creature in my hands.