If I Stare Too Long

Chapter 3: Hold Tight (Gotta Stay Close By Me)

Billy knows this place.

He remembers the smell, the cloying musty dampness in the air.

As he walks, his boots meet puddles on the ground. They splash stale water into the frayed cuffs of his jeans. Somewhere off to his left, a pipe drips. Loud and echoing.

Something skitters through the warehouse. Too big to be a cockroach. Too frequent to just be one living thing.

Billy's been here before. He knows this place.

His heart pounds in his chest, lungs doing their damndest to claw their way up toward his throat. He clenches his fist until his fingernails dig into his palms. It hurts. But not as bad as what he knows is coming.

Before he can slip fully into the nightmare, something wet and cold smacks him right in the face—he startles upward, choking, coughing, pulling at whatever landed on him.

"Morning, sleeping beauty," Eddie Munson says to him.

He's shirtless and dripping wet, standing over Billy like a statue, silhouetted by the blue, blue sky.

In Billy's hands is Eddie's dripping tee shirt. It smells like the lake. Billy's fingers are clenched hard enough to wring the wet straight out of it. Billy's heart is still racing.

"Ain't that a familiar look," Eddie says, head tilting a bit, long hair damp and curling, scars almost as bad as Billy's scattered across the pale skin of his chest and stomach.

Eyes too dark. Too knowing.

Billy looks away first.

He can't have dozed off for long. The sun is still high in the sky, barely moved at all when Billy squints up at it. He feels hot– tacky to the touch– and he realizes he'd broken into a cold sweat despite the summer heat.

"His majesty stole the tunes," Eddie says, sitting down next to him in wet jeans, gaze keen when Billy shifts away; he can hear some 60's rock band playing, but Steve managed to get the radio out to that floating dock, so it sounds tinny and far away. "He is an admittedly– and, might I add, unfairly– good swimmer."

Billy blinks a few times when he looks over at Eddie's face– expression guileless and smile friendly. Completely bypassing whatever nightmare Billy had evidently and obviously been falling into despite clearly noticing.

"I'm serious," Eddie adds, holding up an arm over his head and waving it around. "He held the radio over his head and still swam faster than me."

Billy wants to laugh, he does—the mental image of that is just too perfect, too believable. Like a movie playing out in Billy's head. But the laugh gets caught somewhere in his overcrowded throat.

"Is there more beer?" Billy asks instead. He lets the shirt drop somewhere between his knees with a soggy thump. "Or did Harrington take that too?"

He looks over at Eddie and grins.

"Sorry: Stevie," Billy corrects himself, putting on the tone that Eddie uses.

Eddie hardly looks offended. Arches a brow and grins real wide, leaning back on his hands as holds Billy's stare.

"Nah," he says, gesturing with a jerk of his chin toward the water, toward the floating dock where Steve Harrington lays sprawled in the sun. "Ditched everything but the tunes."

He's not exactly wrong. When Billy looks, he mostly sees skin. There's the dark scrap of what must be his underwear, his sunglasses, and that shiny red radio. Down by the waterline, his wet clothes lay discarded.