𝒎𝒂𝒚𝒃𝒆 • 𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒅𝒊𝒆

* pebbles and glitter *

A candle flame quivered under the weight of a sigh. Shadows danced across a near-blank page. A pen tapped mindlessly against a chin. A young man closed his eyes, ran a hand through curly hair, dropped a pen onto a table.

The final project for Richie's playwriting class had been assigned a few weeks previously. The students had been given two months to write a sixty to ninety page stage play. There was no prompt, no required topic, no quotes that needed to be integrated. The sole expectation: the play was to be done in a genre they hadn't yet written for this class.

That was a problem. Richie had been writing screenplays, scripts and stage plays for as long as he could remember, and he'd never had any difficulty - but he wrote comedy. He always had. He had no idea how to write anything else. He rarely watched anything but comedy either, unless it was some horror movie or romantic drama with Bev that he only paid half attention to, so he didn't know where even to begin . What kind of plot should a non-comedic play have? What kind of dialogue? He had, more or less, no fucking clue.

He'd started and scrapped about a million ideas thus far, each with a different genre. He'd tried horror. He'd tried mystery. He'd tried tragedy. He'd even tried romance, his least favourite genre by far. But nothing seemed to stick. He could never get more than ten lines in before he decided he sounded like an absolute twat, and he had no idea what should happen next, and this was a stupid genre anyway, and he may as well just start over. The waste basket beside his desk, normally nearly empty, was overflowing with torn and crumpled notebook papers. His pens were all almost out of ink, but he'd yet to make any headway. With the deadline drawing nearer and the blank page of death glaring menacingly every time he opened his notebook, Richie was starting to get a little worried. Of course, this only made his brain even more void of ideas. Fucking writer's block.

Another sigh evoked more shadows. The flame trembled, flickered, died. Richie closed his notebook.

It was almost time to meet Eddie anyway.

They hadn't discussed a set time to meet. In fact, their late-night encounters themselves weren't strictly decided upon. Over the last couple of weeks it had simply become routine, an unspoken agreement. Richie would leave his apartment between one and four in the morning and wait under the lamp. Eddie would meet him before ten minutes had passed and together they would walk. If Richie hadn't left by four, Eddie knew not to expect him. If Eddie took longer than ten minutes to come down, Richie knew not to wait up. They never knocked on one another's door to ask if they were on for tonight. They never wondered aloud where they should go, or what time they would be home. They didn't talk about these things. They simply understood. .

***

Door opening, door closing. Keys jingling, lock clicking. Footsteps.

Eddie's heart did the excited little flip he'd come to associate with Richie. He wasn't sure why he liked him so much - Richie talked too much and his jokes weren't funny and he was, quite frankly, annoying. But he was nice . Being around him was nice. He was like cold hands wrapped around a warm mug; like bike rides with Bill in the summertime; like raindrops sliding down a foggy window. He was warm. Familiar. Eddie felt like he'd known him for years rather than weeks. It was strange. It was nice.

He was nice.

Eddie waited the three minutes and twenty eight seconds until he saw Richie standing under the streetlamp, then pulled on his coat and went out to meet him. He tried, as he descended the stairs, to school his face into a more neutral expression.