I STILL LOVE YOU

Chapter 2~I'm Begging You to Keep on Haunting Me

( RICHIE POV )

      Not a day went by where Richie didn't regret leaving his best friends the way he did.

      He didn't even mention to his friends that he was running away. He just got up and left.

      He was always a shitty friend, now that he thought about it.

      But he had been so depressed the last couple years. The neglect he was suffering from his parents didn't help and it felt like his best friends didn't even notice that he was drowning in self-loathing.

      He was that good at hiding his pain behind his inappropriate jokes.

      He was crude and loud because he was just screaming for someone to notice him. To stop being invisible. Someone nearly did.

      Eddie Kaspbrak. Eds. Eddie Spaghetti. Nicknames Eddie absolutely hated but Richie knew he liked them deep down.

      God, Richie loved him. He did. But he was so damn terrified of falling in love, especially with his best friend, that he kept it to himself. He bottled up his emotions and got the fuck out of Derry.

      He often found himself thinking of Eddie. Everyday. How he constantly screamed at him when he was being gross or rambled on and on about how he was going to get a disease because he had split his lip open and didn't do anything about it. Even when Eddie would smack the glasses off Richie's face with his foot while resting on the hammock, he still missed him.

      Richie never stopped loving Eddie. Even when Marissa came around.

      Marissa Lopez, a woman he loved to call "The Devil Incarnated." She wasn't the best, absolutely not. He didn't love her either. But she got pregnant and he would be damned if he didn't get to meet his child.

      He loved Edith the second he held her. It wasn't just the fact that he named her after the man he loved, but there was this tie that bonded him together the moment he looked in her green eyes.

      Richie was going to spoil that little girl rotten.

      It wasn't easy, of course not. Waking up multiple times in the middle of the night whenever Edith cried, but he wouldn't change it for the world.

      He wished Marissa felt that way too.

      She couldn't seem to connect to Edith the way Richie did. Her own daughter, the child she carried for nine months.

      As his daughter grew older, even she tried to be there for her mother. But Marissa got stressed so easily and annoyed, often sending her to play by herself in her room.

      They fought so much because of this. Edith would sometimes wake in the middle of the night to them arguing and would hide herself in the bathroom. Richie's heart broke whenever she did this, coaxing her out and holding her, reassuring her that everything was okay.

      He didn't want his baby girl growing up the way he did, with parents that didn't give a shit. Her mother might not care, but damnit, he did. And he was going to make sure she knew it.

      And despite how much Richie tried to shield her from the fact that her mother wasn't even trying to be a mom to her, the truth came out eventually.

      He had left for work at studio for a radio show he had been doing over the last year. He said goodbye to Marissa, kissed his four year old—constantly reminding him that she was turning five in three months—daughter's cheek and left.