❦♰❀ reddie smut ☿✿☆

97. take it slow, and it'll work itself out fine

by: spunknbite

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The first time they kissed — Eddie sleepy from the morphine, half convinced Richie was some sort of ecstatic, death-throes-induced hallucination — he'd thought in an opioid daze I like that you're so much bigger than me.

He liked that he had to lean up to meet him as Richie hovered over the hospital bed from the chair he'd been parked in for the better part of a week (although Eddie couldn't have said at the time that it had been a week; or that Richie had only left the hospital when Mike had manhandled him out, insisting he needed a shower and rest in an actual bed and not the row of pushed-together chairs he'd stolen from the ICU waiting room; or that after being frogmarched back to the hotel, jittery that Bill wouldn't text if Eddie's blood pressure dropped again, Richie took a barely-adequate shower before skipping the nap entirely and returning back to his bedside; Eddie didn't know any of that, only that every time he briefly woke up, the world around him oscillating and out-of-focus, the sole thing he was certain of was the Richie was next to him).

He liked that as he started to tilt up to kiss him, Richie had stooped down in a kind of sheltering embrace so that Eddie wouldn't jostle the staples keeping his chest together. Protective, almost. Hands so much larger than his own had cupped his face, and Eddie had thought I like that you're so much bigger than me, and then, it feels safe here as days-old scruff rubbed against his cheek.

It wasn't just that Richie was bigger than he was. He was broader, sturdier, solid. There was a reassurance in his build, a promise. A promise of what? Eddie hadn't known, but he had believed in it, whatever it was.

Richie grew up, he thought, not for the first time since returning to Derry. Pronounced shoulders and deltoids atop deceptively muscular arms — a natural build because Eddie very much doubted Richie was hitting the gym with any regularity — and so much fucking hair everywhere. Up his arms and across his chest, peeking out from the haggard collar of an old t-shirt; over the backs of his hands and across his knuckles; sticking out in wires on his chin and cheeks.

The last time he'd seen Richie before all of this, he'd been all gangly legs and sinew. Long limbs the product of a stretched-out, growth spurt that his weight hadn't caught up to. Knobby knees, a gait that was still young despite being already over six feet. And even though only days before coming back to Derry Eddie wouldn't have been able to spot Richie in a crowd, his recognition at the Jade had been immediate. It's you, he'd thought, you grew the hell up. He was borderline uncanny now, a little jarring; Richie inhabiting this grown-ass man's body. The same stupid jokes and dumb voices and telling eyes, but now radiating a sort of authority that his size and age gifted.

(And Christ, Eddie wanted to kiss him because of it; because of the hard angles of his shoulders in contrast with the soft curves of his stomach under his t-shirt; because of his blunted, bitten nails; because of the sharp bob of his Adam's apple every time he swallowed; because Eddie liked the image of having to arch forward on his toes to reach his mouth; because of the inherent masculinity of him, and that was a thought Eddie needed to sit with.)

But morphine-musings were short-lived.

When Eddie slipped back under, too soon after the first kiss that started everything, it was to the feeling of Richie's splayed fingers slotted between his own, covering the expanse of his hand with ease.

*

The second time they kissed — weeks later, Richie's arm around Eddie's shoulder, a hand steadying him as he helped Eddie sit up in bed for a glass of water — Eddie had looked over and saw the same eyes he recognized from childhood, their concern magnified behind over-sized lenses, and that had been enough to make him think I should have been kissing you all this time, so he neglected the water in favor of Richie's mouth, his dry lips insistent as Richie threaded fingers through Eddie's bed-mussed hair.