'complete me, mistreat me, want you to be bad' by mathgoat on ao3
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They each had a key to each other's apartment and Richie should have known this would come around to bite him in the ass one of these days.
(Literally.)
He'd grown an elaborate collection of notebooks over the years, first whatever shitty exercise books he could find at the dollar store in middle school, then upgrading to proper sketchbooks in high school when he started taking art electives, and eventually he had to buy (from IKEA, and let Eddie and Ben build) a massive shelf for all his damn notebooks because, yes, he was a notebook hoarder, so sue him. He studied art of various kinds in college and after his multitude of identical books and dorming with Eddie nearly ended up with his embarrassingly horny sketches being discovered, Richie learned to keep his shit labelled.
As in, each black sketchbook had a piece of masking tape on the front with a red sharpie title so he didn't accidentally take his Spaghetti's Slut book to his anatomy class again. (Luckily nobody in that class knew Eddie so having his hands and thighs drawn over and over again just looked like Richie was really dedicated to his work when he was really just a lovestruck pervert.)
(He really didn't like thinking of himself in that way, but then he'd gone and drawn the lower half of his own face with Eddie's hand around his throat and the words good boy across his own full lips and, okay, yeah, he was a little bit of a creep sometimes.)
(At least he'd never seriously considered drawing fantasy-Eddie's dick.)
Sometimes Richie was certain he'd never grown out of his middle school crush tendencies, especially times like this when he was lying on his stomach on his bed, doodling in said sketchbook various combinations of his own name mixed with his best friend's like a teenage girl. It was hard, Richie felt, to have been so helplessly in love with someone for over a decade and not have them know, not be able to show his feelings because there was no way in hell Eddie liked him back, no matter how many tall, smart, funny boyfriends he had. Richie was just seeing signs where there were none, on account of his shitty eyesight, of course. But god, how he wanted to run his hands across Eddie's chest, grip his biceps and kiss his cheeks and appreciate everything that he was up close and in real life instead of relying on his memory of the times he'd seen him half-naked coming out of the showers at college or lazing around Richie's apartment in those tiny little shorts that Richie's dick was always so traitorously interested in.
He tapped his pencil against the page.
Richie Kaspbrak
Eddie Tozier
Richie Kaspbrak-Tozier
Tozier-Kaspbrak
He honestly thought they all sounded as good as each other.
Not that it mattered.
God, he had to stop this. He had to get over Eddie already. For fuck's sake, it'd been... nearly fourteen years. He'd been in love with his best friend for fourteen years. He was twenty-five years old, three of their friends were married, two of them to each other, and here Richie was, pining after his middle school crush like a teenage idiot.
