Chapter Text
1. August 2018
Money, Richie decides as his knee bounces frantically under his jacket, really makes people weird. This should not be a new conclusion. He’s been living in Los Angeles for almost three years now; there’s maybe no better place on earth to see the consequences of wealth unencumbered by sense. Still, though, the waiting room of this office puts a new spin on it. There are a lot of purposeless stainless steel panels backlit by blue-white LEDs; a lot of glass dividers emblazoned with frosted patterns that look vaguely like paint smears or maybe yoga studio logos. The overall effect is that you’re waiting to get some kind of plastic surgery invented by the CIA. It is not a place that Richie Tozier, who is quickly sweating through the only white button-down shirt he owns, would have freely chosen to spend time in.
Unfortunately, money also makes other things happen. Money, for instance, can also be exchanged for therapy. And Richie really needs to go back to therapy.
He’d even been on time for his interview, too. Stan had been genuinely impressed; he’d called the feat “Olympic.” He sounded sarcastic, but Stan always sounds sarcastic. This was the level of sarcasm that Richie knows means sincerity. But still he’d been left to cool his heels in their psychopath foyer for twenty minutes. Maybe it’s some kind of corporate power move.
Richie (9:21 a.m.)
Hey how long am I supposed to wait here before I assume they forgot abt me
Like is this normal?? Is it like a business strategy??
Staniel (9:23 a.m.)
The job isn’t important enough to warrant playing games during the interview. They’re probably just running behind.
You’ll be fine.
Richie (9:21 a.m.)
U always know how to flatter me stangela
Richie’s knee bounces even faster.
Stan was the one to get him the interview in the first place. APM’s accounting department had hired him straight out of college, and they like him enough to take his recommendation about Richie. That isn’t strange: Stan is smart, efficient, and probably really fucking good at whatever it was that Excel is supposed to do. What Richie does find strange is that Stan seems to like them back. As he’d said a few weeks earlier, “I’m definitely not saving the world, but the company’s pretty straightforward. Pay’s good. They don’t do stupid management overhauls. The health insurance isn’t perfect, but it could definitely be worse.”
Richie had sighed from the other end of Stan’s sectional. He’d been splitting time between a sticky-floored hole-in-the-wall bar that hosted a number of shitty comedians and a second, more upscale bar that did a lot of brunch. It was 3:30 p.m. and Richie smelled strongly of mimosas. He absolutely did not have health insurance.
“Ah, the insurance,” he said in a mournful sort of eastern bloc grandmother voice. “Sometimes, I like to hold an envelope close to my heart and pretend that it is news from America about my deductible. They are just silly dreams, but I am grateful to haff this dream at all.”
“That one sucks,” Stan had said blankly, flipping through the X-Files backlog to find an episode neither of them hated. “Anyway, I think they’re hiring somebody entry level right now. You should apply. You could probably get a tight ten just out of boring office shenanigans if you’re willing to bow to the man a little bit.”
Richie hmm’ed, realizing that the whole conversation had been a setup. That was Stan’s way. He cared for Richie like a velvet rope cared for a crowd, tipping him gently in different directions to keep him out of trouble. They found heart-to-hearts mutually impossible. Instead, Richie tested all of his voices on Stan first, and Stan pretended that he didn’t dedicate time to figuring out how to get Richie to the dentist.
“I guess,” Richie had said, which meant thank you.
Richie has never had an office job before. Hasn’t tried to get one since college. Most job interviews for serving or bartending are fairly to-the-point: have you ever done this before? Are you going to show up when you’re scheduled? Are you a murderer, and if so, will that become a problem for us?
They’d called him to schedule the interview on Monday. He had spent the three intervening days reading everything that every shitty entrepreneurial blog had said to be prepared for. Ten Tips for Nailing that Interview. Three Steps to a Perfect Handshake. Five Interview Questions to be Prepared For. Twenty Interview Questions to be Prepared for. A Hundred Interview Questions to be Prepared For.
Tell me about yourself, he thinks.
I’m Richie. I graduated from SUNY Purchase three years ago—don’t say barely, and don’t remind them of your major—and I’ve been in LA ever since because I’m interested in the entertainment industry.
Why are you interested in working for APM?
Well, I’m—obviously I’m not. You have my resume. You have already guessed that I’m a hack writer or a hack actor or a hack comedian (ding ding ding), and this will be a day job I will physically be at, but will never care about. I want to work here because I cannot afford to pay out of pocket for a therapist, but I also can’t afford not to see one, because as much as I want to stand on stage and be funny for a living, I also—and I hope this isn’t too personal—need to be alive to do that. Finally, of course, I regularly jerk it to the idea of knowing the number on my paycheck ahead of time.
Why should we hire you?
Because I do not expect upward mobility in this position. Because I can reach high shelves. Because Stan likes me, and that’s no small feat. Because you all seem a little uptight, and I am a perfect foil for that energy, primarily because I am so good at pretending that I am not freaking out all the time.
What’s your dream job?
Go fuck yourself.
Where would you like to be in five years?
Nowhere different because I worked here, that’s for sure.
Richie lets himself go fully dead behind the eyes then, imagining that they hired someone else yesterday and now they are watching him through the lobby’s security camera, chortling to themselves about his qualifications. He glances around to see if they even have one, then realizes he couldn’t guess what the fuck a security camera might look like if it was picked out by the same people that brought you “track lighting pointed directly at the fake succulent planters, like they want you to stare at the light reflecting off the glued-together pebbles until you’re ready to commit murder.”
Then, between his very eyes and the plants in question, there passes an ass that distracts him completely. It is small, but artfully shaped, like a bonsai tree. It is hugged by a pair of suit pants that surely indicate that the wearer has money, because no pair of pants that Richie has ever been able to afford have fit him quite like that. The ass gets its point across efficiently, and if Richie is going to be stood up by a job interview, he’s at least getting something out of the experience.
His eyes track lazily upward to the guy’s face, or what little of it he can catch as he zips past. The rest of his suit is equally flattering, waist and curve of shoulders; his dark brown hair is held in check by a zealous application of mousse, and he’s barking something into a comically oversized cell phone. That guy, Richie thought, belongs in an office like a key in an ignition. He doesn’t have crises of confidence in lobbies that look like spaceships.
Then he hangs up, and Richie tunes back in to the world at large to hear him mutter “shit, shit, shit” and drop his cell phone into his pocket like it’s a live bomb.
“—Kendra,” Richie can just barely hear the bonsai man say. “—traffic, my—supposed to be a candidate—”
Fuck, Richie thinks as the receptionist looks past Handsome Guy and points in his direction.
The guy turns to look at him then, and Richie still has the gall to be surprised by his face. It’s younger than he expected, but it’s not just that; there’s something about the worried tilt of his eyes and the slash of his mouth that makes Richie’s brain zing in response. A string plucked.
Do not get interested in the corporate wunderkind, Richie tells himself sternly. Do not decide that he is cute.
But then the guy turns back around without any acknowledgement that Richie exists, which is, humiliatingly, Richie’s type in a nutshell. He can very clearly hear the guy ask, “Well, where the fuck’s Harry, then? No, you know what, I’ll just take him back there myself.”
The guy turns, clearly fuming. Richie feels like he has a Windows screensaver bumping around in his stomach. His hand is just slightly cold when he shakes Richie’s, and by the end of a very clipped “Hi, Edward Kaspbrak,” Richie is a goner.
Not without effort, he introduces himself like a human person, and then the guy begins striding toward the door next to reception. “Follow me,” he says, without a glance behind him.
Dumbly, Richie does.
2. January 2019
“Hey Angie,” Richie calls as a little head of golden curls pops into view down the hallway.
“Hi Richie,” Angie choruses back, trailing her elegant father behind her. Adrian Mellon’s office is directly to his left, and Richie bops the intercom button to let him know that his husband and daughter are here before he flips a Tootsie roll off his desk in their direction. They’re nice people, despite the fact that Angie’s sort of a child star, playing the sweet little sister on some Freeform show about mermaids.
“Isn’t it a school day?” Richie says in mock disapproval.
“Isn’t it a work day?” she chirps back, giving him a Shirley-Temple head tilt.
Her father, Don, nods pleasantly to Richie as he shepherds her into her other father’s office.
So the job very much does not suck. Or—it does, but Richie doesn’t hate it. Not the way he’s hated every bartending/table-serving/shit-taking job he’s had over the past couple of years. He’s not getting paid more, if you look at it hourly, but he gets to sit down most of the time. He’s in much less danger of having drinks spilled on him—although, given Richie’s generally lackluster level of control over his limbs, he’s never completely out of the woods on that one.
He’s still not a hundred percent sure what the company actually does. Financial advising for talent management, or something like that? Stan explained it to him once or twice—there are the creatives, who do not have enough practical skills to run their own shit, and then there are agents, who like to believe that they have practical skills but are more like the creatives than they think, and then there is APM, who makes sure nobody goes bankrupt.
Sort of.
Richie’s part of it, though, is delightfully manageable. He sits at the desk in front of the risk department. He answers the phone. He makes sure nobody fucks up their Google Calendar. He goes to the mailroom for packages and the front door for food delivery. He forwards expense reports to accounting, which is technically not his job, but this way he gets to see what everyone uses the company cards for, and he’s nosy enough to take the trade-off.
The most important task, however, is to be an anxiety sink.
Nobody’s ever said that to him directly, but he’s pretty sure it’s why he got the job. He’d been interviewed by some vague management goon in a suit and a pleasant-looking woman named Carol, who was leaving the position to move to Washington. The suit had asked all the questions he’d been ready for, and it was okay, but not great.
Carol had withheld any remarks until the end of the interview, when she had looked keenly at Richie’s resume, then up at his face. “You’ve been working in the service industry for the past few years?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Richie answered, then cringed. Ma’am? He was a northern hick, for fuck’s sake. Where did ma’am come from? “Uh, I know it’s probably not a traditional background for this type of job, but, you know, made me a fantastic multitasker. And I’m very good with people.”
“Sure,” Carol had murmured, setting the paper down on the desk and tapping it with one frosty-pink fingernail. “Stanley Uris tells me you also do comedy.”
The suit looked a little surprised. Richie understood suddenly that Carol was by far the most powerful person in the room, and he laughed uncomfortably. “Well, you know L.A., everyone moonlights as something. And I obviously didn’t move here to model.”
Carol had given him a thoughtful glance and a half-smile, but let the joke die without dignity. “What do you do if someone heckles you?”
The clock had ticked so loudly into the boardroom that Richie wanted to rip it off the wall. “You mean, like, if I’m onstage?”
“Yes, I think so,” Carol said, leaning back in her chair. “How do you handle that?”
“Well, you know, you give it back to ‘em a little bit.” Richie wasn’t sure how honest to be. “I mean, sometimes people are genuinely mean or they’ve been overserved or something, and you just try to make a joke about it directed to the rest of the audience. But a lot of the time people are just kind of trying to participate or get a little attention or whatever, so you do some back-and-forth, make fun of them for a minute, and they’re happy.”
“Interesting,” Carol had said. “And that doesn’t throw you off?”
“Not really?” The sweat was surely through all five layers of Richie’s suit jacket by now. “I mean, no. Not anymore. It’s kind of part of the job.”
“Well, thank you for coming,” she’d said abruptly, and within seconds he’d found himself blinking into the bright sunlight on the sidewalk out front, sure that he wasn’t going to get it.
But he did.
Richie’s desk is the first and only line of defense between five very high-strung risk analysts and the world they get paid six figures to worry about. There’s Adrian to his left, who is handsome and tense in a sort of ambitious frat-boy way. In the office behind Connor is Lisa Albrecht, who wears the most expensive Fitbit they sell and has, you know, the rest of the personality that goes with that. Directly behind Richie is Harry Metcalf, the risk VP or something equally corporate-sounding, who is, to put it lightly, a complete dud. As far as Richie can tell, he does nothing, but he still constantly looks like he’s about to have a heart attack about it. Then there’s Betty Ripsom, who he might like the most out of all of them. She at least takes one of the Tootsie rolls from his desk sometimes.
And of course, there’s—well.
“I changed that flight to San Antonio,” Eddie Kaspbrak half-yells as he burns rubber out of his office door and down the hallway to the break room. Richie, having already memorized this dance from six months of experience, waits impatiently.
Sure enough, Eddie comes back around the corner within a few seconds, holding an awful-looking Whole Foods salad in one hand and a protein shake in the other. “If I take off at ten, the TSA PreCheck line will be practically as long as the regular one. And I’m not flying in anything made by Boeing if I don’t have to.”
“Totally sensible,” Richie replies in his very best customer service voice.
Here is a joke that Richie added to his set recently: I think God fucked up a little, with my sexuality. Not the gay part. I know that was on purpose because he also made me get along really well with my mom. No, I mean the big man was at his, like, celestial toolbench, holding the boner wire in one hand, and then one of the angels was like, hey, did you mean to make duck dicks look like this? And then when he turned back, he forgot where he was, and he was like “I’ll just weld this to the annoyance circuit and see what happens.” So now whenever someone, like, cuts me in line at the grocery store, I just—boi-oi-oi-oi-oing. You know? I’ll be behind the bar at 1 a.m. fucking swamped ‘cause the other bartender took shrooms earlier and is trying to teach the limes to do math or whatever, and some guy will order a mojito, which takes about a month to make, and i’ll just be furiously muddling the mint like—he makes a vaguely suggestive mortar-and-pestle motion—fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck...me? Anyway, the moral of the story is don’t heckle me because I will try to dry-hump you.
He sighs and adds a couple of lines to the sticky note on his computer desktop labeled “HRH,” grabbing a quick sideways glance at Eddie’s retreating form before his office door closes again. Knowing that there’s a stick up there doesn’t ruin the view. Unfortunately, if Richie’s being honest, Eddie’s ferocious commitment to being a pain in the ass is part of his appeal. It’s the suggestion of standards. He’s like a mean cheerleading coach or something.
On his first day, he’d walked past Richie without looking anywhere near his desk, and he’d spent two hours in his office before he seemed to notice him at all. He’d stopped in surprise and blinked once before saying, with a flat kind of disapproval, “You’re the new Carol.”
“Yes?” Richie had said. “I mean, I’m Richie. Tozier. But yeah, I’m Carol’s replacement. It’s not very convincing yet, but give me a month or two and a decent wig and you won’t be able to tell the difference.”
Eddie hadn’t laughed, hadn’t even acknowledged the joke beyond a deepening furrow between his brows. “You really go by Richie? ” he said instead.
Richie, who did not want to get fired that quickly, just smiled and nodded.
So yes, out of all five walking cases of IBS under Richie’s care, Eddie is by far the most difficult to please. It’s annoying because Richie knows that he can be charming when he tries, and goddammit, he’s been trying. If the man would just break, just do anything besides act like a human bottle of multivitamins, Richie is sure he’d stop being so obsessed with him. But he hasn’t. No matter how cheerfully Richie complies with his demands.
It’s manageable, though. The whole job is manageable.
And then all three Mellonses come bursting out of Adrian’s office.
Richie knows immediately that something has gone wrong. There aren’t any theatrics, but he can see that Angie is valiantly trying to keep her little round face from crumpling up, and Don looks like he’s made of migraines. Adrian’s usual aura of “teetering on the brink of panic” has tipped decisively toward disaster.
“What’s up, what happened?” Richie asks, eyes bouncing between all three of them to find the most collected one.
“It’s not a big deal, really, it’s just—photographers, out front,” Don says. “Which is normally fine, but—well, last week, a couple of ‘em scared the shit out of her when she was out with a friend.”
He pitches his voice low on shit, the way parents do. Angie is eleven, but Richie is reminded of exactly how little that is when the first panicky tear escapes over her right cheek. He nods tightly, picking up the phone and sandwiching it on his shoulder. “Yeah, Adrian told me about that. Uh, I think they’re probably here because Audra Levine is in the building somewhere today. Let me see about getting security for you.”
Connor has dipped back into his office to peek out the window again. “Can you go out the back?” he calls loudly.
“I guess I could, but—” Don mouths fuck behind Angie’s head. “I parked the car right across the street. There was a spot open, it didn’t seem like a big deal; I’m sorry, honey—”
“Goddammit—I mean, it’s fine, we’ll figure it out—”
Richie has just been patched through to the desk downstairs when Eddie’s door opens with a dramatic whoosh of displaced air. “What is happening out here?” he demands.
“Someone’s getting papped downstairs and we’re just trying to figure out how to get to the car,” Don explains, and Eddie huffs in disbelief.
“I think Vince downstairs can get you out the back and take you—” Richie starts to say.
“God dammit! ” Eddie interrupts, apparently unaware of the pre-teen who is now actively sobbing in their midst. “It’s, like, the middle of the day! How can the economy possibly sustain a bunch of leeches like that during the work week? It’s ridiculous, it’s like just get a—”
“Yeah, Kendra, sorry, can you say that again?” Richie says into the phone.
Somehow the tirade is now directed at Richie, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’s there: “—it’s like what happened to fuckin’ Princess Di, and we’re in L.A., of all places, every third person is famous, you know, like get a life—”
Adrian looks like he needs an inhaler; Angie’s face has gone blotchy. Richie still can’t hear the other end of the line properly. He finally covers the receiver with one hand and reaches out to snap with the other. “Hey Kaspbrak!” he hisses, and Eddie looks over in alarm. “Could you maybe not be an asshole about this one thing for five seconds? Because you are not helping!”
And miraculously, Eddie falls silent, his mouth a little o of surprise.
“Anyway, like I was saying,” Richie continues calmly. “Vince can grab Adrian’s car from the garage and bring it around back for you if you can wait, like, twenty minutes.”
“That’s fine, thanks,” Don says.
Eddie’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click, and Richie glances over. “You know what, actually, hold on,” Eddie says, and he disappears down the hallway at his customary impossibly fast clip.
Inside of two minutes, the noise from outside rises to a roar. Adrian jogs over to the window first, and his panicked wheezing starts to sound a little more like laughter.
“What?” Richie asks. When there’s no reply, he drops the phone into his shirt pocket and slips into the office behind him.
He can’t hear anything distinct from up three stories and through a double window, but he can see well enough. Eddie is red-faced, hands slicing through the air in front of the photographers, letting loose what Richie can only imagine to be a terrifying tirade. His big chihuahua eyes look ready to fall out of his skull. “That can’t be his whole plan,” Richie mutters. Paparazzi get yelled at almost constantly; they surely have infinite patience for it, even if being on the receiving end of Eddie’s rage carries less of a monetary reward than getting the same treatment from Rihanna. They look a little cowed, which is a testament to Eddie’s shit-losing capabilities, but not tempted to decamp.
Then Eddie points at what is clearly one of the photographers’ cars, a beat-up silver Honda parked diagonally in the fire lane. One of the dudes falters, stepping forward slightly, hands up.
“You can’t do anything to the car, Kaspbrak,” Adrian murmurs. “You’ll get fuckin’ sued.”
Instead of keying the door panels, though, Eddie kneels calmly next to the wheel and reaches for the valve stem. Unscrews the cap neatly. Takes, of all things, a pair of pliers from his pocket, and begins to remove the pressure pin.
The photographer stands frozen, hoping to call Eddie’s bluff.
Eddie turns over his shoulder to deliver one last line, and this time Richie can clearly read his lips: can you afford a tow truck?
He thinks he might be drooling on the window.
Sure enough, it takes about thirty seconds for the photographers to disappear down the street. The handset beeps in Richie’s pocket to alert him of a call waiting, and he picks up.
“Do you still need that car?” Kendra-from-the-front-desk asks pleasantly.
“Uh, no,” Richie says slowly. Down on the sidewalk, Eddie raises both arms to the retreating paparazzi caravan, middle fingers unfurled like the flags of a victorious army. “No, I think we got it taken care of.”
Somewhere inside the cavern of Richie’s chest, things slide around like attic boxes in an earthquake.
3. July 2019
Richie’s new therapist, Kumail, thinks the reliability of an office job is good for him. “Consistent schedule,” he says. “Nothing super high pressure. Can I call it boring?”
You could, Richie thinks. You could, because he still answers phones and emails and sits behind a desk. He is now intimately familiar with the lumbar support in his chair and how each of the little levels under the seat adjusts it. He found a dial that loosens the seatback hinge and twisted it until it let him lean back far enough to fall backwards, which drives Eddie crazy.
But it’s not as boring as he thinks Kumail imagines it to be. A strange number of people in the office are adjacent to fame: Adrian, for instance, with his actress daughter. Mike down in HR is married to Bill Denbrough—that Bill Denbrough. Richie’d run into the guy for the first time in the bathroom, which was only slightly surreal. He was a lot handsomer than you’d expect a novelist to be. And he was short . He’d also seen red-carpet photos of Lisa Albrecht on Cameron Esposito’s arm, once, but he didn’t know what was going on there.
And Eddie, of all people—the human embodiment of a stainless steel kitchen appliance—is bosom buddies with Beverly Marsh, a designer famous enough for her PA to follow her to lunch dates. The assistant’s name is Kay, and Richie likes her a lot.
Not that Richie could identify a designer by sight. No, Adrian had had to tip him off. All he knew the first time it happened was that the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in real life had swanned into the lobby with a smile that set Richie’s solid Kinsey 6 back to a 5.5, and Eddie had shot out the door of his office like a kid on Christmas. He had swept her up in one of those been-too-long hugs, arms wrapped all the way around her slim waist, and she had buried her face in his shoulder in return. Her feet lifted off the ground, just briefly, with an ease that made Richie wonder both about their relationship and about what, exactly, was going on under Eddie’s prim little shirt-sleeves.
“You look amazing,” he’d said warmly, and she’d laughed a big nasal laugh Richie hadn’t really expected from her.
“It’s all the sex,” she stage-whispered, tapping the tip of her nose with one graceful index finger, and Richie felt his dignity crumble expectantly, because Eddie had let out this stupid, eye-crinkled, chin-up laugh that Richie coveted fiercely. Once he’d seen it, once he knew it was possible, he burned with the desire to pry it out of Eddie himself.
He’d greeted Kay, then led Beverly and her armful of sushi into his office, leaving Richie alone with his thoughts. Well, almost alone.
Kay looked like a fashion plate, incredible cheekbones and close-cropped dark hair and a collection of necklaces so delicately arranged that Richie couldn’t believe they weren’t tangled. She had settled in the lobby with him. By then, he’d learned of the quiet solidarity of assistants and other phone-answerers, and so he was only a little embarrassed to ask her: “Are they…?”
She’d given him an oh-honey look, head tilted and lips curled, not unkindly. “No, definitely not,” she said. “Bev’s just gotten back from her honeymoon with Ben Hanscom. She and Eddie just grew up together. Anyway, he’s—they’re just really close friends.”
Richie’s brain had lit up dramatically with flashing, whooping sirens. HE’S! WHAT! he’d wanted to shriek. HE’S WHAT HE’S WHAT HE’S WHAT!!!
So there was that reason that work wasn’t boring, too. There was Richie’s soppy campaign of making cow eyes at the back of Eddie’s head as he passed, gently pressing Betty for details about his personal life (“I don’t think he has one. He had this awful fiancé a few years ago, but we’re all glad that’s over”), and chasing the incomparable high of a quiet, muttered “Thanks, Rich” whenever Richie picks something up for him from the copier.
Kumail does not know yet that Richie has a big slobbery crush on his boss, but it’s not hard to guess what he’d say.
Between the two of them, though, they’re mostly focused on getting Richie over the rocky beach of new medications. Within their first few sessions, Kumail had started making noises about getting Richie a formal ADHD diagnosis. Which made sense, even if Richie’s father still referred to it as “little-shit-itis,” as he had since Richie was a preteen. The diagnosis, and for that matter, the giant binder about things like “rejection sensitivity” (which. Ouch), had been kind of an immediate godsend. The stimulants were more of a journey.
Between the late-night gigs—he’s getting more weekend slots now, but he certainly isn’t above a Thursday—and the hard 9am start at APM, Richie’s sleep schedule was already mostly hot garbage. But they’d tweaked his Vyvanse this week, too, and last night he’d slept fitfully until about 4am, when he’d found himself staring at the ceiling with the stone-cold certainty that that was all the sleep for tonight, folks!
And he might as well work on some new stuff—the Vyvanse talking again—and he’s always more productive in that quiet office at his desk, so against all odds, Richie finds himself shuffling into work at 6:30 in the fucking morning. Without anyone threatening his life.
Surely there’s a Black Mirror episode about this.
When he boots up the desktop computer, the first thing on the screen is still that HRH sticky note, although now it’s just titled with a single spaghetti emoji. It’s longer now. He wasn’t hired to be anybody’s assistant, but he can’t stop himself from being a moony idiot, so what can he do except collect little pieces of preference and opinion like a magpie nesting in a button factory.
It’s quiet, dark: the light filters cool and gray through all those layers of frosted glass. None of the humming office machines will kick on until he flicks the switch to the overheads. This is the only reason that he notices the small warm light through the wall of Eddie’s new office. A lamp left on overnight, most likely, Richie thinks, and he moves toward the door.
Eddie’s in Harry’s office now. Turns out Richie’s assessment of their relative effectiveness had been accurate: Harry had retired suddenly with a little encouragement from the board, and Eddie had been swept less-than-gently into the role. Richie heard enough to know it was a rough transition; Harry’d been barely minding a full stove of screaming teakettles, and now it fell to Eddie to yank them back from disaster. Not to mention that, while Richie doesn’t know much about corporate structure, he guesses that this job is not normally given to someone who’s barely over thirty.
Eddie had been less collected, that’s for sure. He had also, in a move that shocked everyone, begun voluntarily asking for help. The “thanks, Rich” economy was thriving—flooded, even.
So when Richie pushes the office door open, he is perhaps less surprised than he ought to be to see that it’s not just a lamp. It’s a whole Eddie, curled up on his couch like a puppy under a blanket that was surely meant to be decorative, deeply asleep.
And it’s such a cliché that Richie wants to tear his hair out, but Eddie looks different like that. He always looks young, but now there’s a delicacy to it. An openness. He always looks worried and furious, but in sleep, muscles gone slack, he looks mournful more than anything. The tilt of his eyebrows melancholy. His hair spills softly over the arm pillowed under his head.
Worst of all, his skinny socked feet stick out just under the edge of the blanket. The stack of them, the collection of angles, and the shoes neatly tucked under the edge of the couch make Richie’s pulse stutter. He actually reaches up to his own chest to make sure nothing’s happened to his ribs. That they have not, in fact, left his heart aching open to the air.
He closes the door quietly. At least once before, he had suspected this had happened: extra mugs in the dishwasher, items queued at the printer with timestamps between ten and two a.m. Still, Eddie’s energy was always so relentless that it was impossible to tell.
He pads quietly down the hall and toward the break room. The sleek, overpriced coffee machine seems screaming-loud in the silence. He’d use the Keurig, but that’s been on the spaghetti note for a while: Keurigs are wasteful and pointless. If you don’t like regular drip, just plug your nose and chug it like everybody else. Eddie, the most particular, fussy man Richie knows, hates things that are fussy and particular.
His phone buzzes with a text. It’s almost certainly Stan, who is getting married next year, and who has the loyalty to ask Richie to be his best man, but the good sense to babysit him while he does it.
Staniel (6:41 a.m.)
You can’t be the officiant because both mine and Patty’s parents would kill us, but mostly because you’d cry through the whole thing and you know it.
Richie (6:42 a.m.)
Lmao too late to keep me from doing a toast though huh
Staniel (6:42 a.m.)
What the fuck are you doing up right now?
Richie considers just leaving the pot so it’s there when Eddie wakes up—soon, surely—but some combination of sleep deprivation and the part of his personality based on Bridget Jones’s Diary won’t let him. Instead, he fills one of their bigger mugs, some deeply millennial thing that says “Boss Bitch” on the front, and sweeps together a handful of creamers and sugar.
Eddie is still soundly asleep, but that doesn’t stop Richie from cringing when the mug scrapes a little as he sets it on the coffee table nearest Eddie’s face. He sets out the creamers and sugar in little rows, three and three: he knows exactly how Eddie takes his coffee, but he also knows that he’s got a weird thing about other people making it for him. He’ll politely accept a cup of coffee that someone’s already added creamer to, but he won’t drink it.
Richie had brought it up, once, when they were both briefly in the break room at the same time. He had been sleep-deprived then, too, so he didn’t process how embarrassing it was to admit that he’d noticed it until it was too late. But Eddie, to his credit, didn’t blink; he just shrugged and said “mommy issues.”
This piece of information was not in Richie's notes. But he had not forgotten it.
As he makes his escape, Eddie is just beginning to stir, so Richie cannot risk an extra second’s glance. But he wants to, badly. Just to see if the melancholy falls away from Eddie’s face as he wakes up, or if it stays, and everything else lies on top of it.
Richie (7:05 a.m.)
Started doing sunrise yoga never felt better my chakras are so aligned rn
Maybe i’ll get ordained behind your back ;) spare everybody the toast part
Stan (7:10 a.m.)
It’s gonna be a good toast, asshole. Don’t pretend you aren’t a hopeless romantic in a comedian hat.
And if that isn’t a small miracle.
It’s a morning of them.
The first is that, as Richie starts fiddling with his Google Docs, he thinks he can hear the miniscule noises of someone waking up in the office behind him. Maybe he’s imagining the scraping noises, or the couch shifting as Eddie sits up, but he is absolutely sure he is not imagining the short, sharp laugh.
The Man (7:16 a.m.)
Boss bitch?
Richie (7:17 a.m.)
Accept that the shoe fits amigo
The second is that when the door does open behind him, Richie keeps himself from turning around to look. From hungrily catching a glimpse of that sweet, rumpled version of Eddie that he knows will be impossible not to see under the sharp, tightly-held exterior. He already feels like it’s haunting him. He forces himself to lean into the screen like there is nothing more interesting in the world than the lines of opening patter he’s been workshopping for weeks.
The third is that, as he passes, Eddie does not say “thanks, Rich.” Instead, he reaches out to Richie’s shoulder with a sleep-warm hand, his fingers skipping over the seam of Richie’s dress shirt. Not a confident, putting-green squeeze; just that brief moment of unarticulated contact. Almost nervous. It’s light and probably meaningless and it sets him on fire.
Eddie shuffles down the hallway, coffee clutched in his right hand. His shirtsleeves hang open absently, and Richie stares after them, helplessly memorizing the gentle animal shape of Eddie’s left wrist.