eddie munson

He’d been doing it since he was little — since before he really knew what he was doing at all. And once he started, he didn’t know how to stop.

It was completely innocent, back in the day. Just a way to entertain himself when the dark of the night got too scary or the sounds of his parents screaming down the hall got too loud. First, it was his blanket, balled up and stuffed between his legs. Then it was a pillow, tucked beneath his hips as he lay on his stomach, that good-sweet-funny feeling building slowly in his gut as he rocked, and rocked, and rocked. And for a long time, that was all it was: comfort, plain and simple. A distraction from a home that was anything but. A sorely needed dose of dopamine.

But then he’d gone to live with Wayne, and puberty turned his little habit into something dirtier, sending him to the bathroom on a daily basis to take care of whatever ill-timed erection was currently plaguing him, dick leaking like a facet so that he knew for sure that there was something deeply wrong with him. Because there was no way a person was supposed to make that much precome, and there was certainly no way anybody else chubbed up as easily as he did. It was mortifying, and it only got worse.

Whoever thought locker rooms were a good idea had clearly never been a teenage boy. At least, they had never been a queer teenage boy. And they certainly hadn’t been a closeted one, as Eddie was, forced to hide himself behind shower curtains because the sight of other wet boys parading around with their blooming bodies on display had him bricked up faster than a garden wall. The shower drain caught a lot of his shame, as did the socks at home that he rinsed in the bathroom sink to keep Wayne from being suspicious. He’d suffered enough, having to take a runt like him in.

As it were, he went through a lot of socks — sometimes multiple pairs a day. It’s just that he couldn’t stop, even when it hurt. Even when his dick was raw and red and he had to grit his teeth to keep going, leaving him trembling in the aftershocks of a realization that had long dawned on him:

He was a freak. And he had an ugly, dirty problem.

The only person he’d dated — a girl from the other end of the trailer park, Ashley — had made fun of him for it; had turned him down more often than not and called him a horn dog with varying degrees of malice. She’d meant it to hurt the last time, that much was clear.

All you want is sex, Eddie, she’d said on the front porch of his trailer, arms crossed defensively over her chest like she needed the protection; like Eddie couldn’t be trusted. And fuck if that didn’t sting. He spun out about it for months, but at the end of the day, after he’d beat himself black and blue on the inside, his hand still found its way into his pants.

Things got worse after the Upside Down, as everything did. If the pain of his healing body wasn’t enough to keep him up at night, then the nightmares were. What was a man to do with all that spare time, especially when an orgasm seemed to be the only thing that brought him some semblance of peace, that fuzzy, post-climax feeling the lone key he’d found to the kingdom of dreams. Not that it mattered. He’d wake up with a hard-on anyway, and then it was back to square one, each day tugging him closer and closer to insanity by virtue of his own stupid dick.

All of which was not helped by you, who had all but taken up residence at the trailer, your own house having sat nearly empty since the world almost ended. Which — Eddie understood, okay? It couldn’t have been easy, going home to solitude after seeing so much. You were such a big puppy, too, always content to roll over and show your belly for a little bit of attention, hanging near the edges of things until someone called you closer. No carefully curated ego could cover up the way you so badly wanted people to want you. So maybe Eddie saw a little of himself in you, and maybe it felt special, being the one that you chose — a day, a week, an hour. Eddie was greedy for it all. And you didn’t seem to mind. You were generous like that. A good friend, one Eddie sorely needed and had come to care so much about. He loved you in a very real and tragic way, and normally he could live with that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d hid a big, gay crush. But did the guy have to be so fucking gorgeous?

Seriously, you were like Eddie’s personal flavour of torture, all soft smiles and tanned skin and that impossible to resist all-American charm that had Eddie fussing over what he was going to wear and taking time to make his hair behave, hating the way he jerked off in the shower thinking about the way your perfect ass filled out your jeans; hating how he always had to get a hand on himself the moment you left for the night. Or even, on particularly shameful nights, the way he had to excuse himself to the bathroom to rub one out while you sat alone in the living room, dousing his face with cold water afterward just to get his shit straight. So far, you hadn’t noticed. In fact, you seemed hellbent on being wilfully ignorant of Eddie’s little problem, always flopping over to lay in his lap or hooking a leg over Eddie’s knee when they were side by side watching TV on the couch. Eddie shouldn’t have been surprised — You and Robin seemed to lack any semblance of personal space when you were together — but any message his brain sent about all this physical touch being normal was clearly not received by his dick.

Which is why, on a Thursday evening in early September, Eddie found himself shifting on the couch, unable to look away from the little bit of heaven that was you, shirtless, in those goddamn shorts again — the green ones that barely kept your balls contained, the heft of your dick on plain display as you crossed one leg over the other where you were laying on the floor nearby, nose in a magazine. It was getting dark outside, casting the room in long shadows as the TV played softly in the background, the simmering slant of evening painting your skin in pretty golds. For fuck’s sake, even the light loved you.

Eddie tried to shove his attention back toward the campaign notebook on his lap, he really did, but every soft sniff or slight shuffle from your direction pulled his gaze, which of course meant he was going to take a quick peek at what you were packing, because who wouldn’t? Again, he adjusted himself in his sweatpants, and again, he mentally berated himself for how badly he wanted to touch himself, and how badly he wished you would do it instead. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to will himself to be normal. Christ, why couldn’t he be normal? On another day, he might’ve been able to get away with sneaking off to the bathroom to rub one out, but having just gone to take a very real piss, he worried you might think he had diarrhoea or something, and he couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than being irreconcilably horny.