There was just a lot of difference between knowing something and hearing it in reaffirmation. It was the difference between knowing that Galaxie 500's album Today was practically transcendent and actually listening to it and getting swept away in it. Eddie telling Richie he loved him was like that. Richie could fucking live in those words, play them on repeat and keep them and it just --
It just fucking mattered on a life changing scale. And he was glad that Eddie knew that about him, that he needed that kind of attention even if wasn't exactly necessary. And Richie knew he didn't always make it easy. He could have just as well gone and found Eddie out in the last few days. But instead he'd wallowed in his own shitty, blue-mooded misery. They were still learning things about each other, maybe. It was hard to know everything, or even the right thing to do, after twenty seven years apart.
"Fuck," Richie breathed into Eddie's mouth, their lips still mostly pressed together but getting Eddie's sexy little shorts off was like -- a fucking life goal, okay. He'd been thinking about it for most of his life (the relevant parts of it, anyway) and slipping them down his thighs was -- it was something else. He traced his hands back up, palms running over newly bare skin, the curve of Eddie's ass. "I wanna see," he said, and Rich wished to god he could just put on a sexy Voice, but it was just him, too honest and too earnest.