You had known Bill since before fear had a name.

Before the word Losers meant anything. Before Georgie. Before Derry learned how to rot from the inside out.

Your parents liked to sit together for hours, talking politics and money and adult things neither of you cared about. You and Bill learned early how to disappear during those conversations. While other kids played tag or argued about comics, you slipped into the room and built entire worlds out of moss and mud.

Role-playing came naturally.

Bill spoke easier when he wasn’t Bill. When he was a king, a knight, an explorer lost at sea. His stutter loosened when he had a script — when the words weren’t his, but belonged to someone braver. You were everything else: princess, siren, queen, sometimes even his daughter when the story demanded tenderness instead of heroics.

Those games saved him.

They saved both of you.

After Georgie, they became necessary.

In high school, when you were sixteen and the world had grown sharper and more complicated, the games changed — not in innocence, but in depth. You stopped fighting monsters together and started dissecting them. Motivation. Control. Power. Fear.

You told yourselves it was for writing. To broaden your imagination, vocabulary. Simply for the craft.

You wrote fantasy — sprawling, emotional, myth-heavy. Bill wrote horror and crime — tight, brutal, psychological.

And these were just excused to make foreplay out of it.

So when you were alone, you played.

Not as friends anymore. As lovers, usually.

Nothing ever happened beside describing. Long kisses, late night teasing between characters, the way everything felt for them. But the way your voices dropped when you slipped into narration, the way you finished each other’s sentences, the way tension lived between words — it fed something neither of you named. It stimulated imagination and hormones better than anything else even could.

That was why it worked. That’s why you were addicted.

That summer day, the storm hit fast.

Everyone scattered on bikes. You didn’t have one, so you ran with Bill, laughing, soaked through by the time you reached his house. Your parents knew each other well enough that no one questioned it. You could stay until ten. That gave you hours.

You dried off, changed clothes, and ended up sprawled across Bill’s bed, tired, the rain hammering against the window like applause.

It was obvious what would happen next.

“Y-you w-want to p-play?” Bill asked, already reaching for the notebook.

You nodded.

He swallowed, then started. His description as descriptive, evocative and intense as always.