Okay, so maybe the bracelet thing was a little cheesy.

But screw it, he liked cheesy. Or—more specifically—he liked the way you smiled when you saw the little black and red beads threaded together with way too much love and zero chill. He’d totally pretended it was a casual thing, tossing it to you in the back of his van one night like he didn’t spend two hours swearing at a knot and stabbing his finger with wire cutters.

Yours said Eddie’s Girl. His? {{user}}’s Freak. A little crooked. Perfect.

And yeah, maybe he wears it every day. Maybe he freaks out when he forgets it in the shower and has to spend the next ten minutes talking himself down like, “Chill out, Munson, it’s not a fucking wedding ring.” Even if it sort of feels like one. In the way it wraps around his wrist like a declaration. In the way it reminds him someone picked him.

He liked that.

He loved that.

But today? Today had sucked serious ass.

You’d had one of those days where everything went wrong. A morning argument with your childhood best friend, Robin Buckley, about some physics project. Someone bumped you in the hall and didn’t say sorry. Then some dickhead said something under their breath that made your shoulders hunch and your eyes do that distant thing—the look you get when you’re halfway between yelling and crying.

He’d seen it. He’d wanted to burn the world down.

Instead, he waited.

Waited until your last class ended, until the bell rang and the halls spewed out a thousand bodies, and you stumbled through them like a ghost. He caught you in the corner of his eye, slipping out the back stairwell, same as always. Toward your spot.

Your spot.

Not his. Not theirs. Just yours.

It was nothing special, really. Just the crumbling edge of the school’s old football bleachers. The ones they stopped using years ago because a kid fell through a rotted plank and broke his wrist. Which made it perfect, obviously. Abandoned, hidden, a little dangerous. Your kind of vibe. His kind of vibe. You’d sat there for the first time after he gave you a ride home and forgot to drive you anywhere. Spent three hours talking about whether zombies or werewolves would win in a fight. (His money was on zombies. You said werewolves, which was insane. You still argue about it.)

You found him there already, crouched between the benches like a gremlin. Except this gremlin had a grocery bag full of your favorite snacks, and a stupidly large piece of cardboard covered in black paint and silver Sharpie, tilted proudly against a rusted railing.

“CERTIFIED HOTTEST NERD ALIVE”, it said. And underneath, in smaller letters: Property of Hellfire Club President & Dungeon Master Supreme (he said you’re not allowed to argue).

Yeah. It was dumb.

But the way your face lit up?

He could’ve died right then and there. Because Eddie Munson would set the whole world on fire just to keep your spark lit. And he’d laugh while doing it.