bella

You’re standing on a driveway outside a house you faintly recognize, evening light gone soft and blue at the edges, and it takes you a second to spot him. He's leaning against the open door of a car, checking his reflection in the side mirror with the specific, focused intensity of someone who's already redone his hair twice and isn't fully convinced it's sitting right yet.

He's younger here. Not by a ton, just old enough that you know, the way you always know things in these dreams, that this is close to his real age, close to yours, some stretch of high school you're still living through in your actual, waking life. He's in a tuxedo, dark and clearly rented, tie slightly crooked in a way that makes something fond and helpless bloom in your chest before you even fully register why.

He looks good. That's the first thought that lands, simple and immediate. He looks genuinely, distractingly good, broad-shouldered and a little nervous underneath the polish, hair falling just slightly out of place no matter how many times he pushes it back.

It's the second look that catches your eye. There's a thin, pale line through one eyebrow, barely visible unless the light hits it right. Another at the corner of his mouth, faint enough that you'd probably miss it entirely if you weren't already staring. Scars. Small ones, old enough to have mostly faded, and something in your chest goes tight and curious all at once, wondering when, wondering how, wondering just how many fights a boy has to be in before marks like that stop being news to anyone who actually knows him.

You don't get an answer. You never do, not for the details that matter most.

He's muttering to himself, you realize a second later, low and rushed, checking his bowtie for the third time. "Okay. Okay, you've got this. Just act normal. Be normal. Compliment the dress, open the door, don't say anything weird about the corsage—"

You watch him take one more breath, squaring his shoulders like he's about to walk into something far more dangerous than picking up his date, and it's almost enough to make you laugh out loud at how endearing the whole thing is.

A voice calls from the front porch behind him — a woman's voice, warm, clearly amused. "You've been staring at that mirror for ten minutes, Steve. Kelly's going to think you stood her up."

"I'm going, I'm going." He glances back toward the house, and you follow his gaze without meaning to.

It stops you cold, in a way you don't fully expect. You've seen so many pieces of his life by now — his car, his school, a job wearing a ridiculous sailor costume, an entire future you've watched unfold in fragments — but you realize, with a strange little jolt, that you've never once actually seen his parents before. Some voice mentioned once, an absence noted and moved past, but never a face, never a name attached to either of them.

His mother's standing in the doorway, porch light catching her properly for the first time. She has thick, dark brown hair pinned back loose and elegant, the kind of effortless beauty that clearly took real effort to look effortless, dressed like she'd been somewhere nice earlier in the evening and hadn't bothered changing out of it yet. And behind her, a shape in the front hall you understand, somehow, is his father — tall, put-together in that same polished, unhurried way, whiskey glass in hand, the whole picture of two people who know exactly how to look good for an occasion.

So this is them, you think, studying the two of them with the same hungry, cataloguing attention you bring to every scrap of him you're ever handed. This is where he comes from.

Something shifts in Steve's face at the sight of his father, quick and complicated, gone almost as fast as it arrives. "Where was this energy at literally any of my games," he mutters, low enough that it's clearly not meant for his mother to hear, more just something he needs to say out loud to get it out of his own chest. "Two years of Tuesday practices and he shows up for the prom."

"What was that?"

"Nothing. Just — talking to myself." He straightens his tie one final time, some of the sharper edge smoothing back out of his voice by the time he actually answers her. "Wish me luck."

"You don't need luck. You look very handsome."

"That's what moms are supposed to say."

"It's also just true." Her voice carries something soft and proud underneath the teasing, and you find yourself unexpectedly moved by it despite the sting still lingering in what he'd muttered a second before — some old ache surfacing for a family dynamic you don't get to see clearly enough to fully understand yet, warmth and old disappointment tangled up together in the same small doorway, on the same two well-dressed, well-composed faces.

He climbs into the car, corsage box balanced careful on the passenger seat, and the dream folds itself forward the way it sometimes does; streetlights blurring past, the radio low, his knee bouncing slightly the whole short drive over, until you're somewhere else entirely, parked outside a different house, porch light already on and waiting.

He sits there a second before getting out, exhaling long and slow like he's shaking something loose before he lets himself actually go through with this. Then he grabs the corsage box, climbs out of the car, and starts up the front walk.

It's not even real, you remind yourself, the jealousy already sitting hot and stubborn low in your chest, uselessly arguing with a feeling that isn't listening to a single word of it. It's not even happening to you.

It doesn't help at all. You just stay rooted where the dream's left you, watching a boy you've never met climb the steps toward Kelly’s front door, straighten his jacket one last time, and lift his hand to knock — and the door opens before your chest has a chance to settle, your stomach dropping before you've even fully processed why.

Kelly Morganson is, by any objective measure, gorgeous. Bright blonde hair curled just enough to look effortless, the kind of tan that looks earned rather than bought, a dress in pale blue that fits her like it was made for exactly this moment and no other. Her smile, when she sees Steve standing there with the corsage box, goes soft and genuinely delighted, and something in her whole face says sweet before she's even said a word, the kind of sweet that isn't performed, isn't calculated, just easy and real and a little shy underneath the polish.

You hate it. You hate it so much it embarrasses you.

Please have an annoying laugh, you think, uselessly, watching her greet him. Please say something dumb. Please have picked ugly shoes. Please give me literally one single thing to hold against you.

She doesn't. Her laugh, when Steve says something you can't quite catch, is warm and easy, not too loud, not grating, exactly the kind of laugh that makes a room want to laugh along with it. The dress is perfect. Her makeup's perfect. Even the way she tucks a strand of hair back, nervous and pleased all at once, is the kind of small, charming gesture that would probably make you like her immediately if you met her in any version of real life that didn't involve her standing in a doorway waiting for the same boy you can't stop dreaming about.

You settle, bitterly, for hating her parents instead.

"Oh, don't you two look wonderful," Kelly's mother gushes, already herding them both toward better lighting, voice pitched at a volume that suggests she's been waiting all week for this exact moment. "Steven, turn a little that way — no, the other way — Kelly, sweetheart, your strap's crooked—"

"Mom." Kelly's cheeks go faintly pink, mortified in the specific way only a mother can manage. "I'm so sorry," she murmurs to Steve, low enough that her mother mostly misses it. "She's been like this all week."

"It's fine," Steve says, easy, and you believe that particular smile at least — small, genuine, the kind he doesn't have to work at.

Kelly's father hovers near the stairs the entire time, arms crossed, watching Steve with the specific, unblinking intensity of a man auditioning for the role of ‘Intimidating Father’ in a movie nobody asked him to star in. Steve handles it well, polite and steady, shaking his hand firm when it's offered, but you catch the barely-there flicker of this guy's really doing the whole bit, huh cross his face for just a second before he smooths it back into easy charm.

The corsage goes on with visible concentration, Steve's fingers careful and a little clumsy around her wrist, Kelly watching him do it with a soft, patient smile while her mother narrates the entire process like a sports commentator. Cameras flash. Somebody says scoot closer at least four times. Kelly loops her arm through his for the photos, easy and comfortable, and Steve smiles wide and bright for every single shot.

It's a good smile. Objectively, technically, a very good smile.

It's not real, though. You know that immediately, with a sureness you don't fully understand and don't try very hard to investigate — some small, stubborn recognition that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with however many dreams you've spent learning the actual shape of his face. His eyes don't quite reach it. There's a beat, small and almost invisible, right before every photo where something in him has to consciously choose to perform instead of just be, and you're the only person in that whole overlit foyer who seems to see it happening.

I know you, you think, unbidden, watching him laugh at something Kelly's mother says. I really know you. Even if I don't understand how.

It doesn't make the jealousy go away. If anything, it makes it worse — the specific, aching unfairness of being the only one who can tell something's missing, and having absolutely no way to ask him what.

By the time the pictures wind down and the goodbyes are said, the dream's already tugging you forward again, streetlights and stop signs blurring past, until you're sitting invisible in the backseat as Steve pulls into the packed high school lot, engine idling while he finds a spot.

Kelly's quiet for a second once the car's in park, hands folded in her lap, looking out at the lit-up gym windows with an expression that's harder to read than anything she's shown all night.

"Hey," Steve says, gentler now, all the performed brightness from the doorway gone soft and real. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Just—" She laughs, short, a little embarrassed. "Kind of hard not to think about who I thought I'd be walking in there with a month ago."

"I know." He doesn't push, doesn't rush her, just lets the sentence sit there a moment. "For what it's worth, it’s his loss. Seriously."

"You're a good friend, you know that?" She looks over at him, something warm and grateful in it, nothing romantic underneath at all, just plain, easy affection between two people who clearly know exactly what tonight actually is. "Thank you for doing this. I know it's not exactly your idea of a fun Friday."

"Are you kidding? Cheesy pictures, an excuse to wear a tux, and I get to watch you make your ex regret every decision he's ever made." Steve grins, easy and genuine this time, no performance left in it at all. "This is basically the perfect night for me too."

Kelly laughs, real and unguarded, swatting his arm lightly. "You're ridiculous."

"Thank you."

She takes a breath, squaring her shoulders, some of the earlier nerves settling into something steadier. "Okay. Let's get it over with."

"That's the spirit." He kills the engine, comes around to open her door before she can do it herself, and offers his arm with an exaggerated, courtly little bow that makes her laugh again, easier this time.

You watch them walk toward the gym doors together, arm in arm, easy and comfortable in exactly the way two friends are supposed to be, and something in your chest, complicated and reluctant, finally loosens its grip just slightly, just enough to let you notice what you'd been too jealous to see clearly before.

Whatever tonight is, it was never really about her at all. The dream carries you in after them, past the doors, into the noise and the light.

The gym's been transformed into something almost unrecognizable — crepe paper streamers looping from the basketball hoops, a cheap disco ball throwing scattered light across a dance floor packed tight with couples, some banner overhead declaring the night's theme in glittery, slightly crooked letters. It smells like hairspray and cheap cologne and the particular, electric anticipation of a whole gym full of teenagers convinced this night matters more than it actually does.

The DJ slides into something slow, and Steve pulls Kelly out onto the floor without much ceremony, one hand settling easy at her waist, the other holding hers loose and comfortable.

You watch them sway there, unhurried, easy in the specific way two friends are easy with each other, and something aches in your chest so completely it nearly takes your breath. You want that. Not — not necessarily that, not Kelly's dress or Kelly's face turned up laughing at something he's said. Just this. Just a slow song with his hand at your waist and the easy permission to be close to him in front of other people, even just as a friend, even just once, just to know for sure that the boy in your dreams and the boy standing right there under a cheap disco ball are actually, provably the same person.

You don't get that. You just get to watch, aching and invisible on the edge of somebody else's night; watching the hours slip past in the blurred, overlapping way they do at things like this, Steve and Kelly drifting between clusters of friends, somebody handing around a camera, a teacher chaperone making a halfhearted attempt at crowd control near the punch bowl. You lose track of the specific minutes. You don't lose track of him.

It's during a lull between songs that you see it happen — Steve's easy posture going suddenly, subtly still, his eyes catching on something across the gym. You follow his gaze before you can stop yourself.

Nancy. Older than the last time you saw her in any dream, dressed simple and lovely, laughing at something the boy beside her's just said — dark-haired, gentle-looking, an arm slung loose and familiar around her waist. Jonathan, from the dream with the faceless monster.

Something in Steve's face does a small, complicated thing, gone almost as fast as it arrives, not devastation, not anymore, nothing raw. Just an old, worn-soft kind of hurt, familiar in the way old bruises are familiar, pressed on by accident and immediately regretted.

I know that feeling, you think, watching him watch her. I watched the way you jumped to protect her. I know exactly what that look costs you.

He recovers fast, the way he always does, smile sliding back into place before anyone else in the gym could possibly have noticed anything was wrong at all. Kelly sees it anyway.

She doesn't say anything about it directly, just loops her arm through his, tugging him firmly back toward the dance floor right as the DJ swaps into something loud and ridiculous and entirely upbeat, all synth and drums and absolutely no room left for melancholy.

"C'mon," she says, already pulling him along. "This is our song."

"We don't have a song."

"We do now. I just decided."

Whatever protest he might've made dies fast, swallowed up by the music and Kelly's insistence, and within seconds the two of them are making complete, gleeful fools of themselves in the middle of the dance floor. Steve doing some exaggerated, terrible move that might generously be called dancing, Kelly matching his energy step for step, both of them laughing too hard to actually keep any rhythm at all. He spins her, badly, nearly clips somebody's shoulder, and neither of them stops laughing long enough to properly apologize. She ducks under his arm, missteps, grabs his shoulders for balance, both of them cackling now, the whole heavy, complicated ache from a minute ago apparently burned off entirely in the noise and the silliness of it.

You watch, helpless, the jealousy and the longing tangled up together in your chest with something else now too, something warmer, harder to name. Gratitude, maybe. Whoever Kelly is to him, whatever tonight actually is, she's good for him. She's exactly what he needed in this specific, unremarkable moment, and some quiet, generous part of you is glad, even through the ache of wanting to be the one doing it instead.

The song winds down eventually, both of them breathless, hair coming loose from whatever careful styling it started the night in, grinning at each other with the specific, easy delight of two people who've just spent ten minutes being completely ridiculous together and regret none of it.

"Okay," Steve says, still catching his breath, laughing. "That was genuinely humiliating."

"That was incredible. I'm framing this memory."

"Please don't."

"Too late. Already framed it." Kelly's still grinning, flushed and happy, all traces of her earlier nerves long gone.

Steve looks at her a moment, something easy and fond and entirely uncomplicated in it, and you watch the last shadow of Nancy finally clear all the way from his face.

"Hey," he says, glancing toward the gym doors, some new idea clearly forming. "Do you wanna get out of here?"

The afterparty's already loud by the time they pull up outside — some upperclassman's house lit up bright against the dark, music thumping faint through closed windows, a scattering of cars already crowded along the curb. Steve puts the car in park but doesn't move to get out, and neither does Kelly, both of them just sitting there a moment in the sudden quiet.

"Tonight was good," Kelly says finally, a little surprised by her own sentence, like she's still catching up to how true it turned out to be. "Like, really good. I wasn't expecting that."

"Low bar, considering the alternative was crying into punch for three hours."

"Fair." She laughs, soft, glancing over at him. "I'm serious, though. Thank you. I know this wasn't exactly the prom either of us pictured."

"It was better than the one I pictured, honestly." Steve says it easy, sincere, no act left in his voice at all. "I had fun. Like, real fun. Not just doing-a-favor-for-a-friend fun."

"Same." Kelly's quiet a second, looking at him in the dim light coming off the dashboard, something soft and unguarded settling over her face. "You're a really good guy, you know that?"

"I've heard rumors."

"I mean it." She's still looking at him, and something in the air between them shifts, slow and unhurried, neither of them quite naming it as it happens.

You feel it before it happens, the way you always seem to feel things a half-second ahead of them landing, some instinctive, dreadful certainty settling cold in your stomach right as Kelly leans in, right as Steve leans in to meet her.

The kiss is soft. Brief, at first — the kind of thing that could still, in the very first second, pass as nothing, an accident of proximity and a strange, charged night. It doesn't stay that way. It lingers a beat too long, then another, neither of them pulling back right away, and the whole car goes silent around you except for it.

You don't move. You can't. You just stand there, frozen the way you always are in these dreams, and the sound of it, soft and small, and entirely too intimate, fills up every corner of your awareness until there's nothing else left in the whole world except the specific, unbearable proof of his mouth against somebody else's.

The jealousy that rushes through you isn't quiet this time. It isn't the aching, wistful kind from the dance floor. It's hot and immediate and humiliatingly close to fury, directed nowhere reasonable, landing everywhere at once — at Kelly, at the universe, mostly, uselessly, at Steve himself, like he's done something to you personally by kissing a girl even though you have no actual claim to him at all.

You don't even know me, you think, furious and heartbroken in equal measure. You don't even know I exist. You don't owe me anything. So why does this feel like betrayal?

Steve pulls back first, abrupt, like he's just remembered something important.

"Shit." He drags a hand down his face, mortified, already putting distance between them in the small space of the car. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."

"Steve—"

"That wasn't — that's not what tonight was supposed to be. I don't want you thinking I took you just to—"

"Steve." Kelly cuts him off, gentle, unbothered in a way that seems to genuinely surprise him. "It's fine. I also wanted to. It just happened. Let's just forget about it, okay?"

He looks at her a long moment, something complicated working behind his eyes — relief, maybe, and guilt underneath it, and something else you can't quite name from where the dream's left you frozen. "Okay," he says finally. "Yeah. Forgotten."

"Good." She smiles at him, easy again, already reaching for the door handle like the whole thing really has been filed away and closed. "Now let’s walk in before our friends call the police thinking you kidnapped me, or something."

He walks her up the driveway, one hand light at the small of her back, both of them laughing about something you can't hear over the roar still sitting in your own ears. At the door, Kelly turns, says something brief, presses a quick, easy hug to him — nothing romantic in it at all now, just warmth and gratitude, just two friends closing out a strange, good night — and disappears into the chaos behind the door.

Steve stands there a moment on the porch, alone, the party noise spilling out around him, and you watch something complicated move across his face in the porch light — guilt, still, and confusion, and underneath both of those, something that looks almost like loneliness, like the kiss cracked open a door he'd rather have kept shut.

He doesn't go inside.

He just stands there a long moment, hands in his pockets, staring at the lit-up windows like he's trying to decide something important, and then he turns around instead, walking back down the driveway toward his car alone.

You watch him go, chest still tight with jealousy that's already starting to curdle into something softer and sadder now that the anger's burned through — some old, complicated ache for a boy standing by himself on a stranger's driveway, caught between a night that was good and a feeling he apparently can't fully explain even to himself.

I know why, you think, uselessly, watching him climb back into the car alone. I think I know exactly why, and you don't even know.

The porch light blurs at the edges. The music fades first, then the driveway, then Steve himself, dissolving soft into grey the way everything eventually does here, and the last thing you're aware of, right before the dream lets you go entirely, is the specific, aching shape of him sitting alone in a parked car, engine not yet started, looking like a boy who's just figured out something he doesn't have any idea what to do with yet.

You wake up with your chest still tight, the dream clinging stubborn and unwelcome even as your eyes adjust to your own ceiling.

You reach for the floorboard and the notebook on instinct, the way you always do now, and sit there a long moment before you actually start writing, pencil hovering, trying to figure out where to even begin with a dream that left you feeling this many contradictory things at once.

Prom. He looked so handsome. Rented tux, crooked bowtie, hair he clearly spent way too long on. I saw his parents for the first time tonight — his mom's beautiful, brown hair, looked like she'd stepped out of a magazine. His dad too, put together, the kind of handsome that comes with money. I don't know why that detail is sticking with me so much. You pause, chewing the inside of your cheek. His date’s name was Kelly. She was gorgeous, and sweet, and I hated her for absolutely no reason at all, and I know that's embarrassing to admit even here where I know nobody's ever going to read it.

You sit with that a second, letting yourself actually feel the shame of it instead of writing around it the way you usually do.

They kissed. I watched it happen and I wanted to scream. I don't even have a right to feel that, and I felt it anyway, and I think that might be the most humiliating thing I've ever had to write down.

You set the pencil down, pressing the heel of your hand briefly against your eyes, trying to untangle the mess of feelings still sitting hot and complicated in your chest.

He looked happy tonight. That's the part you keep circling back to, the part that should matter more than the jealousy does. Happy in a real way, not the performed kind — laughing until he couldn't dance straight, easy and warm with a girl who clearly needed exactly that kind of night. You should want that for him. You do want that for him, somewhere underneath all the ugly, petty stuff, you want him laughing like that, want him to have good nights, want somebody to be kind to him the way Kelly so plainly was.

You just don't understand how you're supposed to want that and feel the way you do about the lake. About the porch, and the dancing, and Harvest Moon looping soft through open truck doors while he swayed you both slow across the creaky floorboards of a porch that didn't exist anywhere real. You've dreamed of him your whole life, dreamed about a version of the future that felt as solid and real as anything you've ever actually lived. How are you supposed to feel simply happy watching him kiss somebody else, when some stubborn, certain part of you has already decided, somewhere years ago, that the two of you are supposed to end up together?

It doesn't make sense, you write, frustrated, underlining it hard enough to nearly tear the page. I want him happy. I want it to be with me. Both of those are true at the same time and I don't know what to do with that.

The phone on your nightstand rings before you can chase the thought any further, shrill and sudden enough to make you jump.

You answer on the second ring, voice still a little rough. "Hello?"

"Okay, don't panic, but are you still picking me up?" Margaret, breathless and already talking a mile a minute, no actual greeting attached. "Because if you forgot about me I will actually never forgive you."

You laugh despite yourself, the tight knot in your chest loosening just slightly at the sound of her voice. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming in like an hour. I need to pack my bag and get Ella and Shannon, and then I'm grabbing you."

"Okay, good." You can hear her grinning through the phone. "I'm so excited for a weekend of teenage shenanigans with you and your prep school snobs!"

"They're not snobs, Margaret."

"You all go to a school with a crest, babe. I stand by my assessment."

"Ha ha. Very funny." You roll your eyes, though there's no real heat in it, already reaching for your bag with your free hand, mentally cataloging everything you still need to throw into it before you're presentable enough to be seen in public. "I'll see you in an hour."

"Can't wait. Love you, bring snacks."

"Love you too. Bye, Margie."

You hang up, sitting there a moment in the sudden quiet, the ordinary, comfortable rhythm of your actual life already tugging you back into itself — Marcus’s lake house, your senior spring break, days that are going to be full of sunburn and bad music and probably at least one dramatic incident involving somebody's older brother's boat.

You glance back down at the notebook, still open on your knee, and add one more line before you let yourself close it for the day.

I don't know how to want both things at once. But I think I do anyway. Maybe that's just what it means to actually love somebody — wanting their happiness more than you want to be the reason for it, even though it hurts.

You close the notebook, slide it back beneath the floorboard, and press the board flat until it clicks quiet into place.

Then you get up, and go get ready for the weekend, the notebook and dream and your complicated jealousy all tucked safely away behind you for now — at least until the lake house gives you something new to think about instead.

By noon, the four of you have claimed the dock as your own personal territory, towels spread out in a row, a cooler full of wine coolers sweating quietly in the shade beside you.

"Okay, but if you jump from the higher part, you get, like, actual air," Shannon insists, already climbing up onto the boathouse roof despite Ella's protests, wine cooler abandoned somewhere behind her. "Watch."

She jumps. It's not especially impressive, honestly, but the shriek she lets out on the way down is enough to send the rest of you into hysterics anyway, and by the time she surfaces, sputtering and triumphant, Margaret's already climbing up to try it herself.

"You guys are gonna break your necks," Ella calls, unbothered, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, clearly having no intention of joining them.

"Worth it," Margaret shouts back, right before she jumps too, cannonballing hard enough to splash half the dock.

You spend most of the afternoon like that — jumping, floating, ignoring a cluster of senior guys a little further down the dock who keep splashing water in your general direction with the specific, transparent hope that one of you will finally acknowledge them. One of them, a guy named Bryce who'd spent most of junior year convinced he's Elvis’s second coming, makes a valiant attempt to grab Ella's ankle and pull her under, which she avoids so smoothly and with such total disinterest that even his friends laugh at him for it.

"You're gonna have to try way harder than that," Ella informs him, unbothered, already swimming back toward the dock.

"I'm just trying to have fun!"

"You and your right hand can go have fun somewhere else."

By the time the sun starts sinking low and gold over the water, all four of you are thoroughly sunburnt, pleasantly loose from an afternoon of wine coolers, and gathered around a fire pit somebody's already got crackling in the backyard, a whole loose crowd of seniors scattered on blankets and lawn chairs around it.

The stories start the way they always do at parties like this — somebody bringing up an old, embarrassing memory, the whole group piling on with increasingly exaggerated details, laughter rolling loose and easy around the fire. You're deep into a wine cooler and a good mood, leaning into Margaret's shoulder, when one of the guys — Danny, maybe, you're not entirely sure through the haze of firelight and floaty tipsiness — starts in on a story that begins innocently enough.

"Okay, but did you hear about what Aaron Thomas—"

Ella's foot connects with his shin hard enough that he yelps, the sentence dying instantly, and a beat of awkward silence ripples out around the fire pit as several people suddenly find something very interesting to look at that isn't you.

"Ow, what the hell, Ella—"

"Wrong story," she says, tight and pointed, and Danny, to his credit, seems to actually catch on, muttering a quick, sheepish apology before the conversation limps back into motion around some other, safer topic.

"You guys, it's really fine," you say, forcing a smile you don't entirely feel, waving off the sudden careful attention turning your way. "Seriously. I'm good."

Nobody quite believes you, but everybody's kind enough to let the statement stand anyway, conversation slowly reknitting itself back into easy chatter as you get up, brush sand off your shorts, and head down toward the dock without really deciding to.

The water's black and glassy under the moonlight, fire pit noise fading soft behind you the further you walk, and you sit down at the very end of the dock, feet dangling just below the surface of the water, letting the quiet settle over you instead.

You hear footsteps behind you a few minutes later — light, familiar, unhurried — and you don't have to turn around to know who it is before you do.

Margaret settles down beside you without a word, close enough that her shoulder brushes yours, and for a long moment neither of you says anything at all.

You lean your head against her shoulder eventually, and she shifts slightly to make room for it, easy and automatic, like she's done this a hundred times before and expects to do it a hundred more.

The lake stretches out dark and quiet in front of you, moonlight scattered loose across the surface, laughter and firelight still glowing warm somewhere behind you, and for a while, that's all there is — just the water, and the moon, and the quiet, Margaret's shoulder steady under your cheek, holding space for whatever you're not quite ready to say out loud yet.

It's Margaret who finally breaks it.

You're drunker than you probably should be — not sloppy, not out of control, just loose enough at the edges that the quiet between you and Margaret feels less careful than it usually does, less like something either of you is actively managing.

"Can I ask you something?" Her voice comes quieter than the wine coolers would really explain on their own.

"Mm."

"Why'd you actually break up with Aaron?"

The question lands harder than the gentle way she asks it. You feel your whole body go a little more alert despite the haze, some old, practiced defensiveness rising up automatic.

"I already told you why."

"You told me the vague version. The 'it just wasn't working anymore' version." Margaret's not looking at you, staring out at the lake instead, which somehow makes the question feel less like an ambush and more like something she's genuinely trying to understand. "There's been — I don't know. Talk. About it. People saying some stuff."

"What kind of stuff."

"C’mon. You know what kind of stuff." She finally glances over, careful. "You guys were kind of a big deal, you know? Power couple energy, even people at Anderson High knew your names together. When that ends, people talk. They love to fill in the blanks with whatever sounds juiciest."

Something cold settles in your stomach despite the alcohol. "Just say it out loud, Margaret."

"Was there really someone else?"

The question hits you somewhere sharp and immediate, and for a second you just stare at her, genuinely stung. "You think I cheated on him?"

"I didn't say I believed it—"

"But you're asking."

"Because I want to hear it from you and not from some girl who goes to Anderson Prep that doesn’t even know you." Margaret says it plain, no accusation in it, just honesty. "I know you. I don't actually think you'd ever do that. I just — I want the real story, not the hallway version."

You look away, back out at the water, jaw tight. "I didn't cheat on him. I never touched anyone else the entire time we were together. That rumor is complete bullshit and I hate that it's out there."

"Okay." Margaret says it simply, believing you immediately, no further argument. "I believe you. I just had to actually ask instead of just assuming."

"I think it might actually be him, if you want to know the truth," you add, quieter, the words tasting sour on the way out. "Aaron. He didn't exactly take it well, and I know he's said stuff to people — not really lies, exactly, just enough hurt and vague comments left lying around for people to build their own worst version out of it. I don't think he meant for it to turn into that, though. I think he was just sad and talking too much to the wrong people."

"That actually tracks," Margaret admits, wincing slightly. "He did seem pretty wrecked about it, last I heard."

You exhale, some of the tension loosening slightly, though the ache underneath it doesn't fully go anywhere. The fire crackles somewhere behind you, laughter drifting faint across the yard, someone's radio playing low enough that you can only catch fragments of the melody.

Margaret's quiet a moment, and you think, hope, that maybe that's the end of it. But it isn't.

"Was it because of Notre Dame?" she asks, gentler this time, testing. "Like — the distance thing? Because that's a totally normal reason. Nobody would judge you for that."

"Kind of." You say it slow, careful, picking through the truth for the parts you're actually willing to hand over. "It didn't help. Long distance is — it's a lot. It probably would've ended things eventually even if nothing else was going on."

"But that's not the actual reason?"

"Margaret."

"I'm not trying to interrogate you, I promise, I just—" She stops herself, exhales, tries again softer. "I've known you since we were seven. I know when you're giving me the easy version of something instead of the real one. You've been doing it for years, actually, now that I think about it. There's always this part of you I can't quite get to."

Your chest goes tight at that, more than the alcohol accounts for, some old, careful wall inside you creaking dangerously at the mention of it.

"I loved him," you say finally, quiet. "At least I think I did. He was so good to me. He never did anything wrong."

"But?"

You don't answer right away. You just look at her — really look, the fire-lit edge of her face, the patient, familiar warmth in her eyes, so many years of friendship sitting steady behind the question she's asking. Some part of you wants, badly, recklessly, to just say it. All of it. The lake. The truck. A boy named Steve you've been dreaming about since you were five years old, a whole secret life tucked behind a floorboard that you've never once let a single living person see.

You feel your eyes sting, unexpected, and you blink hard against it, throat going tight around a truth you've protected so carefully for so long that you don't even know how to shape your mouth around it anymore.

"Margaret, I—"

You stop. The fire crackles behind you, someone laughing loud at something near the pit, the ordinary noise of a party still going on completely unaware of the conversation happening down here in the dark.

Margaret waits, patient, not pushing, just watching you with the same steady, careful attention she's always given you, the same attention that's made her safe to fall apart in front of for as long as you can remember.

And you sit there on the edge of the dock, moonlight scattered soft across the water, one tear finally slipping loose down your cheek, caught completely between thirteen years of silence and the terrifying, exhausting relief of finally, maybe, being ready to let some of it go.

"It's okay," Margaret says, quiet, steady, reaching over to squeeze your hand where it rests on the dock between you. "You can tell me."

You don't answer right away. You sit with it instead, watching the moonlight break apart and reform on the surface of the lake every time the wind stirs it, trying to figure out if there's actually a version of this you know how to say out loud.

"You're graduating in two months," Margaret says, gentler now, filling the silence you're not ready to fill yourself. "And then you're off to IU, and I'm gonna be stuck here finishing senior year without you, same as always, except this time there's no guarantee you're gonna be twenty minutes away anymore." A small, sad huff of a laugh. "I keep thinking about that. About you leaving and taking some whole part of yourself I never actually got to meet."

You laugh too, wet and unsteady, wiping at your face before you've even fully registered you're crying. "That's a very specific thing to be thinking about."

"I think about you a lot. Sue me."

That gets a real laugh out of you, short and surprised, and something in your chest loosens just enough to let the next part through.

"Can I tell you something?" Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to. "And you have to promise not to think I'm insane. Like, actually promise. Not just say it."

Margaret's face goes careful, worry flickering behind her eyes even as she scoots closer, both hands wrapping around yours. "I promise. Whatever it is."

You don't start where you thought you would. You start somewhere smaller, quieter, working your way in sideways instead of diving straight into the deep end.

"Do you remember second grade? When we first met?"

"Of course. The horse stickers, how could I forget?" Margaret smiles, soft with the memory. "You had the one with the rainbow mane and wouldn't trade it for anything."

"Do you remember how tired I used to get sometimes? During recess." You watch the memory surface behind her eyes, slow at first. "I used to ask to nap under that one tree we always played by. You probably don't even remember that part."

"I do, actually." Margaret's brow furrows, something clicking into place years too late. "I always just figured you were a kid who didn't sleep well. I never thought much of it."

"I wasn't sleeping well. I still don't, some nights." You take a breath, steadying yourself. "I've been having these dreams since I was five years old, Margaret. Before I even met you. The same one, at first — the same boy, over and over — and it's never really stopped since. That tiredness you remember, back when we were seven and eight — that was because of them. The dreams. I just never told you what they actually were."

"Okay," Margaret says carefully, no judgment in it yet, just listening.

"Not just — not normal dreams. The same boy, every single time. I've watched pieces of his whole life happen, out of order, over years — some of them soft and happy, but some of them the kind that used to wake me up screaming when I was little. I've got a notebook, Margaret. I've been writing every single one down since I was a little girl because I was terrified of losing the details, and I have never shown it to a single person. Not you. Not my mo– not my dad. Not Aaron, not once, the entire time we were together." Your voice cracks properly now, and you don't fight it. "I didn't know how to tell him I think I might be in love with somebody who might not even be real. There's no version of that sentence that doesn't sound insane, Margaret. I've rehearsed it a thousand times and it never once comes out sounding like anything except a girl who's lost her mind."

"Hey." Margaret's thumb moves slow across your knuckles, grounding, patient. "I'm not going anywhere. Keep going."

"His name's Steve." Saying it out loud for the first time to another living person does something strange to your chest, cracks it wide open in a way you weren't braced for. "I don't even know his last name — I've heard it, in the dreams, but it never stays with me when I wake up, no matter how hard I try to hold onto it. There's a boy named Dustin who's younger. A girl he works with named Robin. I know the exact sound of his laugh. I know how he tucks my hair back. I've danced with him on a porch that I can’t prove exists anywhere real, and I don't know if any single piece of it is true. I've loved him anyway, for thirteen years, without a shred of proof he's anything more than something my own head built to keep me company."

The confession sits there between you, enormous and finally spoken, the fire pit still crackling faint somewhere behind you.

Margaret's quiet a long moment. When she finally speaks, her voice comes out soft, almost wondering. "Thirteen years."

"I know how it sounds."

"I don't think it sounds like anything you should be ashamed of." She says it slow, like she's genuinely turning the whole idea over rather than rushing to comfort you. "I think it sounds like the biggest secret I've ever heard you keep, and I'm a little heartbroken you carried it alone this whole time — especially that part, back when we were kids. I wish I'd known enough to ask questions back then." A small, disbelieving laugh escapes her, softer now. "And also, now that the shock's wearing off — I have about four hundred questions."

You laugh too, startled into it, more tears slipping loose even as something unclenches slow in your chest. "You're not supposed to have questions. You're supposed to tell me I'm not crazy."

"You're not crazy. Obviously you're not crazy." Margaret says it plain, immediate, like it was never actually in question. "But I've known you since second grade, and you've never once had to make anything up just to be interesting. So if you're telling me you've had dreams about the same specific guy for thirteen years, I believe that you believe it, and honestly? That's enough for me to believe there's something real happening here too, even if neither of us understands what yet."

"What if I never find him, though?" The fear comes out small, the one you've been carrying silent under everything else. "What if this is just something my head does, and I spend my whole life measuring every real person against somebody who was never actually there to measure against?"

Margaret considers that seriously, no easy answer offered up just to fill the silence. "Then I think you'll figure that out when it happens, and I'll be there when you do. But I don't think that's what this is." She squeezes your hands, reassuring. "I think you found something most people never get to feel at all, and you've just been too scared of sounding crazy to let yourself actually believe in it."

You look at her, moonlight catching soft against her face, and something in your chest finally, fully lets go, not exactly resolved, not fixed, just no longer carried alone.

"Tell me everything," Margaret says, tugging you in closer, delighted despite the tears still drying on both your faces. "Start from the beginning. I want to know all of it."

So you do.

You tell her everything, or close enough to it — the lake and the blue truck and the particular gold of that first sunset, the house with no furniture and Neil Young playing from the truck speakers, the school hallway and the bullying, the ice cream parlor and the ridiculous uniform, even the prom night you witnessed with bittersweet emotions. Margaret listens to all of it wide-eyed, occasionally gasping in exactly the right places, asking follow-up questions with the same rabid enthusiasm she'd bring to any good piece of gossip, except this time it's gentle instead of hungry, careful instead of curious for curiosity's sake.

"Okay, the truck thing, though," she says, hand pressed dramatically to her chest. "The dancing on the porch, and the speakers. I'm going to cry about that separately, later, on my own time."

"You're being absurd."

"I'm being moved." She wipes at her eye theatrically, though there's real feeling underneath the performance of it. "This is the most romantic thing I've ever heard in my entire life and you've been sitting on it for years like it was nothing."

"It’s never felt like nothing. It felt like—" You stop, throat going tight again, the good, warm feeling of finally sharing it curdling suddenly into something harder to hold. "It felt like too much, actually. All the time. Loving somebody that much and having absolutely no way to give it to him."

Your voice cracks, and before you can stop it, you're crying again — not the quiet, careful tears from earlier, something rawer this time, frustration bleeding through underneath the sadness.

"I just hate this," you say, wiping angrily at your own face. "I hate loving someone this much and not knowing if I'll ever actually get to have him. I hate carrying around this whole enormous thing for thirteen years and not being able to do anything with it except write it down and hope."

"What? Why?" Margaret looks genuinely baffled, sitting up straighter like you've said something that fundamentally doesn't compute. "That's the whole point of life, isn't it? Finding something worth loving that much? Most people go their entire lives never feeling anything close to what you're describing right now."

"Most people also get to actually have the person they love, Margaret."

"Okay, fair. That part sucks." She softens, scooting closer, wrapping an arm around your shoulders. "But just because you haven't actually found him yet doesn't make your feelings any less real. You know that, right? The love isn't fake just because you don’t know him yet."

You laugh, wet and unsteady, leaning into her. "That's annoyingly poetic for someone who's had five wine coolers."

"I contain multitudes." She squeezes your shoulder, gentler now. "I mean it, though. You're not crazy, and you're not wasting your time, and if the universe has any decency at all, it's gonna hand you this boy someday and you're gonna get to have every single one of those dreams for real."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you'll have loved somebody enormous and real for thirteen years, and I think that still counts for something even if it never gets a happy ending." She bumps her head against yours. "But I don't really believe that's how this goes. I refuse to believe the universe handed you something this specific for all this time just to have it mean nothing."

You sit with that a long moment, the ache in your chest softening slightly, not gone, but lighter somehow, easier to carry now that it isn't only yours to hold anymore — and by the time the fire's burned down low behind you and the cold's finally chased you both back toward the house, some of the night's weight has genuinely lifted, replaced by something looser, sillier, worn thin with wine coolers and relief.

You're both properly exhausted by the time you make it back inside, stumbling slightly on the porch steps, giggling over nothing in the particular loose, silly way only a few too many drinks and a whole lot of emotional release can produce. The pullout couch in the downstairs den creaks alarmingly the second you both collapse onto it, springs protesting under the combined weight, and neither of you cares even a little.

"This bed is trying to kill us," Margaret mumbles, already half asleep, dragging a blanket up over both of you.

"It's very structurally concerning."

"We'll die together. It's very romantic."

You laugh, quiet, settling into the lumpy mattress, the sound of a party still faintly audible somewhere outside, distant and unimportant now. Margaret's already drifting, breathing gone slow and even beside you, and you lie there a moment in the dark, chest still full from the whole enormous night, watching moonlight cut a thin silver line across the ceiling through a gap in the curtains.

"Hey, Margaret," you say, quiet, not sure if she's even still awake to hear it.

"Mm," she mumbles, barely surfacing.

"I love you. Thank you for listening to me."

She shifts closer, one arm flopping heavy and affectionate over your side, voice thick with sleep but entirely sincere underneath it. "You're my best friend," she mumbles into the pillow. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for you."

You smile in the dark, something warm and settled finally taking root in your chest after a whole night of carrying it loose and unprotected, and you fall asleep like that — tangled up together on a couch that creaks with every breath, thirteen years of silence finally, gently laid to rest.

The dream that finds you later that same night arrives soft, the way the good ones sometimes do, dropping you into a driveway dark and quiet, crickets humming somewhere in the grass. There's Steve in the driver's seat of a car that's already stopped moving — engine off, keys probably still in the ignition, tie hanging loose and undone around his neck like he tugged at it the second he was alone enough to.

He doesn't get out right away. He just sits there a long moment, staring at his own front porch light like it's asking him a question he doesn't have a ready answer for, chest rising and falling slow in the quiet dark.

You don't know everything that happened tonight. You know enough — the kiss, the way he pulled back from it, the strange, unfinished ache that followed him all the way home from that party. You watch him sit with whatever's still tangled up inside him a moment longer before he finally pushes the car door open and heads for the house.

The front door creaks soft on its hinges, and the first thing you see, past Steve's shoulder, is a lamp still burning low in the living room — and his mother, curled into the corner of the couch with a book open on her lap, glasses perched low on her nose, that same thick brown hair from the driveway now pulled loose and soft for the night.

Steve stops dead in the doorway. "What are you doing up still?"

"I wanted to see how it went." She sets the book down, careful, watching him with an expression that's trying hard to be casual and not quite managing it.

"Why would you wait up for me now?" It comes out sharper than he probably means it to, some old, worn groove of resentment surfacing fast and automatic. "You've never been here to wait up before."

She flinches, small, and doesn't argue the point. "I know. I'm trying to change that."

Steve doesn't answer right away, just stands there in the doorway, tie still hanging loose, some old tiredness sitting heavy behind his eyes that has nothing to do with how late it is.

"I saved you some dessert," his mother says instead, gentler, nodding toward the kitchen. "From dinner. In case you were hungry when you got in."

"I'm not really—" He stops himself, something in his face softening just slightly. "Thanks, though."

"You don't have to eat it." She's watching him carefully, the way you watch something fragile you're not sure how to hold yet. "I just — I don't know. I thought maybe, if you weren't too tired, we could watch something. I picked up Beverly Hills Cop the other day, or I think we've still got some Indiana Jones tapes around here somewhere." A small, hopeful pause. "We could just talk, too. If you'd rather do that. I know it's late."

Steve hesitates.

You feel it before you fully understand it — some old, tired ache rising up in your own chest, watching him stand there deciding whether to let his own mother back in after however many years of learning not to expect her. You think, unbidden, of your own mother, of a kitchen floor and a shattered mug and every single ordinary night you didn't know to treasure while you still had them. You'd give almost anything, you realize, aching, to have this exact choice in front of you instead of behind you — one more late movie night, one more chance to say yes.

Say yes, you think, useless and desperate, willing it toward him with everything you have. Please. You don't know how lucky you are that she's still there, asking.

Steve exhales, slow, and something in his shoulders finally loosens. "Indiana Jones," he says, quieter now, less guarded. "If you've still got it."

His mother's whole face breaks open with relief, quick and real. "I'll go find it."

It's awkward at first — stilted small talk while the tape rewinds, both of them sitting a careful, unfamiliar distance apart on the couch, like two people relearning a language neither of them's spoken in a long time. But it softens, slowly, the way these things do. Somewhere around the second act, his mother makes an exaggerated, badly-timed gasp at something on screen, and Steve laughs, really laughs, surprised out of him, and she looks so plainly delighted by the sound of it that something in the whole room shifts.

"You always used to do that," Steve says, still grinning. "The gasping thing. Even when you already knew what was gonna happen."

"It's more fun that way."

"It's ridiculous."

"It's tradition," she corrects, mock-offended, and he laughs again, easier this time, some of the old, careful distance between them finally starting to close.

By the time the credits roll, they're both loose and giggling over something you can't quite catch, an old inside joke, maybe, resurfacing rusty but intact after however long it's been sitting unused, and watching it aches in the best and worst way at once. You want this so badly for yourself it's a physical thing, sitting heavy behind your ribs, grief and gladness tangled up together until you can't tell which one's winning.

"I should get to bed," Steve says eventually, stretching, glancing at the clock. "It's really late."

"It is." His mother stands too, gathering the empty popcorn bowl, hesitating a second before she reaches for him instead, pulling him into a hug he doesn't resist at all.

He holds on a beat longer than you expect him to, chin resting on top of her head, something in his whole posture finally, fully unguarded for the first time all dream.

"I love you, Mom," he says, quiet, muffled slightly against her hair.

"I love you more." She pulls back just enough to look at him properly, hands cupping his face for a second, something fiercely tender in it. "When I look at you, I still see the chubby little baby we brought home from the hospital. No matter how tall you get."

"I'm eighteen."

"You'll always be my baby. That's not up for debate." She presses a kiss to his forehead, easy and certain. "Goodnight, sweetheart. I'm glad tonight went well."

"Goodnight, Mom."

He heads for the stairs, and she watches him go with an expression so full of quiet, aching love that it's almost hard to look at directly, and you stay rooted there in the golden lamplight a moment longer after he's gone, watching a woman finally, tentatively finding her way back to her son.

You think of your own mother's hands smoothing your hair back after a bad dream, years and years ago now. You think of a kitchen you can't walk past without bracing yourself, still, even now.

You'd give almost anything for one more ordinary night like this one. You're glad, achingly, complicatedly glad, that at least he gets to have his.

Steve wakes slow, the way he never does in real life, into a room he's certain he's never seen before and somehow already knows by heart.

He doesn't open his eyes right away. He just lies there a moment, taking inventory the way he always does in these dreams — the particular weight of the comforter, heavier than the one on his real bed. The smell of the pillow, laundry detergent and something else underneath it, something warm and familiar he doesn't have a name for yet. Older sheets, soft from a hundred washes. This room is his and also yours. He doesn't know how he knows that. He just does with the same quiet, total certainty that's never once been wrong.

His hand moves before the rest of him catches up, reaching sideways across the mattress, instinctive, easy, toward the warm dip where a body should be.

Your side of the bed.

He doesn't know how he knows that either. He just knows it the way he knows his own name, and his palm finds nothing but rumpled sheets and the faintest, fading warmth of somewhere you were until recently. Not long ago. Close enough that the shape of you is still pressed into the mattress, close enough that some small, disappointed part of him wants to chase it, pull the whole dip of blanket closer just to keep a little of that warmth to himself for a while longer.

Soft summer light pours gold through gauzy curtains he doesn't recognize, catching dust in slow, drifting spirals above the bed. The whole room feels washed in it, warm and hazy at the edges, more like a memory than a place — the kind of light that makes everything feel a little bit like heaven, unhurried and entirely safe.

He stretches, groaning low and satisfied, one arm flung up over his head, and for a second he just lies there in it, soaking up a morning that isn't his yet and somehow already feels like it's been his for years.

That's when he hears the footsteps.

Soft, creaking against old wooden floorboards somewhere out in the hallway. There’s more than one set, he's almost sure of it, a heavier, familiar rhythm and something smaller, quicker, pattering along beside it like it's struggling to keep pace. He goes still, listening, some helpless, hopeful thing unfurling slow in his chest.

He can hear voices drifting through the door, muffled, pitched low. Small. Children’s voices, maybe, he can't quite make out the words, just the shape of excitement barely being contained, a whisper that's really more of a very poorly disguised shout.

And then he hears you.

His whole chest does something helpless and immediate at the sound of it, some old, familiar ache blooming warm instead of hollow for once. God, he's missed this. Missed the voice he's only ever heard from a distance, borrowed pieces across a dozen different dreams, never once his, never once this close, this real, right on the other side of a door he could reach out and touch if he wanted to.

"Shh — shh, we need to be really quiet," you whisper, laughter caught somewhere underneath the words, barely holding it together yourself. "Daddy's still sleeping."

Daddy.

The word lands somewhere behind his ribs, huge and quiet all at once, and Steve doesn't move, doesn't breathe, doesn't let himself do anything except lie there and let it settle into every part of him at once — warm, impossible, entirely too big for a single dream to actually be holding.

The footsteps stop just outside the door. He can hear the small, muffled sound of someone trying very hard not to giggle, and your voice again, softer now, closer, murmuring something he can't quite catch — some instruction, maybe, some private joke shared low between you, whoever you really are, whoever's small hands he can just barely imagine tucked into yours on the other side of that door.

The doorknob turns, slow and careful, clearly trying not to creak.

Steve quickly closes his eyes.

He doesn't decide to, not really — it's instinct, pure and immediate, some old habit of not wanting a good thing to end the second it finally arrives. He lets his breathing go slow and even, lets his face settle soft and unguarded against the pillow, and waits there in the dark behind his own eyelids, achingly aware of the door easing open, sets of light and small, careful footsteps spilling into the room,of you standing somewhere just past the threshold, close enough now that if this were real, if any single part of this were real, he could reach out and simply take your hand.

He stays perfectly still, pretending, holding his breath around a happiness so complete it feels like it might crack something open in his chest.

Whatever happens next, he doesn't want to miss a single second of it.

He hears the tiptoeing — small, deliberate, spectacularly unsubtle footsteps trying and failing to be quiet against the floorboards, followed by the soft creak of the mattress dipping under a weight that can't be more than forty pounds soaking wet.

"Shhh — shhh," you whisper, barely holding back laughter, close now, right at the edge of the bed. "Okay. Okay, you can do it now."

Small hands land on his bare arm a second later, gripping tight, and then something soft and quick presses against his cheek — a kiss, sloppy and enthusiastic, followed immediately by a voice pitched at a volume that has clearly never once understood the concept of an indoor whisper.

He feels it. That's the thing that doesn't fully land until a half-second after it happens — the actual, physical weight of small fingers curled into his skin, the damp, real press of a kiss against his cheek. Every other dream he's ever had of you, of any of this, has been like reaching through fog; close enough to see, close enough sometimes to hear, never once close enough to touch. This isn't that. This is warm and solid and entirely, undeniably there, and something in his chest goes still with the shock of it even before he's fully processed what it means.

"Daddy, wake up! Happy Father's Day!"

Steve can't help the grin that breaks across his face before he's even opened his eyes, wide and helpless, giving the whole game away. He knows exactly what's coming. He doesn't care. He lets himself have the extra half-second anyway, eyes still closed, just soaking in the small, insistent hands still gripping his arm, the mattress bouncing slightly as its tiny occupant waits, badly, for him to wake up properly.

When he finally opens his eyes, Annabelle's hovering directly above him, three years old and grinning so wide it takes up half her face, hair still mussed with sleep, one hand still fisted in the sleeve of his t-shirt like she's afraid he might try to escape back into unconsciousness.

"Hi, monkey," he says, voice rough with sleep, and she practically vibrates with delight at getting him to actually speak.

You're standing just past her, by the side of the bed, and the sight of you nearly undoes him before anything else even registers — hair pulled back messily, wearing one of his old t-shirts, a baby balanced on your hip who can't be more than a year old, round-cheeked and blinking sleepily against your shoulder. Henry.

Beside you, Annabelle's twin stands with the kind of intense, focused concentration only a three-year-old can bring to carrying a plate. There are four pancakes stacked lopsided and uneven, drowning in syrup, powdered sugar dusted so thick it's practically snowing off the sides, strawberries balanced precariously on top like she added them at the very last second and refused to be talked out of it.

Caroline.

Something in Steve's chest goes tight and warm all at once, recognition landing soft and complicated behind his ribs. He knows that name. He has known it for years now, carried carefully in the back of a notebook he's never once shown another living soul, attached to a woman he watched slip away in a kitchen that wasn't his to grieve in. He doesn't know, in this moment, if the two of you chose it on purpose, if some part of you carried her forward the same way he's carried the memory of her forward too. He just knows it settles into his chest like something sacred, watching your daughter — his daughter — hold that plate of ridiculous pancakes with the same careful, serious pride her name deserves.

Your face, when he finally looks up at you properly, is so full it nearly stops his heart outright — love, plain and total, care in every soft line of it, excitement barely contained behind your smile, like you've been waiting all morning just to watch this exact moment land on his face.

"Happy Father's Day, baby," you say, quiet, warm, entirely certain.

Steve feels, for one enormous, suspended second, like he might actually combust, like there's no possible container built that could actually hold everything currently trying to happen inside his chest at once. He feels like he might cry, or he might laugh. He thinks, distantly, that a person could probably die happy in a moment exactly like this one, and it wouldn't even feel like losing anything.

"C'mere," he manages instead, voice thick, reaching for all of you at once; and his arms actually close around something solid, something that hugs back, small bodies piling into him with real, undeniable weight, and some old, disbelieving part of him keeps waiting for his hands to pass straight through the way they always have before. They don't. Nothing here slips through his fingers tonight. He holds on a little harder because of it.

The whole bed dissolves into chaos after that: Annabelle burrowing under his arm like she's trying to actually climb inside his ribcage, Caroline carefully, seriously delivering the pancake plate directly onto his lap with the gravity of a state dinner, syrup immediately threatening the sheets in a way nobody in the room seems remotely concerned about. You settle in beside him with Henry still drowsy against your shoulder, and for a long, golden stretch of morning, none of you do anything at all except exist together in one overcrowded, sticky, perfect bed.

"Your mom called earlier, by the way," you say, shifting Henry a little higher on your hip, catching Steve's eye over the twins' heads. "While you were still asleep. Wanted to confirm lunch today. She said she's making the chicken, apparently, the good recipe, and she also said to tell you not to make us late this time."

"What? We're never late."

"We were half an hour late to Easter brunch."

"That was a fluke. It was a hair emergency."

"Mm-hm." You're smiling, easy, unbothered, already reaching over to swipe a stray bit of syrup off Henry's cheek before it can migrate anywhere worse. "Your dad's coming too. Confirmed, not just a maybe this time. Silvia said he actually cancelled his tee time so he could make it."

Something in Steve's chest warms at that, quiet and complicated, older than the morning itself. It still catches him sometimes, even now, even years into this being simply true instead of something to hope for, the plain, uncomplicated fact of his father actually showing up. Not squeezing them in around something else. Not a maybe he has to brace himself against disappointment for. Just there, present, and on time, because his granddaughters asked him to be and that turned out to be reason enough.

He thinks about all the birthdays his dad missed growing up, all the ‘maybe, if I can get away’ mornings that never once turned into an actual yes. He doesn't dwell on it, not with Annabelle's syrupy hand currently patting his face for attention. He just lets the quiet gratitude sit there a moment, familiar and still slightly disbelieving after all this time, watching his own father get a second chance at having a real family that he clearly isn't wasting.

"Noon, then," he says instead, voice easy, and steals a strawberry off the pancake plate before Caroline can stop him, which she absolutely tries to.

The morning eventually spills out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, breakfast dishes multiplying faster than seems physically possible for four pancakes and some fruit, syrup somehow ending up on three separate surfaces that had no business being anywhere near the plate in the first place. Annabelle and Caroline disappear into the living room not long after, some cartoon blaring cheerfully through the doorway, Henry down for a nap in some other room Steve hasn't seen yet but somehow already knows the layout of anyway.

He finds you at the sink, sleeves pushed up, working through the stack of dishes with the unhurried, easy rhythm of somebody who's done this exact chore a thousand mornings before. Steve dries what you hand him, comfortable silence settling between you, the muffled cartoon soundtrack drifting in from the other room the only real noise left in the whole house.

He comes up behind you eventually, setting the dish towel aside, and wraps both arms around your waist, tucking his face into the curve of your neck, breathing you in slow and deliberate like he's trying to memorize it.

"How's this morning measuring up?" you ask, voice light, though he can hear the smile in it, feel it in the way you lean back into him without even needing to think about it.

"I’m the luckiest man in the entire world," he says, quiet, entirely sincere, and means it with every single piece of himself he has.

You turn in his arms, soap-damp hands finding his shoulders, and look up at him with that same full, certain expression from this morning — love and care and something steadier underneath both of those, something that feels less like a feeling and more like a fact he gets to keep. He leans down and kisses you, slow and unhurried, tasting faintly of syrup and coffee and something that's just entirely, permanently you.

He feels it. All of it, the actual warmth of your mouth against his, the soft, real weight of your hands sliding up to rest against his jaw, the specific give of you leaning into him instead of some untouchable idea of you standing just out of reach. He's dreamed about you for years. He's never once, not one single time, actually gotten to feel any of it before tonight, and the shock of it — the sheer, giddy disbelief of it — nearly knocks the breath clean out of him even as he kisses you slower, softer, greedy for every last second he apparently gets to keep this time. It's such a small thing, really, an ordinary kitchen-sink kiss, the kind of thing that’s probably happened here a thousand times before and means nothing more than good morning to you. To him, right now, it might as well be the single most important thing that's ever happened to him.

For one perfect, suspended moment there's nothing else in the whole world except this kitchen, this sink full of dishes, this woman he can finally, actually touch, and the sound of his children laughing at cartoons in the next room.

This, he thinks, right at the very edge of the dream starting to thin. Please God, just let this be real someday. Please let me actually get to keep this.

He wakes up still smiling, the taste of syrup and your mouth both somehow lingering, aching and warm, long after the ceiling above him resolves back into the same one it always is.

As soon as he’s fully awake he immediately wants to go back in.

That's new, or at least it's new to feel it this sharply — most mornings after one of these dreams, there's an ache, sure, familiar and manageable, something he's learned to carry around all day like a bruise he's stopped flinching at. This is different. This is his hand still half-reaching across an empty bed that isn't real, his mouth still faintly remembering the taste of syrup and coffee and you, his chest still full of a kitchen and kids piled into his lap and a father who finally, finally showed up on time. He lies there staring at his actual ceiling, low and familiar and entirely wrong, and wants nothing in the world except to close his eyes and fall backward into a life he's never actually lived.

He doesn't get to. That's not how any of this works, and he's known that for years now.

Except, and this is the part he keeps circling back to, lying there, it wasn't like all the other times. Every single dream he's ever had of you, going all the way back to a track meet he can barely remember the exact shape of anymore, has been the same in one crucial way: he was never actually in it. Watching, always. Close enough to ache over, close enough to reach out, but never close enough to touch. He got used to that a long time ago, folded it into the shape of what these dreams simply were, the rules of a thing he'd stopped expecting to change.

Last night broke every one of those rules at once. He could touch. He could be touched, feel the small hands gripping his arm hard enough to leave an imprint, a kiss pressed damp and real against his cheek. He was inside it this time, not watching through glass. He keeps turning that fact over and over, still slightly stunned by it, like a kid picking a scab just to see if it’s healed yet.

He doesn't know what changed. He just knows something did, and he's not sure he's ever going to be able to go back to not knowing what your hand actually feels like closing around his.

The dreams don't come as often as they used to. That's the trade, he's noticed, somewhere along the way, there are fewer of them now, sometimes whole months stretching out empty and dreamless, but when they do come, they come bigger. Longer. Whole stretches of a life he gets to actually live in for a while instead of just glimpse through a cracked door. Details shift sometimes, small things — a house that's white with green shutters one night and something else entirely the next, kids whose faces blur if he tries too hard to hold onto them, twin girls who are sometimes three and sometimes older, a name that changes shape at the edges no matter how many times he's written it down. He doesn't let it bother him the way it used to. He's stopped needing the details to hold perfectly still. He just needs you to be there.

You always are. That part never changes.

Everything else in his life has changed plenty, though, since that night at the Byers’ house, since the demogorgon and the bat and Nancy's shaking hands wrapped around a rifle that first terrible time.

He doesn't let himself catalog it often, the whole ugly list of it — but some nights, staring at his ceiling like this, it lines up anyway, whether he wants it to or not. The thing with no face in the Byers' living room. The days spent hauling nail-studded bats and raw meat across train tracks, hunting down Dart. Billy Hargrove's fists, the taste of his own blood thick enough that he still can't stand a certain shade of copper-red without his stomach turning. Navigating through tunnels, trying to keep four kids alive while fighting against things that shouldn't exist. The mall. The Russians. The torture, the questions, Robin's voice cracking apart beside him in a cold room that smelled like machine oil and fear. And then, worst of all, that thing made of what used to be people, flayed and wrong and endless, a version of horror he still doesn't have language for even now, even this far removed from it.

He's alive. He knows he's supposed to feel grateful about that, and he mostly does, on the good days. It doesn't stop the nightmares from showing up anyway, patient and regular, an old debt his mind keeps insisting on collecting.

The easier ones are about himself. He can admit that much, at least in the dark, at least at three in the morning when there's nobody around to hear him admit it. Dreams where something finally gets him, some version of the thing with no face, some new impossible horror wearing an old one's shape, and it's quiet after. Nobody comes looking. The house stays just as big and empty as it's always been, and it just... stays that way, permanently, nobody left to notice the specific shape of the silence. Those ones ache in a hollow, familiar way, more sad than terrifying. He's had a long time to get used to the idea that his own absence might not actually disturb anything.

The worse ones are never really about him at all.

Those are the ones that actually wake him up gasping — Dustin's voice cut off mid-sentence. Robin, somewhere he can't reach, calling his name and getting nothing back. Any of them, really; Max, Lucas, Mike, El, whoever the dream decides to hand him that particular night — hurt, or worse, while he stands there uselessly, arms too slow, bat swinging through air that's already empty of whatever he was trying to protect. Failing them. That's always the shape of it, no matter which face the dream chooses to wear that night, always him failing, again, the way some old, tired part of him has already decided is simply what he's for.

He knows, somewhere rational and daylight-shaped, that it isn't true. He's saved people. He's shown up, over and over, bat in hand, ready to give more and more of himself away, every single time it's mattered. The nightmares don't care about that math. They never have.

You're the only thing that's never once shown up in any of it.

He's turned that over plenty of times too, lying awake after the worse ones, chest still pounding — some old, grateful wonder at the fact that whatever part of his mind builds you, it's never once let you anywhere near the horror. When he dreams of you, it's always the other thing. The good thing. Tracks and backyard birthdays and a graduation lawn full of golden light. Kids with syrup on their faces. A past he wishes he could’ve been a part of and future he's never lived but somehow already misses. When he dreams of you, he doesn't dream of failing anyone. He just dreams of being enough, finally, somewhere soft enough to actually rest in it.

He keeps coming back to the kiss, though. That's the part he can't quite set down.

It's a stupid thing to fixate on, probably, compared to everything else the dream handed him — a whole family, a father he actually got to have, syrup and sunlight and a life fully lived instead of just witnessed. But it's the kiss that keeps replaying, unbidden, every time his mind goes quiet enough to let it. The actual, physical fact of it. Your mouth against his, soft and real and entirely there, nothing about it borrowed or half-imagined the way everything else in his head has always had to be. He's grinning about it right now, alone in his room, feeling like an idiot and not caring even a little. Twenty years old and giddy over a kitchen-sink kiss that never technically happened, and he can't bring himself to be embarrassed about it. Not even close.

Because that's the thing sitting underneath all of it now, quiet and enormous and completely unshakable: he knows you're real.

He's spent years telling himself otherwise, on the bad days — some story his lonely, overactive mind built out of spare parts and too many empty rooms, nothing more than that. He can't tell himself that anymore. Not after last night. You can't touch something that isn't real. You can't feel a hand close around yours, warm and certain, from somewhere that only exists behind your own eyes. Whatever this is, wherever you actually are, you're out there. Somewhere. Real, and waiting on the other side of a life he hasn't found his way into yet.

He just has to find you. That thought settles into him clean and simple, none of the usual doubt attached to it this time — not if, not maybe someday, just a plain, quiet certainty that this is now, officially, the actual shape of his life's work. Find you. Get to you. Get to all of it — the kitchen, the kids, the kind of love that doesn't have to be imagined anymore, that he gets to actually build with his own two hands instead of just visit in his sleep. He doesn't know how yet. He doesn't know where to start looking, doesn't have a last name or a city or anything close to a map.

He knows it's possible now, though. That's new too. And it's enough, this morning, to make the whole impossible search feel like something worth actually chasing instead of just hoping for.

He gets up eventually, quiet in the early light, and goes to the closet.

The first notebook's long since full, tucked into an old shoebox at the back, joined a while back by a second one that's most of the way there too. He pulls out the third, newer, barely broken in, spine still stiff, and settles back onto the edge of the bed with it open on his knee.

He writes fast, the way he always does now, well-practiced after all these years, trying to get everything down before the morning has a chance to wear the edges soft.

Kitchen. Kids. Twin girls again, three years old I think, a boy too, younger. Called him Henry. One of the girls was Annabelle. The other—

He pauses there, pencil hovering, throat going tight around the next word before he lets himself write it anyway.

Caroline. She was named Caroline.

Dad was there. Actually there, not a maybe. Mom called that morning to confirm. He cleared his whole afternoon. I don't know if I've ever actually seen that happen in real life, and it happened so easy in the dream I almost didn't feel how big it was until I was already crying about it in my own kitchen.

You said Happy Father's Day like it was the easiest sentence in the world to hand me. Like I'd actually earned it.

He stops again, exhales slow, and keeps going anyway, the way he always does — every single dream of you since he started keeping these, written down no matter how repetitive the words get by now, no matter how many times he's already described the particular color your laugh turns everything, no matter how many different notebooks it takes to hold all of it.

I could touch you this time. He writes it slow, pressing the pencil harder than he needs to, like the words might come out realer for it. Annabelle's hands, your hand, the kiss at the sink — all of it. I FELT it. That's never happened before. Not once, in all the years of this.

I don't know why now. I don't know what changed. I just know I'm not gonna be able to convince myself you're not real anymore. You can't hold a made-up person. I know that now.

I don't know why I keep getting you and not the other stuff. I don't know why you're the one part of my head that never turns into something I have to survive.

I just know I'd take a hundred more nightmares if it meant I got this dream back even one more time.

I have to find you. I don't know how yet. But I'm not giving up on it, on you — not after last night. Not after finally getting to feel your hand actually close around mine.

He closes the notebook eventually, sits there a long moment with his palm flat against the cover, chest still full of syrup and sunlight and a version of his own father he's never once actually gotten to keep. He doesn't put it away right away. He grabs the first one, the oldest and flips back, slow, through page after page of the same aching, hopeful handwriting, years of it by now, every single entry circling the same impossible, unproven fact.

I don't know if you're real, one of the earliest entries reads, ink gone slightly faded now. But I love you like you are.

He still means every word of it, even now, even years and two full notebooks later. It reads different this morning, though, less like a wish thrown out into the dark and more like a promise he's just now found the proof to actually keep.

He sets it gently on the nightstand, not quite ready to put it away yet, and lies back down, staring at the ceiling, aching for a kitchen that doesn't exist yet and a version of his own life he's never once gotten to actually touch. Not yet, he corrects himself, quiet and certain. Not yet. But real. Real enough to feel. Real enough to find.

Before he can settle back into his bed, back into you, Steve's getting dressed for another eight-hour shift he didn't ask for when the thought finally settles all the way into place, clear and unshakable in a way it's never quite managed to be before.

It's her or nothing.

He's never let himself land on that quite so plainly before, not in these exact words, and not with this little room left to argue himself back out of it. After Nancy, he'll admit, he fell back into old habits fast, faster than he'd like to cop to out loud, and he'd kept right on falling into them for months since, no real reason to stop. A different girl every few weeks for a while there, the same old restless search running quiet underneath every single one of them: a laugh that's almost right, hair that's almost the correct shade, some stranger's perfume that stops him cold in a hallway for reasons he could never fully explain to whoever he happened to be standing next to at the time. He told himself it didn't mean anything. Told himself he was just having fun, moving on, doing the normal thing a single guy his age is supposed to do. There was never any real reason to stop doing that. It's not like he had proof of anything, not really — just a stubborn, aching hope he'd never quite managed to shake, no matter how many other girls he tried out in its place.

Last night changed that. He knows better now than he did even yesterday, knows it since a kitchen sink and a kiss he actually got to feel, actually real under his own hands for the first time in years of dreaming about you.

He's not doing the old thing anymore. He decided it somewhere between waking up and pulling his uniform vest off the hanger, plain and total and entirely new — no more searching for pieces of you in girls who were never going to be you in the first place, no more settling for close-enough just to fill up a Friday night. He'd rather be alone and actually waiting for something real than keep handing pieces of himself to people who were only ever going to remind him, eventually, disappointingly, that they weren't you. He doesn't know how to find you yet. He knows, at least, that as of this morning, he's done looking anywhere else.

He grabs his keys and heads out to get Robin.

She's waiting on her porch when he pulls up, already talking before she's even fully in the car.

"Okay, so, you know how I told you I made the Tammy Thompson joke? Your Muppet one?" Robin's buckling in without looking, already deep into whatever thought she's been sitting on since he dropped her off yesterday. "Vickie laughed,Steve. Not, like, a polite laugh. A real one. The kind where she had to put her hand over her mouth."

He glances over, fighting a grin. "It’s my joke, I know it’s funny."

"Doesn't matter. What matters is the laugh." Robin drums her fingers against her knee, restless with it. "Girls don't laugh like that at just anybody's jokes. That's a — that's a specific laugh."

He takes the turn toward the strip mall easy, one hand loose on the wheel. "Did you actually talk to her, though? Besides the joke?"

"I said hi. She said hi back." Robin says it like she's presenting hard evidence in a courtroom. "There was eye contact."

"Robin."

"There was prolonged eye contact."

"That's still not really—"

"I'm working on it, okay?" She huffs, half-laughing at herself, dragging both hands down her face. "It's not like there's a manual for this. 'How to Determine If The Girl In The Band Is Also Gay Without Just Asking Her Directly Because That's Terrifying.' I would read that book cover to cover."

"I'd read that too, honestly."

"You would not."

"I would too. For support."

She swats his arm, laughing properly now, and the rest of the drive dissolves into easy, familiar noise — her running increasingly elaborate theories about Vickie's laugh, her eye contact, the precise angle at which she'd tilted her head during their conversation about a Blondie cassette last week, each theory more scientifically rigorous and less actually scientific than the last. Steve listens, genuinely invested despite himself, grateful in some small, steady way for exactly this — a friend who lets him think about something other than his own tangled mess of a heart for twenty straight minutes on a Saturday morning.

Family Video's slammed by the time they get the lights on, which tracks — spring break just hit Hawkins, every kid in a fifty-mile radius suddenly free and looking for something to do with their empty afternoon, and Keith's response to a full week of nonstop foot traffic has been to schedule both of them open-to-close every single day like the two of them alone can hold back the tide of restless, movie-hungry adolescents on his own.

"This is inhumane," Robin announces, finally getting thirty seconds to lean against the counter after fielding what feels like the fifteenth question in a row about whether they've got a second copy of some movie already checked out twice over. "I could be doing literally anything else with my spring break."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something. Anything that isn't refereeing a stampede of teenage girls fighting over the last copy of Pretty in Pink."

"He takes foot traffic very seriously."

"He takes nothing seriously except making us work through it without backup." Robin sighs, already reaching for the next stack of returns piling up faster than either of them can shelve them. "Only, what, six more days of this?"

"Five, technically."

"Well, it’s five days too many."

The TV behind the counter crackles through some local morning show, half music and half chatter neither of them's really paying attention to — until the newscasters voice shifts, suddenly, into something more careful, more deliberate, the specific cadence reserved for news that isn't supposed to sound as bad as it actually is.

"— We're in the Forest Hills trailer park in East Roane County. We don't have a lot of details now, but we can confirm that the body of a Hawkins High student was discovered early this morning. Police have not released the name although we are told they're currently in the process of notifying the family. —"

Robin goes still beside him, returns forgotten in her hands. "Did he say Hawkins High?"

"Yeah." Something cold settles low in Steve's stomach, old and familiar in a way he hates. "Yeah, he did."

Neither of them says anything else for a second, the radio still murmuring on behind them, both of them caught in the same unspoken, dreadful math — please let this be normal, please let this just be a normal, terrible, ordinary thing, please don't let this be—

The bell over the door slams open hard enough to bounce off the wall, and Dustin comes barreling through it with Max right behind him, both of them wild-eyed, both of them clearly having raced the whole way there.

"How many phones do you have," Dustin demands, breathless, not even bothering with hello. "Here. In the store. Right now. How many."

The next few days blur together in a way that doesn't leave much room for anything except moving forward.

Chrissy Cunningham. That's the name that finally gets attached to the news report, and it knocks something loose in Steve's chest the second he hears it — not because he knew her, but because he knows exactly what kind of story usually follows a name like that in this town. He's right, unfortunately, in the worst way possible. Then there's Eddie, hiding out scared and half-feral in the back of some abandoned boathouse that belongs to a guy everyone just calls Reefer Rick, swearing up and down he didn't do what Hawkins has already decided he did. There's Max, worse than any of them want to admit out loud, caught in the grip of something with a name now, Vecna, something older and more patient and cruel in a way that makes even the demogorgon feel simple by comparison. There's a whole ugly, complicated shape to how it works, once they finally piece it together: the curse, the countdown, the exact terrible mechanics of what happens if nobody manages to stop it in time.

Nancy's tried calling the Byers’ in California twice already, Dustin once more on top of that, hoping somebody picks up long enough to explain what's happening and why they need to know. Nothing. No answer any time, just a phone ringing out into a house three states away that might as well be on the moon for how little good it's doing them right now. They'll keep trying. For now, it's just the people already in Hawkins, doing what they can with what they've got.

Steve doesn't sleep much, those first few nights. Nobody does.

By the time they all end up crammed into the Wheelers' basement, it's less a meeting and more a full-blown council of war, sleeping bags and takeout containers scattered across every available surface.

"Okay," Dustin says, standing in front of the couch like he's about to deliver a lecture nobody asked for, which, knowing Dustin, he probably is. "We know what he does, we know how he does it. What we don't know is when or why he does it."

"Kate Bush stopped it for Max, back in the cemetery," Lucas points out, arms crossed, exhausted in the particular way that's become everyone's default setting lately. “We could do that again."

"That was different. That was luck, mostly." Nancy's got a notepad balanced on her knee, pen moving fast, cataloguing something only she seems to fully understand yet. "We need something more reliable than luck this time." Nancy says, quieter now, and something in her voice pulls the whole room's attention. "He's not just hurting her. He's in there. Inside her head. Showing her things, using them against her — memories, fears, whatever he can find that'll hold her still long enough." A pause. "That's how he gets them. Not from outside. From the inside, where nobody else can even see it happening."

The room goes a little quieter at that, the specific horror of it settling in fresh even though most of them have already heard some version of it once already this week.

Steve doesn't say anything. He goes very still instead, leaning against the doorframe, something cold working its way slow down the back of his neck that has nothing to do with the draft coming in through the window by the door

Inside her head. Showing her things. Using them against her.

He thinks, before he can stop himself, about a kitchen sink. A kiss he could actually feel for the first time in thirteen years. He tells himself it's not the same thing, that Max's visions sound like nothing close to what he's been carrying around since he was six years old, warm and private and entirely his own. He almost believes himself. Almost.

Lucas paces, glancing at the phone on the wall every so often like it might ring on its own if he just watched it hard enough. Erica, unimpressed by literally everyone in the room, keeps pointing out logical gaps nobody else has thought to question yet, which is somehow both extremely annoying and consistently useful.

"We need eyes on Max at all times," Nancy says eventually, cutting through the noise. "Somebody with her constantly. If it starts again, we need to know the second it does."

"I can do it," Lucas says immediately, already half out of his seat.

"We'll rotate," Dustin adds. "Nobody does it alone."

Steve doesn't say much through the rest of it, honestly — hangs back near the door, listens, watches this strange, exhausted, fiercely stubborn group of kids do what they've apparently always done, piece by piece, in whatever ruined living room happens to be available that week. But underneath the noise and the string and the increasingly ambitious theories about frequencies and gates, that one sentence keeps circling back around on him, patient and unwelcome. Inside her head. Showing her things. He thinks about notebooks carefully tucked behind a shoebox at home. He thinks about a kiss he's still not sure he imagined right, and for the first time in thirteen years, he's not sure "imagined" is even the right word for it anymore.

"Okay," Nancy says, clapping her hands together, refocusing the whole room at once. "Let's go through it one more time, from the top."

Steve pushes off the doorframe on autopilot, already scanning the room until he finds Robin over by the stairs, and something in his chest decides, plain and urgent, that whatever else needs doing can wait five more minutes.

He needs to talk to somebody. Right now, before the thought can finish taking root and choke out everything else.

He catches up to her before she can make it all the way to the bathroom, fingers closing gentle around her sleeve, tugging her toward the Wheelers' backyard instead. "Can we— I need to talk to you. For a second. Alone."

She clocks something in his face immediately, the easy exhaustion sliding off her own expression fast. "Yeah. Yeah, of course."

The outside is cold, spring not quite committed to warming up yet, and Steve stands there a second once the door's shut behind them, arms wrapped around himself, not sure where to actually start.

"You're freaking me out a little," Robin says, gentle, giving him space. "What's going on?"

"The thing Nancy said. About Vecna. That he — that he gets inside people's heads. Puts things there. Visions, memories, or whatever." Steve drags a hand back through his hair, unable to stand still. "I can't stop thinking about it."

"Okay. That's — yeah, that's terrifying, but you're not the one who's—"

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to not think I'm completely insane." He cuts her off before he can lose his nerve, before the whole thing can slide back down his throat the way it always has, every single time he's come close to saying any of this out loud to another living person. "I've been having dreams. Since I was a kid. About this girl."

Robin blinks, clearly bracing for something worse than that. "...Okay?"

"Not just — they’re not normal dreams, Robin. It’s always the same girl. Since I was six. I've watched her whole life happen in pieces, out of order, since before I even understood what I was looking at. I've seen her as a kid. I've seen her — I've seen versions of us grown, married, with real, actual kids, a whole life I've never lived, and it's always her, every single time, never once anyone else." The words come out faster now that they've started, messy, tumbling over each other like he's been holding a door shut for years and it's finally given way. "I've got notebooks. Three of them. I write every single one down, every detail, every time, because I've been scared for years that if I don't, I'll lose her completely, and I've never told a single person, not once, not ever, because it sounds—"

"Steve."

"—it sounds totally insane, Robin, and I know it does, I've always known it does, that's why I never—"

"Steve." She catches his arm, steady, cutting through the spiral before it can fully take him under. "Breathe."

He does, finally, chest heaving slightly with how fast he'd been talking, and Robin just stands there with him a second, patient, letting him get his feet back under him before she says anything else.

"Okay," she says finally, careful. "So. You've been dreaming about the same girl since you were a kid."

"Yeah."

"For — what, twelve years?"

"Thirteen, almost fourteen." He says it quiet, almost embarrassed by the specificity of it, like admitting he's counted makes the whole thing worse instead of better.

"And you've never told anyone. Not your parents, not—"

"Nobody." He wraps his arms tighter around himself. "I've never even said her name out loud to another person. I don't even fully know her last name, that's how — that's how much of this I don't actually have. Just feelings. Just a whole, entire life I've apparently been building around someone I've never technically met." He laughs, short and humorless. "You can see why I never brought it up."

Robin's quiet a moment, processing, her face doing something careful and thoughtful instead of the alarmed reaction he's been bracing for his whole life. "Okay. I don't think that makes you insane, for the record."

"You don't know that yet."

"I mean it, Steve. People have recurring dreams. It's a real thing. It doesn't mean—"

"It's not just a recurring dream." His voice cracks up sharper than he means it to, frustration bleeding through fast. "Robin, I can touch her now. Last night, for the first time in all these years, I could actually feel her — her hand, her lips, her — everything. That's never happened before. Not once. And then today I find out there's a — a monster that gets inside people's heads and puts things there that feel completely real, and I don't—" His voice breaks properly this time, raw underneath the words. "I don't know if any of it's even mine anymore. I don't know if she's real, if I made her up, if something's just been using her to get to me this whole time and I've been too stupid and too in love with the idea of her to notice it."

"Steve—"

"They aren't just dreams." It comes out too loud, cracking apart at the edges, more scared than angry even though it lands like anger. "They're real, Rob — at least, I thought they were. I've thought that my whole life. And now I don't know anymore, and I don't — I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that."

The silence after lands heavy between them, just the two of them and the cold yard and the muffled sound of the others still talking strategy inside. Robin doesn't flinch away from the outburst. She just waits it out, steady, until his breathing evens back toward something manageable.

"Okay," she says again, quieter this time. "Let's actually think about this. Like an actual problem. Not just panic about it."

He nods, throat tight, grateful for the shift even as some part of him is still braced for the worst.

"Vecna's victims — what do we actually know? Nightmares. Headaches. Nosebleeds. Time slipping, having visions." She counts it off on her fingers, methodical, the same careful logic she brings to everything. "Do you get nightmares?"

"...Yeah. But so does everyone who's been through what we've been through, that's not exactly—"

"Headaches?"

"I've taken about ten beatings in the last three years, Robin, of course I get headaches."

"Right, but is it new? Different from before all this?"

He considers it honestly, turning it over instead of just reacting. "...No. Not really. Same as always."

"Nosebleeds? Losing time?"

"No."

"Then I don't think you're cursed, Steve." She says it plain, steady, meeting his eyes directly so he knows she means it. "I think you've got a lifetime of trauma giving you nightmares and headaches like literally everyone else we know, and I think that's genuinely awful and you deserve better than that, but it's not the same thing as what's happening to Max."

Something in his chest loosens, just slightly, at that — not fully, not completely, but enough to breathe a little easier. "Then what is it? The touching thing. That's never happened before. Why now?"

"I don't know." Robin says it honestly, no easy answer dressed up to make him feel better. "I genuinely don't know, Steve. But I don't think it's Vecna. I think it's something else. Something we don't have an explanation for yet." A pause, gentler. "That doesn't mean it's not real. It just means we don't understand it yet. Those aren't the same thing."

He lets that sit a moment, turning it over, some of the panic finally settling into something closer to just plain exhaustion. "I've never told anyone, Robin. Any of it. Not the dreams, not her, not — not how much I actually—" He stops, throat tight again, differently this time. "It's been the only thing I've ever kept, and I didn't even realize how much it mattered until right now, saying it out loud."

"I'm glad you told me." She means it, plain and simple, no performance to it at all.

He pulls her into a hug before he's fully decided to, holding on a little tighter than usual, grateful in a way he doesn't have better words for right now. "Thank you," he says, quiet, into her shoulder. "For not thinking I'm crazy."

"You're a little crazy. Just not about this."

He huffs out something that's almost a laugh, pulling back enough to look at her properly. "Please don't tell anyone. Any of it — her, the dreams, any of it. I'm not ready for anyone else to know. I don't even know what to tell them if they asked."

"I won't." Robin squeezes his arm once, steady. "It's yours to tell. Whenever you're ready. If you're ever ready."

"Yeah." He exhales, long and slow, some of the tightness in his chest finally starting to unwind. "Yeah. Thanks, Robin."

"Anytime." She bumps his shoulder gently with hers, and after a moment, nods back toward the door. "C'mon. Let's go save Max. You can have your entire identity crisis about your dream girl some other day."

"Comforting."

"I'm a comforting person." She's already pulling the door open, letting the warmth and noise of the house spill back out around them. "Mostly."

Steve follows her back inside, chest still tight, still uncertain, but a little lighter than he was ten minutes ago, the weight of it, at least, is no longer entirely his to carry alone.

The Wheelers' basement couch has a spring digging into his shoulder blade no matter how he arranges himself, and Steve lies there a long while in the dark, staring at the water-stained ceiling, too wired to actually settle.

His head's still spinning from the conversation in the yard, from saying all of it out loud for the first time in his life, from Robin's steady, careful reasoning that helped some and didn't fully fix the rest. Inside her head. Showing her things. The words keep circling, patient and unwelcome, no matter how many times he tries to talk himself back down from them. He's exhausted in the specific, hollowed-out way that usually guarantees a dreamless night, body and mind both worn too thin to properly fight each other anymore.

He doesn't remember actually falling asleep. He just knows, one blink later, that he's somewhere else entirely.

The room resolves slow around him, familiar in that same total, wordless way — the same bed, the same soft, worn sheets, the same white ceilings he's apparently going to spend a whole future underneath. Sunlight pours warm and gold through the curtains, thick and unhurried, painting everything in that particular, honeyed color that only seems to exist in the very best mornings.

There are no small footsteps in the hallway this time. No sticky syrup, no tiny hands, no Daddy! echoing bright through the house. Just you, tucked warm against his side, one leg tangled loosely through his, hair a soft mess against the pillow, and something in Steve's chest settles so completely at the sight of you that he almost forgets to breathe.

Before the kids, he thinks, distant and certain, the way he always understands things here. Earlier. Just the two of you, still new enough to this that every single morning apparently still feels like this — golden, unhurried, entirely too good to actually be real.

You stir against him, blinking slow into the sunlight, and when you tip your face up to look at him properly, the light catches your eyes in a way that makes something in his chest ache sweetly, helplessly. You're smiling before you've even fully woken up, easy and unguarded, like waking up next to him is simply the expected, obvious shape of every single morning you've ever had.

"Good Morning," you murmur, voice rough with sleep, and he could listen to that exact sound for the rest of his life and never once get tired of it.

"Morning." He tucks a strand of hair back from your face, unhurried, savoring the excuse to touch you at all. "You're staring at me."

"I'm allowed to stare at my own—" You stop, laugh softly at yourself, shaking your head. "I'm allowed to stare."

"Yeah, you are." He grins, entirely too pleased with himself, and pulls you in a little closer just because he can.

For a long, golden while, neither of you does anything except exist there together, tangled up in warm sheets and quiet, giddy affection, and Steve feels something in his chest go so full it's almost unbearable, not the aching, hopeful kind he's used to, but something steadier. Something that feels less like longing and more like home.

Eventually you shift, stretching, blinking properly awake now, and start to sit up. "Alright, loverboy." You say it light, teasing, already reaching for the edge of the blanket. "We need to get up and get ready, or we're gonna be late."

"Late for what?"

"Doesn't matter. Something. We have plans." You're only half paying attention to your own argument, clearly more interested in extracting yourself from the tangle of sheets than actually leaving. "C'mon."

"No." He wraps both hands around your waist before you can get more than a few inches away, tugging you firmly back down against him, delighted with himself the whole way through it. "Pleaseee. Just five more minutes?"

"Steve."

"Five minutes." He noses at your shoulder, grinning against your skin, entirely unrepentant. "Whatever it is, it can wait five minutes. I refuse to believe otherwise."

"You say that every single morning."

"And I'm right every single morning." He pulls you fully back into his chest, arms looping secure around you, and you go easily, laughing, no real resistance left in it at all. "See? You're not even trying that hard to leave."

"Because I have zero self-control around you. It's becoming a real problem."

"It's a wonderful problem. I fully support this problem." He presses a slow, lazy kiss to your shoulder, then your jaw, then finally your mouth, unhurried and warm and entirely certain, and you melt into it exactly the way you always do, one hand curling loose into the front of his shirt like you're not going anywhere either, not really, not for a good while yet.

"Five minutes," you murmur against his mouth, smiling.

"Five minutes," he nods, agreeing, and already knowing neither of you means it.

The light starts to soften at the edges eventually, the room thinning the way it always does right before the dream lets him go, colors bleeding gentle into grey, your voice growing distant even as he tries to hold onto the sound of it.

He doesn't fight it this time. He just lies there, right at the edge of losing it, and makes a decision instead — quiet, plain, entirely his own.

You're real.

He doesn't know how he knows it. He just knows, with a certainty that has nothing shaky left in it at all, that whatever's happening to Max, whatever Vecna does to the people he touches, it isn't this. It couldn't be this. A monster doesn't build a morning like this one, doesn't hand somebody five extra unhurried minutes and a laugh caught warm against his own mouth and a whole quiet lifetime of before the kids mornings just like it. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you're waiting, you're not a curse. You've never once felt like anything except the truest thing he's got.

I'm going to find you, he thinks, the room fully grey now, your warmth already fading from beneath his hands. I don't care how long it takes. I'm going to find you.

He wakes up on the Wheelers' lumpy couch a moment later, spring still digging into his shoulder, and for the first time in days, he's smiling.

previous chapter | next chapter

taglist:

You’re standing on a driveway outside a house you faintly recognize, evening light gone soft and blue at the edges, and it takes you a second to spot him. He's leaning against the open door of a car, checking his reflection in the side mirror with the specific, focused intensity of someone who's already redone his hair twice and isn't fully convinced it's sitting right yet.

He's younger here. Not by a ton, just old enough that you know, the way you always know things in these dreams, that this is close to his real age, close to yours, some stretch of high school you're still living through in your actual, waking life. He's in a tuxedo, dark and clearly rented, tie slightly crooked in a way that makes something fond and helpless bloom in your chest before you even fully register why.

He looks good. That's the first thought that lands, simple and immediate. He looks genuinely, distractingly good, broad-shouldered and a little nervous underneath the polish, hair falling just slightly out of place no matter how many times he pushes it back.

It's the second look that catches your eye. There's a thin, pale line through one eyebrow, barely visible unless the light hits it right. Another at the corner of his mouth, faint enough that you'd probably miss it entirely if you weren't already staring. Scars. Small ones, old enough to have mostly faded, and something in your chest goes tight and curious all at once, wondering when, wondering how, wondering just how many fights a boy has to be in before marks like that stop being news to anyone who actually knows him.

You don't get an answer. You never do, not for the details that matter most.

He's muttering to himself, you realize a second later, low and rushed, checking his bowtie for the third time. "Okay. Okay, you've got this. Just act normal. Be normal. Compliment the dress, open the door, don't say anything weird about the corsage—"

You watch him take one more breath, squaring his shoulders like he's about to walk into something far more dangerous than picking up his date, and it's almost enough to make you laugh out loud at how endearing the whole thing is.

A voice calls from the front porch behind him — a woman's voice, warm, clearly amused. "You've been staring at that mirror for ten minutes, Steve. Kelly's going to think you stood her up."

"I'm going, I'm going." He glances back toward the house, and you follow his gaze without meaning to.

It stops you cold, in a way you don't fully expect. You've seen so many pieces of his life by now — his car, his school, a job wearing a ridiculous sailor costume, an entire future you've watched unfold in fragments — but you realize, with a strange little jolt, that you've never once actually seen his parents before. Some voice mentioned once, an absence noted and moved past, but never a face, never a name attached to either of them.

His mother's standing in the doorway, porch light catching her properly for the first time. She has thick, dark brown hair pinned back loose and elegant, the kind of effortless beauty that clearly took real effort to look effortless, dressed like she'd been somewhere nice earlier in the evening and hadn't bothered changing out of it yet. And behind her, a shape in the front hall you understand, somehow, is his father — tall, put-together in that same polished, unhurried way, whiskey glass in hand, the whole picture of two people who know exactly how to look good for an occasion.

So this is them, you think, studying the two of them with the same hungry, cataloguing attention you bring to every scrap of him you're ever handed. This is where he comes from.

Something shifts in Steve's face at the sight of his father, quick and complicated, gone almost as fast as it arrives. "Where was this energy at literally any of my games," he mutters, low enough that it's clearly not meant for his mother to hear, more just something he needs to say out loud to get it out of his own chest. "Two years of Tuesday practices and he shows up for the prom."

"What was that?"

"Nothing. Just — talking to myself." He straightens his tie one final time, some of the sharper edge smoothing back out of his voice by the time he actually answers her. "Wish me luck."

"You don't need luck. You look very handsome."

"That's what moms are supposed to say."

"It's also just true." Her voice carries something soft and proud underneath the teasing, and you find yourself unexpectedly moved by it despite the sting still lingering in what he'd muttered a second before — some old ache surfacing for a family dynamic you don't get to see clearly enough to fully understand yet, warmth and old disappointment tangled up together in the same small doorway, on the same two well-dressed, well-composed faces.

He climbs into the car, corsage box balanced careful on the passenger seat, and the dream folds itself forward the way it sometimes does; streetlights blurring past, the radio low, his knee bouncing slightly the whole short drive over, until you're somewhere else entirely, parked outside a different house, porch light already on and waiting.

He sits there a second before getting out, exhaling long and slow like he's shaking something loose before he lets himself actually go through with this. Then he grabs the corsage box, climbs out of the car, and starts up the front walk.

It's not even real, you remind yourself, the jealousy already sitting hot and stubborn low in your chest, uselessly arguing with a feeling that isn't listening to a single word of it. It's not even happening to you.

It doesn't help at all. You just stay rooted where the dream's left you, watching a boy you've never met climb the steps toward Kelly’s front door, straighten his jacket one last time, and lift his hand to knock — and the door opens before your chest has a chance to settle, your stomach dropping before you've even fully processed why.

Kelly Morganson is, by any objective measure, gorgeous. Bright blonde hair curled just enough to look effortless, the kind of tan that looks earned rather than bought, a dress in pale blue that fits her like it was made for exactly this moment and no other. Her smile, when she sees Steve standing there with the corsage box, goes soft and genuinely delighted, and something in her whole face says sweet before she's even said a word, the kind of sweet that isn't performed, isn't calculated, just easy and real and a little shy underneath the polish.

You hate it. You hate it so much it embarrasses you.

Please have an annoying laugh, you think, uselessly, watching her greet him. Please say something dumb. Please have picked ugly shoes. Please give me literally one single thing to hold against you.

She doesn't. Her laugh, when Steve says something you can't quite catch, is warm and easy, not too loud, not grating, exactly the kind of laugh that makes a room want to laugh along with it. The dress is perfect. Her makeup's perfect. Even the way she tucks a strand of hair back, nervous and pleased all at once, is the kind of small, charming gesture that would probably make you like her immediately if you met her in any version of real life that didn't involve her standing in a doorway waiting for the same boy you can't stop dreaming about.

You settle, bitterly, for hating her parents instead.

"Oh, don't you two look wonderful," Kelly's mother gushes, already herding them both toward better lighting, voice pitched at a volume that suggests she's been waiting all week for this exact moment. "Steven, turn a little that way — no, the other way — Kelly, sweetheart, your strap's crooked—"

"Mom." Kelly's cheeks go faintly pink, mortified in the specific way only a mother can manage. "I'm so sorry," she murmurs to Steve, low enough that her mother mostly misses it. "She's been like this all week."

"It's fine," Steve says, easy, and you believe that particular smile at least — small, genuine, the kind he doesn't have to work at.

Kelly's father hovers near the stairs the entire time, arms crossed, watching Steve with the specific, unblinking intensity of a man auditioning for the role of ‘Intimidating Father’ in a movie nobody asked him to star in. Steve handles it well, polite and steady, shaking his hand firm when it's offered, but you catch the barely-there flicker of this guy's really doing the whole bit, huh cross his face for just a second before he smooths it back into easy charm.

The corsage goes on with visible concentration, Steve's fingers careful and a little clumsy around her wrist, Kelly watching him do it with a soft, patient smile while her mother narrates the entire process like a sports commentator. Cameras flash. Somebody says scoot closer at least four times. Kelly loops her arm through his for the photos, easy and comfortable, and Steve smiles wide and bright for every single shot.

It's a good smile. Objectively, technically, a very good smile.

It's not real, though. You know that immediately, with a sureness you don't fully understand and don't try very hard to investigate — some small, stubborn recognition that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with however many dreams you've spent learning the actual shape of his face. His eyes don't quite reach it. There's a beat, small and almost invisible, right before every photo where something in him has to consciously choose to perform instead of just be, and you're the only person in that whole overlit foyer who seems to see it happening.

I know you, you think, unbidden, watching him laugh at something Kelly's mother says. I really know you. Even if I don't understand how.

It doesn't make the jealousy go away. If anything, it makes it worse — the specific, aching unfairness of being the only one who can tell something's missing, and having absolutely no way to ask him what.

By the time the pictures wind down and the goodbyes are said, the dream's already tugging you forward again, streetlights and stop signs blurring past, until you're sitting invisible in the backseat as Steve pulls into the packed high school lot, engine idling while he finds a spot.

Kelly's quiet for a second once the car's in park, hands folded in her lap, looking out at the lit-up gym windows with an expression that's harder to read than anything she's shown all night.

"Hey," Steve says, gentler now, all the performed brightness from the doorway gone soft and real. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Just—" She laughs, short, a little embarrassed. "Kind of hard not to think about who I thought I'd be walking in there with a month ago."

"I know." He doesn't push, doesn't rush her, just lets the sentence sit there a moment. "For what it's worth, it’s his loss. Seriously."

"You're a good friend, you know that?" She looks over at him, something warm and grateful in it, nothing romantic underneath at all, just plain, easy affection between two people who clearly know exactly what tonight actually is. "Thank you for doing this. I know it's not exactly your idea of a fun Friday."

"Are you kidding? Cheesy pictures, an excuse to wear a tux, and I get to watch you make your ex regret every decision he's ever made." Steve grins, easy and genuine this time, no performance left in it at all. "This is basically the perfect night for me too."

Kelly laughs, real and unguarded, swatting his arm lightly. "You're ridiculous."

"Thank you."

She takes a breath, squaring her shoulders, some of the earlier nerves settling into something steadier. "Okay. Let's get it over with."

"That's the spirit." He kills the engine, comes around to open her door before she can do it herself, and offers his arm with an exaggerated, courtly little bow that makes her laugh again, easier this time.

You watch them walk toward the gym doors together, arm in arm, easy and comfortable in exactly the way two friends are supposed to be, and something in your chest, complicated and reluctant, finally loosens its grip just slightly, just enough to let you notice what you'd been too jealous to see clearly before.

Whatever tonight is, it was never really about her at all. The dream carries you in after them, past the doors, into the noise and the light.

The gym's been transformed into something almost unrecognizable — crepe paper streamers looping from the basketball hoops, a cheap disco ball throwing scattered light across a dance floor packed tight with couples, some banner overhead declaring the night's theme in glittery, slightly crooked letters. It smells like hairspray and cheap cologne and the particular, electric anticipation of a whole gym full of teenagers convinced this night matters more than it actually does.

The DJ slides into something slow, and Steve pulls Kelly out onto the floor without much ceremony, one hand settling easy at her waist, the other holding hers loose and comfortable.

You watch them sway there, unhurried, easy in the specific way two friends are easy with each other, and something aches in your chest so completely it nearly takes your breath. You want that. Not — not necessarily that, not Kelly's dress or Kelly's face turned up laughing at something he's said. Just this. Just a slow song with his hand at your waist and the easy permission to be close to him in front of other people, even just as a friend, even just once, just to know for sure that the boy in your dreams and the boy standing right there under a cheap disco ball are actually, provably the same person.

You don't get that. You just get to watch, aching and invisible on the edge of somebody else's night; watching the hours slip past in the blurred, overlapping way they do at things like this, Steve and Kelly drifting between clusters of friends, somebody handing around a camera, a teacher chaperone making a halfhearted attempt at crowd control near the punch bowl. You lose track of the specific minutes. You don't lose track of him.

It's during a lull between songs that you see it happen — Steve's easy posture going suddenly, subtly still, his eyes catching on something across the gym. You follow his gaze before you can stop yourself.

Nancy. Older than the last time you saw her in any dream, dressed simple and lovely, laughing at something the boy beside her's just said — dark-haired, gentle-looking, an arm slung loose and familiar around her waist. Jonathan, from the dream with the faceless monster.

Something in Steve's face does a small, complicated thing, gone almost as fast as it arrives, not devastation, not anymore, nothing raw. Just an old, worn-soft kind of hurt, familiar in the way old bruises are familiar, pressed on by accident and immediately regretted.

I know that feeling, you think, watching him watch her. I watched the way you jumped to protect her. I know exactly what that look costs you.

He recovers fast, the way he always does, smile sliding back into place before anyone else in the gym could possibly have noticed anything was wrong at all. Kelly sees it anyway.

She doesn't say anything about it directly, just loops her arm through his, tugging him firmly back toward the dance floor right as the DJ swaps into something loud and ridiculous and entirely upbeat, all synth and drums and absolutely no room left for melancholy.

"C'mon," she says, already pulling him along. "This is our song."

"We don't have a song."

"We do now. I just decided."

Whatever protest he might've made dies fast, swallowed up by the music and Kelly's insistence, and within seconds the two of them are making complete, gleeful fools of themselves in the middle of the dance floor. Steve doing some exaggerated, terrible move that might generously be called dancing, Kelly matching his energy step for step, both of them laughing too hard to actually keep any rhythm at all. He spins her, badly, nearly clips somebody's shoulder, and neither of them stops laughing long enough to properly apologize. She ducks under his arm, missteps, grabs his shoulders for balance, both of them cackling now, the whole heavy, complicated ache from a minute ago apparently burned off entirely in the noise and the silliness of it.

You watch, helpless, the jealousy and the longing tangled up together in your chest with something else now too, something warmer, harder to name. Gratitude, maybe. Whoever Kelly is to him, whatever tonight actually is, she's good for him. She's exactly what he needed in this specific, unremarkable moment, and some quiet, generous part of you is glad, even through the ache of wanting to be the one doing it instead.

The song winds down eventually, both of them breathless, hair coming loose from whatever careful styling it started the night in, grinning at each other with the specific, easy delight of two people who've just spent ten minutes being completely ridiculous together and regret none of it.

"Okay," Steve says, still catching his breath, laughing. "That was genuinely humiliating."

"That was incredible. I'm framing this memory."

"Please don't."

"Too late. Already framed it." Kelly's still grinning, flushed and happy, all traces of her earlier nerves long gone.

Steve looks at her a moment, something easy and fond and entirely uncomplicated in it, and you watch the last shadow of Nancy finally clear all the way from his face.

"Hey," he says, glancing toward the gym doors, some new idea clearly forming. "Do you wanna get out of here?"

The afterparty's already loud by the time they pull up outside — some upperclassman's house lit up bright against the dark, music thumping faint through closed windows, a scattering of cars already crowded along the curb. Steve puts the car in park but doesn't move to get out, and neither does Kelly, both of them just sitting there a moment in the sudden quiet.

"Tonight was good," Kelly says finally, a little surprised by her own sentence, like she's still catching up to how true it turned out to be. "Like, really good. I wasn't expecting that."

"Low bar, considering the alternative was crying into punch for three hours."

"Fair." She laughs, soft, glancing over at him. "I'm serious, though. Thank you. I know this wasn't exactly the prom either of us pictured."

"It was better than the one I pictured, honestly." Steve says it easy, sincere, no act left in his voice at all. "I had fun. Like, real fun. Not just doing-a-favor-for-a-friend fun."

"Same." Kelly's quiet a second, looking at him in the dim light coming off the dashboard, something soft and unguarded settling over her face. "You're a really good guy, you know that?"

"I've heard rumors."

"I mean it." She's still looking at him, and something in the air between them shifts, slow and unhurried, neither of them quite naming it as it happens.

You feel it before it happens, the way you always seem to feel things a half-second ahead of them landing, some instinctive, dreadful certainty settling cold in your stomach right as Kelly leans in, right as Steve leans in to meet her.

The kiss is soft. Brief, at first — the kind of thing that could still, in the very first second, pass as nothing, an accident of proximity and a strange, charged night. It doesn't stay that way. It lingers a beat too long, then another, neither of them pulling back right away, and the whole car goes silent around you except for it.

You don't move. You can't. You just stand there, frozen the way you always are in these dreams, and the sound of it, soft and small, and entirely too intimate, fills up every corner of your awareness until there's nothing else left in the whole world except the specific, unbearable proof of his mouth against somebody else's.

The jealousy that rushes through you isn't quiet this time. It isn't the aching, wistful kind from the dance floor. It's hot and immediate and humiliatingly close to fury, directed nowhere reasonable, landing everywhere at once — at Kelly, at the universe, mostly, uselessly, at Steve himself, like he's done something to you personally by kissing a girl even though you have no actual claim to him at all.

You don't even know me, you think, furious and heartbroken in equal measure. You don't even know I exist. You don't owe me anything. So why does this feel like betrayal?

Steve pulls back first, abrupt, like he's just remembered something important.

"Shit." He drags a hand down his face, mortified, already putting distance between them in the small space of the car. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."

"Steve—"

"That wasn't — that's not what tonight was supposed to be. I don't want you thinking I took you just to—"

"Steve." Kelly cuts him off, gentle, unbothered in a way that seems to genuinely surprise him. "It's fine. I also wanted to. It just happened. Let's just forget about it, okay?"

He looks at her a long moment, something complicated working behind his eyes — relief, maybe, and guilt underneath it, and something else you can't quite name from where the dream's left you frozen. "Okay," he says finally. "Yeah. Forgotten."

"Good." She smiles at him, easy again, already reaching for the door handle like the whole thing really has been filed away and closed. "Now let’s walk in before our friends call the police thinking you kidnapped me, or something."

He walks her up the driveway, one hand light at the small of her back, both of them laughing about something you can't hear over the roar still sitting in your own ears. At the door, Kelly turns, says something brief, presses a quick, easy hug to him — nothing romantic in it at all now, just warmth and gratitude, just two friends closing out a strange, good night — and disappears into the chaos behind the door.

Steve stands there a moment on the porch, alone, the party noise spilling out around him, and you watch something complicated move across his face in the porch light — guilt, still, and confusion, and underneath both of those, something that looks almost like loneliness, like the kiss cracked open a door he'd rather have kept shut.

He doesn't go inside.

He just stands there a long moment, hands in his pockets, staring at the lit-up windows like he's trying to decide something important, and then he turns around instead, walking back down the driveway toward his car alone.

You watch him go, chest still tight with jealousy that's already starting to curdle into something softer and sadder now that the anger's burned through — some old, complicated ache for a boy standing by himself on a stranger's driveway, caught between a night that was good and a feeling he apparently can't fully explain even to himself.

I know why, you think, uselessly, watching him climb back into the car alone. I think I know exactly why, and you don't even know.

The porch light blurs at the edges. The music fades first, then the driveway, then Steve himself, dissolving soft into grey the way everything eventually does here, and the last thing you're aware of, right before the dream lets you go entirely, is the specific, aching shape of him sitting alone in a parked car, engine not yet started, looking like a boy who's just figured out something he doesn't have any idea what to do with yet.

You wake up with your chest still tight, the dream clinging stubborn and unwelcome even as your eyes adjust to your own ceiling.

You reach for the floorboard and the notebook on instinct, the way you always do now, and sit there a long moment before you actually start writing, pencil hovering, trying to figure out where to even begin with a dream that left you feeling this many contradictory things at once.

Prom. He looked so handsome. Rented tux, crooked bowtie, hair he clearly spent way too long on. I saw his parents for the first time tonight — his mom's beautiful, brown hair, looked like she'd stepped out of a magazine. His dad too, put together, the kind of handsome that comes with money. I don't know why that detail is sticking with me so much. You pause, chewing the inside of your cheek. His date’s name was Kelly. She was gorgeous, and sweet, and I hated her for absolutely no reason at all, and I know that's embarrassing to admit even here where I know nobody's ever going to read it.

You sit with that a second, letting yourself actually feel the shame of it instead of writing around it the way you usually do.

They kissed. I watched it happen and I wanted to scream. I don't even have a right to feel that, and I felt it anyway, and I think that might be the most humiliating thing I've ever had to write down.

You set the pencil down, pressing the heel of your hand briefly against your eyes, trying to untangle the mess of feelings still sitting hot and complicated in your chest.

He looked happy tonight. That's the part you keep circling back to, the part that should matter more than the jealousy does. Happy in a real way, not the performed kind — laughing until he couldn't dance straight, easy and warm with a girl who clearly needed exactly that kind of night. You should want that for him. You do want that for him, somewhere underneath all the ugly, petty stuff, you want him laughing like that, want him to have good nights, want somebody to be kind to him the way Kelly so plainly was.

You just don't understand how you're supposed to want that and feel the way you do about the lake. About the porch, and the dancing, and Harvest Moon looping soft through open truck doors while he swayed you both slow across the creaky floorboards of a porch that didn't exist anywhere real. You've dreamed of him your whole life, dreamed about a version of the future that felt as solid and real as anything you've ever actually lived. How are you supposed to feel simply happy watching him kiss somebody else, when some stubborn, certain part of you has already decided, somewhere years ago, that the two of you are supposed to end up together?

It doesn't make sense, you write, frustrated, underlining it hard enough to nearly tear the page. I want him happy. I want it to be with me. Both of those are true at the same time and I don't know what to do with that.

The phone on your nightstand rings before you can chase the thought any further, shrill and sudden enough to make you jump.

You answer on the second ring, voice still a little rough. "Hello?"

"Okay, don't panic, but are you still picking me up?" Margaret, breathless and already talking a mile a minute, no actual greeting attached. "Because if you forgot about me I will actually never forgive you."

You laugh despite yourself, the tight knot in your chest loosening just slightly at the sound of her voice. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming in like an hour. I need to pack my bag and get Ella and Shannon, and then I'm grabbing you."

"Okay, good." You can hear her grinning through the phone. "I'm so excited for a weekend of teenage shenanigans with you and your prep school snobs!"

"They're not snobs, Margaret."

"You all go to a school with a crest, babe. I stand by my assessment."

"Ha ha. Very funny." You roll your eyes, though there's no real heat in it, already reaching for your bag with your free hand, mentally cataloging everything you still need to throw into it before you're presentable enough to be seen in public. "I'll see you in an hour."

"Can't wait. Love you, bring snacks."

"Love you too. Bye, Margie."

You hang up, sitting there a moment in the sudden quiet, the ordinary, comfortable rhythm of your actual life already tugging you back into itself — Marcus’s lake house, your senior spring break, days that are going to be full of sunburn and bad music and probably at least one dramatic incident involving somebody's older brother's boat.

You glance back down at the notebook, still open on your knee, and add one more line before you let yourself close it for the day.

I don't know how to want both things at once. But I think I do anyway. Maybe that's just what it means to actually love somebody — wanting their happiness more than you want to be the reason for it, even though it hurts.

You close the notebook, slide it back beneath the floorboard, and press the board flat until it clicks quiet into place.

Then you get up, and go get ready for the weekend, the notebook and dream and your complicated jealousy all tucked safely away behind you for now — at least until the lake house gives you something new to think about instead.

By noon, the four of you have claimed the dock as your own personal territory, towels spread out in a row, a cooler full of wine coolers sweating quietly in the shade beside you.

"Okay, but if you jump from the higher part, you get, like, actual air," Shannon insists, already climbing up onto the boathouse roof despite Ella's protests, wine cooler abandoned somewhere behind her. "Watch."

She jumps. It's not especially impressive, honestly, but the shriek she lets out on the way down is enough to send the rest of you into hysterics anyway, and by the time she surfaces, sputtering and triumphant, Margaret's already climbing up to try it herself.

"You guys are gonna break your necks," Ella calls, unbothered, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, clearly having no intention of joining them.

"Worth it," Margaret shouts back, right before she jumps too, cannonballing hard enough to splash half the dock.

You spend most of the afternoon like that — jumping, floating, ignoring a cluster of senior guys a little further down the dock who keep splashing water in your general direction with the specific, transparent hope that one of you will finally acknowledge them. One of them, a guy named Bryce who'd spent most of junior year convinced he's Elvis’s second coming, makes a valiant attempt to grab Ella's ankle and pull her under, which she avoids so smoothly and with such total disinterest that even his friends laugh at him for it.

"You're gonna have to try way harder than that," Ella informs him, unbothered, already swimming back toward the dock.

"I'm just trying to have fun!"

"You and your right hand can go have fun somewhere else."

By the time the sun starts sinking low and gold over the water, all four of you are thoroughly sunburnt, pleasantly loose from an afternoon of wine coolers, and gathered around a fire pit somebody's already got crackling in the backyard, a whole loose crowd of seniors scattered on blankets and lawn chairs around it.

The stories start the way they always do at parties like this — somebody bringing up an old, embarrassing memory, the whole group piling on with increasingly exaggerated details, laughter rolling loose and easy around the fire. You're deep into a wine cooler and a good mood, leaning into Margaret's shoulder, when one of the guys — Danny, maybe, you're not entirely sure through the haze of firelight and floaty tipsiness — starts in on a story that begins innocently enough.

"Okay, but did you hear about what Aaron Thomas—"

Ella's foot connects with his shin hard enough that he yelps, the sentence dying instantly, and a beat of awkward silence ripples out around the fire pit as several people suddenly find something very interesting to look at that isn't you.

"Ow, what the hell, Ella—"

"Wrong story," she says, tight and pointed, and Danny, to his credit, seems to actually catch on, muttering a quick, sheepish apology before the conversation limps back into motion around some other, safer topic.

"You guys, it's really fine," you say, forcing a smile you don't entirely feel, waving off the sudden careful attention turning your way. "Seriously. I'm good."

Nobody quite believes you, but everybody's kind enough to let the statement stand anyway, conversation slowly reknitting itself back into easy chatter as you get up, brush sand off your shorts, and head down toward the dock without really deciding to.

The water's black and glassy under the moonlight, fire pit noise fading soft behind you the further you walk, and you sit down at the very end of the dock, feet dangling just below the surface of the water, letting the quiet settle over you instead.

You hear footsteps behind you a few minutes later — light, familiar, unhurried — and you don't have to turn around to know who it is before you do.

Margaret settles down beside you without a word, close enough that her shoulder brushes yours, and for a long moment neither of you says anything at all.

You lean your head against her shoulder eventually, and she shifts slightly to make room for it, easy and automatic, like she's done this a hundred times before and expects to do it a hundred more.

The lake stretches out dark and quiet in front of you, moonlight scattered loose across the surface, laughter and firelight still glowing warm somewhere behind you, and for a while, that's all there is — just the water, and the moon, and the quiet, Margaret's shoulder steady under your cheek, holding space for whatever you're not quite ready to say out loud yet.

It's Margaret who finally breaks it.

You're drunker than you probably should be — not sloppy, not out of control, just loose enough at the edges that the quiet between you and Margaret feels less careful than it usually does, less like something either of you is actively managing.

"Can I ask you something?" Her voice comes quieter than the wine coolers would really explain on their own.

"Mm."

"Why'd you actually break up with Aaron?"

The question lands harder than the gentle way she asks it. You feel your whole body go a little more alert despite the haze, some old, practiced defensiveness rising up automatic.

"I already told you why."

"You told me the vague version. The 'it just wasn't working anymore' version." Margaret's not looking at you, staring out at the lake instead, which somehow makes the question feel less like an ambush and more like something she's genuinely trying to understand. "There's been — I don't know. Talk. About it. People saying some stuff."

"What kind of stuff."

"C’mon. You know what kind of stuff." She finally glances over, careful. "You guys were kind of a big deal, you know? Power couple energy, even people at Anderson High knew your names together. When that ends, people talk. They love to fill in the blanks with whatever sounds juiciest."

Something cold settles in your stomach despite the alcohol. "Just say it out loud, Margaret."

"Was there really someone else?"

The question hits you somewhere sharp and immediate, and for a second you just stare at her, genuinely stung. "You think I cheated on him?"

"I didn't say I believed it—"

"But you're asking."

"Because I want to hear it from you and not from some girl who goes to Anderson Prep that doesn’t even know you." Margaret says it plain, no accusation in it, just honesty. "I know you. I don't actually think you'd ever do that. I just — I want the real story, not the hallway version."

You look away, back out at the water, jaw tight. "I didn't cheat on him. I never touched anyone else the entire time we were together. That rumor is complete bullshit and I hate that it's out there."

"Okay." Margaret says it simply, believing you immediately, no further argument. "I believe you. I just had to actually ask instead of just assuming."

"I think it might actually be him, if you want to know the truth," you add, quieter, the words tasting sour on the way out. "Aaron. He didn't exactly take it well, and I know he's said stuff to people — not really lies, exactly, just enough hurt and vague comments left lying around for people to build their own worst version out of it. I don't think he meant for it to turn into that, though. I think he was just sad and talking too much to the wrong people."

"That actually tracks," Margaret admits, wincing slightly. "He did seem pretty wrecked about it, last I heard."

You exhale, some of the tension loosening slightly, though the ache underneath it doesn't fully go anywhere. The fire crackles somewhere behind you, laughter drifting faint across the yard, someone's radio playing low enough that you can only catch fragments of the melody.

Margaret's quiet a moment, and you think, hope, that maybe that's the end of it. But it isn't.

"Was it because of Notre Dame?" she asks, gentler this time, testing. "Like — the distance thing? Because that's a totally normal reason. Nobody would judge you for that."

"Kind of." You say it slow, careful, picking through the truth for the parts you're actually willing to hand over. "It didn't help. Long distance is — it's a lot. It probably would've ended things eventually even if nothing else was going on."

"But that's not the actual reason?"

"Margaret."

"I'm not trying to interrogate you, I promise, I just—" She stops herself, exhales, tries again softer. "I've known you since we were seven. I know when you're giving me the easy version of something instead of the real one. You've been doing it for years, actually, now that I think about it. There's always this part of you I can't quite get to."

Your chest goes tight at that, more than the alcohol accounts for, some old, careful wall inside you creaking dangerously at the mention of it.

"I loved him," you say finally, quiet. "At least I think I did. He was so good to me. He never did anything wrong."

"But?"

You don't answer right away. You just look at her — really look, the fire-lit edge of her face, the patient, familiar warmth in her eyes, so many years of friendship sitting steady behind the question she's asking. Some part of you wants, badly, recklessly, to just say it. All of it. The lake. The truck. A boy named Steve you've been dreaming about since you were five years old, a whole secret life tucked behind a floorboard that you've never once let a single living person see.

You feel your eyes sting, unexpected, and you blink hard against it, throat going tight around a truth you've protected so carefully for so long that you don't even know how to shape your mouth around it anymore.

"Margaret, I—"

You stop. The fire crackles behind you, someone laughing loud at something near the pit, the ordinary noise of a party still going on completely unaware of the conversation happening down here in the dark.

Margaret waits, patient, not pushing, just watching you with the same steady, careful attention she's always given you, the same attention that's made her safe to fall apart in front of for as long as you can remember.

And you sit there on the edge of the dock, moonlight scattered soft across the water, one tear finally slipping loose down your cheek, caught completely between thirteen years of silence and the terrifying, exhausting relief of finally, maybe, being ready to let some of it go.

"It's okay," Margaret says, quiet, steady, reaching over to squeeze your hand where it rests on the dock between you. "You can tell me."

You don't answer right away. You sit with it instead, watching the moonlight break apart and reform on the surface of the lake every time the wind stirs it, trying to figure out if there's actually a version of this you know how to say out loud.

"You're graduating in two months," Margaret says, gentler now, filling the silence you're not ready to fill yourself. "And then you're off to IU, and I'm gonna be stuck here finishing senior year without you, same as always, except this time there's no guarantee you're gonna be twenty minutes away anymore." A small, sad huff of a laugh. "I keep thinking about that. About you leaving and taking some whole part of yourself I never actually got to meet."

You laugh too, wet and unsteady, wiping at your face before you've even fully registered you're crying. "That's a very specific thing to be thinking about."

"I think about you a lot. Sue me."

That gets a real laugh out of you, short and surprised, and something in your chest loosens just enough to let the next part through.

"Can I tell you something?" Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to. "And you have to promise not to think I'm insane. Like, actually promise. Not just say it."

Margaret's face goes careful, worry flickering behind her eyes even as she scoots closer, both hands wrapping around yours. "I promise. Whatever it is."

You don't start where you thought you would. You start somewhere smaller, quieter, working your way in sideways instead of diving straight into the deep end.

"Do you remember second grade? When we first met?"

"Of course. The horse stickers, how could I forget?" Margaret smiles, soft with the memory. "You had the one with the rainbow mane and wouldn't trade it for anything."

"Do you remember how tired I used to get sometimes? During recess." You watch the memory surface behind her eyes, slow at first. "I used to ask to nap under that one tree we always played by. You probably don't even remember that part."

"I do, actually." Margaret's brow furrows, something clicking into place years too late. "I always just figured you were a kid who didn't sleep well. I never thought much of it."

"I wasn't sleeping well. I still don't, some nights." You take a breath, steadying yourself. "I've been having these dreams since I was five years old, Margaret. Before I even met you. The same one, at first — the same boy, over and over — and it's never really stopped since. That tiredness you remember, back when we were seven and eight — that was because of them. The dreams. I just never told you what they actually were."

"Okay," Margaret says carefully, no judgment in it yet, just listening.

"Not just — not normal dreams. The same boy, every single time. I've watched pieces of his whole life happen, out of order, over years — some of them soft and happy, but some of them the kind that used to wake me up screaming when I was little. I've got a notebook, Margaret. I've been writing every single one down since I was a little girl because I was terrified of losing the details, and I have never shown it to a single person. Not you. Not my mo– not my dad. Not Aaron, not once, the entire time we were together." Your voice cracks properly now, and you don't fight it. "I didn't know how to tell him I think I might be in love with somebody who might not even be real. There's no version of that sentence that doesn't sound insane, Margaret. I've rehearsed it a thousand times and it never once comes out sounding like anything except a girl who's lost her mind."

"Hey." Margaret's thumb moves slow across your knuckles, grounding, patient. "I'm not going anywhere. Keep going."

"His name's Steve." Saying it out loud for the first time to another living person does something strange to your chest, cracks it wide open in a way you weren't braced for. "I don't even know his last name — I've heard it, in the dreams, but it never stays with me when I wake up, no matter how hard I try to hold onto it. There's a boy named Dustin who's younger. A girl he works with named Robin. I know the exact sound of his laugh. I know how he tucks my hair back. I've danced with him on a porch that I can’t prove exists anywhere real, and I don't know if any single piece of it is true. I've loved him anyway, for thirteen years, without a shred of proof he's anything more than something my own head built to keep me company."

The confession sits there between you, enormous and finally spoken, the fire pit still crackling faint somewhere behind you.

Margaret's quiet a long moment. When she finally speaks, her voice comes out soft, almost wondering. "Thirteen years."

"I know how it sounds."

"I don't think it sounds like anything you should be ashamed of." She says it slow, like she's genuinely turning the whole idea over rather than rushing to comfort you. "I think it sounds like the biggest secret I've ever heard you keep, and I'm a little heartbroken you carried it alone this whole time — especially that part, back when we were kids. I wish I'd known enough to ask questions back then." A small, disbelieving laugh escapes her, softer now. "And also, now that the shock's wearing off — I have about four hundred questions."

You laugh too, startled into it, more tears slipping loose even as something unclenches slow in your chest. "You're not supposed to have questions. You're supposed to tell me I'm not crazy."

"You're not crazy. Obviously you're not crazy." Margaret says it plain, immediate, like it was never actually in question. "But I've known you since second grade, and you've never once had to make anything up just to be interesting. So if you're telling me you've had dreams about the same specific guy for thirteen years, I believe that you believe it, and honestly? That's enough for me to believe there's something real happening here too, even if neither of us understands what yet."

"What if I never find him, though?" The fear comes out small, the one you've been carrying silent under everything else. "What if this is just something my head does, and I spend my whole life measuring every real person against somebody who was never actually there to measure against?"

Margaret considers that seriously, no easy answer offered up just to fill the silence. "Then I think you'll figure that out when it happens, and I'll be there when you do. But I don't think that's what this is." She squeezes your hands, reassuring. "I think you found something most people never get to feel at all, and you've just been too scared of sounding crazy to let yourself actually believe in it."

You look at her, moonlight catching soft against her face, and something in your chest finally, fully lets go, not exactly resolved, not fixed, just no longer carried alone.

"Tell me everything," Margaret says, tugging you in closer, delighted despite the tears still drying on both your faces. "Start from the beginning. I want to know all of it."

So you do.

You tell her everything, or close enough to it — the lake and the blue truck and the particular gold of that first sunset, the house with no furniture and Neil Young playing from the truck speakers, the school hallway and the bullying, the ice cream parlor and the ridiculous uniform, even the prom night you witnessed with bittersweet emotions. Margaret listens to all of it wide-eyed, occasionally gasping in exactly the right places, asking follow-up questions with the same rabid enthusiasm she'd bring to any good piece of gossip, except this time it's gentle instead of hungry, careful instead of curious for curiosity's sake.

"Okay, the truck thing, though," she says, hand pressed dramatically to her chest. "The dancing on the porch, and the speakers. I'm going to cry about that separately, later, on my own time."

"You're being absurd."

"I'm being moved." She wipes at her eye theatrically, though there's real feeling underneath the performance of it. "This is the most romantic thing I've ever heard in my entire life and you've been sitting on it for years like it was nothing."

"It’s never felt like nothing. It felt like—" You stop, throat going tight again, the good, warm feeling of finally sharing it curdling suddenly into something harder to hold. "It felt like too much, actually. All the time. Loving somebody that much and having absolutely no way to give it to him."

Your voice cracks, and before you can stop it, you're crying again — not the quiet, careful tears from earlier, something rawer this time, frustration bleeding through underneath the sadness.

"I just hate this," you say, wiping angrily at your own face. "I hate loving someone this much and not knowing if I'll ever actually get to have him. I hate carrying around this whole enormous thing for thirteen years and not being able to do anything with it except write it down and hope."

"What? Why?" Margaret looks genuinely baffled, sitting up straighter like you've said something that fundamentally doesn't compute. "That's the whole point of life, isn't it? Finding something worth loving that much? Most people go their entire lives never feeling anything close to what you're describing right now."

"Most people also get to actually have the person they love, Margaret."

"Okay, fair. That part sucks." She softens, scooting closer, wrapping an arm around your shoulders. "But just because you haven't actually found him yet doesn't make your feelings any less real. You know that, right? The love isn't fake just because you don’t know him yet."

You laugh, wet and unsteady, leaning into her. "That's annoyingly poetic for someone who's had five wine coolers."

"I contain multitudes." She squeezes your shoulder, gentler now. "I mean it, though. You're not crazy, and you're not wasting your time, and if the universe has any decency at all, it's gonna hand you this boy someday and you're gonna get to have every single one of those dreams for real."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you'll have loved somebody enormous and real for thirteen years, and I think that still counts for something even if it never gets a happy ending." She bumps her head against yours. "But I don't really believe that's how this goes. I refuse to believe the universe handed you something this specific for all this time just to have it mean nothing."

You sit with that a long moment, the ache in your chest softening slightly, not gone, but lighter somehow, easier to carry now that it isn't only yours to hold anymore — and by the time the fire's burned down low behind you and the cold's finally chased you both back toward the house, some of the night's weight has genuinely lifted, replaced by something looser, sillier, worn thin with wine coolers and relief.

You're both properly exhausted by the time you make it back inside, stumbling slightly on the porch steps, giggling over nothing in the particular loose, silly way only a few too many drinks and a whole lot of emotional release can produce. The pullout couch in the downstairs den creaks alarmingly the second you both collapse onto it, springs protesting under the combined weight, and neither of you cares even a little.

"This bed is trying to kill us," Margaret mumbles, already half asleep, dragging a blanket up over both of you.

"It's very structurally concerning."

"We'll die together. It's very romantic."

You laugh, quiet, settling into the lumpy mattress, the sound of a party still faintly audible somewhere outside, distant and unimportant now. Margaret's already drifting, breathing gone slow and even beside you, and you lie there a moment in the dark, chest still full from the whole enormous night, watching moonlight cut a thin silver line across the ceiling through a gap in the curtains.

"Hey, Margaret," you say, quiet, not sure if she's even still awake to hear it.

"Mm," she mumbles, barely surfacing.

"I love you. Thank you for listening to me."

She shifts closer, one arm flopping heavy and affectionate over your side, voice thick with sleep but entirely sincere underneath it. "You're my best friend," she mumbles into the pillow. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for you."

You smile in the dark, something warm and settled finally taking root in your chest after a whole night of carrying it loose and unprotected, and you fall asleep like that — tangled up together on a couch that creaks with every breath, thirteen years of silence finally, gently laid to rest.

The dream that finds you later that same night arrives soft, the way the good ones sometimes do, dropping you into a driveway dark and quiet, crickets humming somewhere in the grass. There's Steve in the driver's seat of a car that's already stopped moving — engine off, keys probably still in the ignition, tie hanging loose and undone around his neck like he tugged at it the second he was alone enough to.

He doesn't get out right away. He just sits there a long moment, staring at his own front porch light like it's asking him a question he doesn't have a ready answer for, chest rising and falling slow in the quiet dark.

You don't know everything that happened tonight. You know enough — the kiss, the way he pulled back from it, the strange, unfinished ache that followed him all the way home from that party. You watch him sit with whatever's still tangled up inside him a moment longer before he finally pushes the car door open and heads for the house.

The front door creaks soft on its hinges, and the first thing you see, past Steve's shoulder, is a lamp still burning low in the living room — and his mother, curled into the corner of the couch with a book open on her lap, glasses perched low on her nose, that same thick brown hair from the driveway now pulled loose and soft for the night.

Steve stops dead in the doorway. "What are you doing up still?"

"I wanted to see how it went." She sets the book down, careful, watching him with an expression that's trying hard to be casual and not quite managing it.

"Why would you wait up for me now?" It comes out sharper than he probably means it to, some old, worn groove of resentment surfacing fast and automatic. "You've never been here to wait up before."

She flinches, small, and doesn't argue the point. "I know. I'm trying to change that."

Steve doesn't answer right away, just stands there in the doorway, tie still hanging loose, some old tiredness sitting heavy behind his eyes that has nothing to do with how late it is.

"I saved you some dessert," his mother says instead, gentler, nodding toward the kitchen. "From dinner. In case you were hungry when you got in."

"I'm not really—" He stops himself, something in his face softening just slightly. "Thanks, though."

"You don't have to eat it." She's watching him carefully, the way you watch something fragile you're not sure how to hold yet. "I just — I don't know. I thought maybe, if you weren't too tired, we could watch something. I picked up Beverly Hills Cop the other day, or I think we've still got some Indiana Jones tapes around here somewhere." A small, hopeful pause. "We could just talk, too. If you'd rather do that. I know it's late."

Steve hesitates.

You feel it before you fully understand it — some old, tired ache rising up in your own chest, watching him stand there deciding whether to let his own mother back in after however many years of learning not to expect her. You think, unbidden, of your own mother, of a kitchen floor and a shattered mug and every single ordinary night you didn't know to treasure while you still had them. You'd give almost anything, you realize, aching, to have this exact choice in front of you instead of behind you — one more late movie night, one more chance to say yes.

Say yes, you think, useless and desperate, willing it toward him with everything you have. Please. You don't know how lucky you are that she's still there, asking.

Steve exhales, slow, and something in his shoulders finally loosens. "Indiana Jones," he says, quieter now, less guarded. "If you've still got it."

His mother's whole face breaks open with relief, quick and real. "I'll go find it."

It's awkward at first — stilted small talk while the tape rewinds, both of them sitting a careful, unfamiliar distance apart on the couch, like two people relearning a language neither of them's spoken in a long time. But it softens, slowly, the way these things do. Somewhere around the second act, his mother makes an exaggerated, badly-timed gasp at something on screen, and Steve laughs, really laughs, surprised out of him, and she looks so plainly delighted by the sound of it that something in the whole room shifts.

"You always used to do that," Steve says, still grinning. "The gasping thing. Even when you already knew what was gonna happen."

"It's more fun that way."

"It's ridiculous."

"It's tradition," she corrects, mock-offended, and he laughs again, easier this time, some of the old, careful distance between them finally starting to close.

By the time the credits roll, they're both loose and giggling over something you can't quite catch, an old inside joke, maybe, resurfacing rusty but intact after however long it's been sitting unused, and watching it aches in the best and worst way at once. You want this so badly for yourself it's a physical thing, sitting heavy behind your ribs, grief and gladness tangled up together until you can't tell which one's winning.

"I should get to bed," Steve says eventually, stretching, glancing at the clock. "It's really late."

"It is." His mother stands too, gathering the empty popcorn bowl, hesitating a second before she reaches for him instead, pulling him into a hug he doesn't resist at all.

He holds on a beat longer than you expect him to, chin resting on top of her head, something in his whole posture finally, fully unguarded for the first time all dream.

"I love you, Mom," he says, quiet, muffled slightly against her hair.

"I love you more." She pulls back just enough to look at him properly, hands cupping his face for a second, something fiercely tender in it. "When I look at you, I still see the chubby little baby we brought home from the hospital. No matter how tall you get."

"I'm eighteen."

"You'll always be my baby. That's not up for debate." She presses a kiss to his forehead, easy and certain. "Goodnight, sweetheart. I'm glad tonight went well."

"Goodnight, Mom."

He heads for the stairs, and she watches him go with an expression so full of quiet, aching love that it's almost hard to look at directly, and you stay rooted there in the golden lamplight a moment longer after he's gone, watching a woman finally, tentatively finding her way back to her son.

You think of your own mother's hands smoothing your hair back after a bad dream, years and years ago now. You think of a kitchen you can't walk past without bracing yourself, still, even now.

You'd give almost anything for one more ordinary night like this one. You're glad, achingly, complicatedly glad, that at least he gets to have his.

Steve wakes slow, the way he never does in real life, into a room he's certain he's never seen before and somehow already knows by heart.

He doesn't open his eyes right away. He just lies there a moment, taking inventory the way he always does in these dreams — the particular weight of the comforter, heavier than the one on his real bed. The smell of the pillow, laundry detergent and something else underneath it, something warm and familiar he doesn't have a name for yet. Older sheets, soft from a hundred washes. This room is his and also yours. He doesn't know how he knows that. He just does with the same quiet, total certainty that's never once been wrong.

His hand moves before the rest of him catches up, reaching sideways across the mattress, instinctive, easy, toward the warm dip where a body should be.

Your side of the bed.

He doesn't know how he knows that either. He just knows it the way he knows his own name, and his palm finds nothing but rumpled sheets and the faintest, fading warmth of somewhere you were until recently. Not long ago. Close enough that the shape of you is still pressed into the mattress, close enough that some small, disappointed part of him wants to chase it, pull the whole dip of blanket closer just to keep a little of that warmth to himself for a while longer.

Soft summer light pours gold through gauzy curtains he doesn't recognize, catching dust in slow, drifting spirals above the bed. The whole room feels washed in it, warm and hazy at the edges, more like a memory than a place — the kind of light that makes everything feel a little bit like heaven, unhurried and entirely safe.

He stretches, groaning low and satisfied, one arm flung up over his head, and for a second he just lies there in it, soaking up a morning that isn't his yet and somehow already feels like it's been his for years.

That's when he hears the footsteps.

Soft, creaking against old wooden floorboards somewhere out in the hallway. There’s more than one set, he's almost sure of it, a heavier, familiar rhythm and something smaller, quicker, pattering along beside it like it's struggling to keep pace. He goes still, listening, some helpless, hopeful thing unfurling slow in his chest.

He can hear voices drifting through the door, muffled, pitched low. Small. Children’s voices, maybe, he can't quite make out the words, just the shape of excitement barely being contained, a whisper that's really more of a very poorly disguised shout.

And then he hears you.

His whole chest does something helpless and immediate at the sound of it, some old, familiar ache blooming warm instead of hollow for once. God, he's missed this. Missed the voice he's only ever heard from a distance, borrowed pieces across a dozen different dreams, never once his, never once this close, this real, right on the other side of a door he could reach out and touch if he wanted to.

"Shh — shh, we need to be really quiet," you whisper, laughter caught somewhere underneath the words, barely holding it together yourself. "Daddy's still sleeping."

Daddy.

The word lands somewhere behind his ribs, huge and quiet all at once, and Steve doesn't move, doesn't breathe, doesn't let himself do anything except lie there and let it settle into every part of him at once — warm, impossible, entirely too big for a single dream to actually be holding.

The footsteps stop just outside the door. He can hear the small, muffled sound of someone trying very hard not to giggle, and your voice again, softer now, closer, murmuring something he can't quite catch — some instruction, maybe, some private joke shared low between you, whoever you really are, whoever's small hands he can just barely imagine tucked into yours on the other side of that door.

The doorknob turns, slow and careful, clearly trying not to creak.

Steve quickly closes his eyes.

He doesn't decide to, not really — it's instinct, pure and immediate, some old habit of not wanting a good thing to end the second it finally arrives. He lets his breathing go slow and even, lets his face settle soft and unguarded against the pillow, and waits there in the dark behind his own eyelids, achingly aware of the door easing open, sets of light and small, careful footsteps spilling into the room,of you standing somewhere just past the threshold, close enough now that if this were real, if any single part of this were real, he could reach out and simply take your hand.

He stays perfectly still, pretending, holding his breath around a happiness so complete it feels like it might crack something open in his chest.

Whatever happens next, he doesn't want to miss a single second of it.

He hears the tiptoeing — small, deliberate, spectacularly unsubtle footsteps trying and failing to be quiet against the floorboards, followed by the soft creak of the mattress dipping under a weight that can't be more than forty pounds soaking wet.

"Shhh — shhh," you whisper, barely holding back laughter, close now, right at the edge of the bed. "Okay. Okay, you can do it now."

Small hands land on his bare arm a second later, gripping tight, and then something soft and quick presses against his cheek — a kiss, sloppy and enthusiastic, followed immediately by a voice pitched at a volume that has clearly never once understood the concept of an indoor whisper.

He feels it. That's the thing that doesn't fully land until a half-second after it happens — the actual, physical weight of small fingers curled into his skin, the damp, real press of a kiss against his cheek. Every other dream he's ever had of you, of any of this, has been like reaching through fog; close enough to see, close enough sometimes to hear, never once close enough to touch. This isn't that. This is warm and solid and entirely, undeniably there, and something in his chest goes still with the shock of it even before he's fully processed what it means.

"Daddy, wake up! Happy Father's Day!"

Steve can't help the grin that breaks across his face before he's even opened his eyes, wide and helpless, giving the whole game away. He knows exactly what's coming. He doesn't care. He lets himself have the extra half-second anyway, eyes still closed, just soaking in the small, insistent hands still gripping his arm, the mattress bouncing slightly as its tiny occupant waits, badly, for him to wake up properly.

When he finally opens his eyes, Annabelle's hovering directly above him, three years old and grinning so wide it takes up half her face, hair still mussed with sleep, one hand still fisted in the sleeve of his t-shirt like she's afraid he might try to escape back into unconsciousness.

"Hi, monkey," he says, voice rough with sleep, and she practically vibrates with delight at getting him to actually speak.

You're standing just past her, by the side of the bed, and the sight of you nearly undoes him before anything else even registers — hair pulled back messily, wearing one of his old t-shirts, a baby balanced on your hip who can't be more than a year old, round-cheeked and blinking sleepily against your shoulder. Henry.

Beside you, Annabelle's twin stands with the kind of intense, focused concentration only a three-year-old can bring to carrying a plate. There are four pancakes stacked lopsided and uneven, drowning in syrup, powdered sugar dusted so thick it's practically snowing off the sides, strawberries balanced precariously on top like she added them at the very last second and refused to be talked out of it.

Caroline.

Something in Steve's chest goes tight and warm all at once, recognition landing soft and complicated behind his ribs. He knows that name. He has known it for years now, carried carefully in the back of a notebook he's never once shown another living soul, attached to a woman he watched slip away in a kitchen that wasn't his to grieve in. He doesn't know, in this moment, if the two of you chose it on purpose, if some part of you carried her forward the same way he's carried the memory of her forward too. He just knows it settles into his chest like something sacred, watching your daughter — his daughter — hold that plate of ridiculous pancakes with the same careful, serious pride her name deserves.

Your face, when he finally looks up at you properly, is so full it nearly stops his heart outright — love, plain and total, care in every soft line of it, excitement barely contained behind your smile, like you've been waiting all morning just to watch this exact moment land on his face.

"Happy Father's Day, baby," you say, quiet, warm, entirely certain.

Steve feels, for one enormous, suspended second, like he might actually combust, like there's no possible container built that could actually hold everything currently trying to happen inside his chest at once. He feels like he might cry, or he might laugh. He thinks, distantly, that a person could probably die happy in a moment exactly like this one, and it wouldn't even feel like losing anything.

"C'mere," he manages instead, voice thick, reaching for all of you at once; and his arms actually close around something solid, something that hugs back, small bodies piling into him with real, undeniable weight, and some old, disbelieving part of him keeps waiting for his hands to pass straight through the way they always have before. They don't. Nothing here slips through his fingers tonight. He holds on a little harder because of it.

The whole bed dissolves into chaos after that: Annabelle burrowing under his arm like she's trying to actually climb inside his ribcage, Caroline carefully, seriously delivering the pancake plate directly onto his lap with the gravity of a state dinner, syrup immediately threatening the sheets in a way nobody in the room seems remotely concerned about. You settle in beside him with Henry still drowsy against your shoulder, and for a long, golden stretch of morning, none of you do anything at all except exist together in one overcrowded, sticky, perfect bed.

"Your mom called earlier, by the way," you say, shifting Henry a little higher on your hip, catching Steve's eye over the twins' heads. "While you were still asleep. Wanted to confirm lunch today. She said she's making the chicken, apparently, the good recipe, and she also said to tell you not to make us late this time."

"What? We're never late."

"We were half an hour late to Easter brunch."

"That was a fluke. It was a hair emergency."

"Mm-hm." You're smiling, easy, unbothered, already reaching over to swipe a stray bit of syrup off Henry's cheek before it can migrate anywhere worse. "Your dad's coming too. Confirmed, not just a maybe this time. Silvia said he actually cancelled his tee time so he could make it."

Something in Steve's chest warms at that, quiet and complicated, older than the morning itself. It still catches him sometimes, even now, even years into this being simply true instead of something to hope for, the plain, uncomplicated fact of his father actually showing up. Not squeezing them in around something else. Not a maybe he has to brace himself against disappointment for. Just there, present, and on time, because his granddaughters asked him to be and that turned out to be reason enough.

He thinks about all the birthdays his dad missed growing up, all the ‘maybe, if I can get away’ mornings that never once turned into an actual yes. He doesn't dwell on it, not with Annabelle's syrupy hand currently patting his face for attention. He just lets the quiet gratitude sit there a moment, familiar and still slightly disbelieving after all this time, watching his own father get a second chance at having a real family that he clearly isn't wasting.

"Noon, then," he says instead, voice easy, and steals a strawberry off the pancake plate before Caroline can stop him, which she absolutely tries to.

The morning eventually spills out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, breakfast dishes multiplying faster than seems physically possible for four pancakes and some fruit, syrup somehow ending up on three separate surfaces that had no business being anywhere near the plate in the first place. Annabelle and Caroline disappear into the living room not long after, some cartoon blaring cheerfully through the doorway, Henry down for a nap in some other room Steve hasn't seen yet but somehow already knows the layout of anyway.

He finds you at the sink, sleeves pushed up, working through the stack of dishes with the unhurried, easy rhythm of somebody who's done this exact chore a thousand mornings before. Steve dries what you hand him, comfortable silence settling between you, the muffled cartoon soundtrack drifting in from the other room the only real noise left in the whole house.

He comes up behind you eventually, setting the dish towel aside, and wraps both arms around your waist, tucking his face into the curve of your neck, breathing you in slow and deliberate like he's trying to memorize it.

"How's this morning measuring up?" you ask, voice light, though he can hear the smile in it, feel it in the way you lean back into him without even needing to think about it.

"I’m the luckiest man in the entire world," he says, quiet, entirely sincere, and means it with every single piece of himself he has.

You turn in his arms, soap-damp hands finding his shoulders, and look up at him with that same full, certain expression from this morning — love and care and something steadier underneath both of those, something that feels less like a feeling and more like a fact he gets to keep. He leans down and kisses you, slow and unhurried, tasting faintly of syrup and coffee and something that's just entirely, permanently you.

He feels it. All of it, the actual warmth of your mouth against his, the soft, real weight of your hands sliding up to rest against his jaw, the specific give of you leaning into him instead of some untouchable idea of you standing just out of reach. He's dreamed about you for years. He's never once, not one single time, actually gotten to feel any of it before tonight, and the shock of it — the sheer, giddy disbelief of it — nearly knocks the breath clean out of him even as he kisses you slower, softer, greedy for every last second he apparently gets to keep this time. It's such a small thing, really, an ordinary kitchen-sink kiss, the kind of thing that’s probably happened here a thousand times before and means nothing more than good morning to you. To him, right now, it might as well be the single most important thing that's ever happened to him.

For one perfect, suspended moment there's nothing else in the whole world except this kitchen, this sink full of dishes, this woman he can finally, actually touch, and the sound of his children laughing at cartoons in the next room.

This, he thinks, right at the very edge of the dream starting to thin. Please God, just let this be real someday. Please let me actually get to keep this.

He wakes up still smiling, the taste of syrup and your mouth both somehow lingering, aching and warm, long after the ceiling above him resolves back into the same one it always is.

As soon as he’s fully awake he immediately wants to go back in.

That's new, or at least it's new to feel it this sharply — most mornings after one of these dreams, there's an ache, sure, familiar and manageable, something he's learned to carry around all day like a bruise he's stopped flinching at. This is different. This is his hand still half-reaching across an empty bed that isn't real, his mouth still faintly remembering the taste of syrup and coffee and you, his chest still full of a kitchen and kids piled into his lap and a father who finally, finally showed up on time. He lies there staring at his actual ceiling, low and familiar and entirely wrong, and wants nothing in the world except to close his eyes and fall backward into a life he's never actually lived.

He doesn't get to. That's not how any of this works, and he's known that for years now.

Except, and this is the part he keeps circling back to, lying there, it wasn't like all the other times. Every single dream he's ever had of you, going all the way back to a track meet he can barely remember the exact shape of anymore, has been the same in one crucial way: he was never actually in it. Watching, always. Close enough to ache over, close enough to reach out, but never close enough to touch. He got used to that a long time ago, folded it into the shape of what these dreams simply were, the rules of a thing he'd stopped expecting to change.

Last night broke every one of those rules at once. He could touch. He could be touched, feel the small hands gripping his arm hard enough to leave an imprint, a kiss pressed damp and real against his cheek. He was inside it this time, not watching through glass. He keeps turning that fact over and over, still slightly stunned by it, like a kid picking a scab just to see if it’s healed yet.

He doesn't know what changed. He just knows something did, and he's not sure he's ever going to be able to go back to not knowing what your hand actually feels like closing around his.

The dreams don't come as often as they used to. That's the trade, he's noticed, somewhere along the way, there are fewer of them now, sometimes whole months stretching out empty and dreamless, but when they do come, they come bigger. Longer. Whole stretches of a life he gets to actually live in for a while instead of just glimpse through a cracked door. Details shift sometimes, small things — a house that's white with green shutters one night and something else entirely the next, kids whose faces blur if he tries too hard to hold onto them, twin girls who are sometimes three and sometimes older, a name that changes shape at the edges no matter how many times he's written it down. He doesn't let it bother him the way it used to. He's stopped needing the details to hold perfectly still. He just needs you to be there.

You always are. That part never changes.

Everything else in his life has changed plenty, though, since that night at the Byers’ house, since the demogorgon and the bat and Nancy's shaking hands wrapped around a rifle that first terrible time.

He doesn't let himself catalog it often, the whole ugly list of it — but some nights, staring at his ceiling like this, it lines up anyway, whether he wants it to or not. The thing with no face in the Byers' living room. The days spent hauling nail-studded bats and raw meat across train tracks, hunting down Dart. Billy Hargrove's fists, the taste of his own blood thick enough that he still can't stand a certain shade of copper-red without his stomach turning. Navigating through tunnels, trying to keep four kids alive while fighting against things that shouldn't exist. The mall. The Russians. The torture, the questions, Robin's voice cracking apart beside him in a cold room that smelled like machine oil and fear. And then, worst of all, that thing made of what used to be people, flayed and wrong and endless, a version of horror he still doesn't have language for even now, even this far removed from it.

He's alive. He knows he's supposed to feel grateful about that, and he mostly does, on the good days. It doesn't stop the nightmares from showing up anyway, patient and regular, an old debt his mind keeps insisting on collecting.

The easier ones are about himself. He can admit that much, at least in the dark, at least at three in the morning when there's nobody around to hear him admit it. Dreams where something finally gets him, some version of the thing with no face, some new impossible horror wearing an old one's shape, and it's quiet after. Nobody comes looking. The house stays just as big and empty as it's always been, and it just... stays that way, permanently, nobody left to notice the specific shape of the silence. Those ones ache in a hollow, familiar way, more sad than terrifying. He's had a long time to get used to the idea that his own absence might not actually disturb anything.

The worse ones are never really about him at all.

Those are the ones that actually wake him up gasping — Dustin's voice cut off mid-sentence. Robin, somewhere he can't reach, calling his name and getting nothing back. Any of them, really; Max, Lucas, Mike, El, whoever the dream decides to hand him that particular night — hurt, or worse, while he stands there uselessly, arms too slow, bat swinging through air that's already empty of whatever he was trying to protect. Failing them. That's always the shape of it, no matter which face the dream chooses to wear that night, always him failing, again, the way some old, tired part of him has already decided is simply what he's for.

He knows, somewhere rational and daylight-shaped, that it isn't true. He's saved people. He's shown up, over and over, bat in hand, ready to give more and more of himself away, every single time it's mattered. The nightmares don't care about that math. They never have.

You're the only thing that's never once shown up in any of it.

He's turned that over plenty of times too, lying awake after the worse ones, chest still pounding — some old, grateful wonder at the fact that whatever part of his mind builds you, it's never once let you anywhere near the horror. When he dreams of you, it's always the other thing. The good thing. Tracks and backyard birthdays and a graduation lawn full of golden light. Kids with syrup on their faces. A past he wishes he could’ve been a part of and future he's never lived but somehow already misses. When he dreams of you, he doesn't dream of failing anyone. He just dreams of being enough, finally, somewhere soft enough to actually rest in it.

He keeps coming back to the kiss, though. That's the part he can't quite set down.

It's a stupid thing to fixate on, probably, compared to everything else the dream handed him — a whole family, a father he actually got to have, syrup and sunlight and a life fully lived instead of just witnessed. But it's the kiss that keeps replaying, unbidden, every time his mind goes quiet enough to let it. The actual, physical fact of it. Your mouth against his, soft and real and entirely there, nothing about it borrowed or half-imagined the way everything else in his head has always had to be. He's grinning about it right now, alone in his room, feeling like an idiot and not caring even a little. Twenty years old and giddy over a kitchen-sink kiss that never technically happened, and he can't bring himself to be embarrassed about it. Not even close.

Because that's the thing sitting underneath all of it now, quiet and enormous and completely unshakable: he knows you're real.

He's spent years telling himself otherwise, on the bad days — some story his lonely, overactive mind built out of spare parts and too many empty rooms, nothing more than that. He can't tell himself that anymore. Not after last night. You can't touch something that isn't real. You can't feel a hand close around yours, warm and certain, from somewhere that only exists behind your own eyes. Whatever this is, wherever you actually are, you're out there. Somewhere. Real, and waiting on the other side of a life he hasn't found his way into yet.

He just has to find you. That thought settles into him clean and simple, none of the usual doubt attached to it this time — not if, not maybe someday, just a plain, quiet certainty that this is now, officially, the actual shape of his life's work. Find you. Get to you. Get to all of it — the kitchen, the kids, the kind of love that doesn't have to be imagined anymore, that he gets to actually build with his own two hands instead of just visit in his sleep. He doesn't know how yet. He doesn't know where to start looking, doesn't have a last name or a city or anything close to a map.

He knows it's possible now, though. That's new too. And it's enough, this morning, to make the whole impossible search feel like something worth actually chasing instead of just hoping for.

He gets up eventually, quiet in the early light, and goes to the closet.

The first notebook's long since full, tucked into an old shoebox at the back, joined a while back by a second one that's most of the way there too. He pulls out the third, newer, barely broken in, spine still stiff, and settles back onto the edge of the bed with it open on his knee.

He writes fast, the way he always does now, well-practiced after all these years, trying to get everything down before the morning has a chance to wear the edges soft.

Kitchen. Kids. Twin girls again, three years old I think, a boy too, younger. Called him Henry. One of the girls was Annabelle. The other—

He pauses there, pencil hovering, throat going tight around the next word before he lets himself write it anyway.

Caroline. She was named Caroline.

Dad was there. Actually there, not a maybe. Mom called that morning to confirm. He cleared his whole afternoon. I don't know if I've ever actually seen that happen in real life, and it happened so easy in the dream I almost didn't feel how big it was until I was already crying about it in my own kitchen.

You said Happy Father's Day like it was the easiest sentence in the world to hand me. Like I'd actually earned it.

He stops again, exhales slow, and keeps going anyway, the way he always does — every single dream of you since he started keeping these, written down no matter how repetitive the words get by now, no matter how many times he's already described the particular color your laugh turns everything, no matter how many different notebooks it takes to hold all of it.

I could touch you this time. He writes it slow, pressing the pencil harder than he needs to, like the words might come out realer for it. Annabelle's hands, your hand, the kiss at the sink — all of it. I FELT it. That's never happened before. Not once, in all the years of this.

I don't know why now. I don't know what changed. I just know I'm not gonna be able to convince myself you're not real anymore. You can't hold a made-up person. I know that now.

I don't know why I keep getting you and not the other stuff. I don't know why you're the one part of my head that never turns into something I have to survive.

I just know I'd take a hundred more nightmares if it meant I got this dream back even one more time.

I have to find you. I don't know how yet. But I'm not giving up on it, on you — not after last night. Not after finally getting to feel your hand actually close around mine.

He closes the notebook eventually, sits there a long moment with his palm flat against the cover, chest still full of syrup and sunlight and a version of his own father he's never once actually gotten to keep. He doesn't put it away right away. He grabs the first one, the oldest and flips back, slow, through page after page of the same aching, hopeful handwriting, years of it by now, every single entry circling the same impossible, unproven fact.

I don't know if you're real, one of the earliest entries reads, ink gone slightly faded now. But I love you like you are.

He still means every word of it, even now, even years and two full notebooks later. It reads different this morning, though, less like a wish thrown out into the dark and more like a promise he's just now found the proof to actually keep.

He sets it gently on the nightstand, not quite ready to put it away yet, and lies back down, staring at the ceiling, aching for a kitchen that doesn't exist yet and a version of his own life he's never once gotten to actually touch. Not yet, he corrects himself, quiet and certain. Not yet. But real. Real enough to feel. Real enough to find.

Before he can settle back into his bed, back into you, Steve's getting dressed for another eight-hour shift he didn't ask for when the thought finally settles all the way into place, clear and unshakable in a way it's never quite managed to be before.

It's her or nothing.

He's never let himself land on that quite so plainly before, not in these exact words, and not with this little room left to argue himself back out of it. After Nancy, he'll admit, he fell back into old habits fast, faster than he'd like to cop to out loud, and he'd kept right on falling into them for months since, no real reason to stop. A different girl every few weeks for a while there, the same old restless search running quiet underneath every single one of them: a laugh that's almost right, hair that's almost the correct shade, some stranger's perfume that stops him cold in a hallway for reasons he could never fully explain to whoever he happened to be standing next to at the time. He told himself it didn't mean anything. Told himself he was just having fun, moving on, doing the normal thing a single guy his age is supposed to do. There was never any real reason to stop doing that. It's not like he had proof of anything, not really — just a stubborn, aching hope he'd never quite managed to shake, no matter how many other girls he tried out in its place.

Last night changed that. He knows better now than he did even yesterday, knows it since a kitchen sink and a kiss he actually got to feel, actually real under his own hands for the first time in years of dreaming about you.

He's not doing the old thing anymore. He decided it somewhere between waking up and pulling his uniform vest off the hanger, plain and total and entirely new — no more searching for pieces of you in girls who were never going to be you in the first place, no more settling for close-enough just to fill up a Friday night. He'd rather be alone and actually waiting for something real than keep handing pieces of himself to people who were only ever going to remind him, eventually, disappointingly, that they weren't you. He doesn't know how to find you yet. He knows, at least, that as of this morning, he's done looking anywhere else.

He grabs his keys and heads out to get Robin.

She's waiting on her porch when he pulls up, already talking before she's even fully in the car.

"Okay, so, you know how I told you I made the Tammy Thompson joke? Your Muppet one?" Robin's buckling in without looking, already deep into whatever thought she's been sitting on since he dropped her off yesterday. "Vickie laughed,Steve. Not, like, a polite laugh. A real one. The kind where she had to put her hand over her mouth."

He glances over, fighting a grin. "It’s my joke, I know it’s funny."

"Doesn't matter. What matters is the laugh." Robin drums her fingers against her knee, restless with it. "Girls don't laugh like that at just anybody's jokes. That's a — that's a specific laugh."

He takes the turn toward the strip mall easy, one hand loose on the wheel. "Did you actually talk to her, though? Besides the joke?"

"I said hi. She said hi back." Robin says it like she's presenting hard evidence in a courtroom. "There was eye contact."

"Robin."

"There was prolonged eye contact."

"That's still not really—"

"I'm working on it, okay?" She huffs, half-laughing at herself, dragging both hands down her face. "It's not like there's a manual for this. 'How to Determine If The Girl In The Band Is Also Gay Without Just Asking Her Directly Because That's Terrifying.' I would read that book cover to cover."

"I'd read that too, honestly."

"You would not."

"I would too. For support."

She swats his arm, laughing properly now, and the rest of the drive dissolves into easy, familiar noise — her running increasingly elaborate theories about Vickie's laugh, her eye contact, the precise angle at which she'd tilted her head during their conversation about a Blondie cassette last week, each theory more scientifically rigorous and less actually scientific than the last. Steve listens, genuinely invested despite himself, grateful in some small, steady way for exactly this — a friend who lets him think about something other than his own tangled mess of a heart for twenty straight minutes on a Saturday morning.

Family Video's slammed by the time they get the lights on, which tracks — spring break just hit Hawkins, every kid in a fifty-mile radius suddenly free and looking for something to do with their empty afternoon, and Keith's response to a full week of nonstop foot traffic has been to schedule both of them open-to-close every single day like the two of them alone can hold back the tide of restless, movie-hungry adolescents on his own.

"This is inhumane," Robin announces, finally getting thirty seconds to lean against the counter after fielding what feels like the fifteenth question in a row about whether they've got a second copy of some movie already checked out twice over. "I could be doing literally anything else with my spring break."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something. Anything that isn't refereeing a stampede of teenage girls fighting over the last copy of Pretty in Pink."

"He takes foot traffic very seriously."

"He takes nothing seriously except making us work through it without backup." Robin sighs, already reaching for the next stack of returns piling up faster than either of them can shelve them. "Only, what, six more days of this?"

"Five, technically."

"Well, it’s five days too many."

The TV behind the counter crackles through some local morning show, half music and half chatter neither of them's really paying attention to — until the newscasters voice shifts, suddenly, into something more careful, more deliberate, the specific cadence reserved for news that isn't supposed to sound as bad as it actually is.

"— We're in the Forest Hills trailer park in East Roane County. We don't have a lot of details now, but we can confirm that the body of a Hawkins High student was discovered early this morning. Police have not released the name although we are told they're currently in the process of notifying the family. —"

Robin goes still beside him, returns forgotten in her hands. "Did he say Hawkins High?"

"Yeah." Something cold settles low in Steve's stomach, old and familiar in a way he hates. "Yeah, he did."

Neither of them says anything else for a second, the radio still murmuring on behind them, both of them caught in the same unspoken, dreadful math — please let this be normal, please let this just be a normal, terrible, ordinary thing, please don't let this be—

The bell over the door slams open hard enough to bounce off the wall, and Dustin comes barreling through it with Max right behind him, both of them wild-eyed, both of them clearly having raced the whole way there.

"How many phones do you have," Dustin demands, breathless, not even bothering with hello. "Here. In the store. Right now. How many."

The next few days blur together in a way that doesn't leave much room for anything except moving forward.

Chrissy Cunningham. That's the name that finally gets attached to the news report, and it knocks something loose in Steve's chest the second he hears it — not because he knew her, but because he knows exactly what kind of story usually follows a name like that in this town. He's right, unfortunately, in the worst way possible. Then there's Eddie, hiding out scared and half-feral in the back of some abandoned boathouse that belongs to a guy everyone just calls Reefer Rick, swearing up and down he didn't do what Hawkins has already decided he did. There's Max, worse than any of them want to admit out loud, caught in the grip of something with a name now, Vecna, something older and more patient and cruel in a way that makes even the demogorgon feel simple by comparison. There's a whole ugly, complicated shape to how it works, once they finally piece it together: the curse, the countdown, the exact terrible mechanics of what happens if nobody manages to stop it in time.

Nancy's tried calling the Byers’ in California twice already, Dustin once more on top of that, hoping somebody picks up long enough to explain what's happening and why they need to know. Nothing. No answer any time, just a phone ringing out into a house three states away that might as well be on the moon for how little good it's doing them right now. They'll keep trying. For now, it's just the people already in Hawkins, doing what they can with what they've got.

Steve doesn't sleep much, those first few nights. Nobody does.

By the time they all end up crammed into the Wheelers' basement, it's less a meeting and more a full-blown council of war, sleeping bags and takeout containers scattered across every available surface.

"Okay," Dustin says, standing in front of the couch like he's about to deliver a lecture nobody asked for, which, knowing Dustin, he probably is. "We know what he does, we know how he does it. What we don't know is when or why he does it."

"Kate Bush stopped it for Max, back in the cemetery," Lucas points out, arms crossed, exhausted in the particular way that's become everyone's default setting lately. “We could do that again."

"That was different. That was luck, mostly." Nancy's got a notepad balanced on her knee, pen moving fast, cataloguing something only she seems to fully understand yet. "We need something more reliable than luck this time." Nancy says, quieter now, and something in her voice pulls the whole room's attention. "He's not just hurting her. He's in there. Inside her head. Showing her things, using them against her — memories, fears, whatever he can find that'll hold her still long enough." A pause. "That's how he gets them. Not from outside. From the inside, where nobody else can even see it happening."

The room goes a little quieter at that, the specific horror of it settling in fresh even though most of them have already heard some version of it once already this week.

Steve doesn't say anything. He goes very still instead, leaning against the doorframe, something cold working its way slow down the back of his neck that has nothing to do with the draft coming in through the window by the door

Inside her head. Showing her things. Using them against her.

He thinks, before he can stop himself, about a kitchen sink. A kiss he could actually feel for the first time in thirteen years. He tells himself it's not the same thing, that Max's visions sound like nothing close to what he's been carrying around since he was six years old, warm and private and entirely his own. He almost believes himself. Almost.

Lucas paces, glancing at the phone on the wall every so often like it might ring on its own if he just watched it hard enough. Erica, unimpressed by literally everyone in the room, keeps pointing out logical gaps nobody else has thought to question yet, which is somehow both extremely annoying and consistently useful.

"We need eyes on Max at all times," Nancy says eventually, cutting through the noise. "Somebody with her constantly. If it starts again, we need to know the second it does."

"I can do it," Lucas says immediately, already half out of his seat.

"We'll rotate," Dustin adds. "Nobody does it alone."

Steve doesn't say much through the rest of it, honestly — hangs back near the door, listens, watches this strange, exhausted, fiercely stubborn group of kids do what they've apparently always done, piece by piece, in whatever ruined living room happens to be available that week. But underneath the noise and the string and the increasingly ambitious theories about frequencies and gates, that one sentence keeps circling back around on him, patient and unwelcome. Inside her head. Showing her things. He thinks about notebooks carefully tucked behind a shoebox at home. He thinks about a kiss he's still not sure he imagined right, and for the first time in thirteen years, he's not sure "imagined" is even the right word for it anymore.

"Okay," Nancy says, clapping her hands together, refocusing the whole room at once. "Let's go through it one more time, from the top."

Steve pushes off the doorframe on autopilot, already scanning the room until he finds Robin over by the stairs, and something in his chest decides, plain and urgent, that whatever else needs doing can wait five more minutes.

He needs to talk to somebody. Right now, before the thought can finish taking root and choke out everything else.

He catches up to her before she can make it all the way to the bathroom, fingers closing gentle around her sleeve, tugging her toward the Wheelers' backyard instead. "Can we— I need to talk to you. For a second. Alone."

She clocks something in his face immediately, the easy exhaustion sliding off her own expression fast. "Yeah. Yeah, of course."

The outside is cold, spring not quite committed to warming up yet, and Steve stands there a second once the door's shut behind them, arms wrapped around himself, not sure where to actually start.

"You're freaking me out a little," Robin says, gentle, giving him space. "What's going on?"

"The thing Nancy said. About Vecna. That he — that he gets inside people's heads. Puts things there. Visions, memories, or whatever." Steve drags a hand back through his hair, unable to stand still. "I can't stop thinking about it."

"Okay. That's — yeah, that's terrifying, but you're not the one who's—"

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to not think I'm completely insane." He cuts her off before he can lose his nerve, before the whole thing can slide back down his throat the way it always has, every single time he's come close to saying any of this out loud to another living person. "I've been having dreams. Since I was a kid. About this girl."

Robin blinks, clearly bracing for something worse than that. "...Okay?"

"Not just — they’re not normal dreams, Robin. It’s always the same girl. Since I was six. I've watched her whole life happen in pieces, out of order, since before I even understood what I was looking at. I've seen her as a kid. I've seen her — I've seen versions of us grown, married, with real, actual kids, a whole life I've never lived, and it's always her, every single time, never once anyone else." The words come out faster now that they've started, messy, tumbling over each other like he's been holding a door shut for years and it's finally given way. "I've got notebooks. Three of them. I write every single one down, every detail, every time, because I've been scared for years that if I don't, I'll lose her completely, and I've never told a single person, not once, not ever, because it sounds—"

"Steve."

"—it sounds totally insane, Robin, and I know it does, I've always known it does, that's why I never—"

"Steve." She catches his arm, steady, cutting through the spiral before it can fully take him under. "Breathe."

He does, finally, chest heaving slightly with how fast he'd been talking, and Robin just stands there with him a second, patient, letting him get his feet back under him before she says anything else.

"Okay," she says finally, careful. "So. You've been dreaming about the same girl since you were a kid."

"Yeah."

"For — what, twelve years?"

"Thirteen, almost fourteen." He says it quiet, almost embarrassed by the specificity of it, like admitting he's counted makes the whole thing worse instead of better.

"And you've never told anyone. Not your parents, not—"

"Nobody." He wraps his arms tighter around himself. "I've never even said her name out loud to another person. I don't even fully know her last name, that's how — that's how much of this I don't actually have. Just feelings. Just a whole, entire life I've apparently been building around someone I've never technically met." He laughs, short and humorless. "You can see why I never brought it up."

Robin's quiet a moment, processing, her face doing something careful and thoughtful instead of the alarmed reaction he's been bracing for his whole life. "Okay. I don't think that makes you insane, for the record."

"You don't know that yet."

"I mean it, Steve. People have recurring dreams. It's a real thing. It doesn't mean—"

"It's not just a recurring dream." His voice cracks up sharper than he means it to, frustration bleeding through fast. "Robin, I can touch her now. Last night, for the first time in all these years, I could actually feel her — her hand, her lips, her — everything. That's never happened before. Not once. And then today I find out there's a — a monster that gets inside people's heads and puts things there that feel completely real, and I don't—" His voice breaks properly this time, raw underneath the words. "I don't know if any of it's even mine anymore. I don't know if she's real, if I made her up, if something's just been using her to get to me this whole time and I've been too stupid and too in love with the idea of her to notice it."

"Steve—"

"They aren't just dreams." It comes out too loud, cracking apart at the edges, more scared than angry even though it lands like anger. "They're real, Rob — at least, I thought they were. I've thought that my whole life. And now I don't know anymore, and I don't — I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that."

The silence after lands heavy between them, just the two of them and the cold yard and the muffled sound of the others still talking strategy inside. Robin doesn't flinch away from the outburst. She just waits it out, steady, until his breathing evens back toward something manageable.

"Okay," she says again, quieter this time. "Let's actually think about this. Like an actual problem. Not just panic about it."

He nods, throat tight, grateful for the shift even as some part of him is still braced for the worst.

"Vecna's victims — what do we actually know? Nightmares. Headaches. Nosebleeds. Time slipping, having visions." She counts it off on her fingers, methodical, the same careful logic she brings to everything. "Do you get nightmares?"

"...Yeah. But so does everyone who's been through what we've been through, that's not exactly—"

"Headaches?"

"I've taken about ten beatings in the last three years, Robin, of course I get headaches."

"Right, but is it new? Different from before all this?"

He considers it honestly, turning it over instead of just reacting. "...No. Not really. Same as always."

"Nosebleeds? Losing time?"

"No."

"Then I don't think you're cursed, Steve." She says it plain, steady, meeting his eyes directly so he knows she means it. "I think you've got a lifetime of trauma giving you nightmares and headaches like literally everyone else we know, and I think that's genuinely awful and you deserve better than that, but it's not the same thing as what's happening to Max."

Something in his chest loosens, just slightly, at that — not fully, not completely, but enough to breathe a little easier. "Then what is it? The touching thing. That's never happened before. Why now?"

"I don't know." Robin says it honestly, no easy answer dressed up to make him feel better. "I genuinely don't know, Steve. But I don't think it's Vecna. I think it's something else. Something we don't have an explanation for yet." A pause, gentler. "That doesn't mean it's not real. It just means we don't understand it yet. Those aren't the same thing."

He lets that sit a moment, turning it over, some of the panic finally settling into something closer to just plain exhaustion. "I've never told anyone, Robin. Any of it. Not the dreams, not her, not — not how much I actually—" He stops, throat tight again, differently this time. "It's been the only thing I've ever kept, and I didn't even realize how much it mattered until right now, saying it out loud."

"I'm glad you told me." She means it, plain and simple, no performance to it at all.

He pulls her into a hug before he's fully decided to, holding on a little tighter than usual, grateful in a way he doesn't have better words for right now. "Thank you," he says, quiet, into her shoulder. "For not thinking I'm crazy."

"You're a little crazy. Just not about this."

He huffs out something that's almost a laugh, pulling back enough to look at her properly. "Please don't tell anyone. Any of it — her, the dreams, any of it. I'm not ready for anyone else to know. I don't even know what to tell them if they asked."

"I won't." Robin squeezes his arm once, steady. "It's yours to tell. Whenever you're ready. If you're ever ready."

"Yeah." He exhales, long and slow, some of the tightness in his chest finally starting to unwind. "Yeah. Thanks, Robin."

"Anytime." She bumps his shoulder gently with hers, and after a moment, nods back toward the door. "C'mon. Let's go save Max. You can have your entire identity crisis about your dream girl some other day."

"Comforting."

"I'm a comforting person." She's already pulling the door open, letting the warmth and noise of the house spill back out around them. "Mostly."

Steve follows her back inside, chest still tight, still uncertain, but a little lighter than he was ten minutes ago, the weight of it, at least, is no longer entirely his to carry alone.

The Wheelers' basement couch has a spring digging into his shoulder blade no matter how he arranges himself, and Steve lies there a long while in the dark, staring at the water-stained ceiling, too wired to actually settle.

His head's still spinning from the conversation in the yard, from saying all of it out loud for the first time in his life, from Robin's steady, careful reasoning that helped some and didn't fully fix the rest. Inside her head. Showing her things. The words keep circling, patient and unwelcome, no matter how many times he tries to talk himself back down from them. He's exhausted in the specific, hollowed-out way that usually guarantees a dreamless night, body and mind both worn too thin to properly fight each other anymore.

He doesn't remember actually falling asleep. He just knows, one blink later, that he's somewhere else entirely.

The room resolves slow around him, familiar in that same total, wordless way — the same bed, the same soft, worn sheets, the same white ceilings he's apparently going to spend a whole future underneath. Sunlight pours warm and gold through the curtains, thick and unhurried, painting everything in that particular, honeyed color that only seems to exist in the very best mornings.

There are no small footsteps in the hallway this time. No sticky syrup, no tiny hands, no Daddy! echoing bright through the house. Just you, tucked warm against his side, one leg tangled loosely through his, hair a soft mess against the pillow, and something in Steve's chest settles so completely at the sight of you that he almost forgets to breathe.

Before the kids, he thinks, distant and certain, the way he always understands things here. Earlier. Just the two of you, still new enough to this that every single morning apparently still feels like this — golden, unhurried, entirely too good to actually be real.

You stir against him, blinking slow into the sunlight, and when you tip your face up to look at him properly, the light catches your eyes in a way that makes something in his chest ache sweetly, helplessly. You're smiling before you've even fully woken up, easy and unguarded, like waking up next to him is simply the expected, obvious shape of every single morning you've ever had.

"Good Morning," you murmur, voice rough with sleep, and he could listen to that exact sound for the rest of his life and never once get tired of it.

"Morning." He tucks a strand of hair back from your face, unhurried, savoring the excuse to touch you at all. "You're staring at me."

"I'm allowed to stare at my own—" You stop, laugh softly at yourself, shaking your head. "I'm allowed to stare."

"Yeah, you are." He grins, entirely too pleased with himself, and pulls you in a little closer just because he can.

For a long, golden while, neither of you does anything except exist there together, tangled up in warm sheets and quiet, giddy affection, and Steve feels something in his chest go so full it's almost unbearable, not the aching, hopeful kind he's used to, but something steadier. Something that feels less like longing and more like home.

Eventually you shift, stretching, blinking properly awake now, and start to sit up. "Alright, loverboy." You say it light, teasing, already reaching for the edge of the blanket. "We need to get up and get ready, or we're gonna be late."

"Late for what?"

"Doesn't matter. Something. We have plans." You're only half paying attention to your own argument, clearly more interested in extracting yourself from the tangle of sheets than actually leaving. "C'mon."

"No." He wraps both hands around your waist before you can get more than a few inches away, tugging you firmly back down against him, delighted with himself the whole way through it. "Pleaseee. Just five more minutes?"

"Steve."

"Five minutes." He noses at your shoulder, grinning against your skin, entirely unrepentant. "Whatever it is, it can wait five minutes. I refuse to believe otherwise."

"You say that every single morning."

"And I'm right every single morning." He pulls you fully back into his chest, arms looping secure around you, and you go easily, laughing, no real resistance left in it at all. "See? You're not even trying that hard to leave."

"Because I have zero self-control around you. It's becoming a real problem."

"It's a wonderful problem. I fully support this problem." He presses a slow, lazy kiss to your shoulder, then your jaw, then finally your mouth, unhurried and warm and entirely certain, and you melt into it exactly the way you always do, one hand curling loose into the front of his shirt like you're not going anywhere either, not really, not for a good while yet.

"Five minutes," you murmur against his mouth, smiling.

"Five minutes," he nods, agreeing, and already knowing neither of you means it.

The light starts to soften at the edges eventually, the room thinning the way it always does right before the dream lets him go, colors bleeding gentle into grey, your voice growing distant even as he tries to hold onto the sound of it.

He doesn't fight it this time. He just lies there, right at the edge of losing it, and makes a decision instead — quiet, plain, entirely his own.

You're real.

He doesn't know how he knows it. He just knows, with a certainty that has nothing shaky left in it at all, that whatever's happening to Max, whatever Vecna does to the people he touches, it isn't this. It couldn't be this. A monster doesn't build a morning like this one, doesn't hand somebody five extra unhurried minutes and a laugh caught warm against his own mouth and a whole quiet lifetime of before the kids mornings just like it. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you're waiting, you're not a curse. You've never once felt like anything except the truest thing he's got.

I'm going to find you, he thinks, the room fully grey now, your warmth already fading from beneath his hands. I don't care how long it takes. I'm going to find you.

He wakes up on the Wheelers' lumpy couch a moment later, spring still digging into his shoulder, and for the first time in days, he's smiling.

previous chapter | next chapter

taglist:

The dream drops you into a back room that smells overwhelmingly like waffle cones and industrial air conditioning. You’re tucked into a corner near a mop bucket and boxes of unopened cake cones, and there's Steve — older, unmistakably older, but somehow younger looking than you've ever seen him in any other dream, in a way you don't have words for yet. 

It takes you a second to understand it's the because of the uniform. A striped red shirt beneath a navy sailors shirt and matching shorts. A ridiculous little cap perched at an angle that suggests he's stopped caring how it looked sometime around the fourth hour of his shift, and to top it all off — white knee high socks. He looks completely, gloriously unbothered by how stupid he should feel.

A younger kid is perched on an overturned bucket nearby, curly-haired, gesturing with a scoop like it's a conductor's baton. "Camp Know Where changes a person, Steve. You're looking at a whole new Dustin."

"You've been back two weeks. Still smell like bug spray and nerd."

"That's growth, actually. I learned morse code. Built a radio tower out of spare parts. Also, I met a girl, who, unlike you, actually likes me." Dustin twirls the scoop with theatrical flair. "Meanwhile you're in here every shift striking out with, and I cannot stress this enough, literally everyone."

Steve grimaces and flicks a napkin at him, unimpressed but fond. Dustin flicks it back without breaking stride, already moving on. "What about Robin?"

Steve blinks. "What about her?"

"The girl for you. She's right there. Free real estate."

"She's not my type."

"Based on what data? You've actually talked to her, what, twice? I've talked to her more than you have, and it's been about russian transmissions." Dustin shrugs. "You'd know her better than me. Allegedly."

"I know her fine. We work together." Steve says it easy, dismissive, though something flickers behind it he doesn't seem to fully understand — some old, restless instinct that's never once landed on anything close to right, no matter how many girls he's tried it out on. "She's fine. Just not it."

"'It.'" Dustin repeats the word like a punchline Steve doesn't know he's told. "Very specific criteria for a guy who can't articulate what it actually is."

"I'll know it when I find it."

"Cool. Very scientific." Dustin doesn't even glance up from the ice cream scoop. "Anyway, wouldn't matter — Robin's got the whole whiteboard against you."

Steve pauses. "Wait, you knew about that?"

"Everyone knows about that, Steve."

"She said she's collecting data. On my rejections." Steve gestures at it, half-hidden by napkin boxes near the mop bucket, rows of tally marks climbing well past anything flattering. "I had, like, one class with her junior year. That's our whole history. Where's the vendetta coming from?"

"Maybe you're just memorable."

"That's not comforting."

"Wasn't trying to comfort you. Was trying to be right." Dustin grins, delighted with himself. "Face it. You're not losing your touch, you just never had one to lose."

The bell over the front counter jingles, and Steve's whole posture changes in about half a second flat, shoulders back, that easy, practiced grin sliding into place like a mask he's put on a thousand times. You drift closer, curious, and immediately understand why Dustin's already smirking behind the divider like he knows exactly what's coming.

Two girls, unmistakably his own age, backpacks slung over their shoulders like they wandered in straight from some other part of the mall, lean against the counter, already giggling before Steve's said a single word.

"Ladies." He leans an elbow on the counter, missing it slightly, correcting with a smoothness that almost, almost, sells the whole thing as intentional. He drags a hand back through his hair on the way up, a gesture so practiced it's clearly its own opening move. "Steve Harrington. Some people call me Steve the Hair Harrington. You can call me whichever one you like better."

One girl snorts into her hand. The other one just stares at him, unimpressed, arms crossed. "That's — genuinely terrible."

"I get that a lot." He says it like a compliment, entirely unbothered, scooping with a flourish. "Rocky road, was it? Bold choice. I respect a woman who likes things a little chunky."

Something small and unexpected flares in your chest, watching him lean into it, watching those girls laugh at him — a quick, hot flicker of something that feels embarrassingly close to jealousy before you even fully register it. That's ridiculous, you tell yourself immediately, mortified at your own reaction. He doesn't even know I exist. You watch a second longer, bracing for the feeling to get worse.

Instead, one of the girls, laughing despite herself, says, "Do you actually get anywhere with these lines?"

"Every single time." Steve hands over the cone with total, unshakable sincerity, like the question itself is faintly ridiculous. "It's a numbers game. Odds are always in my favor."

The girl's friend is full-on cackling now, and even the unimpressed one is fighting a smile as they walk off, and the jealousy in your chest dissolves so fast into pure, delighted amusement that you actually laugh out loud, forgetting for a second that nobody here can hear you.

"That was so bad," you say to no one, grinning helplessly.

Dustin, from behind the divider in the back room, mutters something that sounds suspiciously like "a numbers game, sure, Steve," just loud enough for Steve to hear.

"It worked, didn't it?"

"She said no."

"She laughed. Laughing is only a few steps away from a yes."

"That's not how yeses work, Steve."

It keeps going like that; a steady trickle of customers, all of them recognizably his own age, clearly killing time at the mall the way every teenager in Hawkins apparently does, and Steve trotting out a new, increasingly terrible line for every single one of them, apparently incapable of repeating himself even once.

A group of girls who look like they might go to Hawkins High gets informed that Scoops Ahoy's specialty flavor is "heartbreak, and I would know, I invented it — ask around, they call me the Hair for a reason." One girl leaning on the counter with her friends gets, with total, earnest sincerity, hair dragged back for emphasis: "I don't usually do this, but you've got the kind of smile that could end world hunger. Or at least this shift. Steve, by the way. The Hair, if you're nasty."

She laughs so hard she nearly drops her cone.

You're doubled over by this point, delighted in a way that has nothing to do with any of the actual jokes landing — it's watching Dustin's increasingly pained expressions behind the counter, watching Steve commit so completely to believing he's still got it, entirely unaware of how thoroughly he doesn't, watching an entire mall food court fall a little bit in love with a boy in a stupid sailor hat and a genuinely excellent head of hair, one terrible pickup line at a time.

A new customer steps up before Dustin can say anything, and Steve turns that same easy, ridiculous grin on her without missing a beat: "Now, I don't wanna alarm you, but I think you might be lost. Because heaven's usually a little further north of the food court."

Dustin makes a sound like he's been personally wounded. "Oh my god."

The line lands somewhere between so terrible and so earnestly delivered that it loops all the way back around into genuinely funny, and between that and the look on Dustin's face — pure, betrayed disbelief, like he can't decide if he wants to laugh or throw a scoop at Steve's head — you lose it completely. A real laugh, loud and helpless, doubling you over somewhere that isn't really anywhere, shaking you right out of the dream itself.

You wake up laughing, which is apparently becoming something of a pattern.

It takes you a second to place the room, not your own ceiling, but Ella's, string lights looped crooked along the headboard, a poster of some rock band you only half-recognize peeling slightly at one corner. Right. It’s Thursday. You stayed over after the two of you burned through half a bag of popcorn and most of a rented movie neither of you actually finished watching.

You lie there a second longer than you need to, still smiling, before it fully registers just how long it's actually been. Three weeks, at least, since the last real one; a real Steve dream, the kind that leaves something warm behind instead of something you have to shake off. Lately it's mostly been the other kind: the kitchen, the shattered mug, your mom collapsed on the floor, your own hands locking into place against her chest that never once seems to actually help in the dream any more than it did in real life. You wake up from those gasping, some nights, disoriented and shaking in a way that no amount of Ella's family's warmth can fully talk you down from until well into breakfast. You'd take a hundred more nights of terrible pickup lines over even one more night of that kitchen floor, and some greedy, grateful part of you wants to hold onto this one a little longer just for that reason alone.

"Okay," Ella says from the other bed, propped up on one elbow, already grinning at you over the gap between the mattresses. "You were cackling. Like, genuinely cackling, in your sleep. I thought you were choking for a second."

"I wasn't choking."

"You were doing something. What was so funny?" She narrows her eyes, delighted, already fishing. "Good dream?"

"It was — yeah. It was a really good one." A real one, you don't say. The kind I haven't gotten in a while.

"Was it about Aaron?" Ella waggles her eyebrows so hard it's basically a full-body gesture, grinning wide enough to show all her teeth. "Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Was he doing something extra scandalous?"

"Ella."

"I'm just saying! You're allowed. You've been together like, what, two years now—"

"One year, and nine months." The correction comes out automatic, precise, a fact you've apparently got memorized down to the exact number without meaning to.

"Whatever, basically two years, and you never tell me any of the gory details." She flops back onto her pillow, mock-wounded. "I have to just assume the worst — best — most scandalous things."

"It wasn't about Aaron." That part, at least, is true. You don't offer anything else, and Ella, mercifully, doesn't push, she just makes a face like she's filing the mystery away for later interrogation before rolling out of bed to go fight with her curling iron instead.

"Hey," you say, catching her at the bathroom door before she disappears into the mirror for the next twenty minutes. "Thanks again. For letting me crash here."

"You say that every time like I'm doing you some huge favor." Ella rolls her eyes, fond. "You know you can just live here. Since Heather's off at school you can just take her room."

"It’s just that James is at IU the whole semester, and dad's in Cincinnati till Sunday for work." You shrug, keeping it light even though it isn't, entirely. "I just— you know. The dreams. I don't do great in the house by myself when they show up, and lately they've been showing up a lot."

Ella's face softens all the way, no hesitation this time; she's heard this particular explanation enough times by now that it doesn't need any further unpacking. "The kitchen ones?"

You nod, not trusting your voice with much more than that.

"Yeah, no, obviously you're staying here." She says it simply, like there was never really a question to begin with. "You can stay literally whenever you want. My mom loves you more than she loves me, probably."

"That's definitely true."

"I'm aware." She grins again, mercifully letting the heavier moment pass without lingering on it, and disappears into the bathroom, already yelling something about the curling iron being possessed.

You sit there another minute on the edge of the bed, grateful in a way you don't fully have words for; not just for the company, or the hairspray Ella's mom keeps stocked specifically for you now, but for the fact that nobody in this house makes you explain yourself. Nobody asks why a sixteen year old still can't sleep in an empty house almost two years later. They just leave the porch light on and set an extra plate at breakfast, like it's the easiest thing in the world.

You think about Steve three separate times before you've even finished getting dressed, which is, if you're honest, not unusual anymore, though this morning it feels different, lighter, less like reaching for something and more like still holding onto something you got to keep for once.

It happens while you're pulling on a sweater, some flash of the sailor hat, the ridiculous, earnest confidence of The Hair, if you're nasty, and you catch yourself smiling at nothing in the mirror before you can stop it. It happens again while you're digging through your bag for a hair tie, some stray, unplaceable detail from the dream surfacing — the curly-haired kid's voice, the casual way they spoke to each other, and you find yourself trying to hold onto it, turning it over carefully, the way you always do now, cataloging it before it can slip away.

You don't write it down until tonight, obviously. You would never do it here, not at Ella's, the notebook stays home, tucked under its floorboard, safe and singular and entirely yours. But you spend a stray minute standing at Ella's dresser mirror trying to remember every detail anyway, the way you always do lately, half convinced that if you just hold onto enough of it: the mall, the sailor uniform, the Ahoy hat, you might eventually assemble enough real, verifiable facts to prove, one way or another, whether any of it could possibly be true.

You don't know why it matters so much to you whether he's real. You just know it does, more than it probably should, more than you'd ever be able to explain to a single living person without sounding unwell.

You definitely don't tell anyone about the notebook. Not Ella, not your dad, and not Aaron — especially not Aaron.

That's the part that sits heaviest in your chest most mornings, if you actually let yourself sit with it. It feels, some days, uncomfortably close to cheating; not in any way you could point to, not in any way that would hold up if you tried to explain it out loud, but close enough that the guilt shows up anyway, quiet and persistent. A whole notebook of feelings about another boy. A whole private world you retreat into almost every night, one you've never once invited Aaron into, one that occupies more of your actual heart most days than anything happening in your real, waking life.

Aaron is real, you remind yourself, buttoning your sweater, the thought arriving worn and familiar from how many times you've had to reach for it lately. Aaron is good. Aaron loves you, actually, provably, out loud and in front of everyone. This other thing — whatever it might be — isn't even a person. It's just a dream. It's a boy who's never once had to actually show up for you the way Aaron does, every single day, without fail.

It doesn't fully land, the way it never fully lands anymore. You get dressed anyway, and go downstairs, and let the morning carry you forward regardless.

Ella's parents are already at the kitchen table by the time you make it down, her dad half-hidden behind the newspaper, her mom sliding a plate of eggs across the table like she's been doing it your whole life instead of just the last two years.

"Good morning," Ella's mom smiles at you, warm and unbothered, the way she always is. "Sleep okay, honey?"

"Really well, actually."

"Good." She doesn't ask anything further, doesn't need to, just fills your juice glass without being asked and goes back to buttering her own toast. Ella's dad grunts something amiable from behind the sports section that might be a good morning.

"She had a dream about a mystery man last night," Ella announces around a mouthful of toast, entirely too pleased with herself. "Wouldn't tell me who. Very suspicious."

"It's nobody, Ella."

"Nobody makes you laugh in your sleep like that."

"Leave the girl alone," Ella's mom says, mild, not even looking up, and Ella subsides with a theatrical sigh, already moving on to complaining about a trigonometry test instead.

You eat your breakfast, half-listening, half still turning dream details over in your head, and check the clock over the stove more out of habit than urgency. "We should probably go, actually, I told Aaron I'd get us there before the bell this time."

"Since when do you drive us?" Ella asks, already gathering her bag, grinning sideways at you. "Last time you drove I nearly went through the windshield at that stop sign on Miller."

"That only happened one time."

"It happened enough times that I specifically remember it." She grabs a piece of toast to go, already heading for the door. "I love you, but you brake like you're mad at the car."

"I am improving."

"You are technically improving," Ella allows, generous, swinging the front door open. "C'mon, Speed Racer. Try not to kill us on the way to school this time."

You roll your eyes, grab your bag, and follow her out into the cool morning air, car keys already in hand, one last stray thought of a sailor hat and a terrible pickup line trailing warm and unbidden behind you the whole way to the driveway.

The cassette Margaret lent you rattles slightly in the tape deck as Ella cranks the volume, both of you belting some scratchy, gloriously overproduced 70s pop song at a volume that's almost certainly illegal this early in the morning, windows cracked just enough that half the parking lot can hear you botching the high notes on your way in.

"You are so flat," Ella informs you, delighted, still singing anyway.

"You're one to talk."

"I never claimed to be good. My enthusiasm makes up for the lack of talent." She harmonizes badly on purpose just to make you laugh, and you're both still cackling, breathless, as you pull into the space next to Aaron's black truck.

He's out front with a cluster of his friends, bag already slung over one shoulder, and you can hear Jude mid-story before you've even got the car in park — big, sweeping gestures, clearly reenacting some crucial defensive stand from some semifinal game a couple years back.

"—and this guy, this absolute menace right here, strips it clean off him twice, TWICE, and the dude's just standing there like—" Jude does an exaggerated, wounded expression that gets a laugh out of the rest of the group. "And then Aaron comes back and drains a three right in his face. Should've seen this guy's face, man. Priceless."

"I had him rattled the whole game," Aaron says, easy, grinning. "Kid thought he was hot stuff. I humbled him."

"We still lost, though," someone points out.

"By one point. Against a guy who clearly peaked that exact night." Aaron shrugs, unbothered, and then he spots you climbing out of the car and his whole face does something warmer, softer, all the performed confidence melting straight off him. "Hey, there she is."

"Hey." You barely get the word out before he's crossing the distance and kissing you, easy and sweet, one hand coming up to rest at your jaw like it's the most natural gesture in the world.

"Oh my god," Ella announces loudly, gagging with theatrical commitment as she rounds the front of the car. "It is eight in the morning, you two. Some of us haven't even had breakfast fully digest yet."

"Jealous," Aaron says against your mouth, not breaking away.

"Deeply," Ella confirms, unbothered, already heading toward the doors.

Jude and the rest of Aaron's friends erupt into the kind of hollering, wolf-whistling chaos that's apparently required by law whenever Aaron kisses you in public, and Aaron pulls back just enough to flip them off without any real heat behind it, grinning the whole time.

"You guys are the worst," he says, not sounding remotely bothered.

"You're just mad we're witnesses," Jude calls back, already herding the rest of the group toward the doors themselves.

"So," Aaron says, falling into step beside you as the parking lot empties out around you, bag slung over one shoulder, something bright and restless in his voice that you clock immediately. "I finished it. Last night. All the applications, sent out, done."

"Seriously? All of them?"

"All six." He says it like he still can't quite believe it himself, grinning down at you. "Purdue, IU, Notre Dame — reach school, I know, I know, and a couple of the smaller ones my counselor kept pushing. Six schools, six essays, six checks my mom's gonna be annoyed about for a month. Done."

"That's huge, Aaron."

"It's a relief, mostly." He bumps your shoulder with his, easy. "I keep thinking about it, though — like, actually thinking about what it's gonna look like. Next year. Me somewhere, you still here finishing up." He says it lightly, like it's simple math instead of something that makes your stomach do something complicated and unpleasant. "But your senior year's gonna fly by, I promise. And then you'll be back with me, in the same place again. That's the plan, anyway."

"Yep. That's the plan," you echo, keeping your voice easy, practiced.

"I actually wanted your take on something." He pulls a folded paper from his bag, a little crumpled at the corners. "Notre Dame or Purdue, if I get into both. My dad's pushing Notre Dame, obviously, but Purdue's got the better program for what I actually want to do, and it's closer, and—" He stops himself, laughing a little, self-conscious in a way that's rare for him. "Sorry. You don't have to actually weigh in on this. I just — I like knowing what you think. About stuff like this."

"Purdue," you say, mostly because it's closer, mostly because it's the answer that requires the least from you right now, and he lights up like you've handed him something important.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Closer's good."

"Closer is good, you’re right." he agrees, folding the paper back up, satisfied, already moving on to some smaller logistical thought about dorm buildings and roommate assignments you only half hear.

You nod along, smiling in the right places, and underneath it something in your chest sits heavy and quiet the rest of the walk — not about Purdue, not really. About the whole shape of what he's describing so easily, so certainly: a future already sketched out in his handwriting, both of you slotted neatly into it like the outcome was never actually in question. You don't know how to tell him that most days you're not sure you belong anywhere in that drawing at all, not the way he thinks you do. You don't know how you'd even start.

You don't try. You just keep walking, keep nodding, keep trying to be exactly the girl he's already planned an entire future around.

He walks you all the way to your locker, the hallway thinning out around you as the first bell warning crackles overhead.

"I've got that thing with Coach after practice," he says, leaning one shoulder against the locker next to yours while you spin your combination. "But I'll call you tonight. Tell you how the dorm stuff shakes out, if my mom's stopped hyperventilating about the application fees by then."

"Sounds riveting."

"It'll be riveting. I'll make it riveting." He tugs lightly at the strap of your bag, grinning. "You working on anything for track today?"

"Just more conditioning. Nothing exciting."

"Everything you do is exciting." He says it easy, unguarded, entirely sincere, and something in you softens despite everything else sitting complicated underneath it — because that part, at least, has never once been performance. He does think that. He's never once had to pretend to.

"You're ridiculous."

"You love it."

"I tolerate it." You bump his shoulder with yours, and he catches your hand before you can pull all the way back, lacing his fingers loosely through yours for one more second before the second bell warning cuts through the hallway, scattering the last stragglers toward their classrooms.

"Gotta go." He presses a quick kiss to your temple, already backing away down the hall. "Purdue. I've got a good feeling about Purdue."

"Go to class, Aaron."

"Going, going." He grins the whole way backward, nearly colliding with a freshman before he finally turns and jogs off toward the science wing, and you watch him go for one second longer than you probably need to before turning back to your locker, pulling out your books, and heading the opposite direction into a Thursday that already feels, somehow, both entirely ordinary and quietly, privately impossible to explain to anyone at all.

The rest of the morning blurs by the way school days do when nothing especially memorable happens in any of them; a pop quiz in chemistry you're fairly sure you bombed, a substitute in English who lets the whole class get away with doing basically nothing for forty-five minutes, a stretch of study hall spent half-doing homework and half-doodling in the margins of your notebook, careful not to let anything too revealing slip out in ink where somebody could see it.

By lunch, the cafeteria's buzzing with a specific, familiar kind of chaos, somebody's brought up Halloween, two weeks out and the only thing anyone at your table wants to talk about.

"Okay, but we need an actual plan this year," Priya announces, dead serious, jabbing her fork in your direction. "Not a repeat of last year where we all just showed up in whatever and called it a costume."

"I was a very convincing ghost."

"You wore a sheet with two eye holes cut out. That's not a costume, that's a crime against effort."

"Harsh."

"Accurate." Priya's already sketching something on a napkin, group costume ideas spiraling out in increasingly ambitious directions, when Marcus drops into the empty seat next to you, uninvited, grinning like he's about to deliver very important news.

"Okay, hear me out," he says, to the table at large. "You two—" he points between you and the general direction of wherever Aaron currently is, still in line for food, "should do a couples costume. Something dumb. Like salt and pepper shakers."

"Absolutely not."

"Or, hear me out, hear me out — ketchup and mustard."

"Marcus."

"I'm just saying, condiments have range." He looks entirely too pleased with this idea, and Priya, traitorously, looks like she's actually considering it. "You'd crush it. Everyone would talk about it for weeks."

"For all the wrong reasons."

"There's no such thing as wrong reasons at a Halloween party." Marcus steals a fry off your tray without asking, thoroughly unbothered by your look, and wanders off just as Aaron slides into the seat across from you, tray in hand.

"What'd I miss?"

"Marcus wants us to be condiments for Halloween."

"That's genuinely a great idea." Aaron considers it for exactly one second before shaking his head, already moving on. "Actually, no — I had a better one. I was kind of hoping you'd go for the Risky Business thing with me. You know, Joel and Lana, some sunglasses, the whole look."

"I am absolutely not dressing up as a prostitute for Halloween, Aaron."

"That's not — I meant more the, you know. The socks. The sunglasses part." He has the decency to look at least a little sheepish about it, backpedaling fast. "I wasn't thinking the whole — I just thought the sunglasses were a good bit."

"The whole costume comes as a set, Aaron. That's the joke."

"Okay, fair. Withdrawn." He holds both hands up in surrender, grinning despite himself. "Back to condiments, then."

"We are not doing condiments either."

"We can workshop it," he says, entirely unbothered, and steals a fry off your tray for the second time in five minutes like the conversation never happened at all, and you throw another one at him for good measure.

"So," Aaron says, a few minutes later, once the table's noise has drifted off into some separate argument about costume budgets. "I'm actually heading down to Bloomington in a couple weeks. Before decisions come out. Figured I'd get a real look at the place instead of just the brochure version."

"You already toured, though."

"With my parents. That's a different tour." He shrugs, easy, stealing another one of your fries in retaliation. "I was thinking I'd see if your brother's around while I'm down there. Get the actual scoop instead of whatever the admissions office wants me to hear."

"James would talk your ear off about the dining hall menu for at least twenty straight minutes if you let him."

"I'd take it." He grins, and then, a little more careful, a little less performed than a second ago: "You could come too, if you wanted. I mean James wouldn't mind, right? Might be good for you to actually see the place yourself instead of just hearing about it secondhand from me nonstop for the next two years." A beat, something warmer and a little more deliberate underneath the casual tone. "In case it ends up being ours someday. Not just mine."

Something in your chest does a complicated, guilty flip at that — the easy, hopeful way he says ours, like it's already half-decided, like the two of you spending a weekend away together is just one small, obvious step on a path he's already walking with total confidence.

"Maybe," you say, keeping your voice light, easy, the way you've gotten so practiced at doing. "I'd have to check with my dad."

"No pressure. Just — throwing it out there." He bumps your foot under the table, grinning, already moving on to something about Marcus's condiment costume idea, and you let the moment pass, grateful for the deflection even as some quiet, familiar guilt settles low in your stomach for the rest of the period.

Track conditioning that afternoon is its own particular kind of chaos — Coach Merrick running you all through sprints until your lungs burn, the whole team scattered across the infield in various states of exhausted collapse by the time she finally calls it.

"I genuinely might die here," Mary Leigh announces, flat on her back in the grass, staring up at the sky like it personally wronged her. She transferred in from somewhere in Georgia last spring and still hasn't fully adjusted to Indiana's version of weather, a fact she brings up at least twice during every single practice. "Somebody tell my parents I loved them."

"You're being dramatic," Ella says, dropping down next to her, equally winded but considerably less theatrical about it.

"I am dying, Ella. There's a difference between drama and a medical emergency."

"There really isn't, with you."

"I'm going to remember this betrayal." Mary Leigh flings an arm dramatically over her eyes, and you laugh, dropping down into the grass beside both of them, chest still heaving from the last set.

"Random question," you say, once you've caught your breath, keeping your tone as offhand as you can manage. "Either of you ever hear of an ice cream place with, like, a sailor theme? Boat stuff. Sailor hats, the whole thing."

Ella squints at you. "A what?"

"A sailor-themed ice cream parlor. Like at a mall or something, maybe."

"Is this a Fort Wayne thing? Or, like, an Indianapolis thing?" Mary Leigh props herself up on her elbows, actually considering it. "We don't have anything like that down here."

"I didn't say it was here. I just — heard about it somewhere. Wondered if it rang a bell."

"Doesn't ring anything," Ella says, already losing interest, flopping back into the grass. "Sounds like something you'd see at, like, a boardwalk. Why, you planning a road trip?"

"No reason. Just curious." You let it drop as easily as you brought it up, filing the blank looks away right alongside everything else you've never managed to actually confirm. "Forget I asked."

"You're so weird sometimes," Ella says, fond, not pushing it any further.

"You guys hear Marcus's genius costume idea?" you ask, once you've got enough breath back to talk.

"The condiments thing?" Ella makes a face. "Is Aaron actually considering that?"

"Aaron thinks it's a great idea."

"Of course he does." Ella rolls her eyes, fond. "He'd wear a trash bag if you told him it'd make a good couple's costume."

"That's oddly sweet, actually," Mary Leigh says, still flat on her back. "In, like, a deeply unserious way."

"He's like that about everything," you say, and something in your own voice comes out a little more wistful than you meant it to, though neither of them seems to catch it, both too busy arguing about whether ketchup and mustard actually counts as a real costume or just an excuse to wear all red or all yellow.

You lie there in the grass a while longer, listening to them bicker, the afternoon sun warm on your face, and let yourself not think about IU, or dining halls, or the particular weight of the word ours, for at least a few more minutes.

You drop Ella off just as the sky's starting to go gold at the edges, idling at the curb while she gathers her bag from the backseat.

"You coming in?" she asks. "My mom's making that chicken thing you like."

"Maybe a little later — I've got some stuff to get done at home. Dad's back soon, so I gotta make sure the house doesn't look like a disaster before he sees it."

"Fair enough." Ella leans back through the open door for a second, grinning. "Tell Aaron hi from me after he's done scandalizing you in real life."

"Alright. Goodbye, Ella."

"I'll get more out of you eventually!" she calls, already halfway up the driveway, laughing, and you wait until she's safely inside before pulling away from the curb, Margaret's cassette still humming low from the tape deck, the drive home stretching out easy and familiar in front of you.

You've got the whole dream still sitting warm and half-intact in your chest: the sailor hat, the terrible pickup lines, Dustin's voice, and for the first time all day, with the windows down and the last of the afternoon light spilling gold across the dashboard, you let yourself think about it freely, unguarded, already composing the notebook entry in your head before you've even made it home to write it down.

The house is still bright when you pull into the driveway, late afternoon sun slanting warm through the front windows, and you sit in the car a second longer than you need to before actually going inside — a habit you've picked up without really noticing, some small, automatic pause before crossing the threshold, like you're giving the house a chance to just be a house before you have to be inside it.

It's fine, mostly. Daylight makes it fine.

You drop your bag by the door, kick off your shoes, and it's only when you glance down the hall toward the kitchen — an entirely unremarkable, unprompted glance, the kind you make a hundred times a day without thinking — that something in your chest goes quiet and heavy for a second too long. The linoleum's the same. The counter's the same. Nothing about it looks any different than it ever does, than it's looked every single day for two years now, and yet some part of you still braces every time your eyes land there anyway, still half-expects to see something you're never going to see again.

You look away before the feeling can fully settle in. You've gotten good at that, not pretending it isn't there, exactly, just declining to sit with it any longer than you have to, redirecting yourself toward something smaller and more manageable instead.

You head upstairs.

The notebook comes out from under the floorboard easily, familiar, your fingers finding the loose corner without even having to look for it anymore. You settle onto your bed, late sun still pouring gold through the window, and start writing before the dream can fade any further than it already has.

Ice cream shop. Sailor theme — striped shirts, dumb little hats. He was with a kid named Dustin, younger, maybe twelve or thirteen, curly hair, really funny. There's a girl named Robin who also works there but she wasn't there.

He kept trying these terrible pickup lines on customers. Called himself "the Hair" more than once, actually, like it's a whole bit he's committed to. It was the funniest thing I've ever watched. I woke myself up laughing.

First real dream in almost three weeks. Mostly it's been the kitchen lately. I'll take this one over that a hundred times out of a hundred.

You pause there, pencil hovering, and reach for his last name — the way you usually reach for things left behind in these dreams, the way you've written dozens of times by now across a dozen different entries — and come up with nothing.

You know he said it. You're almost sure of that much, at least — some easy, confident introduction, tossed off like it was nothing, the same breath as the ridiculous nickname. But the actual word won't come, no matter how many times you turn it over, chasing it the way you'd chase a word stuck right on the tip of your tongue. It's already gone soft and formless at the edges, the way names and street signs always seem to go in these dreams, dissolving faster than anything else no matter how hard you try to hold onto them.

You try anyway. You sit there for a long minute, eyes shut, replaying the dream from the very start: the mop bucket, Dustin's teasing, the bell over the counter, hoping the sound of it might come back to you if you just retrace enough of the steps around it. It doesn't. Whatever the word actually was, it's already slipped past the place where memory turns into fact, leaving nothing behind but the shape of where it used to be.

Steve H., you write instead, frustrated, underlining it twice like the emphasis might somehow will the rest of it back. You want it — badly, more than you'd ever admit to anyone — because a last name is the one thing that might actually turn into something real. A last name means a phone book. A last name means an address, a real one, something you could point to instead of just describe.

Half a name isn't enough for any of that. You know that even as you write it, and it aches a little, the particular frustration of being handed almost everything you'd need and losing the one piece that would have made the rest of it usable.

You close the notebook before the thought can go any further, sliding it back beneath the floorboard, pressing it flat until it clicks quiet into place.

The afternoon light's gone soft and heavy through your window by the time you finally lie back against your pillow, meaning to just rest for a minute before getting up to shower and pack a bag for Ella's — or maybe Mary Leigh's, you haven't decided yet, whoever answers the phone first.

You don't mean to fall asleep, you rarely do.

But the bed is warm, and the day's been long in the specific, invisible way days are long when half of them are spent performing a version of normal that takes more from you than it looks like from the outside, and your eyes are heavier than you realize until they're already closed, the last of the sun sliding gold and slow across your bedroom ceiling.

You figure you'll wake up in twenty minutes, thirty at most. Just enough time to shower, throw a bag together, and get out before dinner.

You're asleep before you can even finish the thought.

The dream starts easy enough, the way the best ones do, before you understand it's not going to stay that way.

You're somewhere fluorescent-lit and industrial, concrete floors and low ceilings, the hum of machinery somewhere close by that you can't quite place. Steve's sitting a few feet away, older again, hunched forward with his elbows braced on his knees, laughing so hard at something you didn’t hear.

"Okay — okay, wait, say that again," he manages, still laughing, shoulders shaking with it.

A voice answers from somewhere behind him, dry and pleased with itself. "I said if you die down here, I'm telling everyone it was because you tried to flirt your way out of it."

"That's — that's slander. That's premature slander."

"It's not slander if it's accurate."

He laughs again, helpless, and something warm and easy blooms in your chest just watching it — you almost laugh too, the sound of his laugh so purely, ridiculously him that it catches somewhere happy in your own throat before you can stop it. You try to turn toward the voice, curious, wanting to see who he's bantering with. Your body won't move. You're fixed here, rooted to whatever spot the dream's decided to plant you in, able to hear everything and see almost nothing beyond the narrow, unmoving slice of the room directly in front of you.

Robin, you think, distant and certain, the way you know most things in these dreams. You don't get a face to go with it. Just the voice — sharp, warm underneath the sarcasm, clearly enjoying getting a rise out of him even in whatever strange, fluorescent-lit place this turns out to be.

You don't see anything wrong yet. That's the part that stays with you longest, later — how normal it still feels, right up until it doesn't.

The door at the far end of the room opens, and the lighthearted thing in your chest curdles all at once into something else entirely.

There are men in the room now — several of them, moving with the clipped, efficient purpose of people who do this often. One of them crosses straight to Steve, and before you can fully register what's happening, a hand fists hard in his hair and wrenches his head back and up, sharp and rough.

That's when you see it. The blood.

It's already dried at the corner of his mouth, a thin dark line down his jaw, one eye swollen just enough to look wrong on a face you know so well it aches — none of it visible a second ago, none of it there while he was laughing, like the dream is only letting you see the truth of it now that someone's forcing his face into the light. Restraints hold him fixed to the chair, wrists lashed tight to the arms of it, and your chest goes cold and tight all at once, the warmth from a second ago gone completely, replaced by something closer to panic.

The men are talking to each other, fast and clipped, in a language you don't understand, moving with the same clinical efficiency as before. It's Steve's voice that sounds wrong first — looser than it was only a few seconds ago, words dragging slightly at the edges, like his mouth isn't quite keeping pace with what he's trying to say.

"Hey — hey, easy, I'm cooperating, see, very — very cooperative guy, right here—" The sentence wanders somewhere it shouldn't, trailing off before picking back up a beat too late, and something about the rhythm of it makes your stomach twist harder than the restraints or the blood already had.

"Steve?" Robin's voice too, thinner than it was a minute ago, syllables blurring soft into each other. "Steve, I don't feel good—"

What's wrong with them, you think, confused, grasping for an explanation your mind can actually hold onto. Why do they both sound drunk? It doesn't occur to you yet that someone did this to them on purpose, whatever those men gave them, it's already worked its way through both of them, stripping something away that neither of them can get back by trying harder.

"Leave him alone!" Robin's voice cracks trying to find its usual sharpness and doesn't quite manage it. "He doesn't know anything, I swear, we don't—"

Someone cuts her off, harsh, and you hear something — a smack, a pitiful sound of protest — that makes your whole body strain uselessly against whatever's holding you fixed in place, desperate to turn, to see her, to do anything other than stand frozen and useless while this happens all around you.

"Steve." Your own voice comes out thin, useless, exactly the way it always is here. "Steve, I'm here, I'm—"

He can't hear you. He never will.

They ask him something. You don't catch all the words — accented, clipped, half-drowned by your own pulse pounding loud in your ears — but you catch the shape of a question, and Steve's answer, loose and slightly slurred, dragged up from somewhere he clearly doesn't have much control left of: "I already — I told you, man, I scoop ice cream. I don't know anything about—"

One of the men steps back, winds up, and you scream his name, useless, desperate, straining against the frozen weight of your own body as the man's fist rears back—

Your eyes fly open to the sound of your phone ringing, shrill and insistent on the nightstand, and for one horrible, disoriented second you're still half inside the dream, chest heaving, certain the blow is still hanging there somewhere, still about to land, still not finished.

The room is dim, late-afternoon light gone dusky through the blinds. Your heart is slamming so hard you can feel it in your throat, your hands shaking as you fumble for the phone, knocking the clunky plastic half off the nightstand before you manage to actually grab it.

You don't answer right away. You sit there a second, breathing hard, one hand pressed flat over your own racing heart, trying to steady it into something that won't sound like panic the second you pick up.

It's not real, you tell yourself, the same worn, familiar argument you've had with yourself a hundred times before, never quite managing to fully believe it. It's not real. He's fine. Wherever he is, whatever year that even was — he's fine, he is okay. If it’s not real then he has to be okay.

The phone keeps ringing, insistent, and you finally swipe it up, forcing your voice into something steady before you answer.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me." Aaron's voice, easy and warm, grounding you back into your own body faster than anything else could have. "I called Ella's but she said you hadn't gone back over there yet. Figured I'd try your house next."

"Sorry, I was asleep. Long day." You press your palm harder against your chest, willing your heart to finish settling before he can hear anything wrong in your voice. "What's up?"

"Nothing, really. Just wanted to hear your voice." A small pause, and you can hear the smile in it even through the phone. "That's not weird, right? Calling for no reason?"

"It's not weird." Something in your chest loosens, warm and real, chasing the last of the dream's cold edges further away. "That’s actually really nice, Aaron."

You talk for a few minutes about nothing much and somewhere in the middle of it, still a little rattled, still craving the specific, uncomplicated safety of somewhere warm and full of people, you hear yourself ask before you've fully decided to.

"Hey, is it okay if I stay at your place again this weekend? Instead of Ella's?"

"Are you kidding? My mom is always asking about you." He laughs, easy. "Pretty sure if you stopped coming around she'd stage some kind of intervention. My dad already moved that old recliner out of the guest room because you mentioned once you didn't love the color."

"I said it in passing. One time."

"Doesn't matter. You said it, so it's gone. I'm pretty sure they'd throw the rest of my childhood stuff out on the curb too if you asked them to. Redecorate the whole room to your exact specifications. I'm basically just living there on your family's good graces at this point."

"That's not true."

"It's a little true." You can hear him grinning through the phone. "Come on over. Stay as long as you want. Nobody's gonna ask you a single question you don't want to answer."

Something in your chest aches at that, warm and grateful and a little bit sad all at once, though you don't examine the sad part too closely.

"Thank you," you say instead, quietly.

"Anytime. Always." A beat, softer. "I should let you go get your bag together, probably. But I love you. See you soon."

"Love you," you say back, easy, automatic — and it isn't until after you've already hung up, phone still warm in your hand, that you notice, the way you always seem to notice a half-second too late, the small, missing word at the front of it.

You don't let yourself sit with that either. You get up, and go get ready for your stay at the Thomas’s, and carry both the worry and the ache with you the whole way there.

The dream drops him into a warm, overlapping wall of noise, laughter and clinking glasses and somebody's off-key rendition of a song blaring from a jukebox somewhere behind him. It takes Steve a second to place the room: low light, sticky floors, a chalkboard behind the bar advertising a drink special in handwriting nobody bothered to make legible. College bar. Definitely a college bar.

He's barely gotten his bearings before he spots you, and the whole room seems to warm up another five degrees just from that.

You're at the center of a long table pushed together from what looks like three separate tables, surrounded by more people than he's ever seen in one of these dreams — a cluster of girls squeezed in close on one side, laughing at something on someone's camera, and a whole loud, easy crowd of guys on the other, all matching energy, a couple of them wearing shirts with greek letters stitched across the chest. Somebody's got a sash on that reads GRAD across it in glittery marker. It's clearly, unmistakably, the last stretch of something big.

"Okay, okay," a girl says — Amy, something in Steve supplies without being asked — raising her glass high enough to slosh a little over the side. "To senior year. To not dying before finals. To Charlotte somehow still passing organic chem despite never once opening the textbook."

"I opened it," Charlotte protests, delighted, already laughing. "I looked at the cover for a full ten seconds."

"Hey! That's basically studying."

The table erupts into laughter, glasses clinking together in a loose, chaotic toast, and Steve finds himself grinning helplessly along with all of it, leaning against the edge of the table like he's got just as much of a stake in Charlotte's chemistry grade as anyone else there. He can't touch anything. Can't be seen, can't be heard, same as always. But something about the noise and the warmth of it pulls him in anyway, makes him feel less like he's watching from outside a window and more like he just happens to be the one guy at the table nobody's bothered to introduce yet.

"To Heather," someone else calls out, further down, "surviving three roommates and at least one minor gas leak."

"That gas leak built character," Heather says, deadpan, and gets another round of laughter for it.

You're glowing in the middle of all of it — older again, easy in your own skin in that particular, settled way he's only ever seen in the birthday dream. Older than any of that, actually, he realizes, watching you throw your head back laughing at something one of the fraternity guys says. This is further out than he's ever gotten before. Whole years further.

The night moves the way nights like this do, one bar bleeding into the next, the whole loud group spilling out onto a street lit up gold and noisy with other groups doing the exact same thing, everybody wearing some version of the same giddy, half-panicked energy of people who know an ending is coming and are trying to hold onto the last of it a little too hard.

"I can't believe we're actually doing this," Amy says, arm slung around your shoulders as the group ambles toward the next place, some string-lit patio bar with a line already snaking out the door. "Like, in two weeks, this—" she gestures at the whole noisy street, the whole crowd of you "—just doesn't exist anymore."

"Don't," Charlotte groans. "I'm not emotionally prepared to be sad and drunk at the same time."

"I'm just saying! We're never all gonna be in one place like this again. Not really." Amy squeezes your shoulder, more sincere for a second under the noise. "I'm gonna miss this so much it's stupid."

"We'll survive," you say, but Steve, watching, catches the way your voice softens right along with hers, the same bittersweet weight sitting behind your eyes even as you smile.

One of the guys — tall, easy laugh, clearly comfortable enough in the group that he must be a regular fixture — throws an arm loosely around your shoulders from the other side, grinning down at you. "Did Davis end up hearing back from that interview yet? The fancy one his dad's been bragging about to literally everyone at the club?"

"Not yet. Should be soon, though."

"Tell him if he gets into that program I expect a private tour of whatever obnoxious car his parents buy him to celebrate."

"Yeah, yeah. I'll pass along the message. He'll pretend he didn't hear it."

Something about the friend's face nags at Steve as he laughs along, easy and unplaceable, gone almost as soon as it arrives — a flicker of I know that face from somewhere, a half-formed image of a party, or a gym, somebody's face lit up under fluorescent lights in a moment he can't quite locate. He frowns slightly, trying to chase it down, the way he tries to chase down everything in these dreams that won't hold still. It slips away before he can place it, dissolving back into the noise of the bar the second he stops reaching for it.

Weird, he thinks, and lets it go, the way the dream seems to want him to. Just another detail he's not allowed to keep.

Inside the next bar, somebody orders a round of shots nobody really needed, and the whole table toasts again, this time to something looser, less organized — "to us," somebody says, and it's apparently enough, because everyone drinks to it anyway, laughing at how thin the toast actually was.

Steve finds himself genuinely, helplessly happy, wedged into the middle of a booth between two guys who don't know he exists, watching you across the table laugh so hard at one of Heather's stories that you have to put your drink down before you spill it. He doesn't know these people. Doesn't know their majors, their hometowns, whatever's waiting for all of them two weeks from now on the other side of this specific, glowing, temporary version of being twenty-two and surrounded by everyone you love in one room.

He doesn't need to know any of that. He's just glad, plain and uncomplicated, to be here for it — to watch you exist in a version of your life that's clearly, fully yours, full of people who adore you, on the very edge of something enormous and new.

"Speech!" one of the fraternity guys calls out, banging his glass on the table. "C'mon, somebody give a speech. We're graduating in two weeks, somebody has to say something meaningful."

"I'll do it." Amy stands up on the bench, wobbling slightly, glass raised high. "To four years of terrible decisions, worse hangovers, and somehow still ending up exactly where we're supposed to be." A pause, her voice going soft under the noise for just a second. "And to however far away we all end up, don't you dare any of you forget tonight or this table."

The whole group erupts — cheering, glasses raised, someone getting a little emotional near the end of the table and immediately getting teased for it — and you're laughing and a little misty-eyed all at once, raising your own glass along with everyone else's, and Steve watches the whole moment with something warm and full sitting steady in his chest, no ache to it at all for once. Just simple, complete happiness, borrowed from a night that was never really his to begin with and somehow feeling like a gift anyway.

When he wakes, he's still smiling before he's even fully aware he's awake.

He lies there a minute, replaying it — Amy's toast, Charlotte's terrible organic chem defense, the noisy, golden street full of people who love you exactly the way you deserve to be loved. He doesn't chase down that stray, unplaceable flicker of recognition from the bar either, that half-second where somebody's face nearly clicked into a memory he couldn't quite reach — just lets it go, the way the dream always seems to want him to, and lets the whole night settle into his chest warm and complete instead, the rare kind that doesn't ache at all on the way out.

He doesn't know where any of that happens yet, or when, or who half those people are going to turn out to be to you. He just knows, lying there grinning at his own ceiling like an idiot, that wherever and whenever it is — you're surrounded by people who love you, laughing until you can't hold your drink steady, standing right at the edge of the rest of your life.

I got to be there for that, he thinks, simple and pleased, even if nobody there ever knew it.

It's enough, this time, to just have gotten to watch.

The good feeling doesn't last long after he wakes up.

It's still there at first — warm, easy, the residue of a night he wasn't really part of clinging pleasantly to his chest the way it always does after a good one. He lies there smiling at his ceiling for a solid minute before the rest of it catches up to him, the way it always eventually does.

Nancy.

The thought arrives quiet and sudden, and the good feeling curdles almost instantly into something heavier, something closer to shame. He's got a girlfriend. A real one, awake, solid, sitting in his passenger seat every morning on the way to school, who loves him and who he loves back — actually loves, not the easy, performed version he handed out to half of Hawkins for two straight years before her. And he just spent an entire night, in whatever secret part of his mind handles this, wrapped up in someone else's laugh, someone else's future, some stranger's graduation party he had absolutely no business feeling this happy about.

He hasn't done anything wrong. He knows that, logically, knows that a person can't help what shows up behind their own eyes at three in the morning. It doesn't make the guilt sit any lighter in his chest.

He thinks about it a long time, lying there, turning the whole shape of it over the way he's gotten so used to doing.

There was a version of himself, not that long ago, who spent every single date searching for pieces of you in somebody else's face — Macey's laugh, some stranger's perfume, a white car that made his stomach drop for no reason he could explain to anyone. He knows that about himself. Isn't proud of it, exactly, but doesn't pretend it didn't happen either.

And then he met Nancy Wheeler, and something about the whole exhausting habit just… stopped.

He didn't even notice at first. It took him weeks to realize he'd gone an entire month without once catching himself comparing her to you, without that automatic, unconscious flinch of close, but not quite. Nancy doesn't remind him of you. Not her laugh, not her hair, not the particular, sharp way she argues a point until she's won it. She's never once, not for one single second, felt like an echo of somebody he's never actually met.

He used to think that would bother him. It doesn't. If anything, it's the opposite — it's the reason he trusts what he feels for her at all. Nancy isn't a stand-in for anything or anyone. She's not a good approximation of a feeling he can't have. She's just Nancy, whole and separate and entirely her own person, and he loves her precisely because none of it is borrowed from somewhere else.

And there's something else too, something even harder to explain to anyone who wasn't there for it. What he and Nancy went through together — the thing with no face crawling out of the wall in the Byers' living room, the bat, the blood, the whole impossible night neither of them is ever allowed to talk about outside the small, tight circle of people who actually lived through it — that's not something a dream can manufacture a substitute for. That's real in a way almost nothing else in his life is real. He held her with his own two hands that night. He bled for it, a little, and so did she, in ways that never fully healed even after the physical part did. He doesn't know if you exist anywhere outside his own head. He knows exactly what he and Nancy survived, together, side by side, in a house that still doesn't sit right in his chest whenever he drives past it. No half-remembered dream girl gets to touch that particular kind of bond, whatever else she might get to touch instead.

Which is what makes the guilt so confusing. If loving Nancy is real — and it is, he's sure of that, more sure of it than he's been of almost anything — then what does it mean that some other part of him is still reaching for you, still cataloguing your laugh and your perfume and your last name he can never quite hold onto, still keeping an entire secret notebook full of feelings about a girl who might not even exist?

He doesn't have an answer. He's stopped expecting one, most days. It doesn't stop the guilt from showing up anyway, quiet and persistent, every single time one of these dreams leaves him this happy.

He gets up and gets the notebook anyway. He always does, with or without the guilt.

He tells himself, writing it down, that it isn't really a betrayal — that recording a dream isn't the same as chasing something, that Nancy would never even need to know, that there's nothing here that costs her anything real. He's not sure he fully believes himself. He writes it down regardless, the way he always does, some old habit stronger than the guilt sitting on top of it.

College bar, somewhere. Graduation coming up soon for her. Friends — Amy, Heather, Charlotte, a whole big group, guys too, some of them in a fraternity maybe. Toasts. Everybody a little drunk and a little sad about it all.

There was a guy in the group I almost recognized. Couldn't place him though. Gone before I could catch it.

He pauses there, pencil hovering, chewing the inside of his cheek before he lets himself write the next part.

Somebody mentioned a name — Davis. Sounded like her boyfriend, maybe. Rich kid, going to med school somewhere fancy. Didn't like hearing about it even though I probably should've been fine with it.

I have a girlfriend. I love my girlfriend. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.

He sits there a long moment after that, staring at his own handwriting, something uncomfortable and unresolved sitting behind his ribs. He thinks, unbidden, about college — his own, whenever he actually gets there, wherever that ends up being. Some quiet, half-formed hope surfaces before he can stop it: maybe that's when I actually meet her. Maybe that's the whole point of all this — not now, not with Nancy, but somewhere further out, once all of this is supposed to happen.

It's a strange thought to have while lying in the same room he's about to leave to go pick up the girl he's actually, currently, provably in love with. He doesn't examine that too closely either. He closes the notebook, tucks it back behind the shoebox of baseball cards, and gets up to get ready for school like it's any other Tuesday.

Nancy's already outside by the time he pulls up, backpack slung over one shoulder, hair still damp from the shower, and something in his chest does what it always does when he sees her — settles, simple and certain, no comparison anywhere in it at all.

"You're two minutes late," she says, sliding into the passenger seat, mock-stern.

"Traffic."

"There's no traffic in Hawkins, Steve."

"There's traffic in my mind," he says, and she rolls her eyes, but she's smiling when she does it, reaching over to turn the radio up before he's even fully pulled back onto the road.

He takes the turn onto Cornwallis without thinking about it, same as always, and it's only when the Byers' place comes into view for half a second down the side road — small, quiet, nothing about it different from any other house on the street to anyone who doesn't know better — that Nancy's hand finds his on the gearshift, quick and wordless, gone again just as fast. Neither of them says anything about it. They never really do. It's just a thing their hands know how to do now, some small, automatic reflex built out of a night neither of them talks about outside a very short list of people, and Steve squeezes back before he lets go to shift gears, grateful, the way he always is, that at least this part of it they get to carry together instead of alone.

He glances at her once, quick, sideways, memorizing the specific, unremarkable way morning light catches her profile — nothing about it echoing anyone else at all, nothing borrowed, nothing almost-right. "I missed you," he says, quieter, meaning it the whole reckless, unguarded way he always means things like that with her.

"I saw you last night." She says it lightly, teasing, already flipping through radio stations — fond, definitely fond, but a half-beat slower to land on anything warmer than that, her attention already halfway back to the dial before his sentence has even fully settled. It's nothing. He's used to it. She's just not built the same way he is about saying things out loud, that's all.

"Still counts."

"If you say so." She finds a station she likes and leaves it there, humming along under her breath, and Steve tells himself that's an answer too, in its own way — just a quieter one than the kind he keeps handing her, and maybe, he thinks, watching her hand still resting loose and familiar near his on the seat, not really so different from a hand finding his at exactly the right second without needing to be asked.

Just Nancy. Just this. Just the actual, solid, waking-up-and-choosing-her-again version of love he gets to have, every single ordinary morning, whether he deserves the guilt sitting underneath it or not.

He pushes the guilt down, same as always, and drives them both to school.

"Hey, so," Steve says, easing the car into the school lot, scanning for a decent spot with more focus than the task probably deserves. "Would you be willing to look over some of my college essay stuff? Like, actually look at it. Not just tell me it's fine because you feel bad."

Nancy blinks at him, clearly caught off guard. "You wrote college essays?"

"I've started essays."

"Steve, it's barely October."

"I know. I'm trying to be proactive." He says it like the word itself surprises him a little, still finding a parking spot, still talking. "I figure if I get a head start now, I'm not scrambling in January like everybody else. Get ahead of it."

"Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend." She's not entirely joking, studying him now with the specific, narrow-eyed attention she usually reserves for something she thinks doesn't quite add up. "You've never once been proactive about anything academic in your entire life."

"That's not true. I'm proactive about basketball."

"Basketball isn't a subject, Steve."

"It's a discipline." He throws the car into park, only half-joking now. "Look, my dad's already started in on the 'what's the plan' thing at dinner. Full lecture last week about how I need 'direction.' I figure the fastest way to shut him up is to actually have some."

Nancy softens slightly at that, the teasing edge dropping out of her voice. She knows enough about Steve's house — the quiet, the expectations, the specific flavor of disappointment his father's gotten so efficient at delivering — not to push too hard on it. "Okay. That I believe a little more."

"See? Not just a personality transplant."

"I didn't say I believed it completely." She's watching him again, that same careful, searching look from a second ago. "You've seemed different the last few days, though. Not just about school. Just — somewhere else in your head a lot."

"I've had stuff on my mind."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Just — the future. Getting out of here eventually. You know." He shrugs, a little more evasive than he means to be, throwing a glance toward the school doors instead of at her. "Everybody's already talking about next year like it's decided. Figured I should probably start actually deciding something myself instead of just showing up to it."

Nancy doesn't answer right away. Something crosses her face, brief and distant, gone almost as fast as it arrives — the same look she gets sometimes when a conversation drifts too close to anything from last November, anything with Barb's name anywhere near the edges of it, even when nobody's said it out loud. Steve's learned not to chase that look when it shows up. He just waits it out instead, lets her come back to the conversation on her own time.

"I get that," she says finally, quieter. "Wanting to actually go somewhere. Not just — stay stuck in whatever this year turns into."

"Yeah." He reaches over, gentle, and tucks a piece of hair back that hasn't actually fallen loose, an excuse to be close to her more than anything. "I just want it to matter. Whatever I end up doing. Doesn't have to be some big thing. Just — mine, I guess. Something I actually picked."

"That's not a small thing, Steve." She says it plainly, some of the distance from a second ago folding back into something more present, more here with him. "I like this version of you. Ambitious Steve."

"Ambitious Steve's here to stay."

"We'll see." She's smiling now, small and real, and something in the space between them shifts easy and familiar, the kind of quiet that doesn't need filling.

He leans in first. She meets him halfway, one hand coming up to rest light against his jaw, and for a few unhurried seconds there's nothing else in the entire morning except this — her mouth soft against his, the windows slightly fogged, the ordinary, solid comfort of a girl he actually gets to have instead of one he only ever gets to dream about.

Then an engine guns loud and obnoxious somewhere behind them, tires screeching faintly as some car swings too fast into an empty spot two rows over, and Nancy pulls back first, startled, laughing despite herself.

"Somebody's in a hurry," she says, glancing over her shoulder at whoever it is, already reaching for her bag.

"Some people have no respect for a moment." Steve sighs, exaggerated, though he's grinning too, already resigned to the morning reasserting itself around them. "We should probably go anyway. Don't wanna be late to your own personal essay-grading job."

"Remember that you’re the one who asked for it."

"Best decision I've made all week." He gets out of the car, still smiling, the engine's roar already fading into the ordinary background noise of the parking lot filling up, and falls into step beside her toward the doors, the whole strange, unexamined shape of the morning tucked quietly away behind him for now.

The next few days pass in the kind of blur that doesn't leave much behind to remember.

There's a new guy — Billy Hargrove, transferred in from California, already strutting the halls like he owns them by second period. He corners Steve near the gym after practice, all sharp grin and sharper posturing, some comment about "King Steve" that isn't remotely a compliment the way he says it. Steve brushes it off easy enough on the surface, tells himself it's nothing, some new kid trying to stake a claim. Something about the guy sits wrong in his stomach anyway, low and unplaceable, gone before he can figure out why.

He doesn't think about it much past that. He's got bigger things weighing on him by the time the day's done.

Dinner at the Hollands' is the kind of evening that leaves a person feeling scraped hollow afterward.

Steve doesn't say much of anything. He just eats what's put in front of him and lets Nancy carry the weight of the conversation, watching her do it with a kind of quiet, practiced grace that breaks his heart a little every single time. He holds her hand under the table the whole time and during the ride home afterward, neither of them saying much, both of them carrying the same specific, unspoken exhaustion of two people lying to grieving parents because the truth is worse than anything either of them could actually say out loud.

He thinks, driving her home, that this is exactly the kind of thing that binds two people together in a way nothing else can. He doesn't know yet how wrong that thought is about to turn out to be.

The Halloween party is loud, crowded, everyone in costume, red cups everywhere, the whole house thick with the specific chaos of a party that got away from whoever was supposed to be chaperoning it hours ago.

Nancy's drinking more than usual almost from the second they walk in — a cup that keeps finding its way back to the punch before it's ever fully empty, a laugh that gets a little louder and looser with every refill. Steve notices. He doesn't make a thing of it, not at first — the party keeps pulling at him too, a couple guys from the basketball team dragging him into some argument in the kitchen, somebody's cousin cornering him for ten straight minutes about some weed he's trying to sell. He circles back to check on her every so often, gets waved off each time with some version of I'm fine, go have fun, and believes her a little more than he probably should each time he hears it.

By the time he finds her again, well past midnight, something's clearly gone wrong. She's swaying slightly near the kitchen island, cup dipping down into the punch bowl again. 

“Hey." He keeps his voice light, careful, closing the distance between them slow enough that it doesn't feel like an ambush, gently reaching for the cup in her hands.. “No, you’ve had enough, okay?” 

“Screw you!” She says it too fast, already half turning back toward the punch bowl.

“Please Nance, I’m serious—” That final sharp tug of the solo cup sent red liquid splashing down the front of her costume and across the floor in one sharp, ugly second.

The room does the thing rooms full of drunk teenagers do — dramatic gasps, a beat of laughter, somebody shouting something unhelpful, a ripple of attention Nancy clearly hates being the center of. 

“What the hell, Steve!”

"Shit– Nance, I’m sorry..." Steve's there in three steps, hand steady at her elbow, already following her down the hall toward the bathroom before the moment can turn into more of a scene than it already has.

“That’s not coming off, Nance.”

She's quiet at first, scrubbing at the red stain with a wet hand towel. “It’s coming out.”

It's when he steps in front of her, trying to catch her eye, get her to stop scrubbing, that something in her face finally cracks open. 

"C’mon Nance. Please just let me take you home,"

"No— I’m— No. You wanted this." She slurs out, accusation dripping from her words.

"No, I didn’t want this." He shakes his head while trying to get a hold on her arm again, to steady her. “I told you to stop drinking.” 

"It’s bullshit. All bullshit." She looks at him then, something raw and unguarded, glassy-eyed in a way that has nothing to do with the alcohol alone. 

"No, it’s not bullshit Nancy."

"No, you." It comes out sharp, immediate, and something in her face softens right after, guilty, though she doesn't take it back. "You’re bullshit."

"Wha– what?"

“You. You’re pretending like everything’s okay,” 

She’s quiet for a moment, staring into his eyes with an emotion he can’t recognize. So Steve waits, standing there in the bathroom, patient in the specific way he knows he needs to be with a drunk girl.

“Like– like it’s great and we’re in love. And we’re partying– yeah, let’s party!”

"Like we’re in love?" He asks finally, so quiet he almost misses it under the muffled bass thumping through the wall. He reaches up and cups her face with the same gentle fragility he would cradle her beating heart. 

“It’s bullshit.”

“You don’t love me?”

Something flickers across her face at that, her voice coming out a little more gently. "It’s bullshit,"

The words land somewhere behind his ribs, sudden and total, knocking something loose he didn't know was still holding steady until right this second.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. He doesn't even know how to.

He steps back eventually, quiet, and leaves the bathroom, leaves her standing there in front of the sink — not out of cruelty, just because staying feels unbearable, some old instinct telling him to move before the feeling catches up to him fully. He doesn't say goodbye to anyone on his way out, doesn't bother finding whoever's coat he borrowed or whatever half-costume piece he left somewhere in the living room. He just walks straight out the front door, past the keg stand and the shitty decorations and the candlelit pumpkins on the porch steps, out into the cold October air, and doesn't look back once.

He doesn't remember much of the walk to his car, or the first few minutes on the road after — just the porch lights blurring past, the radio left off, his hands steady on the wheel out of muscle memory more than anything else. And it isn't until he's turning onto his own street that the whole thing finally catches up to him — not anger, not really, just a heavy, hollowed-out kind of sadness that sits in his chest like something physical.

I loved her. The thought arrives simple and devastating, turning over and over as he pulls into the driveway and just sits there, engine ticking as it cools, not ready yet to go inside. I actually loved her. Not the searching for someone else kind. Not the almost kind. The real thing, finally, for the first time in my whole life and it still wasn't enough. She still doesn't love me back.

He feels, more than anything, like a fool. He'd spent so long telling himself the love he had for Nancy was proof of something, proof he could feel something real, something not borrowed from a dream he couldn't even prove was true. And it was real. He's sure of that, even now, even with his chest aching like this. It just didn't matter in the end. Real hadn't been enough to make her love him back.

He sits there a long while, car still idling in the driveway, turning it over slow and careful, the way he does with everything that actually hurts. Nancy was the first person he ever really got to just be with — no searching, no half-conscious cataloguing, no quiet, exhausting habit of measuring her against a girl he's never even met. He didn't love her because some piece of her reminded him of you. He loved her because she was entirely, completely herself, and being around her had felt, for the first time in his whole life, like putting something down instead of carrying it.

That's the part that actually hurts worse than the breakup itself, if he's honest. Not just that he lost her. That he lost the one relationship that had ever managed to be simple. And underneath the sadness, there's something almost grateful too, small and strange and hard to hold onto right now — glad, even now, even like this, that what they had was real while it lasted. Nobody can take that part away from him, not even her, not even tonight.

But the second that thought settles, the wall it was propped against goes with it, and there's nothing left standing between him and you at all.

He's spent months telling himself you're not real. Some dream his mind built out of loneliness and too many nights alone in a too-big house, nothing more than that, a stubborn habit he's been trying to grow out of the same way he grew out of King Steve. He's said the words to himself so many times they'd almost started to stick. And now, not even thirty minutes out from the worst conversation of his entire life, you're the only thing he can actually think about — clearer than Nancy's face in the bathroom, clearer than the sound of her voice cruelly slurring Bullshit at him.

He hates how easy it is. Hates that the second something real falls apart, he goes running straight back to something he can't even prove exists, like Nancy was never anything more than practice for a feeling he was really saving for someone else. That's not true — he knows that's not true, knows what he had with Nancy was its own whole, separate, real thing — but it doesn't stop the thought from showing up anyway, quiet and unwelcome, right alongside the grief.

Maybe that's the actual problem, he thinks, still sitting there in the driveway, engine off now, chest tight with something he doesn't have a clean name for. Maybe I never really convinced myself of anything at all. Maybe some part of me's been waiting for exactly this — an excuse to stop pretending you're not the one I actually want to go looking for.

He finally gets out of the car and lets himself into the house quiet, doesn't bother with the lights, doesn't bother with anything except getting up the stairs and into his room and out of the ridiculous half-costume he never even finished putting together properly tonight. He's in bed within minutes, still fully dressed except for his shoes, staring up at a ceiling that doesn't offer him a single answer.

Please, he thinks, eyes already sliding shut, exhaustion and heartbreak pulling him under together. Please, just — let me see her tonight. Whoever she turns out to be. I just need somewhere that still feels like it might actually work out.

He doesn't know if it's a fair thing to ask for. He asks anyway, the way he always does, some small, stubborn part of him still reaching for the one place that's never once, in his whole life, made him feel like a fool for hoping.

He's asleep before he can finish the thought all the way through.

The dream arrives soft at first, sunlight instead of streetlights, warm air instead of the cold October night he fell asleep inside of.

Steve finds himself standing at the edge of a huge, sprawling green lawn, rows of folding chairs stretching out in front of a stage draped in red and white banners, a sea of black gowns shifting restlessly in the breeze. Somewhere behind him, a marching band is tuning up, brass catching the sun in little scattered flashes. He doesn't know how he got here. He just knows, the way he always knows things in these dreams, that you're close, and that whatever's about to happen matters enormously.

Indiana University. The letters resolve slowly across a banner strung above the stage, and something in his chest does a small, surprised lift at the sight of it. He didn't know that before. Some old, stubborn part of him files it away instantly, greedily, the way he files away every scrap of you he's ever managed to hold onto.

He finds you in the crowd milling near the front once the ceremony lets out, cap already askew, gown flapping loose in the breeze, and the sight of you nearly knocks the breath out of him — not because anything about the moment is dramatic, just because you look so completely, radiantly happy, laughing with your whole body the second your family reaches you.

He's seen you glow before, in other dreams — the track meet, the birthday, even the bar crawl. He didn't think there was a version of that left to top. He was wrong. There's something different about this one, something that has nothing to do with the sunlight or the cap and gown and everything to do with the specific, unguarded way you're looking at your own life right now, like you can't quite believe you actually made it here and are still deciding whether to laugh or cry about it. He's never once seen you look this radiant. He doesn't think he's ever seen anyone look like this, honestly — not performed, not posed for anyone watching, just pure and entirely unselfconscious in a way that makes something in his chest ache in the best possible way.

Your dad gets there first, pulling you into a hug so tight your feet nearly leave the ground, laughing in a way Steve's never once heard from him in any other dream — open, defenseless, nothing careful about it at all. Your brother's right behind him, taller than Steve remembers, ruffling your hair under the cap until you swat his hand away, both of you laughing. An older woman — your aunt, Steve recognizes her from the birthday dream, filing the detail away automatically — hovers just behind them, already dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, entirely unashamed about it.

Steve notices the gap in it too, quiet and immediate, the same way he notices everything he's not supposed to be able to know. There's a version of this exact moment that should have a fourth person standing in it, and doesn't, and he's the only other one here who actually understands why — who watched it happen, who still remembers the sound of a name he was never supposed to learn. Caroline. He thinks it once, gentle, unbidden, and something in his chest aches for you in a way that has nothing to do with pride at all. He hopes, absurdly, uselessly, that wherever she is, she gets some version of seeing this too.

"Wow. Look at you," your dad says, holding you back at arm's length just to look, like he needs a second to actually take it in. "Look at you."

"Dad, you're gonna make me cry before the pictures even happen."

"Cry all you want. You’ve earned it." He pulls you back in for another hug, quick this time, before letting you go so your brother can take his turn.

Steve stands a little ways off, hands in his pockets, grinning like an idiot at the whole time, feeling — not for the first time in one of these dreams, but maybe more than ever — like he's genuinely, actually here for it. Not watching through glass. Just here, present, part of the noise and the sunlight and the sheer, uncomplicated joy of it.

Later, once the photos are done and the crowd's thinned into smaller, looser clusters, you all end up back at your college house, sitting together at a picnic table someone's dragged into the front yard, a cooler of drinks between you, your cap sitting crooked and forgotten on the table.

"So," your aunt says, leaning forward, elbows on the table, "What's next?"

You laugh, a little helpless, pushing your hair back from your face. "Honestly? I have no idea."

"No idea at all?"

"I mean — I've got some. My lease here runs through August, so I figured I'd just stay, keep working, see what shakes out. No reason to rush into anything before I actually have to." You shrug, easy, though Steve catches something underneath it — a real, honest uncertainty, not panicked exactly, just present, the specific unresolved feeling of standing at the very edge of something enormous with no map for what comes after. "There's a few jobs I've been looking at. Nothing too far away, just haven’t decided quite yet."

"Where's Davis, anyway?" your brother asks, glancing around like he expects him to materialize. "Figured he'd be here for this."

"Interview." You say it a little flat, a little clipped, like it's not the first time you've had to explain it today. "Last-minute thing, some program moved their date up. He's in Missouri."

"On your graduation." Your aunt doesn't quite manage to keep the disapproval out of her voice, mouth pressing into a thin line.

"It's a good program. I told him to go." You say it easy enough, though Steve catches something small and tired underneath it, gone again just as fast as it surfaced.

"Still." Your aunt doesn't push it further than that one word, but she doesn't fully let it go either.

"That's allowed, you know," your brother says, nudging your shoulder. "Not having it all figured out five minutes after graduation, I didn’t."

"I know. Doesn't stop it from being terrifying."

"Terrifying's normal." Your dad says it warm, certain, reaching over to squeeze your hand where it rests on the table. "You've got time. More than you think you do right now."

"That's what everyone keeps telling me."

"Because it's true." He smiles at you, something soft and proud settling into it. "You just graduated college, kid. Let yourself enjoy it for five minutes before you start panicking about the rest."

You laugh again, quieter this time, and lean into his shoulder for a second, and Steve watches the whole exchange with something warm and complicated turning over in his chest — pride, mostly, plain and uncomplicated, but something else too, something that feels almost like relief. You don't know where you're going yet. Neither does he, most days, if he's honest with himself. There's something oddly comforting about that, watching you sit here at the actual edge of your whole life with no more of a plan than he's got for his own.

Maybe that's the point, he thinks, watching you laugh at something your brother says next, easy and unhurried. Maybe none of us are supposed to know yet. Maybe that's not something to be scared of. Maybe it's just — the good kind of unknown, for once.

The dream doesn't need much more than that. It just lets him sit there a while, unseen, unnoticed, soaking in the warm afternoon light and the sound of your family's laughter and the particular, easy way you exist here — grown, capable, entirely your own person, standing right at the threshold of a whole open future you haven't decided the shape of yet.

He doesn't think about Nancy, not once, the whole rest of the dream. That's its own kind of relief, small and unexpected.

When he wakes, the hurt from the night before is still there — of course it's still there, one dream of you can't undo something like that, and some tired, honest part of him knows better than to expect it to. His chest still aches, dull and heavy, the specific shape of You’re bullshit still sitting lodged somewhere behind his ribs where it's probably going to stay a while.

But underneath it, something else has shifted too, small and steady and entirely new. He lies there a long moment, staring at his ceiling, turning the dream over the way he always does — your dad's hand squeezing yours, your aunt's tears, the crooked, forgotten cap on the picnic table, the easy, uncertain hope in your voice when you said I have no idea.

Indiana University, he thinks. She went to IU.

It's not much. It's barely anything, really, just a school, not a street, not a last name, not anything he could actually act on tonight or tomorrow or any day soon. But it's more than he had yesterday, and after a night like the one he just survived, that feels like something worth holding onto, tightly.

He doesn't reach for the notebook right away this time. He just lies there a while longer instead, letting the warmth of the dream sit next to the ache of the night before, both of them true at once, neither one able to cancel the other out.

Maybe I get to see you there too, someday, he thinks, quiet, hopeful in a way he hasn't let himself be in a long time. Maybe that's not as far away as it feels right now.

It's a bigger hope than he's used to letting himself have. He holds onto it anyway, and — strange, unfamiliar, almost unearned — it just feels like hope tonight. Not foolishness wearing hope's clothes.

He lies there a while longer, letting both feelings sit where they are, before his mind finally circles back around to Nancy, the way he knew it eventually would.

He still loves her. That part isn't complicated, no matter how much last night hurt, doesn't feel like something that just switches off because she couldn't say it back, doesn't feel like something he's ready to hand over and walk away from just because one terrible night in a bathroom said otherwise. He thinks about the Hollands' dinner table, her hand steady on his under it. He thinks about the drive to school some mornings, her hand finding his on the gearshift without either of them needing to ask. That's not nothing. That's not something he thinks he's supposed to give up on this easily, not over one drunk, honest, awful conversation said at a party neither of them is going to remember fondly.

He's not ready to just let it go. He decides that plainly, lying there in the grey early light, the same steady certainty he's felt about almost nothing else in his life lately.

He also decides, just as plainly, that he's not driving her to school today.

It's not punishment. He turns the thought over carefully, making sure of that before he lets himself settle on it — it's not about making her feel it, not about tit-for-tat, not about anything petty like that at all. It's just that he needs the morning. Needs a few hours where he isn't sitting three feet away from her in a car, both of them pretending last night didn't happen before either of them has actually figured out what to do with it. She'll understand. Or she won't, not right away, and he'll explain it later, when he's better at explaining things than he is right now at six in the morning with his chest still aching.

He gets up, finally, moving slow, and by the time he's showered and dressed the shape of what he actually wants to do has settled into something clear enough to act on.

Red roses. Not because they're original — he knows they're not, knows it's the most obvious gesture in the world, the kind guys do in movies right before the girl forgives them — but because he means it plainly enough that he doesn't need to be clever about it. He wants to show up at her door tonight, roses in hand, and tell her he's not giving up on this, not yet, not over one hard night. He wants to apologize for pushing, for the timing, for not knowing exactly what she needed him to say back there in the bathroom. He wants to tell her he still loves her and means to keep showing up anyway, however long it takes her to figure out whether she can say it back and mean it.

He doesn't know if it'll work. He doesn't let that stop him from deciding to try.

taglist:

The dream drops you into a back room that smells overwhelmingly like waffle cones and industrial air conditioning. You’re tucked into a corner near a mop bucket and boxes of unopened cake cones, and there's Steve — older, unmistakably older, but somehow younger looking than you've ever seen him in any other dream, in a way you don't have words for yet. 

It takes you a second to understand it's the because of the uniform. A striped red shirt beneath a navy sailors shirt and matching shorts. A ridiculous little cap perched at an angle that suggests he's stopped caring how it looked sometime around the fourth hour of his shift, and to top it all off — white knee high socks. He looks completely, gloriously unbothered by how stupid he should feel.

A younger kid is perched on an overturned bucket nearby, curly-haired, gesturing with a scoop like it's a conductor's baton. "Camp Know Where changes a person, Steve. You're looking at a whole new Dustin."

"You've been back two weeks. Still smell like bug spray and nerd."

"That's growth, actually. I learned morse code. Built a radio tower out of spare parts. Also, I met a girl, who, unlike you, actually likes me." Dustin twirls the scoop with theatrical flair. "Meanwhile you're in here every shift striking out with, and I cannot stress this enough, literally everyone."

Steve grimaces and flicks a napkin at him, unimpressed but fond. Dustin flicks it back without breaking stride, already moving on. "What about Robin?"

Steve blinks. "What about her?"

"The girl for you. She's right there. Free real estate."

"She's not my type."

"Based on what data? You've actually talked to her, what, twice? I've talked to her more than you have, and it's been about russian transmissions." Dustin shrugs. "You'd know her better than me. Allegedly."

"I know her fine. We work together." Steve says it easy, dismissive, though something flickers behind it he doesn't seem to fully understand — some old, restless instinct that's never once landed on anything close to right, no matter how many girls he's tried it out on. "She's fine. Just not it."

"'It.'" Dustin repeats the word like a punchline Steve doesn't know he's told. "Very specific criteria for a guy who can't articulate what it actually is."

"I'll know it when I find it."

"Cool. Very scientific." Dustin doesn't even glance up from the ice cream scoop. "Anyway, wouldn't matter — Robin's got the whole whiteboard against you."

Steve pauses. "Wait, you knew about that?"

"Everyone knows about that, Steve."

"She said she's collecting data. On my rejections." Steve gestures at it, half-hidden by napkin boxes near the mop bucket, rows of tally marks climbing well past anything flattering. "I had, like, one class with her junior year. That's our whole history. Where's the vendetta coming from?"

"Maybe you're just memorable."

"That's not comforting."

"Wasn't trying to comfort you. Was trying to be right." Dustin grins, delighted with himself. "Face it. You're not losing your touch, you just never had one to lose."

The bell over the front counter jingles, and Steve's whole posture changes in about half a second flat, shoulders back, that easy, practiced grin sliding into place like a mask he's put on a thousand times. You drift closer, curious, and immediately understand why Dustin's already smirking behind the divider like he knows exactly what's coming.

Two girls, unmistakably his own age, backpacks slung over their shoulders like they wandered in straight from some other part of the mall, lean against the counter, already giggling before Steve's said a single word.

"Ladies." He leans an elbow on the counter, missing it slightly, correcting with a smoothness that almost, almost, sells the whole thing as intentional. He drags a hand back through his hair on the way up, a gesture so practiced it's clearly its own opening move. "Steve Harrington. Some people call me Steve the Hair Harrington. You can call me whichever one you like better."

One girl snorts into her hand. The other one just stares at him, unimpressed, arms crossed. "That's — genuinely terrible."

"I get that a lot." He says it like a compliment, entirely unbothered, scooping with a flourish. "Rocky road, was it? Bold choice. I respect a woman who likes things a little chunky."

Something small and unexpected flares in your chest, watching him lean into it, watching those girls laugh at him — a quick, hot flicker of something that feels embarrassingly close to jealousy before you even fully register it. That's ridiculous, you tell yourself immediately, mortified at your own reaction. He doesn't even know I exist. You watch a second longer, bracing for the feeling to get worse.

Instead, one of the girls, laughing despite herself, says, "Do you actually get anywhere with these lines?"

"Every single time." Steve hands over the cone with total, unshakable sincerity, like the question itself is faintly ridiculous. "It's a numbers game. Odds are always in my favor."

The girl's friend is full-on cackling now, and even the unimpressed one is fighting a smile as they walk off, and the jealousy in your chest dissolves so fast into pure, delighted amusement that you actually laugh out loud, forgetting for a second that nobody here can hear you.

"That was so bad," you say to no one, grinning helplessly.

Dustin, from behind the divider in the back room, mutters something that sounds suspiciously like "a numbers game, sure, Steve," just loud enough for Steve to hear.

"It worked, didn't it?"

"She said no."

"She laughed. Laughing is only a few steps away from a yes."

"That's not how yeses work, Steve."

It keeps going like that; a steady trickle of customers, all of them recognizably his own age, clearly killing time at the mall the way every teenager in Hawkins apparently does, and Steve trotting out a new, increasingly terrible line for every single one of them, apparently incapable of repeating himself even once.

A group of girls who look like they might go to Hawkins High gets informed that Scoops Ahoy's specialty flavor is "heartbreak, and I would know, I invented it — ask around, they call me the Hair for a reason." One girl leaning on the counter with her friends gets, with total, earnest sincerity, hair dragged back for emphasis: "I don't usually do this, but you've got the kind of smile that could end world hunger. Or at least this shift. Steve, by the way. The Hair, if you're nasty."

She laughs so hard she nearly drops her cone.

You're doubled over by this point, delighted in a way that has nothing to do with any of the actual jokes landing — it's watching Dustin's increasingly pained expressions behind the counter, watching Steve commit so completely to believing he's still got it, entirely unaware of how thoroughly he doesn't, watching an entire mall food court fall a little bit in love with a boy in a stupid sailor hat and a genuinely excellent head of hair, one terrible pickup line at a time.

A new customer steps up before Dustin can say anything, and Steve turns that same easy, ridiculous grin on her without missing a beat: "Now, I don't wanna alarm you, but I think you might be lost. Because heaven's usually a little further north of the food court."

Dustin makes a sound like he's been personally wounded. "Oh my god."

The line lands somewhere between so terrible and so earnestly delivered that it loops all the way back around into genuinely funny, and between that and the look on Dustin's face — pure, betrayed disbelief, like he can't decide if he wants to laugh or throw a scoop at Steve's head — you lose it completely. A real laugh, loud and helpless, doubling you over somewhere that isn't really anywhere, shaking you right out of the dream itself.

You wake up laughing, which is apparently becoming something of a pattern.

It takes you a second to place the room, not your own ceiling, but Ella's, string lights looped crooked along the headboard, a poster of some rock band you only half-recognize peeling slightly at one corner. Right. It’s Thursday. You stayed over after the two of you burned through half a bag of popcorn and most of a rented movie neither of you actually finished watching.

You lie there a second longer than you need to, still smiling, before it fully registers just how long it's actually been. Three weeks, at least, since the last real one; a real Steve dream, the kind that leaves something warm behind instead of something you have to shake off. Lately it's mostly been the other kind: the kitchen, the shattered mug, your mom collapsed on the floor, your own hands locking into place against her chest that never once seems to actually help in the dream any more than it did in real life. You wake up from those gasping, some nights, disoriented and shaking in a way that no amount of Ella's family's warmth can fully talk you down from until well into breakfast. You'd take a hundred more nights of terrible pickup lines over even one more night of that kitchen floor, and some greedy, grateful part of you wants to hold onto this one a little longer just for that reason alone.

"Okay," Ella says from the other bed, propped up on one elbow, already grinning at you over the gap between the mattresses. "You were cackling. Like, genuinely cackling, in your sleep. I thought you were choking for a second."

"I wasn't choking."

"You were doing something. What was so funny?" She narrows her eyes, delighted, already fishing. "Good dream?"

"It was — yeah. It was a really good one." A real one, you don't say. The kind I haven't gotten in a while.

"Was it about Aaron?" Ella waggles her eyebrows so hard it's basically a full-body gesture, grinning wide enough to show all her teeth. "Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Was he doing something extra scandalous?"

"Ella."

"I'm just saying! You're allowed. You've been together like, what, two years now—"

"One year, and nine months." The correction comes out automatic, precise, a fact you've apparently got memorized down to the exact number without meaning to.

"Whatever, basically two years, and you never tell me any of the gory details." She flops back onto her pillow, mock-wounded. "I have to just assume the worst — best — most scandalous things."

"It wasn't about Aaron." That part, at least, is true. You don't offer anything else, and Ella, mercifully, doesn't push, she just makes a face like she's filing the mystery away for later interrogation before rolling out of bed to go fight with her curling iron instead.

"Hey," you say, catching her at the bathroom door before she disappears into the mirror for the next twenty minutes. "Thanks again. For letting me crash here."

"You say that every time like I'm doing you some huge favor." Ella rolls her eyes, fond. "You know you can just live here. Since Heather's off at school you can just take her room."

"It’s just that James is at IU the whole semester, and dad's in Cincinnati till Sunday for work." You shrug, keeping it light even though it isn't, entirely. "I just— you know. The dreams. I don't do great in the house by myself when they show up, and lately they've been showing up a lot."

Ella's face softens all the way, no hesitation this time; she's heard this particular explanation enough times by now that it doesn't need any further unpacking. "The kitchen ones?"

You nod, not trusting your voice with much more than that.

"Yeah, no, obviously you're staying here." She says it simply, like there was never really a question to begin with. "You can stay literally whenever you want. My mom loves you more than she loves me, probably."

"That's definitely true."

"I'm aware." She grins again, mercifully letting the heavier moment pass without lingering on it, and disappears into the bathroom, already yelling something about the curling iron being possessed.

You sit there another minute on the edge of the bed, grateful in a way you don't fully have words for; not just for the company, or the hairspray Ella's mom keeps stocked specifically for you now, but for the fact that nobody in this house makes you explain yourself. Nobody asks why a sixteen year old still can't sleep in an empty house almost two years later. They just leave the porch light on and set an extra plate at breakfast, like it's the easiest thing in the world.

You think about Steve three separate times before you've even finished getting dressed, which is, if you're honest, not unusual anymore, though this morning it feels different, lighter, less like reaching for something and more like still holding onto something you got to keep for once.

It happens while you're pulling on a sweater, some flash of the sailor hat, the ridiculous, earnest confidence of The Hair, if you're nasty, and you catch yourself smiling at nothing in the mirror before you can stop it. It happens again while you're digging through your bag for a hair tie, some stray, unplaceable detail from the dream surfacing — the curly-haired kid's voice, the casual way they spoke to each other, and you find yourself trying to hold onto it, turning it over carefully, the way you always do now, cataloging it before it can slip away.

You don't write it down until tonight, obviously. You would never do it here, not at Ella's, the notebook stays home, tucked under its floorboard, safe and singular and entirely yours. But you spend a stray minute standing at Ella's dresser mirror trying to remember every detail anyway, the way you always do lately, half convinced that if you just hold onto enough of it: the mall, the sailor uniform, the Ahoy hat, you might eventually assemble enough real, verifiable facts to prove, one way or another, whether any of it could possibly be true.

You don't know why it matters so much to you whether he's real. You just know it does, more than it probably should, more than you'd ever be able to explain to a single living person without sounding unwell.

You definitely don't tell anyone about the notebook. Not Ella, not your dad, and not Aaron — especially not Aaron.

That's the part that sits heaviest in your chest most mornings, if you actually let yourself sit with it. It feels, some days, uncomfortably close to cheating; not in any way you could point to, not in any way that would hold up if you tried to explain it out loud, but close enough that the guilt shows up anyway, quiet and persistent. A whole notebook of feelings about another boy. A whole private world you retreat into almost every night, one you've never once invited Aaron into, one that occupies more of your actual heart most days than anything happening in your real, waking life.

Aaron is real, you remind yourself, buttoning your sweater, the thought arriving worn and familiar from how many times you've had to reach for it lately. Aaron is good. Aaron loves you, actually, provably, out loud and in front of everyone. This other thing — whatever it might be — isn't even a person. It's just a dream. It's a boy who's never once had to actually show up for you the way Aaron does, every single day, without fail.

It doesn't fully land, the way it never fully lands anymore. You get dressed anyway, and go downstairs, and let the morning carry you forward regardless.

Ella's parents are already at the kitchen table by the time you make it down, her dad half-hidden behind the newspaper, her mom sliding a plate of eggs across the table like she's been doing it your whole life instead of just the last two years.

"Good morning," Ella's mom smiles at you, warm and unbothered, the way she always is. "Sleep okay, honey?"

"Really well, actually."

"Good." She doesn't ask anything further, doesn't need to, just fills your juice glass without being asked and goes back to buttering her own toast. Ella's dad grunts something amiable from behind the sports section that might be a good morning.

"She had a dream about a mystery man last night," Ella announces around a mouthful of toast, entirely too pleased with herself. "Wouldn't tell me who. Very suspicious."

"It's nobody, Ella."

"Nobody makes you laugh in your sleep like that."

"Leave the girl alone," Ella's mom says, mild, not even looking up, and Ella subsides with a theatrical sigh, already moving on to complaining about a trigonometry test instead.

You eat your breakfast, half-listening, half still turning dream details over in your head, and check the clock over the stove more out of habit than urgency. "We should probably go, actually, I told Aaron I'd get us there before the bell this time."

"Since when do you drive us?" Ella asks, already gathering her bag, grinning sideways at you. "Last time you drove I nearly went through the windshield at that stop sign on Miller."

"That only happened one time."

"It happened enough times that I specifically remember it." She grabs a piece of toast to go, already heading for the door. "I love you, but you brake like you're mad at the car."

"I am improving."

"You are technically improving," Ella allows, generous, swinging the front door open. "C'mon, Speed Racer. Try not to kill us on the way to school this time."

You roll your eyes, grab your bag, and follow her out into the cool morning air, car keys already in hand, one last stray thought of a sailor hat and a terrible pickup line trailing warm and unbidden behind you the whole way to the driveway.

The cassette Margaret lent you rattles slightly in the tape deck as Ella cranks the volume, both of you belting some scratchy, gloriously overproduced 70s pop song at a volume that's almost certainly illegal this early in the morning, windows cracked just enough that half the parking lot can hear you botching the high notes on your way in.

"You are so flat," Ella informs you, delighted, still singing anyway.

"You're one to talk."

"I never claimed to be good. My enthusiasm makes up for the lack of talent." She harmonizes badly on purpose just to make you laugh, and you're both still cackling, breathless, as you pull into the space next to Aaron's black truck.

He's out front with a cluster of his friends, bag already slung over one shoulder, and you can hear Jude mid-story before you've even got the car in park — big, sweeping gestures, clearly reenacting some crucial defensive stand from some semifinal game a couple years back.

"—and this guy, this absolute menace right here, strips it clean off him twice, TWICE, and the dude's just standing there like—" Jude does an exaggerated, wounded expression that gets a laugh out of the rest of the group. "And then Aaron comes back and drains a three right in his face. Should've seen this guy's face, man. Priceless."

"I had him rattled the whole game," Aaron says, easy, grinning. "Kid thought he was hot stuff. I humbled him."

"We still lost, though," someone points out.

"By one point. Against a guy who clearly peaked that exact night." Aaron shrugs, unbothered, and then he spots you climbing out of the car and his whole face does something warmer, softer, all the performed confidence melting straight off him. "Hey, there she is."

"Hey." You barely get the word out before he's crossing the distance and kissing you, easy and sweet, one hand coming up to rest at your jaw like it's the most natural gesture in the world.

"Oh my god," Ella announces loudly, gagging with theatrical commitment as she rounds the front of the car. "It is eight in the morning, you two. Some of us haven't even had breakfast fully digest yet."

"Jealous," Aaron says against your mouth, not breaking away.

"Deeply," Ella confirms, unbothered, already heading toward the doors.

Jude and the rest of Aaron's friends erupt into the kind of hollering, wolf-whistling chaos that's apparently required by law whenever Aaron kisses you in public, and Aaron pulls back just enough to flip them off without any real heat behind it, grinning the whole time.

"You guys are the worst," he says, not sounding remotely bothered.

"You're just mad we're witnesses," Jude calls back, already herding the rest of the group toward the doors themselves.

"So," Aaron says, falling into step beside you as the parking lot empties out around you, bag slung over one shoulder, something bright and restless in his voice that you clock immediately. "I finished it. Last night. All the applications, sent out, done."

"Seriously? All of them?"

"All six." He says it like he still can't quite believe it himself, grinning down at you. "Purdue, IU, Notre Dame — reach school, I know, I know, and a couple of the smaller ones my counselor kept pushing. Six schools, six essays, six checks my mom's gonna be annoyed about for a month. Done."

"That's huge, Aaron."

"It's a relief, mostly." He bumps your shoulder with his, easy. "I keep thinking about it, though — like, actually thinking about what it's gonna look like. Next year. Me somewhere, you still here finishing up." He says it lightly, like it's simple math instead of something that makes your stomach do something complicated and unpleasant. "But your senior year's gonna fly by, I promise. And then you'll be back with me, in the same place again. That's the plan, anyway."

"Yep. That's the plan," you echo, keeping your voice easy, practiced.

"I actually wanted your take on something." He pulls a folded paper from his bag, a little crumpled at the corners. "Notre Dame or Purdue, if I get into both. My dad's pushing Notre Dame, obviously, but Purdue's got the better program for what I actually want to do, and it's closer, and—" He stops himself, laughing a little, self-conscious in a way that's rare for him. "Sorry. You don't have to actually weigh in on this. I just — I like knowing what you think. About stuff like this."

"Purdue," you say, mostly because it's closer, mostly because it's the answer that requires the least from you right now, and he lights up like you've handed him something important.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Closer's good."

"Closer is good, you’re right." he agrees, folding the paper back up, satisfied, already moving on to some smaller logistical thought about dorm buildings and roommate assignments you only half hear.

You nod along, smiling in the right places, and underneath it something in your chest sits heavy and quiet the rest of the walk — not about Purdue, not really. About the whole shape of what he's describing so easily, so certainly: a future already sketched out in his handwriting, both of you slotted neatly into it like the outcome was never actually in question. You don't know how to tell him that most days you're not sure you belong anywhere in that drawing at all, not the way he thinks you do. You don't know how you'd even start.

You don't try. You just keep walking, keep nodding, keep trying to be exactly the girl he's already planned an entire future around.

He walks you all the way to your locker, the hallway thinning out around you as the first bell warning crackles overhead.

"I've got that thing with Coach after practice," he says, leaning one shoulder against the locker next to yours while you spin your combination. "But I'll call you tonight. Tell you how the dorm stuff shakes out, if my mom's stopped hyperventilating about the application fees by then."

"Sounds riveting."

"It'll be riveting. I'll make it riveting." He tugs lightly at the strap of your bag, grinning. "You working on anything for track today?"

"Just more conditioning. Nothing exciting."

"Everything you do is exciting." He says it easy, unguarded, entirely sincere, and something in you softens despite everything else sitting complicated underneath it — because that part, at least, has never once been performance. He does think that. He's never once had to pretend to.

"You're ridiculous."

"You love it."

"I tolerate it." You bump his shoulder with yours, and he catches your hand before you can pull all the way back, lacing his fingers loosely through yours for one more second before the second bell warning cuts through the hallway, scattering the last stragglers toward their classrooms.

"Gotta go." He presses a quick kiss to your temple, already backing away down the hall. "Purdue. I've got a good feeling about Purdue."

"Go to class, Aaron."

"Going, going." He grins the whole way backward, nearly colliding with a freshman before he finally turns and jogs off toward the science wing, and you watch him go for one second longer than you probably need to before turning back to your locker, pulling out your books, and heading the opposite direction into a Thursday that already feels, somehow, both entirely ordinary and quietly, privately impossible to explain to anyone at all.

The rest of the morning blurs by the way school days do when nothing especially memorable happens in any of them; a pop quiz in chemistry you're fairly sure you bombed, a substitute in English who lets the whole class get away with doing basically nothing for forty-five minutes, a stretch of study hall spent half-doing homework and half-doodling in the margins of your notebook, careful not to let anything too revealing slip out in ink where somebody could see it.

By lunch, the cafeteria's buzzing with a specific, familiar kind of chaos, somebody's brought up Halloween, two weeks out and the only thing anyone at your table wants to talk about.

"Okay, but we need an actual plan this year," Priya announces, dead serious, jabbing her fork in your direction. "Not a repeat of last year where we all just showed up in whatever and called it a costume."

"I was a very convincing ghost."

"You wore a sheet with two eye holes cut out. That's not a costume, that's a crime against effort."

"Harsh."

"Accurate." Priya's already sketching something on a napkin, group costume ideas spiraling out in increasingly ambitious directions, when Marcus drops into the empty seat next to you, uninvited, grinning like he's about to deliver very important news.

"Okay, hear me out," he says, to the table at large. "You two—" he points between you and the general direction of wherever Aaron currently is, still in line for food, "should do a couples costume. Something dumb. Like salt and pepper shakers."

"Absolutely not."

"Or, hear me out, hear me out — ketchup and mustard."

"Marcus."

"I'm just saying, condiments have range." He looks entirely too pleased with this idea, and Priya, traitorously, looks like she's actually considering it. "You'd crush it. Everyone would talk about it for weeks."

"For all the wrong reasons."

"There's no such thing as wrong reasons at a Halloween party." Marcus steals a fry off your tray without asking, thoroughly unbothered by your look, and wanders off just as Aaron slides into the seat across from you, tray in hand.

"What'd I miss?"

"Marcus wants us to be condiments for Halloween."

"That's genuinely a great idea." Aaron considers it for exactly one second before shaking his head, already moving on. "Actually, no — I had a better one. I was kind of hoping you'd go for the Risky Business thing with me. You know, Joel and Lana, some sunglasses, the whole look."

"I am absolutely not dressing up as a prostitute for Halloween, Aaron."

"That's not — I meant more the, you know. The socks. The sunglasses part." He has the decency to look at least a little sheepish about it, backpedaling fast. "I wasn't thinking the whole — I just thought the sunglasses were a good bit."

"The whole costume comes as a set, Aaron. That's the joke."

"Okay, fair. Withdrawn." He holds both hands up in surrender, grinning despite himself. "Back to condiments, then."

"We are not doing condiments either."

"We can workshop it," he says, entirely unbothered, and steals a fry off your tray for the second time in five minutes like the conversation never happened at all, and you throw another one at him for good measure.

"So," Aaron says, a few minutes later, once the table's noise has drifted off into some separate argument about costume budgets. "I'm actually heading down to Bloomington in a couple weeks. Before decisions come out. Figured I'd get a real look at the place instead of just the brochure version."

"You already toured, though."

"With my parents. That's a different tour." He shrugs, easy, stealing another one of your fries in retaliation. "I was thinking I'd see if your brother's around while I'm down there. Get the actual scoop instead of whatever the admissions office wants me to hear."

"James would talk your ear off about the dining hall menu for at least twenty straight minutes if you let him."

"I'd take it." He grins, and then, a little more careful, a little less performed than a second ago: "You could come too, if you wanted. I mean James wouldn't mind, right? Might be good for you to actually see the place yourself instead of just hearing about it secondhand from me nonstop for the next two years." A beat, something warmer and a little more deliberate underneath the casual tone. "In case it ends up being ours someday. Not just mine."

Something in your chest does a complicated, guilty flip at that — the easy, hopeful way he says ours, like it's already half-decided, like the two of you spending a weekend away together is just one small, obvious step on a path he's already walking with total confidence.

"Maybe," you say, keeping your voice light, easy, the way you've gotten so practiced at doing. "I'd have to check with my dad."

"No pressure. Just — throwing it out there." He bumps your foot under the table, grinning, already moving on to something about Marcus's condiment costume idea, and you let the moment pass, grateful for the deflection even as some quiet, familiar guilt settles low in your stomach for the rest of the period.

Track conditioning that afternoon is its own particular kind of chaos — Coach Merrick running you all through sprints until your lungs burn, the whole team scattered across the infield in various states of exhausted collapse by the time she finally calls it.

"I genuinely might die here," Mary Leigh announces, flat on her back in the grass, staring up at the sky like it personally wronged her. She transferred in from somewhere in Georgia last spring and still hasn't fully adjusted to Indiana's version of weather, a fact she brings up at least twice during every single practice. "Somebody tell my parents I loved them."

"You're being dramatic," Ella says, dropping down next to her, equally winded but considerably less theatrical about it.

"I am dying, Ella. There's a difference between drama and a medical emergency."

"There really isn't, with you."

"I'm going to remember this betrayal." Mary Leigh flings an arm dramatically over her eyes, and you laugh, dropping down into the grass beside both of them, chest still heaving from the last set.

"Random question," you say, once you've caught your breath, keeping your tone as offhand as you can manage. "Either of you ever hear of an ice cream place with, like, a sailor theme? Boat stuff. Sailor hats, the whole thing."

Ella squints at you. "A what?"

"A sailor-themed ice cream parlor. Like at a mall or something, maybe."

"Is this a Fort Wayne thing? Or, like, an Indianapolis thing?" Mary Leigh props herself up on her elbows, actually considering it. "We don't have anything like that down here."

"I didn't say it was here. I just — heard about it somewhere. Wondered if it rang a bell."

"Doesn't ring anything," Ella says, already losing interest, flopping back into the grass. "Sounds like something you'd see at, like, a boardwalk. Why, you planning a road trip?"

"No reason. Just curious." You let it drop as easily as you brought it up, filing the blank looks away right alongside everything else you've never managed to actually confirm. "Forget I asked."

"You're so weird sometimes," Ella says, fond, not pushing it any further.

"You guys hear Marcus's genius costume idea?" you ask, once you've got enough breath back to talk.

"The condiments thing?" Ella makes a face. "Is Aaron actually considering that?"

"Aaron thinks it's a great idea."

"Of course he does." Ella rolls her eyes, fond. "He'd wear a trash bag if you told him it'd make a good couple's costume."

"That's oddly sweet, actually," Mary Leigh says, still flat on her back. "In, like, a deeply unserious way."

"He's like that about everything," you say, and something in your own voice comes out a little more wistful than you meant it to, though neither of them seems to catch it, both too busy arguing about whether ketchup and mustard actually counts as a real costume or just an excuse to wear all red or all yellow.

You lie there in the grass a while longer, listening to them bicker, the afternoon sun warm on your face, and let yourself not think about IU, or dining halls, or the particular weight of the word ours, for at least a few more minutes.

You drop Ella off just as the sky's starting to go gold at the edges, idling at the curb while she gathers her bag from the backseat.

"You coming in?" she asks. "My mom's making that chicken thing you like."

"Maybe a little later — I've got some stuff to get done at home. Dad's back soon, so I gotta make sure the house doesn't look like a disaster before he sees it."

"Fair enough." Ella leans back through the open door for a second, grinning. "Tell Aaron hi from me after he's done scandalizing you in real life."

"Alright. Goodbye, Ella."

"I'll get more out of you eventually!" she calls, already halfway up the driveway, laughing, and you wait until she's safely inside before pulling away from the curb, Margaret's cassette still humming low from the tape deck, the drive home stretching out easy and familiar in front of you.

You've got the whole dream still sitting warm and half-intact in your chest: the sailor hat, the terrible pickup lines, Dustin's voice, and for the first time all day, with the windows down and the last of the afternoon light spilling gold across the dashboard, you let yourself think about it freely, unguarded, already composing the notebook entry in your head before you've even made it home to write it down.

The house is still bright when you pull into the driveway, late afternoon sun slanting warm through the front windows, and you sit in the car a second longer than you need to before actually going inside — a habit you've picked up without really noticing, some small, automatic pause before crossing the threshold, like you're giving the house a chance to just be a house before you have to be inside it.

It's fine, mostly. Daylight makes it fine.

You drop your bag by the door, kick off your shoes, and it's only when you glance down the hall toward the kitchen — an entirely unremarkable, unprompted glance, the kind you make a hundred times a day without thinking — that something in your chest goes quiet and heavy for a second too long. The linoleum's the same. The counter's the same. Nothing about it looks any different than it ever does, than it's looked every single day for two years now, and yet some part of you still braces every time your eyes land there anyway, still half-expects to see something you're never going to see again.

You look away before the feeling can fully settle in. You've gotten good at that, not pretending it isn't there, exactly, just declining to sit with it any longer than you have to, redirecting yourself toward something smaller and more manageable instead.

You head upstairs.

The notebook comes out from under the floorboard easily, familiar, your fingers finding the loose corner without even having to look for it anymore. You settle onto your bed, late sun still pouring gold through the window, and start writing before the dream can fade any further than it already has.

Ice cream shop. Sailor theme — striped shirts, dumb little hats. He was with a kid named Dustin, younger, maybe twelve or thirteen, curly hair, really funny. There's a girl named Robin who also works there but she wasn't there.

He kept trying these terrible pickup lines on customers. Called himself "the Hair" more than once, actually, like it's a whole bit he's committed to. It was the funniest thing I've ever watched. I woke myself up laughing.

First real dream in almost three weeks. Mostly it's been the kitchen lately. I'll take this one over that a hundred times out of a hundred.

You pause there, pencil hovering, and reach for his last name — the way you usually reach for things left behind in these dreams, the way you've written dozens of times by now across a dozen different entries — and come up with nothing.

You know he said it. You're almost sure of that much, at least — some easy, confident introduction, tossed off like it was nothing, the same breath as the ridiculous nickname. But the actual word won't come, no matter how many times you turn it over, chasing it the way you'd chase a word stuck right on the tip of your tongue. It's already gone soft and formless at the edges, the way names and street signs always seem to go in these dreams, dissolving faster than anything else no matter how hard you try to hold onto them.

You try anyway. You sit there for a long minute, eyes shut, replaying the dream from the very start: the mop bucket, Dustin's teasing, the bell over the counter, hoping the sound of it might come back to you if you just retrace enough of the steps around it. It doesn't. Whatever the word actually was, it's already slipped past the place where memory turns into fact, leaving nothing behind but the shape of where it used to be.

Steve H., you write instead, frustrated, underlining it twice like the emphasis might somehow will the rest of it back. You want it — badly, more than you'd ever admit to anyone — because a last name is the one thing that might actually turn into something real. A last name means a phone book. A last name means an address, a real one, something you could point to instead of just describe.

Half a name isn't enough for any of that. You know that even as you write it, and it aches a little, the particular frustration of being handed almost everything you'd need and losing the one piece that would have made the rest of it usable.

You close the notebook before the thought can go any further, sliding it back beneath the floorboard, pressing it flat until it clicks quiet into place.

The afternoon light's gone soft and heavy through your window by the time you finally lie back against your pillow, meaning to just rest for a minute before getting up to shower and pack a bag for Ella's — or maybe Mary Leigh's, you haven't decided yet, whoever answers the phone first.

You don't mean to fall asleep, you rarely do.

But the bed is warm, and the day's been long in the specific, invisible way days are long when half of them are spent performing a version of normal that takes more from you than it looks like from the outside, and your eyes are heavier than you realize until they're already closed, the last of the sun sliding gold and slow across your bedroom ceiling.

You figure you'll wake up in twenty minutes, thirty at most. Just enough time to shower, throw a bag together, and get out before dinner.

You're asleep before you can even finish the thought.

The dream starts easy enough, the way the best ones do, before you understand it's not going to stay that way.

You're somewhere fluorescent-lit and industrial, concrete floors and low ceilings, the hum of machinery somewhere close by that you can't quite place. Steve's sitting a few feet away, older again, hunched forward with his elbows braced on his knees, laughing so hard at something you didn’t hear.

"Okay — okay, wait, say that again," he manages, still laughing, shoulders shaking with it.

A voice answers from somewhere behind him, dry and pleased with itself. "I said if you die down here, I'm telling everyone it was because you tried to flirt your way out of it."

"That's — that's slander. That's premature slander."

"It's not slander if it's accurate."

He laughs again, helpless, and something warm and easy blooms in your chest just watching it — you almost laugh too, the sound of his laugh so purely, ridiculously him that it catches somewhere happy in your own throat before you can stop it. You try to turn toward the voice, curious, wanting to see who he's bantering with. Your body won't move. You're fixed here, rooted to whatever spot the dream's decided to plant you in, able to hear everything and see almost nothing beyond the narrow, unmoving slice of the room directly in front of you.

Robin, you think, distant and certain, the way you know most things in these dreams. You don't get a face to go with it. Just the voice — sharp, warm underneath the sarcasm, clearly enjoying getting a rise out of him even in whatever strange, fluorescent-lit place this turns out to be.

You don't see anything wrong yet. That's the part that stays with you longest, later — how normal it still feels, right up until it doesn't.

The door at the far end of the room opens, and the lighthearted thing in your chest curdles all at once into something else entirely.

There are men in the room now — several of them, moving with the clipped, efficient purpose of people who do this often. One of them crosses straight to Steve, and before you can fully register what's happening, a hand fists hard in his hair and wrenches his head back and up, sharp and rough.

That's when you see it. The blood.

It's already dried at the corner of his mouth, a thin dark line down his jaw, one eye swollen just enough to look wrong on a face you know so well it aches — none of it visible a second ago, none of it there while he was laughing, like the dream is only letting you see the truth of it now that someone's forcing his face into the light. Restraints hold him fixed to the chair, wrists lashed tight to the arms of it, and your chest goes cold and tight all at once, the warmth from a second ago gone completely, replaced by something closer to panic.

The men are talking to each other, fast and clipped, in a language you don't understand, moving with the same clinical efficiency as before. It's Steve's voice that sounds wrong first — looser than it was only a few seconds ago, words dragging slightly at the edges, like his mouth isn't quite keeping pace with what he's trying to say.

"Hey — hey, easy, I'm cooperating, see, very — very cooperative guy, right here—" The sentence wanders somewhere it shouldn't, trailing off before picking back up a beat too late, and something about the rhythm of it makes your stomach twist harder than the restraints or the blood already had.

"Steve?" Robin's voice too, thinner than it was a minute ago, syllables blurring soft into each other. "Steve, I don't feel good—"

What's wrong with them, you think, confused, grasping for an explanation your mind can actually hold onto. Why do they both sound drunk? It doesn't occur to you yet that someone did this to them on purpose, whatever those men gave them, it's already worked its way through both of them, stripping something away that neither of them can get back by trying harder.

"Leave him alone!" Robin's voice cracks trying to find its usual sharpness and doesn't quite manage it. "He doesn't know anything, I swear, we don't—"

Someone cuts her off, harsh, and you hear something — a smack, a pitiful sound of protest — that makes your whole body strain uselessly against whatever's holding you fixed in place, desperate to turn, to see her, to do anything other than stand frozen and useless while this happens all around you.

"Steve." Your own voice comes out thin, useless, exactly the way it always is here. "Steve, I'm here, I'm—"

He can't hear you. He never will.

They ask him something. You don't catch all the words — accented, clipped, half-drowned by your own pulse pounding loud in your ears — but you catch the shape of a question, and Steve's answer, loose and slightly slurred, dragged up from somewhere he clearly doesn't have much control left of: "I already — I told you, man, I scoop ice cream. I don't know anything about—"

One of the men steps back, winds up, and you scream his name, useless, desperate, straining against the frozen weight of your own body as the man's fist rears back—

Your eyes fly open to the sound of your phone ringing, shrill and insistent on the nightstand, and for one horrible, disoriented second you're still half inside the dream, chest heaving, certain the blow is still hanging there somewhere, still about to land, still not finished.

The room is dim, late-afternoon light gone dusky through the blinds. Your heart is slamming so hard you can feel it in your throat, your hands shaking as you fumble for the phone, knocking the clunky plastic half off the nightstand before you manage to actually grab it.

You don't answer right away. You sit there a second, breathing hard, one hand pressed flat over your own racing heart, trying to steady it into something that won't sound like panic the second you pick up.

It's not real, you tell yourself, the same worn, familiar argument you've had with yourself a hundred times before, never quite managing to fully believe it. It's not real. He's fine. Wherever he is, whatever year that even was — he's fine, he is okay. If it’s not real then he has to be okay.

The phone keeps ringing, insistent, and you finally swipe it up, forcing your voice into something steady before you answer.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me." Aaron's voice, easy and warm, grounding you back into your own body faster than anything else could have. "I called Ella's but she said you hadn't gone back over there yet. Figured I'd try your house next."

"Sorry, I was asleep. Long day." You press your palm harder against your chest, willing your heart to finish settling before he can hear anything wrong in your voice. "What's up?"

"Nothing, really. Just wanted to hear your voice." A small pause, and you can hear the smile in it even through the phone. "That's not weird, right? Calling for no reason?"

"It's not weird." Something in your chest loosens, warm and real, chasing the last of the dream's cold edges further away. "That’s actually really nice, Aaron."

You talk for a few minutes about nothing much and somewhere in the middle of it, still a little rattled, still craving the specific, uncomplicated safety of somewhere warm and full of people, you hear yourself ask before you've fully decided to.

"Hey, is it okay if I stay at your place again this weekend? Instead of Ella's?"

"Are you kidding? My mom is always asking about you." He laughs, easy. "Pretty sure if you stopped coming around she'd stage some kind of intervention. My dad already moved that old recliner out of the guest room because you mentioned once you didn't love the color."

"I said it in passing. One time."

"Doesn't matter. You said it, so it's gone. I'm pretty sure they'd throw the rest of my childhood stuff out on the curb too if you asked them to. Redecorate the whole room to your exact specifications. I'm basically just living there on your family's good graces at this point."

"That's not true."

"It's a little true." You can hear him grinning through the phone. "Come on over. Stay as long as you want. Nobody's gonna ask you a single question you don't want to answer."

Something in your chest aches at that, warm and grateful and a little bit sad all at once, though you don't examine the sad part too closely.

"Thank you," you say instead, quietly.

"Anytime. Always." A beat, softer. "I should let you go get your bag together, probably. But I love you. See you soon."

"Love you," you say back, easy, automatic — and it isn't until after you've already hung up, phone still warm in your hand, that you notice, the way you always seem to notice a half-second too late, the small, missing word at the front of it.

You don't let yourself sit with that either. You get up, and go get ready for your stay at the Thomas’s, and carry both the worry and the ache with you the whole way there.

The dream drops him into a warm, overlapping wall of noise, laughter and clinking glasses and somebody's off-key rendition of a song blaring from a jukebox somewhere behind him. It takes Steve a second to place the room: low light, sticky floors, a chalkboard behind the bar advertising a drink special in handwriting nobody bothered to make legible. College bar. Definitely a college bar.

He's barely gotten his bearings before he spots you, and the whole room seems to warm up another five degrees just from that.

You're at the center of a long table pushed together from what looks like three separate tables, surrounded by more people than he's ever seen in one of these dreams — a cluster of girls squeezed in close on one side, laughing at something on someone's camera, and a whole loud, easy crowd of guys on the other, all matching energy, a couple of them wearing shirts with greek letters stitched across the chest. Somebody's got a sash on that reads GRAD across it in glittery marker. It's clearly, unmistakably, the last stretch of something big.

"Okay, okay," a girl says — Amy, something in Steve supplies without being asked — raising her glass high enough to slosh a little over the side. "To senior year. To not dying before finals. To Charlotte somehow still passing organic chem despite never once opening the textbook."

"I opened it," Charlotte protests, delighted, already laughing. "I looked at the cover for a full ten seconds."

"Hey! That's basically studying."

The table erupts into laughter, glasses clinking together in a loose, chaotic toast, and Steve finds himself grinning helplessly along with all of it, leaning against the edge of the table like he's got just as much of a stake in Charlotte's chemistry grade as anyone else there. He can't touch anything. Can't be seen, can't be heard, same as always. But something about the noise and the warmth of it pulls him in anyway, makes him feel less like he's watching from outside a window and more like he just happens to be the one guy at the table nobody's bothered to introduce yet.

"To Heather," someone else calls out, further down, "surviving three roommates and at least one minor gas leak."

"That gas leak built character," Heather says, deadpan, and gets another round of laughter for it.

You're glowing in the middle of all of it — older again, easy in your own skin in that particular, settled way he's only ever seen in the birthday dream. Older than any of that, actually, he realizes, watching you throw your head back laughing at something one of the fraternity guys says. This is further out than he's ever gotten before. Whole years further.

The night moves the way nights like this do, one bar bleeding into the next, the whole loud group spilling out onto a street lit up gold and noisy with other groups doing the exact same thing, everybody wearing some version of the same giddy, half-panicked energy of people who know an ending is coming and are trying to hold onto the last of it a little too hard.

"I can't believe we're actually doing this," Amy says, arm slung around your shoulders as the group ambles toward the next place, some string-lit patio bar with a line already snaking out the door. "Like, in two weeks, this—" she gestures at the whole noisy street, the whole crowd of you "—just doesn't exist anymore."

"Don't," Charlotte groans. "I'm not emotionally prepared to be sad and drunk at the same time."

"I'm just saying! We're never all gonna be in one place like this again. Not really." Amy squeezes your shoulder, more sincere for a second under the noise. "I'm gonna miss this so much it's stupid."

"We'll survive," you say, but Steve, watching, catches the way your voice softens right along with hers, the same bittersweet weight sitting behind your eyes even as you smile.

One of the guys — tall, easy laugh, clearly comfortable enough in the group that he must be a regular fixture — throws an arm loosely around your shoulders from the other side, grinning down at you. "Did Davis end up hearing back from that interview yet? The fancy one his dad's been bragging about to literally everyone at the club?"

"Not yet. Should be soon, though."

"Tell him if he gets into that program I expect a private tour of whatever obnoxious car his parents buy him to celebrate."

"Yeah, yeah. I'll pass along the message. He'll pretend he didn't hear it."

Something about the friend's face nags at Steve as he laughs along, easy and unplaceable, gone almost as soon as it arrives — a flicker of I know that face from somewhere, a half-formed image of a party, or a gym, somebody's face lit up under fluorescent lights in a moment he can't quite locate. He frowns slightly, trying to chase it down, the way he tries to chase down everything in these dreams that won't hold still. It slips away before he can place it, dissolving back into the noise of the bar the second he stops reaching for it.

Weird, he thinks, and lets it go, the way the dream seems to want him to. Just another detail he's not allowed to keep.

Inside the next bar, somebody orders a round of shots nobody really needed, and the whole table toasts again, this time to something looser, less organized — "to us," somebody says, and it's apparently enough, because everyone drinks to it anyway, laughing at how thin the toast actually was.

Steve finds himself genuinely, helplessly happy, wedged into the middle of a booth between two guys who don't know he exists, watching you across the table laugh so hard at one of Heather's stories that you have to put your drink down before you spill it. He doesn't know these people. Doesn't know their majors, their hometowns, whatever's waiting for all of them two weeks from now on the other side of this specific, glowing, temporary version of being twenty-two and surrounded by everyone you love in one room.

He doesn't need to know any of that. He's just glad, plain and uncomplicated, to be here for it — to watch you exist in a version of your life that's clearly, fully yours, full of people who adore you, on the very edge of something enormous and new.

"Speech!" one of the fraternity guys calls out, banging his glass on the table. "C'mon, somebody give a speech. We're graduating in two weeks, somebody has to say something meaningful."

"I'll do it." Amy stands up on the bench, wobbling slightly, glass raised high. "To four years of terrible decisions, worse hangovers, and somehow still ending up exactly where we're supposed to be." A pause, her voice going soft under the noise for just a second. "And to however far away we all end up, don't you dare any of you forget tonight or this table."

The whole group erupts — cheering, glasses raised, someone getting a little emotional near the end of the table and immediately getting teased for it — and you're laughing and a little misty-eyed all at once, raising your own glass along with everyone else's, and Steve watches the whole moment with something warm and full sitting steady in his chest, no ache to it at all for once. Just simple, complete happiness, borrowed from a night that was never really his to begin with and somehow feeling like a gift anyway.

When he wakes, he's still smiling before he's even fully aware he's awake.

He lies there a minute, replaying it — Amy's toast, Charlotte's terrible organic chem defense, the noisy, golden street full of people who love you exactly the way you deserve to be loved. He doesn't chase down that stray, unplaceable flicker of recognition from the bar either, that half-second where somebody's face nearly clicked into a memory he couldn't quite reach — just lets it go, the way the dream always seems to want him to, and lets the whole night settle into his chest warm and complete instead, the rare kind that doesn't ache at all on the way out.

He doesn't know where any of that happens yet, or when, or who half those people are going to turn out to be to you. He just knows, lying there grinning at his own ceiling like an idiot, that wherever and whenever it is — you're surrounded by people who love you, laughing until you can't hold your drink steady, standing right at the edge of the rest of your life.

I got to be there for that, he thinks, simple and pleased, even if nobody there ever knew it.

It's enough, this time, to just have gotten to watch.

The good feeling doesn't last long after he wakes up.

It's still there at first — warm, easy, the residue of a night he wasn't really part of clinging pleasantly to his chest the way it always does after a good one. He lies there smiling at his ceiling for a solid minute before the rest of it catches up to him, the way it always eventually does.

Nancy.

The thought arrives quiet and sudden, and the good feeling curdles almost instantly into something heavier, something closer to shame. He's got a girlfriend. A real one, awake, solid, sitting in his passenger seat every morning on the way to school, who loves him and who he loves back — actually loves, not the easy, performed version he handed out to half of Hawkins for two straight years before her. And he just spent an entire night, in whatever secret part of his mind handles this, wrapped up in someone else's laugh, someone else's future, some stranger's graduation party he had absolutely no business feeling this happy about.

He hasn't done anything wrong. He knows that, logically, knows that a person can't help what shows up behind their own eyes at three in the morning. It doesn't make the guilt sit any lighter in his chest.

He thinks about it a long time, lying there, turning the whole shape of it over the way he's gotten so used to doing.

There was a version of himself, not that long ago, who spent every single date searching for pieces of you in somebody else's face — Macey's laugh, some stranger's perfume, a white car that made his stomach drop for no reason he could explain to anyone. He knows that about himself. Isn't proud of it, exactly, but doesn't pretend it didn't happen either.

And then he met Nancy Wheeler, and something about the whole exhausting habit just… stopped.

He didn't even notice at first. It took him weeks to realize he'd gone an entire month without once catching himself comparing her to you, without that automatic, unconscious flinch of close, but not quite. Nancy doesn't remind him of you. Not her laugh, not her hair, not the particular, sharp way she argues a point until she's won it. She's never once, not for one single second, felt like an echo of somebody he's never actually met.

He used to think that would bother him. It doesn't. If anything, it's the opposite — it's the reason he trusts what he feels for her at all. Nancy isn't a stand-in for anything or anyone. She's not a good approximation of a feeling he can't have. She's just Nancy, whole and separate and entirely her own person, and he loves her precisely because none of it is borrowed from somewhere else.

And there's something else too, something even harder to explain to anyone who wasn't there for it. What he and Nancy went through together — the thing with no face crawling out of the wall in the Byers' living room, the bat, the blood, the whole impossible night neither of them is ever allowed to talk about outside the small, tight circle of people who actually lived through it — that's not something a dream can manufacture a substitute for. That's real in a way almost nothing else in his life is real. He held her with his own two hands that night. He bled for it, a little, and so did she, in ways that never fully healed even after the physical part did. He doesn't know if you exist anywhere outside his own head. He knows exactly what he and Nancy survived, together, side by side, in a house that still doesn't sit right in his chest whenever he drives past it. No half-remembered dream girl gets to touch that particular kind of bond, whatever else she might get to touch instead.

Which is what makes the guilt so confusing. If loving Nancy is real — and it is, he's sure of that, more sure of it than he's been of almost anything — then what does it mean that some other part of him is still reaching for you, still cataloguing your laugh and your perfume and your last name he can never quite hold onto, still keeping an entire secret notebook full of feelings about a girl who might not even exist?

He doesn't have an answer. He's stopped expecting one, most days. It doesn't stop the guilt from showing up anyway, quiet and persistent, every single time one of these dreams leaves him this happy.

He gets up and gets the notebook anyway. He always does, with or without the guilt.

He tells himself, writing it down, that it isn't really a betrayal — that recording a dream isn't the same as chasing something, that Nancy would never even need to know, that there's nothing here that costs her anything real. He's not sure he fully believes himself. He writes it down regardless, the way he always does, some old habit stronger than the guilt sitting on top of it.

College bar, somewhere. Graduation coming up soon for her. Friends — Amy, Heather, Charlotte, a whole big group, guys too, some of them in a fraternity maybe. Toasts. Everybody a little drunk and a little sad about it all.

There was a guy in the group I almost recognized. Couldn't place him though. Gone before I could catch it.

He pauses there, pencil hovering, chewing the inside of his cheek before he lets himself write the next part.

Somebody mentioned a name — Davis. Sounded like her boyfriend, maybe. Rich kid, going to med school somewhere fancy. Didn't like hearing about it even though I probably should've been fine with it.

I have a girlfriend. I love my girlfriend. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.

He sits there a long moment after that, staring at his own handwriting, something uncomfortable and unresolved sitting behind his ribs. He thinks, unbidden, about college — his own, whenever he actually gets there, wherever that ends up being. Some quiet, half-formed hope surfaces before he can stop it: maybe that's when I actually meet her. Maybe that's the whole point of all this — not now, not with Nancy, but somewhere further out, once all of this is supposed to happen.

It's a strange thought to have while lying in the same room he's about to leave to go pick up the girl he's actually, currently, provably in love with. He doesn't examine that too closely either. He closes the notebook, tucks it back behind the shoebox of baseball cards, and gets up to get ready for school like it's any other Tuesday.

Nancy's already outside by the time he pulls up, backpack slung over one shoulder, hair still damp from the shower, and something in his chest does what it always does when he sees her — settles, simple and certain, no comparison anywhere in it at all.

"You're two minutes late," she says, sliding into the passenger seat, mock-stern.

"Traffic."

"There's no traffic in Hawkins, Steve."

"There's traffic in my mind," he says, and she rolls her eyes, but she's smiling when she does it, reaching over to turn the radio up before he's even fully pulled back onto the road.

He takes the turn onto Cornwallis without thinking about it, same as always, and it's only when the Byers' place comes into view for half a second down the side road — small, quiet, nothing about it different from any other house on the street to anyone who doesn't know better — that Nancy's hand finds his on the gearshift, quick and wordless, gone again just as fast. Neither of them says anything about it. They never really do. It's just a thing their hands know how to do now, some small, automatic reflex built out of a night neither of them talks about outside a very short list of people, and Steve squeezes back before he lets go to shift gears, grateful, the way he always is, that at least this part of it they get to carry together instead of alone.

He glances at her once, quick, sideways, memorizing the specific, unremarkable way morning light catches her profile — nothing about it echoing anyone else at all, nothing borrowed, nothing almost-right. "I missed you," he says, quieter, meaning it the whole reckless, unguarded way he always means things like that with her.

"I saw you last night." She says it lightly, teasing, already flipping through radio stations — fond, definitely fond, but a half-beat slower to land on anything warmer than that, her attention already halfway back to the dial before his sentence has even fully settled. It's nothing. He's used to it. She's just not built the same way he is about saying things out loud, that's all.

"Still counts."

"If you say so." She finds a station she likes and leaves it there, humming along under her breath, and Steve tells himself that's an answer too, in its own way — just a quieter one than the kind he keeps handing her, and maybe, he thinks, watching her hand still resting loose and familiar near his on the seat, not really so different from a hand finding his at exactly the right second without needing to be asked.

Just Nancy. Just this. Just the actual, solid, waking-up-and-choosing-her-again version of love he gets to have, every single ordinary morning, whether he deserves the guilt sitting underneath it or not.

He pushes the guilt down, same as always, and drives them both to school.

"Hey, so," Steve says, easing the car into the school lot, scanning for a decent spot with more focus than the task probably deserves. "Would you be willing to look over some of my college essay stuff? Like, actually look at it. Not just tell me it's fine because you feel bad."

Nancy blinks at him, clearly caught off guard. "You wrote college essays?"

"I've started essays."

"Steve, it's barely October."

"I know. I'm trying to be proactive." He says it like the word itself surprises him a little, still finding a parking spot, still talking. "I figure if I get a head start now, I'm not scrambling in January like everybody else. Get ahead of it."

"Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend." She's not entirely joking, studying him now with the specific, narrow-eyed attention she usually reserves for something she thinks doesn't quite add up. "You've never once been proactive about anything academic in your entire life."

"That's not true. I'm proactive about basketball."

"Basketball isn't a subject, Steve."

"It's a discipline." He throws the car into park, only half-joking now. "Look, my dad's already started in on the 'what's the plan' thing at dinner. Full lecture last week about how I need 'direction.' I figure the fastest way to shut him up is to actually have some."

Nancy softens slightly at that, the teasing edge dropping out of her voice. She knows enough about Steve's house — the quiet, the expectations, the specific flavor of disappointment his father's gotten so efficient at delivering — not to push too hard on it. "Okay. That I believe a little more."

"See? Not just a personality transplant."

"I didn't say I believed it completely." She's watching him again, that same careful, searching look from a second ago. "You've seemed different the last few days, though. Not just about school. Just — somewhere else in your head a lot."

"I've had stuff on my mind."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Just — the future. Getting out of here eventually. You know." He shrugs, a little more evasive than he means to be, throwing a glance toward the school doors instead of at her. "Everybody's already talking about next year like it's decided. Figured I should probably start actually deciding something myself instead of just showing up to it."

Nancy doesn't answer right away. Something crosses her face, brief and distant, gone almost as fast as it arrives — the same look she gets sometimes when a conversation drifts too close to anything from last November, anything with Barb's name anywhere near the edges of it, even when nobody's said it out loud. Steve's learned not to chase that look when it shows up. He just waits it out instead, lets her come back to the conversation on her own time.

"I get that," she says finally, quieter. "Wanting to actually go somewhere. Not just — stay stuck in whatever this year turns into."

"Yeah." He reaches over, gentle, and tucks a piece of hair back that hasn't actually fallen loose, an excuse to be close to her more than anything. "I just want it to matter. Whatever I end up doing. Doesn't have to be some big thing. Just — mine, I guess. Something I actually picked."

"That's not a small thing, Steve." She says it plainly, some of the distance from a second ago folding back into something more present, more here with him. "I like this version of you. Ambitious Steve."

"Ambitious Steve's here to stay."

"We'll see." She's smiling now, small and real, and something in the space between them shifts easy and familiar, the kind of quiet that doesn't need filling.

He leans in first. She meets him halfway, one hand coming up to rest light against his jaw, and for a few unhurried seconds there's nothing else in the entire morning except this — her mouth soft against his, the windows slightly fogged, the ordinary, solid comfort of a girl he actually gets to have instead of one he only ever gets to dream about.

Then an engine guns loud and obnoxious somewhere behind them, tires screeching faintly as some car swings too fast into an empty spot two rows over, and Nancy pulls back first, startled, laughing despite herself.

"Somebody's in a hurry," she says, glancing over her shoulder at whoever it is, already reaching for her bag.

"Some people have no respect for a moment." Steve sighs, exaggerated, though he's grinning too, already resigned to the morning reasserting itself around them. "We should probably go anyway. Don't wanna be late to your own personal essay-grading job."

"Remember that you’re the one who asked for it."

"Best decision I've made all week." He gets out of the car, still smiling, the engine's roar already fading into the ordinary background noise of the parking lot filling up, and falls into step beside her toward the doors, the whole strange, unexamined shape of the morning tucked quietly away behind him for now.

The next few days pass in the kind of blur that doesn't leave much behind to remember.

There's a new guy — Billy Hargrove, transferred in from California, already strutting the halls like he owns them by second period. He corners Steve near the gym after practice, all sharp grin and sharper posturing, some comment about "King Steve" that isn't remotely a compliment the way he says it. Steve brushes it off easy enough on the surface, tells himself it's nothing, some new kid trying to stake a claim. Something about the guy sits wrong in his stomach anyway, low and unplaceable, gone before he can figure out why.

He doesn't think about it much past that. He's got bigger things weighing on him by the time the day's done.

Dinner at the Hollands' is the kind of evening that leaves a person feeling scraped hollow afterward.

Steve doesn't say much of anything. He just eats what's put in front of him and lets Nancy carry the weight of the conversation, watching her do it with a kind of quiet, practiced grace that breaks his heart a little every single time. He holds her hand under the table the whole time and during the ride home afterward, neither of them saying much, both of them carrying the same specific, unspoken exhaustion of two people lying to grieving parents because the truth is worse than anything either of them could actually say out loud.

He thinks, driving her home, that this is exactly the kind of thing that binds two people together in a way nothing else can. He doesn't know yet how wrong that thought is about to turn out to be.

The Halloween party is loud, crowded, everyone in costume, red cups everywhere, the whole house thick with the specific chaos of a party that got away from whoever was supposed to be chaperoning it hours ago.

Nancy's drinking more than usual almost from the second they walk in — a cup that keeps finding its way back to the punch before it's ever fully empty, a laugh that gets a little louder and looser with every refill. Steve notices. He doesn't make a thing of it, not at first — the party keeps pulling at him too, a couple guys from the basketball team dragging him into some argument in the kitchen, somebody's cousin cornering him for ten straight minutes about some weed he's trying to sell. He circles back to check on her every so often, gets waved off each time with some version of I'm fine, go have fun, and believes her a little more than he probably should each time he hears it.

By the time he finds her again, well past midnight, something's clearly gone wrong. She's swaying slightly near the kitchen island, cup dipping down into the punch bowl again. 

“Hey." He keeps his voice light, careful, closing the distance between them slow enough that it doesn't feel like an ambush, gently reaching for the cup in her hands.. “No, you’ve had enough, okay?” 

“Screw you!” She says it too fast, already half turning back toward the punch bowl.

“Please Nance, I’m serious—” That final sharp tug of the solo cup sent red liquid splashing down the front of her costume and across the floor in one sharp, ugly second.

The room does the thing rooms full of drunk teenagers do — dramatic gasps, a beat of laughter, somebody shouting something unhelpful, a ripple of attention Nancy clearly hates being the center of. 

“What the hell, Steve!”

"Shit– Nance, I’m sorry..." Steve's there in three steps, hand steady at her elbow, already following her down the hall toward the bathroom before the moment can turn into more of a scene than it already has.

“That’s not coming off, Nance.”

She's quiet at first, scrubbing at the red stain with a wet hand towel. “It’s coming out.”

It's when he steps in front of her, trying to catch her eye, get her to stop scrubbing, that something in her face finally cracks open. 

"C’mon Nance. Please just let me take you home,"

"No— I’m— No. You wanted this." She slurs out, accusation dripping from her words.

"No, I didn’t want this." He shakes his head while trying to get a hold on her arm again, to steady her. “I told you to stop drinking.” 

"It’s bullshit. All bullshit." She looks at him then, something raw and unguarded, glassy-eyed in a way that has nothing to do with the alcohol alone. 

"No, it’s not bullshit Nancy."

"No, you." It comes out sharp, immediate, and something in her face softens right after, guilty, though she doesn't take it back. "You’re bullshit."

"Wha– what?"

“You. You’re pretending like everything’s okay,” 

She’s quiet for a moment, staring into his eyes with an emotion he can’t recognize. So Steve waits, standing there in the bathroom, patient in the specific way he knows he needs to be with a drunk girl.

“Like– like it’s great and we’re in love. And we’re partying– yeah, let’s party!”

"Like we’re in love?" He asks finally, so quiet he almost misses it under the muffled bass thumping through the wall. He reaches up and cups her face with the same gentle fragility he would cradle her beating heart. 

“It’s bullshit.”

“You don’t love me?”

Something flickers across her face at that, her voice coming out a little more gently. "It’s bullshit,"

The words land somewhere behind his ribs, sudden and total, knocking something loose he didn't know was still holding steady until right this second.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. He doesn't even know how to.

He steps back eventually, quiet, and leaves the bathroom, leaves her standing there in front of the sink — not out of cruelty, just because staying feels unbearable, some old instinct telling him to move before the feeling catches up to him fully. He doesn't say goodbye to anyone on his way out, doesn't bother finding whoever's coat he borrowed or whatever half-costume piece he left somewhere in the living room. He just walks straight out the front door, past the keg stand and the shitty decorations and the candlelit pumpkins on the porch steps, out into the cold October air, and doesn't look back once.

He doesn't remember much of the walk to his car, or the first few minutes on the road after — just the porch lights blurring past, the radio left off, his hands steady on the wheel out of muscle memory more than anything else. And it isn't until he's turning onto his own street that the whole thing finally catches up to him — not anger, not really, just a heavy, hollowed-out kind of sadness that sits in his chest like something physical.

I loved her. The thought arrives simple and devastating, turning over and over as he pulls into the driveway and just sits there, engine ticking as it cools, not ready yet to go inside. I actually loved her. Not the searching for someone else kind. Not the almost kind. The real thing, finally, for the first time in my whole life and it still wasn't enough. She still doesn't love me back.

He feels, more than anything, like a fool. He'd spent so long telling himself the love he had for Nancy was proof of something, proof he could feel something real, something not borrowed from a dream he couldn't even prove was true. And it was real. He's sure of that, even now, even with his chest aching like this. It just didn't matter in the end. Real hadn't been enough to make her love him back.

He sits there a long while, car still idling in the driveway, turning it over slow and careful, the way he does with everything that actually hurts. Nancy was the first person he ever really got to just be with — no searching, no half-conscious cataloguing, no quiet, exhausting habit of measuring her against a girl he's never even met. He didn't love her because some piece of her reminded him of you. He loved her because she was entirely, completely herself, and being around her had felt, for the first time in his whole life, like putting something down instead of carrying it.

That's the part that actually hurts worse than the breakup itself, if he's honest. Not just that he lost her. That he lost the one relationship that had ever managed to be simple. And underneath the sadness, there's something almost grateful too, small and strange and hard to hold onto right now — glad, even now, even like this, that what they had was real while it lasted. Nobody can take that part away from him, not even her, not even tonight.

But the second that thought settles, the wall it was propped against goes with it, and there's nothing left standing between him and you at all.

He's spent months telling himself you're not real. Some dream his mind built out of loneliness and too many nights alone in a too-big house, nothing more than that, a stubborn habit he's been trying to grow out of the same way he grew out of King Steve. He's said the words to himself so many times they'd almost started to stick. And now, not even thirty minutes out from the worst conversation of his entire life, you're the only thing he can actually think about — clearer than Nancy's face in the bathroom, clearer than the sound of her voice cruelly slurring Bullshit at him.

He hates how easy it is. Hates that the second something real falls apart, he goes running straight back to something he can't even prove exists, like Nancy was never anything more than practice for a feeling he was really saving for someone else. That's not true — he knows that's not true, knows what he had with Nancy was its own whole, separate, real thing — but it doesn't stop the thought from showing up anyway, quiet and unwelcome, right alongside the grief.

Maybe that's the actual problem, he thinks, still sitting there in the driveway, engine off now, chest tight with something he doesn't have a clean name for. Maybe I never really convinced myself of anything at all. Maybe some part of me's been waiting for exactly this — an excuse to stop pretending you're not the one I actually want to go looking for.

He finally gets out of the car and lets himself into the house quiet, doesn't bother with the lights, doesn't bother with anything except getting up the stairs and into his room and out of the ridiculous half-costume he never even finished putting together properly tonight. He's in bed within minutes, still fully dressed except for his shoes, staring up at a ceiling that doesn't offer him a single answer.

Please, he thinks, eyes already sliding shut, exhaustion and heartbreak pulling him under together. Please, just — let me see her tonight. Whoever she turns out to be. I just need somewhere that still feels like it might actually work out.

He doesn't know if it's a fair thing to ask for. He asks anyway, the way he always does, some small, stubborn part of him still reaching for the one place that's never once, in his whole life, made him feel like a fool for hoping.

He's asleep before he can finish the thought all the way through.

The dream arrives soft at first, sunlight instead of streetlights, warm air instead of the cold October night he fell asleep inside of.

Steve finds himself standing at the edge of a huge, sprawling green lawn, rows of folding chairs stretching out in front of a stage draped in red and white banners, a sea of black gowns shifting restlessly in the breeze. Somewhere behind him, a marching band is tuning up, brass catching the sun in little scattered flashes. He doesn't know how he got here. He just knows, the way he always knows things in these dreams, that you're close, and that whatever's about to happen matters enormously.

Indiana University. The letters resolve slowly across a banner strung above the stage, and something in his chest does a small, surprised lift at the sight of it. He didn't know that before. Some old, stubborn part of him files it away instantly, greedily, the way he files away every scrap of you he's ever managed to hold onto.

He finds you in the crowd milling near the front once the ceremony lets out, cap already askew, gown flapping loose in the breeze, and the sight of you nearly knocks the breath out of him — not because anything about the moment is dramatic, just because you look so completely, radiantly happy, laughing with your whole body the second your family reaches you.

He's seen you glow before, in other dreams — the track meet, the birthday, even the bar crawl. He didn't think there was a version of that left to top. He was wrong. There's something different about this one, something that has nothing to do with the sunlight or the cap and gown and everything to do with the specific, unguarded way you're looking at your own life right now, like you can't quite believe you actually made it here and are still deciding whether to laugh or cry about it. He's never once seen you look this radiant. He doesn't think he's ever seen anyone look like this, honestly — not performed, not posed for anyone watching, just pure and entirely unselfconscious in a way that makes something in his chest ache in the best possible way.

Your dad gets there first, pulling you into a hug so tight your feet nearly leave the ground, laughing in a way Steve's never once heard from him in any other dream — open, defenseless, nothing careful about it at all. Your brother's right behind him, taller than Steve remembers, ruffling your hair under the cap until you swat his hand away, both of you laughing. An older woman — your aunt, Steve recognizes her from the birthday dream, filing the detail away automatically — hovers just behind them, already dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, entirely unashamed about it.

Steve notices the gap in it too, quiet and immediate, the same way he notices everything he's not supposed to be able to know. There's a version of this exact moment that should have a fourth person standing in it, and doesn't, and he's the only other one here who actually understands why — who watched it happen, who still remembers the sound of a name he was never supposed to learn. Caroline. He thinks it once, gentle, unbidden, and something in his chest aches for you in a way that has nothing to do with pride at all. He hopes, absurdly, uselessly, that wherever she is, she gets some version of seeing this too.

"Wow. Look at you," your dad says, holding you back at arm's length just to look, like he needs a second to actually take it in. "Look at you."

"Dad, you're gonna make me cry before the pictures even happen."

"Cry all you want. You’ve earned it." He pulls you back in for another hug, quick this time, before letting you go so your brother can take his turn.

Steve stands a little ways off, hands in his pockets, grinning like an idiot at the whole time, feeling — not for the first time in one of these dreams, but maybe more than ever — like he's genuinely, actually here for it. Not watching through glass. Just here, present, part of the noise and the sunlight and the sheer, uncomplicated joy of it.

Later, once the photos are done and the crowd's thinned into smaller, looser clusters, you all end up back at your college house, sitting together at a picnic table someone's dragged into the front yard, a cooler of drinks between you, your cap sitting crooked and forgotten on the table.

"So," your aunt says, leaning forward, elbows on the table, "What's next?"

You laugh, a little helpless, pushing your hair back from your face. "Honestly? I have no idea."

"No idea at all?"

"I mean — I've got some. My lease here runs through August, so I figured I'd just stay, keep working, see what shakes out. No reason to rush into anything before I actually have to." You shrug, easy, though Steve catches something underneath it — a real, honest uncertainty, not panicked exactly, just present, the specific unresolved feeling of standing at the very edge of something enormous with no map for what comes after. "There's a few jobs I've been looking at. Nothing too far away, just haven’t decided quite yet."

"Where's Davis, anyway?" your brother asks, glancing around like he expects him to materialize. "Figured he'd be here for this."

"Interview." You say it a little flat, a little clipped, like it's not the first time you've had to explain it today. "Last-minute thing, some program moved their date up. He's in Missouri."

"On your graduation." Your aunt doesn't quite manage to keep the disapproval out of her voice, mouth pressing into a thin line.

"It's a good program. I told him to go." You say it easy enough, though Steve catches something small and tired underneath it, gone again just as fast as it surfaced.

"Still." Your aunt doesn't push it further than that one word, but she doesn't fully let it go either.

"That's allowed, you know," your brother says, nudging your shoulder. "Not having it all figured out five minutes after graduation, I didn’t."

"I know. Doesn't stop it from being terrifying."

"Terrifying's normal." Your dad says it warm, certain, reaching over to squeeze your hand where it rests on the table. "You've got time. More than you think you do right now."

"That's what everyone keeps telling me."

"Because it's true." He smiles at you, something soft and proud settling into it. "You just graduated college, kid. Let yourself enjoy it for five minutes before you start panicking about the rest."

You laugh again, quieter this time, and lean into his shoulder for a second, and Steve watches the whole exchange with something warm and complicated turning over in his chest — pride, mostly, plain and uncomplicated, but something else too, something that feels almost like relief. You don't know where you're going yet. Neither does he, most days, if he's honest with himself. There's something oddly comforting about that, watching you sit here at the actual edge of your whole life with no more of a plan than he's got for his own.

Maybe that's the point, he thinks, watching you laugh at something your brother says next, easy and unhurried. Maybe none of us are supposed to know yet. Maybe that's not something to be scared of. Maybe it's just — the good kind of unknown, for once.

The dream doesn't need much more than that. It just lets him sit there a while, unseen, unnoticed, soaking in the warm afternoon light and the sound of your family's laughter and the particular, easy way you exist here — grown, capable, entirely your own person, standing right at the threshold of a whole open future you haven't decided the shape of yet.

He doesn't think about Nancy, not once, the whole rest of the dream. That's its own kind of relief, small and unexpected.

When he wakes, the hurt from the night before is still there — of course it's still there, one dream of you can't undo something like that, and some tired, honest part of him knows better than to expect it to. His chest still aches, dull and heavy, the specific shape of You’re bullshit still sitting lodged somewhere behind his ribs where it's probably going to stay a while.

But underneath it, something else has shifted too, small and steady and entirely new. He lies there a long moment, staring at his ceiling, turning the dream over the way he always does — your dad's hand squeezing yours, your aunt's tears, the crooked, forgotten cap on the picnic table, the easy, uncertain hope in your voice when you said I have no idea.

Indiana University, he thinks. She went to IU.

It's not much. It's barely anything, really, just a school, not a street, not a last name, not anything he could actually act on tonight or tomorrow or any day soon. But it's more than he had yesterday, and after a night like the one he just survived, that feels like something worth holding onto, tightly.

He doesn't reach for the notebook right away this time. He just lies there a while longer instead, letting the warmth of the dream sit next to the ache of the night before, both of them true at once, neither one able to cancel the other out.

Maybe I get to see you there too, someday, he thinks, quiet, hopeful in a way he hasn't let himself be in a long time. Maybe that's not as far away as it feels right now.

It's a bigger hope than he's used to letting himself have. He holds onto it anyway, and — strange, unfamiliar, almost unearned — it just feels like hope tonight. Not foolishness wearing hope's clothes.

He lies there a while longer, letting both feelings sit where they are, before his mind finally circles back around to Nancy, the way he knew it eventually would.

He still loves her. That part isn't complicated, no matter how much last night hurt, doesn't feel like something that just switches off because she couldn't say it back, doesn't feel like something he's ready to hand over and walk away from just because one terrible night in a bathroom said otherwise. He thinks about the Hollands' dinner table, her hand steady on his under it. He thinks about the drive to school some mornings, her hand finding his on the gearshift without either of them needing to ask. That's not nothing. That's not something he thinks he's supposed to give up on this easily, not over one drunk, honest, awful conversation said at a party neither of them is going to remember fondly.

He's not ready to just let it go. He decides that plainly, lying there in the grey early light, the same steady certainty he's felt about almost nothing else in his life lately.

He also decides, just as plainly, that he's not driving her to school today.

It's not punishment. He turns the thought over carefully, making sure of that before he lets himself settle on it — it's not about making her feel it, not about tit-for-tat, not about anything petty like that at all. It's just that he needs the morning. Needs a few hours where he isn't sitting three feet away from her in a car, both of them pretending last night didn't happen before either of them has actually figured out what to do with it. She'll understand. Or she won't, not right away, and he'll explain it later, when he's better at explaining things than he is right now at six in the morning with his chest still aching.

He gets up, finally, moving slow, and by the time he's showered and dressed the shape of what he actually wants to do has settled into something clear enough to act on.

Red roses. Not because they're original — he knows they're not, knows it's the most obvious gesture in the world, the kind guys do in movies right before the girl forgives them — but because he means it plainly enough that he doesn't need to be clever about it. He wants to show up at her door tonight, roses in hand, and tell her he's not giving up on this, not yet, not over one hard night. He wants to apologize for pushing, for the timing, for not knowing exactly what she needed him to say back there in the bathroom. He wants to tell her he still loves her and means to keep showing up anyway, however long it takes her to figure out whether she can say it back and mean it.

He doesn't know if it'll work. He doesn't let that stop him from deciding to try.

taglist: