djo cinematic universe

You killed the headlights a quarter mile out and pulled off behind a thick stand of skeletal cottonwoods, their bare branches clawing at the sky like desperate fingers. The engine ticked as it cooled, and the silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the soft patter of snow on the roof. You bundled deeper into your parka, breath fogging the glass in rhythmic clouds, and settled in with your digital camera equipped with a night-vision lens, notebook balanced on your knee, and a thermos of now-tepid coffee that did little to fight the chill seeping into your bones. The first article had lit a fuse. Shares were climbing steadily on your outlet’s site, a few regional outlets picking it up with cautious headlines, but the local silence had grown deafening. No new sources would talk on record. Even the whispers had dried up. Gator’s blockade was ironclad, methodical, personal, and infuriatingly effective.

Still, you refused to sit idle. Tonight was reconnaissance only. Gather visuals. Timestamps. License plates if any showed. Build the case brick by brick until the whole rotten Tillman structure collapsed under the weight of evidence. You’d come too far to let one cocky deputy with a badge derail everything.

Hours dragged on. Midnight came and went in a haze of cold and anticipation. The snow muffled the world into an eerie hush, every gust of wind rattling the trees like distant warnings. Your eyes burned from staring through the viewfinder, scanning the faint glow of security lights on the distant barn. Nothing yet just shadows and the occasional swirl of flakes caught in the night-vision glow. You shifted in the driver’s seat, legs cramping from the awkward angle, your mind wandering despite your best efforts to stay focused.

Inevitably, it wandered to him. Gator Tillman. The arrogant deputy who’d made it his mission to shut you down. Those hazel-brown eyes that caught the light with flecks of green when he was angry or assessing you. The broad shoulders filling out his deputy jacket, the cocky swagger that masked something deeper, something fractured by years under Roy’s thumb. You hated how much mental real estate he occupied. He was the enemy, the hammer sent to crush your story before it could gain traction. Yet every confrontation left you buzzing with something sharper than pure anger. A reluctant curiosity. The slow, unwelcome burn of seeing the man behind the badge.

You sipped the cold coffee and checked your watch again. 12:47 AM. Still nothing at the barn. Patience was part of the job, but the isolation of Stark County amplified every minute. No streetlights out here. No passing cars. Just you, the snow, and the weight of the story pressing down.

Headlights appeared in your rearview mirror, cutting through the darkness like a predator’s eyes.

You ducked instinctively, heart slamming against your ribs. A sheriff’s cruiser rolled up slow, tires crunching through the fresh powder. It stopped directly behind your Jeep, effectively blocking any easy exit. The driver’s door opened. A tall figure unfolded into the night, slick back gel-hair dusted with fresh flakes, deputy jacket zipped high against the cold, tactical vest visible underneath. Even in silhouette, you knew the posture, the confident stride, the slight tilt of his head as he scanned the area.

Of course it was him. Gator. Like the county had summoned its attack dog.

You stayed low for a beat, camera clutched tight in your gloved hands, but Gator was already approaching with that deliberate, unhurried gait. His flashlight beam cut through the falling snow, landing squarely on your window. He rapped on the glass with gloved knuckles, the sound sharp in the quiet.

“Roll it down, journalist. I know it’s you. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

You complied slowly, letting the cold air rush in and sting your cheeks. “Deputy Tillman. Funny meeting you here. Out on a midnight patrol, or is this personal vendetta hours?”

His hazel-brown eyes narrowed, catching the faint glow from your dashboard lights. Snow clung to the longer curls at the back of his hair, making the sharp lines of his face look almost softer in the dimness. The boyish features hardened by loyalty, the smirk already forming on his lips. “Out here alone at 1 AM? On restricted access road. You got a death wish or just plain stupid?”

“Public access,” you corrected coolly, keeping your voice steady despite the adrenaline. “And last I checked, staking out from a legal vantage point isn’t illegal. Unlike whatever’s happening in that barn up there. Prayer meeting? Or something more… organized?”

Gator’s smirk appeared, slow and dangerous, revealing a flash of teeth. He leaned down, one arm braced casually on your Jeep’s roof, bringing his face close enough that you caught the mingled scent of coffee, gun oil, and winter air on his breath. “You really don’t learn, do you? After that article with my name splashed all over it? My old man’s been riding my ass nonstop for days. Department’s in full damage control mode, extra briefings, phone calls from allies asking what the hell we’re gonna do about the ‘meddling reporter.’”

“Good,” you shot back, lifting your chin. “Maybe it’ll finally force some accountability. People deserve to know how the Tillmans really run this county.”

He chuckled low, the sound vibrating through the quiet night and sending an unwelcome shiver down your spine. “Accountability. That’s a real fancy word for someone poking around where she doesn’t belong. Get out of the vehicle.”

“No.”

His expression hardened instantly, the hazel eyes darkening. “Wasn’t a request. You’re coming with me. Can’t have you out here interfering or getting yourself killed on my watch. Roy’d have my hide either way if something happened to you before we shut this circus down.”

You weighed your options quickly. Refuse and risk arrest on some trumped-up charge like obstruction or trespassing. Comply, and maybe, maybe you could use the confined space of his cruiser to your advantage. Get him talking. Probe those cracks you’d glimpsed before. Forced proximity had a way of loosening tongues, even reluctant ones. You grabbed your notebook and camera, stepping out into the knee-deep snow. The cold hit like a slap, seeping through your boots immediately.

Gator’s hand landed on your elbow, not rough, but firm and possessive as he guided you toward the passenger side of his cruiser. His touch burned even through the layers of your parka, a point of heat in the freezing night. He opened the door with mock politeness, waiting until you slid into the warm interior before circling around to the driver’s seat. The cruiser smelled of leather, gun oil, faint cologne, and the faint metallic tang of duty gear. The radio crackled softly with sporadic dispatch chatter. He shut off the headlights, plunging you both into near-darkness broken only by the faint green glow of the dashboard instruments.

“Hands where I can see them,” he said, though his tone lacked real menace this time. It was almost conversational. “And don’t touch anything. This ain’t a joyride.”

You settled back against the seat, notebook in your lap like a shield, trying to ignore how his broad shoulders filled the space and how the heat blasting from the vents carried his scent. “Am I under arrest, Deputy, or is this your version of a ride-along? Protective custody for the big bad journalist?”

“Call it whatever helps you sleep at night.” Gator started the engine but kept it idling low, the heater working overtime. He leaned back in the driver’s seat, long legs stretched as much as the confines allowed, one arm draped lazily over the steering wheel. His hazel-brown eyes flicked to you sideways, studying you in the dim light. Snow continued to fall heavily outside, accumulating on the windshield and cocooning the cruiser in a private, intimate world. “We’re sitting right here until I decide you’ve had enough playing detective for one night. Maybe longer if you keep running that smart mouth of yours.”

The silence stretched between you, thick and charged with everything unsaid. Minutes ticked by on the dashboard clock. You could feel the warmth radiating from his body across the center console, the way his hair brushed the headrest when he shifted to get comfortable. The tension was palpable, hatred still raw from your article naming him, but layered now with the forced closeness and the quiet of the snowstorm.

“So,” you finally broke the silence, voice low to match the mood. “What’s really going on up at that barn? Another one of Roy’s ‘prayer meetings’? Or militia planning for whatever apocalypse he’s preaching this month?”

Gator’s jaw tightened visibly, the muscle jumping under the sharp line. His fingers flexed on the wheel. “None of your damn business. And if you knew what was good for you, you’d stop asking questions that could get you hurt.”

“But I don’t know what’s good for me, apparently,” you pressed, turning slightly in your seat to face him more directly. The leather creaked under you. “I know the stories, Gator. Roy molding you into the perfect deputy since you were barely a teenager. Target practice in the backyard instead of playing ball. Loyalty drills that left more than just emotional scars. How does a kid grow up under that and still think it’s normal?”

His eyes locked fully on yours then, intense and conflicted in the dashboard glow. The air in the cruiser thickened noticeably. You were inches apart, the proximity making every breath feel shared. “You don’t know shit about my family or what we’ve been through,” he growled, that slow North Dakota drawl roughening at the edges. “This county was falling apart before Roy took the badge—drugs flooding in, families breaking, outsiders picking the bones clean. We fixed it. My old man sacrificed everything for order. My way might not look pretty to some city journalist, but it works. People here are safer because of us.”

“At what cost?” Your voice softened just a fraction, testing the waters of that slow burn. Hatred still simmered, but unwanted empathy crept in as you studied his face, the faint scar near his temple, the exhaustion shadowed under his eyes. “How many people have you personally intimidated this week alone? Carla at the clerk’s office. Dotty at the laundromat. How many more ‘friendly visits’ did you make after my article dropped? Does it keep you up at night, or have you gotten used to being Daddy’s hammer?”

Gator leaned closer without seeming to realize it, his elbow brushing the armrest between you. His hazel eyes darkened, pupils blown wide, breath warm against the chilled air. “They’re safer under our watch than they would be with you stirring up trouble. You roll in here like some savior with your notebook and camera, but all you do is tear shit down without understanding the balance we keep. Roy built this from nothing. Kept the peace when no one else could.”

The proximity made your pulse spike traitorously. His body heat cut through the winter chill. You could see the individual snowflakes melting in his hair, the way his tactical vest rose and fell with steady breaths. The enemy was starting to feel tragically human, loyal to a fault, trapped in a legacy of control and expectation. “I understand more than you think,” you murmured, holding his gaze. “I see the cracks, Gator. The way your smirk slips when I mention Roy’s grip. The exhaustion you try to hide behind the badge and the attitude. Ever wonder what your life would look like if you weren’t carrying his weight?”

For a long heartbeat, vulnerability flashed raw across his face, the kid who’d been forged young, forced into endless drills, taught that Tillman blood and badge were inseparable. Then the armor slammed back into place. His smirk returned, sharp and defensive. He reached over suddenly, his large hand covering yours where it rested on the notebook, pinning it lightly but deliberately. Electricity shot up your arm at the contact. Not threatening exactly, but charged. Possessive.

“Keep looking for cracks, journalist,” he said, voice dropping to a rough whisper, “and you might find yourself falling into one you can’t climb out of.” His eyes dipped to your mouth for a lingering second, the snow outside seeming to fall slower. “And I won’t be there to pull you out next time.”

You didn’t pull your hand away immediately. The touch lingered, warm and dangerous, hatred twisting with reluctant respect and a heat that fogged the cruiser windows further. “Maybe I don’t need saving from you,” you replied softly, defiantly. “Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He released your hand like it had burned him, but he didn’t retreat fully. The cruiser felt impossibly smaller. Tension coiled tight between you. Years of his unyielding loyalty versus your relentless truth-seeking, pure animosity layered with something neither of you wanted to name. You both turned back toward the windshield, watching the distant barn through the falling snow. No movement yet. Just the shared warmth, the radio’s low static, and the heavy awareness of each other’s presence.

The hours stretched on in that confined space. Conversation ebbed and flowed in fits and starts, sharp barbs about Roy’s fire-and-brimstone sermons that doubled as power consolidations, your past investigations in Minnesota where death threats became routine, his frustratingly effective tactics at blocking your sources with late-night “visits.” At one point, around 2:15 AM, Gator shared a clipped, reluctant story from when he was sixteen: Roy forcing him to stand guard in a blizzard for hours as “character building,” no coat, just to prove Tillman men didn’t break. You countered with the week you’d spent in hiding after your opioid piece, sleeping in your car to avoid retaliation. Each exchange chipped away at the wall, revealing glimpses of the flawed man beneath the cocky deputy facade.

By 2:45 AM, a pair of trucks finally appeared at the distant barn. You tensed immediately, lifting your camera with steady hands. Gator’s hand shot out fast, covering the lens firmly, his fingers overlapping yours again in the dark.

“Don’t,” he warned, voice low and edged.

“Gator—”

“I said don’t.” His grip tightened slightly, bodies leaning close once more across the console. His hazel eyes bored into yours, inches away, breath mingling. Snow continued its steady fall outside. “You push this tonight and I can’t protect you from what comes next. Roy doesn’t play when it comes to outsiders threatening the family.”

“Protect me?” You laughed softly, bitterly, but didn’t pull away from his touch. “Or protect them—and yourself?”

The moment stretched taut, heavy with everything unsaid. His thumb brushed accidentally over your knuckle, sending another spark through you. Neither moved for several beats. The hatred remained, raw and foundational, but it was evolving, slowly, dangerously into reluctant fascination. The slow burn of enemies who saw too much of each other’s truths in the dark.

Finally, he released you with a muttered curse. “Time to head back to town. I’ll follow you to the motel. No more solo stakeouts, or next time I won’t be this nice.”

You didn’t argue. As he tailed your Jeep through the worsening whiteout, his headlights steady in your mirror, you watched them reflect off the snow, mind racing with conflicting thoughts. The wall between you was cracking. And it terrified you how much you didn’t entirely hate the feeling.

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But you needed something to fixate on that was not Steve’s shirtless body being backlit by the sunset across the lake. He’s submerged up to his chest, wading and looking towards the same beautiful sky you were taking in. Every time you saw the expanse of his shoulders and his bare chest, you envision those horrible bruises that riddled his tanned skin. They have finally faded with time, but you can picture them so clearly.

August was always humid in Hawkins, but this past week, it’s been overwhelmingly muggy and potent.

You were going to miss moments like this. The simplicity and the sweat you resent now, but would yearn to feel going down your neck and spine later.

You take another puff, finally not choking immediately.

Steve finally moves from his swaying position to look back, eyeing you up on the rock formation you are sprawled across. You never swam in the lake, always taking up the real estate on the shore or tucking yourself up on a rock to observe Steve’s backstroke or look out for fish in the shallow end.​

“You never get better with those things,” He mutters, standing up and brushing his hand across his nice-toned stomach.

He slowly moves up to the shore, dropping onto the muddy grass with an oof. He had not said much to you the entire time you two had been here, which you didn’t mind. You were caught up in your own rattling thoughts.

It had been almost two months since the mall fire. That’s what the local news and townspeople have been labelling it.

You were grappling with the nightmares and living in a constant state of anxiety throughout every single day since. Being in public was overwhelming, which made your job search fruitless. Your parents were not pressuring you much. They knew that what you had gone through was crippling you from doing your normal tasks.

Your only partial solace is being with Steve. He made you feel safe in a way not even your mother made you feel. A shared experience and an unspoken understanding that no one in the world could even comprehend.

There was still this part of your soul that had been stripped away. You had been obsessive about trying to narrow down what made you so anxious, but you did not know if you should search for it or accept that this is how you would be forever.

You had been attached to Steve’s hip, sure, but he’s only a mere mortal. He cannot make you any better.

But he has yet to complain about you being near him all the time. If anything, it seems like he is enjoying your time together, distracting him from some of the weird medical stuff he’s been dealing with and that residual anxiety he tried to shield from your prying eyes.

Two weeks ago, you drove out to the audiologist a few hours away with him because of the constant ringing in his ears. He held your hand in the waiting room while his leg bounced. When his name was called, you gave him a reassuring smile as he dropped your hand to see if they could solve his problem.

But people are terrible at having answers for either of you.

As the days go on, you notice some slight positive changes, but they are slow to come back.

He’s not shaking his head as much, telling you the ringing actually goes away for small increments during the day. You chalk it up to the variety of medications he’s on.

His fingernails are growing back and aren’t bleeding as much due to his abuse of them. He gnawed them down to the cuticles and had bandaids on every other finger for a month.

Just last week, you were able to actually sleep for more than 4 hours. With the light on. Your doctor has not been notified about your sleeping habits. Or the fact that you cannot close your eyes at night without rehashing the Mindflayer’s wrath and the following days.

You numbed those intense, vivid memories with wine you stole from your father’s large wine cabinet in the basement. It was becoming the only thing you could rely on to pull your thoughts away from that entire incident. You knew it was bad. You knew that you could not get dependent on it. You had only done it three times when you were really desperate and exhausted. You couldn’t shut your eyes without envisioning Steve sacrificing himself for Dustin. Even though that had not happened, your mind became obsessed with laying out that scene. The alcohol numbed you enough that it became a small crutch. But you were becoming uneasy with the idea that you would never feel at peace without it.

You promised yourself two nights ago that you would stop. And you have.

You just wanted to be normal again.

“The more I smoke, the better I get.”

He grimaces at your response. He’s quick to hop up onto your rock throne and snatch the unlit end from your fingers. “Nope.”

“What do you mean nope?”

“Meaning I am not letting you get better at it. Find a new oral fixation.”

You roll your eyes when his dripping wet shorts leave tiny droplets on your bare thigh. He ashes out the cigarette, dropping down next to you.

He was not going to stop you from figuring out a way to redirect your traumatized brain.

“I think it’s time you change the subject.”

You wipe off some of the water with your pointer finger, focusing your eyes elsewhere.

“Fine…I think Robin has a lead on a job,” Steve states as he stretches his shoulders and leans back onto his palms beside you. His long legs hang over the side of the miniature cliff, and he kicks them like a toddler on a swing. He can never sit still.

“Oh, really?” You draw a heart with the residual water, right on your knee. “Where?”

“Before she left, she said that the new video store on Kersey was hiring. Apparently, she knows the manager.”

You hum before you speak, “That’s great, I’m sure she’ll get it. She knows a lot about movies.”

“Maybe we could all get a job there.”

You shoot him a glance. He’s still looking over the lake, now wrapping his arms around his knees. He tucks himself inward, and as he does, his wet thigh brushes over yours.

“I wouldn’t count on that, Steve.”

He smirks, his hazel eyes finally meeting yours. You would not dare look away from him, now.  He looked too pretty in the orange and pink hues that took over the entire sky. His hair is slicked back, but three tiny strands are curled onto his forehead. He hasn’t shaved for the last couple of days, so his face is a bit more stubbly.

You wonder if he notices the small things about you. You wonder if he can read your mind and see that you are hiding something from him.​

“But just imagine! You, me, Robin,” His brows raise in excitement, “Working in a video store with endless movies to watch.”

“Yeah, it’d be cool, but I am not putting my faith into something like that.”

His face slightly droops, obviously annoyed by your passiveness. You had not been that gung-ho about anything lately. You were overly cautious to really put all your eggs in one basket. And with Steve, he tried to be optimistic if it was something that came to you.

His shoulder pushes you, shifting your ass across the rough platform you were on, “Why are you being a stick in the mud?”

You manage a half-assed giggle, “I’m just being realistic.”

“Well, I’d like to daydream about a world where I get to work with my best friends.”​

You stare out over the bugs that are settling over the haze of the lake water.

Life seems simple here. The outdoors have always made you feel some sort of freedom you yearned for growing up. That’s why you loved driving around, too. Fresh air, open road, your best friend by your side. You did not have to worry about the pressure of doing anything. No one was waiting for you. No one needed your input or opinion.

You didn’t have the constant reminder that your childhood was basically behind you.

This summer was really hammering that home.

When September hits, you won’t be able to sit in this spot without a hoodie or jeans on. You liked the piercing sun on your bare legs and shoulders, not the frigid overcast that Indiana was permanently stuck in during the fall.

There was a time when you didn’t mind it. When you got together with friends during October to go trick-or-treating. The fall festival Hawkins always hosted in the town center. Thanksgiving at your Grandma’s, and your uncles would pile a bunch of leaves for you and your cousins.

It was the season you started getting close to Steve.

6th-grade chorus Christmas concert. You two were stuck next to each other on the risers, and he would intentionally sing the wrong note to make everyone laugh. You would nudge him to keep him on track, and somehow that spiraled into you two walking home side by side every day.

He was easy to talk to. He was enthusiastic about just about everything you said. He would get this twinkle in his eyes when you would talk about your new favorite song or all the boys you had crushes on.

That twinkle had faded quite a bit over time, but on rare occasions, you’d catch a hint of it when you teased him.

You click your tongue, thinking of a way to steer the conversation. Faux optimism. That’ll get him.

You nudge him with your shoulder, “If you get a job there, maybe you’ll meet some chicks.”

His face flickers, staring in the opposite direction. It’s almost like the comment made him uncomfortable. “I think that ship has sailed.”

You don’t know why he’s being weird now. So you double down, trying to joke more, so maybe he will give it back to you.

“What do you mean? You trying out guys for size?”

“Don’t be an ass,” He gives you a hint of a smile, scanning your face, “No, like, I don’t know. I just feel like… I want to focus on me. Figure out what I really want.”

You bite your lip, only encouraging him to continue. “That is important.”

“With Nancy, I felt like I knew exactly what I wanted. But the more I…” He pauses, really contemplating his next words. His fingers tap on his bare knee, “I guess getting older shines a light on different parts and people in your life.”

It’s endearing to hear him talk like this. Steve is a lot of things, but he’s rarely sentimental. So hearing that he is taking into account different people in his life, and their meaning to the bigger picture, made you happy.

“Aw, Steve Harrington gettin’ all old and wise on me?”

“Hopefully.”

The intense rise of bugs buzzing and making noise makes you believe you misheard him. Your brow twitches as you scan him all the way from his feet to his suddenly very serious expression.

“Hopefully?”

“Yeah, hopefully I get old and wise with you.”

Your eyes flicker down at his lips. Only the briefest glance before locking back onto his eyes.

“That’s not what I meant.”

He looks at your lips, “But it’s what I meant.”

It makes goosebumps rush across your skin.

You needed to create a barrier. Distance. Deflect. Something.

You slide off the slicker part of the rock, finding your footing in the mud below. You trek through, not saying anything because you are already sick of the way Steve has been making you feel lately.

Like there’s something unsaid. Something that lies in wait, waiting for you to pull back the curtain.

But you were sick of that. Having to be the one who pressed forward when things got too real. It made you feel stupid and anxious.

You could count on one hand the sly comments like this Steve had made towards you in the last week.

He’s all talk.

Because if there was more intention behind what he said, there would be a follow up. A kiss. A holding of your hand. A heated gaze. Something.​

But it always resulted in some casual joke or him averting his eyes away from you.

As you work your way up to the tall grass and dirt path, you hear Steve’s rapid footsteps behind you. His bare feet splatting on the mushy ground, his breath uneven.

“Hey!”

You instantly begin rambling, trying to disconnect from what just happened. “We should get home, it’s getting dark.”

“What just happened?”

You try to play stupid, but it sounds strained, “What?”

He does his normal stance. Both hands on his hip, one leg slightly jutted out. Eyes narrowed, his nose slightly scrunched.

“I think we should stop dancing around this.”

You cross your arms over your chest, not wanting to hear much more from him. That was until he moved from his spot, inching closer to you with those oogling eyes.

“For fucks sake, Steve.”

His face flickers, “What!?”

When his hand reaches out for your hand that’s placed on top of your forearm, you snatch it away. Maybe these physical queues were not enough after all. You still did not want it. You felt like this was wrong somehow. Like your best friend must have really gotten his brain rattled in his skull during his fight with the Russians a couple of months ago, and caved into a delusional world that centered around his genuine feelings for you.

“You don’t feel that way about me, okay? You can’t. You don’t.”

He looks offended, but his hand still tries to reach out again to yours. You let him take it this time, but you don’t wrap your fingers around his knuckles.

“You don’t get to tell me how I feel about you!” He barks, pulling you closer. You brace yourself against his chest, trying not to fall too much closer into him, “Jesus, do you hear yourself?”

“Yes. Loud and clear,” You whisper, dropping all physical contact with a quick swivel.

With your back turned to him now, you take three steps before his voice rings out again.

“Is it me? Am I-”

You shift back, head snapping towards him to stop him mid-sentence, “Steve, stop.”

“I’m not good enough?”

You shake your head, knowing he’s about to jump down the rabbit hole of self-deprecation.

“That’s not it at all.”

“Then tell me!”

His voice is shaking, and he looks uneasy, like he may throw up.

“I am not someone you need to love because I’ve just been around for a while,” You state before biting down on your lips, as if to seal them off from saying more. There was more to your rationale, but it felt like the wrong time to say it.

His face relaxes slightly, like he was about to change your mind. Like this was just a misunderstanding that he could fix with a confession. “Did you not hear me earlier?”

You did, but you wish you hadn’t. You are mad that this conversation was even sparked because you were not ready to have it.

“I am an idiot because I didn’t see you earlier, Bug! God, I was the biggest idiot ever! Because everything that I could possibly want has been here the entire time! Nancy was great, and yeah, I have had other crushes before, but I was always trying to be something else for them. I’m me when I’m with you. I want that. I want you.”

It was like your entire life flashed before your eyes as he poured his heart out. You see yourself falling in love with him, spending every holiday together. Then a wedding by a beautiful lake, just like the one you’re currently at. Then children. Two or three. A small baby in your arms while two toddlers run around the backyard of the beautiful home that Steve fixed up. Going to soccer games and hosting birthday parties. When they grow up, you and Steve fall into a lifeless routine where you make dinner when he gets home from his 9-5, and you watch TV together on the couch. Then repeat that every day. Until you’re old and the grandchildren come by to try to fill that void you are harboring.

Then you die, old and miserable and completely unfulfilled.

And the entire time you watch this flash go by, you recognize the lifeless eyes you display. That residual ache that is currently lingering in your bones stays around forever, and you’re never fully present in every small moment that truly matters. Sure, you can share those happy moments, but you’re truly unfeeling.

All because you had a part of you ripped out of you when you were a teenager. All the love Steve gave you wasn’t enough. Your children were never enough. You were never fucking enough. Your brain and heart were toxic and poisonous, and you remained stuck in one place the entirety of your life.

It makes you sick to your stomach. You cannot put Steve through that.

“You can be you around me. I love that,” You say gently, as a single tear drops from your eye, “More than you even know. But I’m… I’m not me, right now, okay? I’m… I’m not ready. I’m anxious, and my brain is fucking muddled with all these racing thoughts all the time. I am not me with you. Or anyone. Not right now. If you had said this at the beginning of summer, sure. I was different then. I was normal. But you don’t want me like this.”

He’s quick to respond, reaching back out and pulling you towards him. He’s pleading now. “I do.”

Your lip quivers as you speak, “You won’t. You don’t.”

“I’m with you every day, already. Why does a label change that?”

“I’m not going to be your girlfriend because I need to fix me first, and I cannot do that when you want something from me! I’m not going to be someone you deserve.”

He cradles your face, looking down at you with the utmost admiration. His eyes are slightly misty, but at this angle, you can only really focus on how much green is laced throughout his iris, mixing in with that golden brown.

He was so goddamn pretty you wished your heart was ready to fully take him on. But you know you’d be doing him a disservice. You needed to figure some shit out first. You didn’t know what, but there was something.

“Can I just…” His thumb sweeps over your chin, “Can I kiss you?”

You feel like you almost look through him when you respond, “It’s not going to change my mind.”

“I don’t care, I just need to.”

You don’t know why you nod, but you do. ​

In all honesty, you hope that it will change your mind. That the electricity of finally kissing Steve after years of pining after him would heal you and wake you up from whatever you’re dealing with.

He presses his lips into yours, but instead of melting into it, you go completely rigid. His right palm cradles your cheek as his fingers pass your hairline. His left hand travels down your shoulder, making you more aware of where it’s passing through and not the fact that he’s trying to get you to move your lips with his.

His hand finally stops right on your elbow as he withdraws from your mouth.

His eyes are still closed, and that’s when it hits you that you had your eyes open the entire time. ​

He doesn’t say anything, just stands millimeters from your face. The air grows tense the moment you unintentionally exhale loudly. Like a sigh of relief that the kiss is finally over. ​

That rubs him the wrong way. It would rub you the wrong way, too.

He is quick to start towards the car, snatching his t-shirt from a nearby branch he used as a hanger, “Let’s get you home.”

You blink rapidly, suddenly feeling the need to tell him what you’ve been meaning to tell him. Maybe this was the right time.

“I’m going to live with my aunt.”

He stops dead in his tracks, his t-shirt balled up in his hands like he wants to throw it like a basketball. “What?”

The plans had been confirmed the evening prior. Your mom reached out to her sister, and she agreed to have you stay with her in the city. Your struggles did not need to be Hawkin’s problem. You needed to be somewhere else.

Your eyes well up with tears. It’s the first time you cried since that night two months ago. “I leave next week. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

He races towards you, stopping about 2 feet from you. “Bug, what the hell?”

You hate the expression he has on his face. It’s already morphing into resentment. ​

“My mom thinks it’ll be good for me to get a change of scenery. My aunt knows a good therapist in South Bend that I can go see-”

He cuts you off, his nostrils flaring, “You’re leaving?! Four hours away?”

A single tear drops across your cheek, and you instantly wipe it away. You swallow, knowing that if you don’t do this, the resentment would go both ways. You did not want to hate Steve, but you knew you could push through him hating you.

He was never quick at coming around to things, but once it happened, he was usually grateful no one listened to his plan.

“I need to. I need this, Steve.”

His demeanor changes when he hears your shaky voice. He stucks in a sharp breath, letting his eyes travel towards the woods that line the lake.

“It seems you already made up your mind,” He whispers, the sounds of locus practically covering up his words, “And I don’t think I’d be wise to try to change it.”

dividers by @/cafekitsune

He looks back at you with that particular expression he has, the one that’s patient and a little bit knowing and careful in a way that makes your sternum feel too small.

"I'm fine," you say.

"You've said hello to the same group of people twice in the last hour without realising it."

"That's networking."

"That's autopilot." He shifts slightly, angling himself toward you without making it obvious, the way he's learned to do so that it looks like casual conversation and not what it actually is. "Say the word, and we go. Car's already out front. I texted Carter twenty minutes ago."

Of course, he did. Of course, he'd anticipated it before you'd even consciously registered how tired you were.

That’s the thing about Steve that you hadn't expected when this arrangement began — you'd expected competent, you'd expected professional, you'd even been prepared for charming.

You had not been prepared for perceptive. For the way he pays attention to you with a kind of quiet consistency that nobody has ever really bothered with before.

You want to argue. You are good at arguing with him — genuinely good at it, which surprises you because most people fold under the particular brand of stubborn that you've developed over years of being underestimated. 

Steve doesn't fold. He pushes back with this infuriating calm and occasionally a smile that makes an argument feel less important than it had a moment ago. It’s become something of a sport between you. A very confusing sport with rules that seem to be changing gradually, and without your full consent.

But your feet are screaming, and your face hurts from smiling, and the thought of another hour of this makes something in your chest cave quietly inward like a building settling.

"Five minutes," you smile without a lot of light. "Let me say goodbye to the Hargrove table."

Something in his expression eases — barely perceptibly, the way tension leaves a room slowly. "I'll get your coat."

—

The rain had started while you were inside. Of course it had.

Steve meets you outside the cloakroom with your coat already open, holding it out by the lapels so you can slide your arms in without fumbling — a small thing, effortless, the kind of thing he'd started doing without either of you commenting on it. 

Early on, you'd said thank you every time. Somewhere around month four, you think you stopped, because the gratitude had started feeling inadequate for what it was actually expressing, and inadequate felt worse than silence.

The doorman near the entrance has a stand of umbrellas, and Steve lifts one without breaking stride, shaking it open one-handed as you step out from beneath the awning and into the night.

The rain is steady and cold, the self-serious kind that means business, and the pavement in front of the venue gleams under the amber streetlights like dark polished glass.

Your car is idling at the curb roughly ten metres away, where there’s room for the SUV, Carter visible through the windscreen.

Steve falls into step beside you, umbrella raised. You’re maybe halfway there when you notice it.

You notice it the way you notice most things about him — sideways, peripheral, the brain catching something before the conscious mind catches up.

A faint cool mist against your left hand. You look down. Your hand is well within the umbrella's coverage. You look up, following the angle of the canopy, and the whole picture sets itself with a clarity that's almost annoying.

The umbrella is tilted entirely over you. The rain is hitting Steve's right shoulder in a steady dark bloom that is spreading down the back of his jacket, darkening the grey wool by degrees. He’s looking straight ahead at the car, expression perfectly even, apparently unbothered by the fact that he’s getting rained on in a suit that probably cost more than most people's rent.

"Steve."

"Mm."

"The umbrella."

"What about it." More of a statement than a question.

You stop walking. He takes one more step before the absence of you registers, and he stops too, turning to look at you with an expression that’s making a genuine effort to be neutral and falling slightly short of the mark.

"It's completely over me," you say.

"That's the idea."

"That's not — you're soaked."

"I'm a little damp."

"Your whole shoulder is —"

"It's rain." He nods toward the car with the patient air of someone who considers this topic closed. "It's fifteen feet. Let's just —"

"Steve." You reach up and take hold of the umbrella handle — his hand is already there and your fingers close over his, which neither of you had planned and neither of you immediately correct.

You pull the umbrella toward centre. Toward both of you. It brings you closer together, your shoulder against his arm, the warmth of him immediate through the fabric of your coat. 

The umbrella now covers the space between you imperfectly, not quite reaching either edge. "Don't do that."

He looks down at you. Up close, in the rain and the amber light, there’s something moving across his face that he can’t name and doesn’t try to. The string of water drips from the umbrella's edge, caught the light for a moment before it falls.

"Do what?" he says, quieter.

"The self-sacrificing thing." Your fingers are still on the umbrella handle. His hand hasn't moved. "You do it constantly and you act like I don't notice."

"I'm just holding an umbrella."

"You tilted it entirely over me and were going to stand there and get rained on and not say a single word about it."

A pause. The rain keeps falling. Somewhere behind you a car door closes.

"I'd rather we both get a bit wet," you say, "than you take all of it."

Something shifts in his expression. Something slight and unannounced, like a key turning in a lock that nobody has acknowledged exists.

"Noted," he says, finally. And he doesn’t move the umbrella back.

—

The car is warm and dark and smells like leather and the faint trace of whatever product Steve uses in his hair, which you had clocked sometime around month three, and had been pointedly not thinking about ever since. 

Carter has the radio on low — something ambient and instrumental, the kind of music that exists specifically to fill silence without demanding anything from it — and the rain is hitting the roof in a steady percussion that’s frankly unfair given how tired you already are. Like the universe offering you a lullaby and expecting you to decline.

You have your phone out with every intention of returning three emails that have been sitting unanswered since this afternoon. Important ones, probably. Your assistant had flagged at least two of them.

"You don't have to do that tonight," Steve says from beside you.

You don’t look up. "I know."

"It's nearly midnight."

"I'm aware of what time it is."

A pause. You can feel him looking at you in the particular way he does — not intrusive, not demanding, just present in a way that is somehow more noticeable than if he'd been staring.

"The emails will be there in the morning," he says.

"So will my anxiety about them."

He doesn’t push further. That’s another thing about him that you hadn't expected and hadn't prepared for — he knows when to stop. Most people either drop things too early or don't drop them at all. Steve has some internal calibration that tells him exactly where the line is, and he stops precisely at it every time, and it’s one of the more quietly disarming things about him.

You answer one email. The words keep sliding off each other in a way that suggests your brain is running on significantly reduced power, the sentences take longer to form than they should, your thumb hovers over the keyboard for stretches that are becoming embarrassing.

The city begins to thin outside the window. The streetlights grow further apart. The radio plays something without edges.

You answer half of a second email.

The phone screen is very bright. You turn the brightness down. That helps for approximately ninety seconds before your eyes begin their campaign of passive resistance, growing heavier in increments too small to catch until they’re simply, undeniably, difficult to keep open.

You blink hard. Sit up slightly straighter. Refocused on the email.

Hi David, thank you for your message regarding the —

Your head dips. You catch it. Steve says nothing.

— regarding the proposed timeline for —

You blink again, slow. The rain on the roof is so constant it stops sounding like rain and starts sounding like quiet itself, like the audio equivalent of a weighted blanket, like something designed specifically and maliciously to undo the last of your resistance.

The phone goes dark in your hand on an auto-lock timer. You don’t unlock it.

You aren’t aware of the precise moment it happens. That’s the nature of that particular kind of exhaustion — it doesn’t announce itself or give you the chance to negotiate. It simply arrives, folds you under, and takes the decision out of your hands entirely. 

One moment, the dark interior of the car, the glow of passing lights through the rain-streaked window. Then nothing.

What you aren’t aware of, and won’t be aware of until later, is the way it happens. The slow lean — incremental, unconscious, following the pull of gravity and warmth — until your head comes to rest against Steve's shoulder. The slight shift of him as he registers it. The pause, long enough to count, long enough to make a choice.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t clear his throat or shift away or do any of the things that would be easy and reasonable. He stays exactly as he is and lets you sleep and says nothing.

He does, after a moment, reach forward with his free hand and adjust the air temperature, turning it up a degree. A small thing. A thing nobody would ever know he'd done.

Carter glances in the rearview mirror once and keeps driving.

The radio plays on.

You sleep on, completely unaware of the fact that Steve sits very still for the remainder of the journey with his eyes forward and the careful expression of a person thinking through something they aren't quite ready to say out loud. 

The city lights run across the window in amber and gold. The rain tapers slightly as you leave the centre behind. He doesn’t move until Carter takes a corner and the motion shifts you slightly, and his arm comes up, instinctive, automatic, before he catches himself and lowers it back. His hand settles at the edge of the seat instead. Not quite touching. Very nearly.

You sleep through all of it.

You wake briefly, once, somewhere on the motorway. A foggy and graceless resurfacing — the world dark and moving, the rain soft on the roof, a vague awareness of your own weight leaning into something solid. The shoulder resolves itself first. Then the sleeve of his jacket, slightly cool and faintly damp from the rain. Then the warmth of him beneath it.

Your brain performs a slow inventory of the situation from somewhere very far underwater. You should sit up, it offers, with very little conviction.

You should say something, it tries again. Or move. Or acknowledge this in some way.

You do none of those things. The warmth is too complete and the exhaustion is too total and Steve isn't moving, and somehow that last fact is the one that settles everything.

He isn't moving. He'd had forty minutes to move, and he hadn't, which meant something that your three-quarter-asleep brain didn't have the capacity to fully examine but noted carefully for later, filed it somewhere it would absolutely surface at an inconvenient moment.

You mean to sit up.

You let your eyes close instead.

The last thing you’re aware of is the sound of the rain, and the steady warmth of him, and the radio playing something low and wordless into the dark.

—

"Hey." Close and quiet. A hand on your arm, careful. "We're here."

The car has stopped. The rain has thinned to almost nothing, just the occasional tap against the glass. You blink, slow and graceless, at the hotel lobby burning gold through the window, and then you blink at your own hands, and then you become gradually and unhappily aware that you had been asleep on Steve’s shoulder for what had apparently been the entire journey.

You sit up. Your neck protests. Steve is watching you with an expression you have been cataloguing for months without successfully filing under any category you trusted.

"How long was I asleep?" you ask.

"About forty minutes."

"Please tell me I didn't snore."

The corner of his mouth moves. "I'm not going to tell you that."

"Steve—"

"You're fine." He reaches across and pushes the car door open, which requires him to lean briefly across your eyeline, and you look at the ceiling of the car with great focus until he’s done. "Come on. Before you fall back asleep sitting up."

"I don't do that."

"You absolutely do that."

—

The hotel is the quiet kind of grand. All deep carpet and low lighting and the particular hush of a place that charges enough per night to insist on it. Your rooms are side by side on the fourteenth floor, 1407 and 1408, which had been a logistical arrangement at the start and had since become something that felt, without any discussion, simply correct.

You say goodnight in the corridor. Steve waits until your door closes — you know because you listen for the sound of his own door and it doesn’t come until after yours clicks shut, which is something you never once comment on, or think about more than what was probably advisable.

You shower. You change into something that isn't architecture held together by ribbons and your own stubbornness. You sit on the edge of the enormous white bed in your cardigan and your socks, and you feel, profoundly, the particular peace of being somewhere quiet after somewhere loud.

Then you pick up the room service menu and stare at it for far too long because your brain is still operating at roughly sixty percent capacity.

You order the pasta because you want it. You order the soup because it’s cold outside. You order the bread because it’s been a very long night and you feel you’ve earned it.

And then, already reaching to set the phone down, you notice the last item in your basket.

A burger. Medium-well. No onion. Extra pickles. Mustard instead of mayo.

You stare at it.

The specific and complete wrongness of it registers slowly and then all at once. That was not how you ordered a burger. You don’t even particularly like mustard. There’s exactly one person in your life who orders a burger that way, and you know it because you had watched him do it across eleven meals, in nine different cities, over eight months, sitting across from him in hotel restaurants and airport lounges and once in the front seat of a hire car outside a motorway service station in the rain. 

The particulars had apparently been transcribed somewhere in your brain without ever asking your permission.

You look at the confirmation screen for a long moment.

Then you put your phone down, fold your hands in your lap, and sit with the information quietly for a minute.

Then you pick the phone back up and complete the order.

When the knock comes twenty minutes later, you open the door, sign for everything, tip generously, and stand in the corridor in your socks, staring at the bag with the burger in it.

You pick it up. You walk four steps to the left.

You knock on the door of room 1408.

A pause — the television going quiet, the sound of movement. Then the door opens, and Steve is there in a grey t-shirt and joggers, with his hair damp from the shower, and he looks at you, and then at the bag, and then back at you, and his expression does something that starts as confusion and lands somewhere else entirely.

"Don't," you say, before he can get there.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to say something insufferable."

"I was going to say—" he pauses, recalibrating, a smile threatening the corner of his mouth "—how did you know?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"That's—"

"Against my will," you say. "Completely against my will. I was barely conscious. It just happened."

He takes the bag from you, and the back of his hand is warm where it passes over your fingers, and neither of you say anything about that either. He’s smiling properly now, not his professional smile, not his public one — the other one, the quieter one, the one that does something unhelpful to the general situation of being near him.

"Thank you," he says.

"Go to sleep," you say.

"You too."

You turn back toward your own door. Behind you, you hear him stay — hear the absence of his door closing, the particular quality of silence that means he’s still there, still in the doorframe, the way he always waits until you’re inside. 

It’s a small thing. It’s the kind of small thing that has been accumulating for months, quietly and without ceremony, like rain collecting in something that has only just begun to understand it's a vessel.

You let yourself into your room. You don't look back.

On the TV screen, you catch the parachute.

Parker’s throat tightens so hard it almost pisses him off.

You catch it with both hands and this careful, fragile little smile that looks too tired for your age and too grateful for a world that has not earned it, and the sight of that expression does something nasty and warm and unbearable to the center of his chest.

“Open it,” he says to the screen, low and urgent and already leaning forward farther. “C’mon. Open the damn thing.”

He doesn’t realize that he’s talking out loud more now. He’s done it in little bits over the last four days, muttering at the television like one more lunatic in a country built by them, but today it feels different. Less restrained. More helpless. More honest, maybe, which is a word he has never once enjoyed.

You’re sitting there in the shadows of the arena, all wrapped up in those two windbreakers with that godawful injury in your leg and dirt on your face and grit in your hair, and your hands are shaking a little as you open the silver canister.

Parker squints.

At first? All he can tell is that it’s cloth. Something folded. Something bigger than he expected. He actually stands up fully now without even meaning to, moving closer to the television.

“What the hell is that,” he mutters. “What is it.”

You unravel it slowly.

Your expression changes before his does. He sees that much. The little flicker in your face. Confusion at first. Then dawning. Then something softer. Something almost stunned.

Then you drape it over your shoulders.

And disappear.

Parker goes dead still.

You don’t literally disappear, no. He’s not blind. He can still see the outline of you because the camera angle is high and the movement gives you away… but the thing itself — the fabric, the construction of it, the color and cut and whatever sick genius had designed it — swallows you into the woods almost instantly. It pulls the surrounding dusk over your body like an extra skin. Like a shield. Brush-colored. Bark-colored. Deep greens, mud browns and earthy shadows. When you move, the thing shifts with the environment instead of against it.

“Oh, shit,” Parker breathes.

He says it with no drama at all. Just plain wonder.

Because there it is. Finally! A little silver shot at your survival. A nifty little gift from the sky that actually matters.

The flat around him fades away for a second while he watches you realize it too, right there in real time on live television. You touch the edges of the thick fabric. Test it. Look down at yourself. Then around. Then up at the trees and their branches and the rough architecture of all the places above ground that pain had kept you from taking earlier.

Parker’s grip tightens on the arm of the old chair beside him.

Because he knows you.

Knows the tilt of your mind when an idea locks into place. Knows that quiet, stubborn little spark that comes over your face when suffering has to take a backseat to practicality whether it likes it or not.

Sure enough, you move toward the stream.

Slowly, because your leg is still fucked. There is no prettying that up. Every step has that slight…wrongness to it. That grit-your-teeth carefulness. You’re running on will power and whatever else God forgot to ration out fairly before the Games started.

Parker hates watching it.

Hates it with a violence that feels too close to shame.

Because there you are, hauling your own body through agony in front of the whole nation, while he stands dry and furious and upright in the old upstairs flat over the bakery your father left behind.

Because there you are, taking what little help comes to you without whining about how long it took.

Because there you are, far away yet still making him feel things he has spent years turning into stone.

He drags one hand over his mouth and keeps watching.

You fill your hands with water. Drink. Again. Again. Then fill the bottle you’ve managed to keep with you from the Careers’ supply bags while you still can, making yourself useful before the pain catches back up. Efficient even now. Methodical. Never dramatic when no one is there to see.

Except everyone is there to see, and that thought makes Parker’s jaw lock.

He hates the Capitol for turning this into spectacle.

He also hates the ugly, unavoidable fact that without spectacle? Maybe there would have been no parachute at all.

The contradiction sits in him like a nail.

Onscreen, you reach the tree you’ve chosen.

Parker actually takes a half-step closer to the TV. “No,” he murmurs out loud, because instinct says no before anything else can. No, don’t put weight on it. No, don’t push it. No, don’t climb anything with that leg. No, no, no.

But then you do.

Of course you do.

Because what the hell else are you supposed to do—?! Sleep on the ground and hope the woods grow kind overnight?

You start climbing, and Parker can’t tell if the pounding in his ears is just the storm outside or his own pulse. He watches you move slower than usual now — smarter, too. One arm, then the other. Good leg first. Then the bad one dragged after. Rest. Breathe. Shift. Haul. Pause. Keep going.

It’s not as graceful as you normally are.

That somehow makes it worse and more impressive at the same time. There isn’t any performance to it. No audience-facing flourish to it or false heroism. Just a wounded girl from Hawkins climbing a damn tree… because the world has left her no better option.

Parker swallows hard enough that it hurts.

He remembers you at nine years old trying to climb the fence out back in a Sunday dress because you’d decided the apricots on the other side looked “lonely.” He remembers your knobby little knees getting all scuffed up. Your stupid determination. The way you had never once listened to reason if your mind was already made up.

He remembers hating that about you.

He remembers secretly admiring it too.

He remembers being too young to understand that those things could even happen at the same time.

Onscreen, you get high enough to make it count.

Then you start working with the fabric.

And Parker’s frown deepens now, because now he’s trying to figure out what exactly it is besides a camouflage cloak, because you’re not just wrapping up in it. You’re… securing it. Knotting it. Testing it. Adjusting it between sturdier branches in a way that suggests shape, intention, engineering.

“What are you doing,” he asks, leaning even closer, talking to the television again like a complete headcase. “What is that. What the fuck is it—?”

You tug the thing into place.

Then lower your weight into it.

And suddenly it becomes obvious.

A hammock.

It’s not some soft, decorative, backyard rich-people bullshit type of hammock with cute stripes and a glass of lemonade. No, it’s something harsher — built for survival, built to disappear. Something that holds and hides at once.

Parker blinks.

Then once more.

Then, to his own private horror, he laughs under his breath.

Not because anything is funny.

Just because the relief and realization both come out wrong.

“You’re kidding me,” he mutters. “Okay. Yeah, alright.”

Onscreen, the thing holds.

It holds you.

And because it’s built the way it is, because whoever designed it understood the assignment down to the bone, the shape of it sinks into the tree line and surrounding brush until even Parker has to keep checking where exactly you are to make sure he hasn’t lost sight of you.

The smile that comes over his face feels strange there.

Like something he has not worn honestly in a while.

It hurts.

It also won’t go away.

He wipes quickly at under one eye before any tears can really form and grow teeth. “Don’t do that,” he mutters to himself more than to you. “Don’t start.”

Start what, exactly, he doesn’t say.

He already knows.

The dangerous thing.

The human thing.

The thing where all his careful bitterness… begins failing under the weight of what is plainly in front of him.

Then you reach back for the parachute, intending to hide it from view.

But that’s when brows knit, as you stare into the little basket.

Parker’s do too. “There’s more…?”

You slowly pull out and reveal another item: a sleek little rectangular kit. Gold toned with a matte finish to keep it from shining like a target — but no less aesthetic in how it’s been crafted. It’s small enough to fit in your hands.

Parker stares curiously. “What the hell is that…?”

You open it…

Inside: little pans of earth colors. Greens gone muddy and mossy. Browns. Charcoal. Clay. Something near black. Brushes tucked neat in their slots like a rich girl’s watercolor set if rich girls were being taught how to disappear out in the wild instead of painting fruit.

A camouflage kit.

Parker actually stares at the TV screen with his mouth partway open for a long time. Then he blows out a breath that is half laugh, half curse.

“Well I’ll be damned.”

You hug the thing to your chest.

That’s what gets him. Not the usefulness of it, though that matters. Not even the strategy of it, though that matters too. It’s that one little involuntary, happy movement of yours. The way your gratitude overtakes pain for half a second and wins.

You tilt your head back and mouth thank you to the sky.

Parker’s face twists up all strange.

Because of course you thank whoever just became your sponsor — because even now, even here, even torn open and exhausted and hunted…? You still look grateful instead of entitled.

The worst part… is that your older brother can hear your voice in his head without meaning to. Gentle. Soft. Polite. Sincere. The way that you’ve always thanked people as if kindness is shocking every single time it happens.

His throat burns, chest aching with it.

He sits back down abruptly because standing there grinning and glassy-eyed at a television screen like some emotional idiot is not a look he’s willing to tolerate in himself.

He barely gets seated again before the sky outside splits open.

Thunder cracks so loudly it rattles the old upstairs windows.

The flat flashes white.

Then black.

Parker jolts upright so fast the chair legs scrape the wood as the television dies with a crispy fizz and a pop, the whole room dropping instantly into ugly storm-dark.

For one full beat there is nothing.

Just the rain. The wind. Parker’s own breathing.

Then he swears.

“Fuck.”

He’s moving before the word is done leaving his mouth, already grabbing for the flashlight on the side table — because the generator out back has been touchy ever since March, and because ten seconds without knowing what’s happening in the arena currently feels exactly like being skinned alive.

He crosses the room in long three strides.

Another curse. Another thunder crack. The flashlight beam jolts over the little flat’s walls — over the chipped yellow paint in the tiny kitchenette, over the framed bakery license still hanging crooked, over the old family photos he never moved because moving them would mean looking directly at them and leaving them where they are means not having to decide anything.

He gets halfway to the stairs when the power kicks back on.

Everything blinks. Hums. Surges.

…and the television fizzes back to life again in a spray of static and the room goes blue once more.

Parker freezes where he is… chest heaving just a little, feeling stupid as hell and still not even remotely calm.

Onscreen, the live feed of the arena is back.

You’re still there.

Still in the tree. Still hidden. Still alive.

Parker sags against the banister so hard it is nearly undignified. “Fucking A,” he breathes, standing there for another second before making himself walk back towards the sofa while shoving the flashlight down onto the table a little harder than necessary. “Christ.”

The silent treatment from the back house continues to go uninterrupted.

Anjelica has been back there for hours now, shut in with her bitterness and her ego and her refusal to say his name first — and for once? Parker cannot bring himself to give a shit.

Usually he would by now.

Usually he would already have gone through all the motions. Knocked lightly. Asked if she wanted tea. Apologized for tone, timing, delivery, existence — whichever one the evening happened to require. Usually, he would’ve spent the last several hours trying to earn back affection his stepmother’s always made sound conditional on his obedience but never called it that.

But not tonight.

Tonight? She can rot in it.

…and that realization startles him some too.

Not because it’s cruel, but because it’s freeing in a way he does not yet trust.

So he sits.

And he watches.

And for the first time in what feels like forever… he lets himself stop clawing after Anjelica’s approval long enough to care about something else more.

On the TV screen, you finally settle into the hammock. Test the weight again. Adjust the camouflage edges around yourself. You pull both the windbreaker jackets tighter around you, with the little gold kit hidden in your pocket… just within reach, should you need it. At the moment? You don’t need it just yet.

Because at the moment, you are hidden.

Not perfectly. Nothing is ever perfect in there. But close enough that it makes Parker’s chest go warm with something suspiciously like hope.

He leans forward again, forearms on his knees, eyes never leaving his little sister’s image on the  television.

“There you go,” he murmurs quietly this time. “Blend in.”

His voice sounds different now.

Less brittle.

Like he’s talking to you, not at you.

And that, more than anything else, is probably the most dangerous sign of all — because he’s hardly ever allowed himself to find a language with you that comes across as fluent.

Your brother is now truly beginning to regret that while he watches you duck down into the hammock and hide yourself from sight.

By the time the full chapter of evening shifts across town, the storm’s turned Steve Harrington’s house into a ship. Not literally. But the lights flicker enough to make the comparison feel fair — the old trees around the property bow and thrash like black water, and every window in the place hums faintly with wind pressure like they’re all trying very hard not to become a problem.

The power’s still out.

It hasn’t regained life yet.

Upstairs, in the entertainment room, chaos reigns exactly the way it always does when four boys and one Erica Sinclair are told to remain calm.

Which is to say: not at all.

“The power better come back right now,” Dustin announces to the dead TV, smacking the side of it with his flat palm like the set has personally betrayed him.

Mike is already on his knees beside the entertainment center, jiggling wires and muttering, “That’s not how electricity works.”

Lucas, standing by the lamp that no longer works, squints. “Then why’re you doing exactly the same thing.”

“Because I’m troubleshooting.”

“You’re panicking.”

“I can panic and troubleshoot at the same time.”

“That explains so much,” Erica says from the couch, arms folded, expression disgustedly regal while the dark keeps flashing blue every now and then from lightning outside.

Will doesn’t say anything at first.

That’s what Mike quietly notices.

In a room where Dustin is crashing out loud enough for six people and Erica is insulting everyone’s intelligence as a community service, Will Byers going quiet feels far louder than thunder.

He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of the blankets still around his shoulders even though the room isn’t cold… and his sweet eyes are fixed on the blank television screen like if he stares hard enough he can force it back into compliance, while also forcing his darkest traumas out of his mind. Every  time the power hiccups somewhere lower inside the house… his whole body tenses before he can stop it.

Because it feels like being in the Upside Down all over again.

Mike straightens slowly from the tangle of cords and crosses the room while his friends keep clamoring around, talking over each other. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He simply drops down beside his best friend, nudging his shoulder once.

“It’ll come back,” he says with quiet assurance.

Will blinks at him, then tries a shrug that doesn’t really work. “Yeah—yeah, it will.”

“Really,” Mike keeps going, expression warm and encouraging. “It’s just a big storm. No strange stuff. It’ll pass.” 

Will nods like he’s actively trying to believe it.

Mike looks at him for another moment. “Or, well—it might hang out a while, but hey. Still. It’s just Mother Nature’s trying to one-up the end of the world.”

That earns a genuine huffs of laughter, just a little one, through Will’s nose.

And that’s when Mike crookedly smiles, hand on his best friend’s shoulder as he feels the posture easing beneath his palm. “You really okay?”

Will nods, smiling sheepishly at him. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

Behind them, Dustin is still arguing with the universe. “If this goddamn storm knocks out the feed permanently?—I am literally going to sue weather.”

“You can’t sue weather,” Lucas quips.

“Watch me.”

Erica looks at him flatly. “You gonna sue Channel 10’s meteorologist next?”

Dustin whirls around to face her. “Know what? I just might.”

They keep bickering, uselessly fiddling with the antenna and wires.

Will pulls the blanket tighter around himself and finally says what’s actually in his head. “I just… hate when it does that.” He nibbles his lip. “Makes me feel like I’m…”

He doesn’t finish.

But Mike nods immediately because he already knows.

It’s not just whole “losing power” thing. It’s the everything-thing. The stranger things that keep simmering beneath the surface, reshaping everything that’s meant to be mundane inconveniences. The storms. The dark. The way the house feels wrong when the electricity cuts and all that’s left is the sound of trees and wind and whatever nightmare the mind wants to invent in the gaps. Mike was there for enough of the first apocalypse, back when no one knew it was coming, back when a kid mysteriously went missing… to know exactly why this would get under Will’s skin.

Because he experienced this whole hell firsthand.

“It’s okay,” Mike says, softer now. “Really, it’s just the power this time.”

Will looks at him with that wide, serious face of his that always says so much more than whatever he’s willing to verbalize out loud. Instead, he just settles for saying, very quietly, “That’s what people always say right before it’s not.”

That one gets Mike right in the ribs.

He doesn’t dare argue that, knowing is true.

So he just bumps their shoulders together again, then stays there. “Well… at least we’ve got each other this time… right?”

Will‘s eyes shine up at him, the first real smile finding his face. 

He nods once. “Yeah. Yeah, we do.”

They hold each others’ gave for a moment.

In the background, Erica is now telling Dustin he has “the electrical instincts of a jellyfish,” which would probably be funnier if Dustin weren’t currently half sprawled across the floor trying to reconnect the antenna with the fully tragic intensity of a wartime surgeon.

“Bro,” Lucas complains at him. “Could you not—?!”

“It’s gonna work,” Dustin barks back.

“The power is literally out!”

Just then, all at once, the room clicks back to life.

Lamp. Television. Static hiss.

All five kids freeze.

Then explode.

“Oh thank God—”

“Don’t touch anything—”

“Move, move, MOVE—”

Dustin and Mike both lunge for the television at the same time while Lucas reaches over them to adjust the rabbit-ear antenna, with Erica hovering over his shoulder, hissing contradictory instructions like a tiny overpaid executive.

“Left, idiot!”

“I am going left.”

“That is your other left.”

Will is up now too — heart still kicking hard, watching the picture roll and fuzz and then catch.

The live feed returns in a burst of grain and color.

You’re still the main event.

Still up in the tree, hidden so well that for half a second? Even Dustin loses you, regardless of his brand new glasses.

Then you shift slightly in the hammock and the whole room lights up.

“Oh my God.”

“She did it!”

“That is so awesome.”

“She’s literally Harry Potter,” Mike blurts. “Like, with the invisibility cloak!”

Erica crosses her arms and lifts her chin. “Harry Potter wishes.”

That finally gets the real laugh out of Will.

Not a big one. Just enough to prove he’s easing.

Enough that Mike grins in relief without making it obvious.

The room settles into something eerily quiet after that, enough that everyone ends up drifting toward the big window together to look outside… right when the next gust of wind smacks the house broadside.

The trees in the yard are bending now.

Not swaying prettily. Bending. The branches rake at each other like a bear’s claws, while the sky beyond them is nearly black — even though technically, it’s still early evening. And every now and then, something veiny flashes way off behind the treeline, bright enough to show everybody their own reflections in the glass for one weird second before darkness takes the yard again.

No one says much now.

Because there isn’t much to say.

Just the shared, unspoken understanding that this thing outside is now really getting serious and none of them like the shape of it.

The knock at the entertainment room door comes gently.

Five heads whip around at once.

Then Eddie pushes it open with one shoulder, peering in. “You guys good?”

They all answer over each other in a rush.

“Yes, but—”

“The power—”

“What if it goes again—”

“Do we lose the feed if that happens—”

“Is the house gonna blow away—”

Eddie raises both hands. “Okay, wow. Beautiful. Love the enthusiasm. Just— one at a time before I fake my own death.”

That gets a few fragile little laughs.

He glances around the room, checking faces the way he always does now. Counting heads. Checking for panic. Looking at Will a beat longer than the others just because he knows storms and darkness are extra shitty territory there.

Then he says, practical and easy, “It’s fine. If the power goes again, we’ll get the generators going. I just need to finish up dinner first. Unless you all want half-cooked food poisoning with your weather event.”

Dustin opens his mouth.

Eddie points at him. “Don’t.”

Dustin shuts it again.

“Good man.”

Another deep roll of thunder moves through the house, this one much closer.

Eddie tips his head. “Mike. Henderson. C’mon downstairs. Help me not burn the place down.”

Mike blinks. “Why us.”

“Because you two got the most mouth and I plan to put it to work.”

“That feels targeted,” Dustin grunts, standing anyway.

“It is targeted.”

Mike gets up too, smoothing his shirt down like he’s been drafted into public office against his will.

Eddie looks at the others, juts his chin. “Sinclair’s, Willie Nelson — go ahead and start pulling a few things together, take ‘em down toward the basement. Flashlights. Blankets. Whatever you’ll wanna not be crying over later if this  weather gets uglier.”

That lands heavier than the rest.

Will’s face changes first. “You think it could get that bad?”

Eddie doesn’t bullshit them. Never really has.

“I think it could,” he says. “And I think being ready beats acting shocked.”

Lucas nods before anybody else can, already moving. Erica hops down from the couch with a dramatic sigh but she moves too. Will lingers for just one second more, then nods and follows.

Nobody likes it.

Nobody argues either.

Because they all know the rules now. The new ones. The end-of-times ones. The ones where safety means doing the “boring” things before they become urgent.

Eddie watches them all scatter into motion and feels that old pressure settle between his tense shoulder blades again. The one that comes with being the oldest person in a room full of kids when the weather gets creepy and every light in the house suddenly feels conditional.

Then he claps once. “Loving the teamwork. Let’s move before I become the kind of bitchy housewife nobody deserves.”

“That ship sailed days ago,” Erica deadpans on her way past him.

Eddie presses a hand to his chest. “You wound me, child.”

She doesn’t even look back. “Go cry about it.”

Mike snickers while Dustin nearly trips over his own sock, also snickering as they shuffle down the hall towards the stairwell. Will smiles a little to himself while Lucas shakes his head like this is somehow normal.

…and maybe now it is.

Maybe this is what “normal” looks like at the end of the world... Noise. Fear. Planning. Dinner. The television on too loud in the background with the fate of people they love playing out a thousand miles away, while a storm bears down on the roof and everyone still has to figure out whose job it is to carry the extra batteries and flashlights.

Downstairs, Eddie leads Mike and Dustin toward the warm kitchen while the live feed keeps talking from the television behind them with Nancy’s sleeping form on the couch.

In the arena, Steve still sleeps.

Ro still nibbles seeds and roots in the hush of the hidden shelter.

The Careers still circle their hoarded little empire with Syl at spear-point servitude while Carol stays knocked out cold.

Thresh moves like a myth near the grasses.

Foxface waits in her hole with watchful eyes and leaf-stained teeth.

Hannah and Jack share crackers in the cave.

And you, hidden high in the tree under borrowed camouflage with your first real shot at surviving the night… vanish a little more fully every time the wind stirs the branches around you.

In Hawkins, the sky goes darker.

And inside Steve Harrington’s giant kitchen, Eddie Munson reaches for a pan while watching the weather report on the little television above the counter and feels every hair rise on the back of his neck. The meteorologist is talking too fast now. Radar blooms in sick colors over the map and the wind speeds keep climbing. There’s talk of “unstable cells.” “Rotation chances.” Overnight escalation. The kind of phrases that don’t mean much until they do.

Eddie turns the stove knob and listens to the hiss of gas while watching the start of a flame forming.

Behind him, Mike and Dustin are already whisper-bickering about whether or not canned green beans count as “actual greens” while the big house creaks again under the next hard gust.

“Mike,” Eddie quietly murmurs, not wanting to wake Nancy in the living room. “You’re on chopping duty. Dusty, start a fresh pot of coffee for the officers.”

He watches them obey without complaint, smirking to himself fondly.

Then Eddie glances once toward the dark window over the sink.

Outside, the trees are no longer bending politely.

They are bracing.

And somewhere in the deep center of the storm, something feels not just bad — but patient.

Like the storm knows it has time.

9:58PM -> The Games

The first sound it makes does not belong to anything with a soul.

It rips through the arena at nearly ten o’clock that night in one wretched, wet, long, gargling bellow… sounding like something between a scream, a choke, and the sound of a slaughterhouse drain backing up.

Ro wakes all at once.

Not with the soft surfacing of a child dragged out of safe sleep by accident. One second he’s buried in the sleeping bag, warm, snuggly tucked in beside the heavy reassuring shape of Steve Harrington’s sleeping body. The next… his eyes are open so wide they ache, and every little bone in him has gone rigid with terror.

He does not move at first.

He just listens.

The little hut is pitch black. Not just dim or shadowy. Black-black. The kind of dark that presses on the eyes and makes the whole world feel smaller than it is. Around him, the little igloo-shaped hideout of bent branches and leaves and roots holds tight. He can smell damp bark. Earth. Steve’s shirt. The faint medicinal green stink of chewed-up leaves still resting over the swollen bites on Steve’s neck, forearm, and knee.

Steve is still asleep.

That’s the first miracle.

Even with that awful sound still echoing through the woods, even with Ro’s own little heart beating so painfully hard that it feels like something trying to escape its cage, Steve keeps breathing slowly and evenly beneath the black sideways-draped sleeping bag and the blanket of leaves blanketing him from torso-down — face turned into the backpack Ro made into a pillow. One arm is now bent awkwardly beneath him. But he’s still unconscious as the dead… except for the steady rise and fall of his back.

Then the thing out in the darkness makes another noise.

Closer.

This one is lower. Less dramatic. Worse.

A dragging sound. A thick sound. Wet friction over dirt and leaves and roots like something broken is hauling itself forward anyway out of pure hate.

Ro’s whole body tightens.

He slowly, slowly, slowly lifts the edge of the sleeping bag from his face. The darkness beyond does not change. He still can’t see a damn thing. But now? He can hear better. Every scrape, every shift. Every horrible, bubbling breath and exhale from the unknown beast.

It’s getting closer.

And it’s big.

That’s the awful part. That’s the part that reaches into Ro and squeezes hard enough to make his stomach lurch. Because this isn’t some little arena mutt or a fox or one of those gangly coyotes he heard earlier in the day. Whatever is out there sounds huge. Sounds wrong. Sounds like it’s got too many joints or not enough. Sounds like bones grinding where bones should not grind and slime stretching where skin should not do that.

Ro wets his lips. 

They’re trembling and he hates that.

Then he remembers…

Very carefully, very warily, without letting the sleeping bag rustle too much… he reaches one hand out from under it and fumbles in the dark for the object he kept close on purpose.

His fingers close around cool plastic.

The sunglasses.

Only… they’re not really sunglasses, are they?

Steve never figured that part out. Or maybe he would have — if he’d allowed himself the chance to try them on the first night, or the next night, instead of spending the past day and a half dead to the world on tracker-jacker venom. But Ro knows. He knows because he tested them after rescuing Steve, after the light first started going down and he got curious enough to put them on… just for a second, just to see what they did.

Night vision.

He gets them onto his face with shaking hands.

The world changes all at once.

Not bright, exactly. But visible.

Shapes swim into being in green-gray tones and ghostly outlines. The earthy hut curves around him in a rough dome of branches, roots, twigs and packed leaves. Tiny harmless bugs crawling between slivers of bark. The rough line of Steve’s sleeping body stretched on his stomach. The bow tucked safely against one wall. Every single one of Steve’s supplies still lined up where Ro left them — knife, iodine, crackers, jerky, rope, wire, matches, water bottle, balm tin, everything neat and untouched because Ro would sooner starve than go pawing through another person’s life.

And of course, Steve himself.

Steve is still there.

Still breathing.

Still sleeping so hard it borders on absurd.

Ro reaches out instinctively and puts one little hand flat against Steve’s back through the black t-shirt. Protective without even thinking about it. Grounding himself with the warmth and the proof of life there.

Then the sound comes again.

Even closer.

So close now that the leaves over the entrance shiver.

Ro freezes.

Outside the hut, something passes just beyond the fragile wall of roots and brush. It doesn’t move like an animal. It doesn’t even move like a monster in storybooks. It moves like several monsters got melted down and poured into one skin that never set right.

He can hear it dragging. Snapping. Wuffling wetly through its own breath.

Then comes the smell.

It reaches the hut a second before the thing fully circles around it — rot and iron and that hot-sweet stink of opened flesh. Ro clamps one tiny hand over his mouth so fast he nearly smacks himself in the nose with the goggles.

Don’t breathe loud. Don’t move a muscle. Don’t make Steve move.

He ducks forward until his chin nearly touches Steve’s shoulder blade — his little body folding in over itself. The sleeping bag bunches up around his legs. His hand fists in Steve’s shirt hard enough to wrinkle it. He can feel the panic in his own fingers, in the tiny tremor that won’t stop.

Outside, the thing keeps circling.

One slow round.

Then another.

Each time it passes, something in the little hut shakes. Leaves quiver. One root gives a tiny creak. Ro can hear it sniffing now, or maybe tasting the air… whatever the fuck it does. There’s spit in the sound. Strings of it too. Dripping . Stretching. He imagines teeth. He imagines a long face made entirely of mouths. He imagines all sorts of horrible shit and knows his own imagination is probably being kinder than the truth.

The thing stops.

Right outside.

Everything inside Ro goes cold. He can’t even cry properly. The fear is much too big for crying. It’s the kind fear that empties a person out so fast there’s no room left for noise.

Then the monster screams.

It’s ear-splitting. It’s not just one scream either, but several layered over each other, like something inside it is always still dying and never fully does. The sound blasts through the hut and makes Ro fold all the way forward, burying his face soundlessly in Steve’s back.

He does not dare scream with it.

But he wants to. God, he wants to. He wants to sob and to beg and to shake Steve awake and say please, please, please do something.

But he doesn’t.

He just bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood and stays dead still.

The beast’s scream eventually cuts off.

Then the thing scrapes past again.

Ro can hear it circling the little hut one last time, still uncertain... Still curious. Suspicious. Whatever thoughts a creature like that is capable of. Then, after what feels like an hour though it’s maybe only thirty seconds, it moves away.

At first just a little. Slow. Then farther. Then faster, its body dragging over the arena forest floor in a slick, awful rush until the sounds start putting distance between themselves and the hut.

Ro still doesn’t move.

He stays folded over Steve for what feels like forever, tears slipping hot and silent under the edges of the goggles. The trembling hand over his mouth is damp now. The other hand is still tangled in Steve’s shirt.

He waits.

One minute. Maybe two.

Five, probably.

Hell, maybe it’s thirty.

Long enough that his back starts aching and his legs go numb.

Far away now, the beastly thing screams again — deeper in the woods, now hunting somewhere else inside the dark of the arena.

Only then does Ro very, very cautiously peel himself back.

His face is wet. He wipes it with his wrist and hates that too. Still, he doesn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself. There’s no room for that in here. There’s just the dark and the unknown and the next problem and the next after that.

He keeps the goggles on.

He crawls back inside the sleeping bag more slowly this time, tucking himself up into the side of Steve’s sleeping shape with one eye still on the entrance and the other on the tiny slivers of motion his goggles let him catch. He shifts until he’s wiggled himself into a little scrunched up ball, his feet pressing into Steve’s side under the bag again. But closer now. Not for comfort exactly… but for proof. For warning. For something solid.

There’s no way he’s sleeping again tonight.

That’s fine.

He got enough earlier. He can do one night scared out of his mind if it means Steve keeps sleeping and living beside him the whole time. So be lays there listening to the woods breathe around them while thinking to himself, with the sort of grim, childish practicality only children and soldiers ever really master: wow, that was fucking horrible.

And somewhere far across the arena, you wake with the same terror already rushing up your spine.

You don’t know what wakes you first.

Maybe it’s the distant beastly scream.

Maybe it’s the tremor of the earth below the tree.

Maybe it’s just pure instinct — that deep, old, primal instinct in human beings that says something bad is close before the mind fully catches up.

Either way, your eyes snap open in complete darkness.

For one disoriented second, the hammock feels like drowning. Tight around you. Curved around your lithe body. Zipped almost fully shut from the inside, except for the small breath-space you left yourself before finally passing out. Your injured shin throbs at the reminder that you are not home, not safe, not in any world where comfort is real for long.

…then the ground below shudders.

…and you know.

Something is out there.

The hellish sound that follows is enough to turn every stiff bone in your body to ice. It doesn’t sound like one creature. It sounds like ten different horrors… all choking each other to death inside the same skin. A roar dragged through phlegm. Teeth gnashing together. Bones cracking. Hot slime pulling in long wet ropes over bark.

You clamp a hand over your mouth instantly.

Do not move.

Do not make the hammock sway wrong.

Do not let panic turn you stupid.

That last part matters. That part is maybe the only thing saving your life right now. The camouflage hammock wrapped around you is doing exactly what it was designed to do: merging with the tree, the dark and the wilderness itself, becoming just another shape among shapes so long as you let it.

So you stay perfectly still.

You stay so still your body starts screaming at you for it.

The unknown thing below you slams into a tree trunk somewhere to your left. The impact shivers through the nearby branches and travels into your own. Your breath jerks so hard you nearly bite your tongue off while the hammock rocks once, swaying with the wind. Please let it look like wind.

Outside, the creature scrapes closer.

You cannot see it.

That might actually be the worst part.

If you could see it, then maybe your mind would at least stop trying to invent something worse. But no. You are left there in the suffocating dark while your imagination builds nightmares with whatever materials it has on hand. Like a giant dog, made of skinned faces. A snake with human hands. One of those demodogs with half its flesh stripped off and all of its bones showing under it. A spider the size of a car with wet human teeth for eyes.

…geez, your own brain is an asshole.

Whump!

The thing hits your tree.

Not hard enough to shake you loose, but hard enough to shake the trunk and make the hammock tremble around you. You silently startle, go rigid inside it, hand still clamped over your mouth. Your other arm is wrapped around your middle so hard it burns.

Please.

Please keep moving.

Please don’t look up.

Please don’t smell me.

The thing makes a low, rolling sound at the base of the tree, and that is when you hear it start climbing.

Not like a squirrel. Not like anything that belongs in nature.

It slithers and hooks and drags and hauls itself upward in jerky, boneless, horrible increments. You hear tree bark tearing under it. Hear something wet slapping the trunk between movements while it breathes like a man drowning in mud.

Your whole body starts shivering with bone-rattling fear.

You can’t stop it. You’re trembling so badly now that it feels like the hammock itself might tell on you.

So you start praying.

Not elegantly. Not in sentences anybody can write down and admire from the live viewing. Hell, the cameras can’t even properly see you right now. Which is unquestionably for the best as you let fear wash over your body in silently anguished waves. All you can do is pray in desperate, broken scraps thrown up into whatever part of heaven still answers girls like you…

Dad, please. Mom, if you’re there, please. Please don’t let it find me. Or if it does, let it be quick.Please let Hannah and Jack stay in the cave. Please let Ro be safely hidden. Please let Steve Harrington still be alive somewhere in this awful place.

The creature reaches you.

Or it reaches the hammock, anyway.

Something brushes the outside of it.

Your whole face twists into a silent scream. 

Miraculously, you still don’t make a sound. Somehow—God knows how. But your mouth opens wide against your palm and your eyes squeeze shut hard enough to ache while the thing drags itself along the side of your hidden little nest.

The hammock dips.

Just a little. A test, maybe. A curious nudge.

The thing is right there. Right fucking there! You can hear the spit. Hear the teeth grind. Hear some deeper internal movement like bloody organs slipping against each other in a body that wasn’t put together right to begin with.

You feel warmth spread under you and for one stunned, hideous second you don’t understand it.

Then you do.

Oh.

Humiliation hits for a split second after the relief does. You’ve pissed yourself from terror inside a tree in a death arena with a monster pressed up against your hiding place.

There is no dignity left on this earth.

You bite down on the inside of your cheek until the shame doesn’t matter any longer. Because alive is alive and alive gets to be embarrassed later.

Outside, the creature lingers…

Then, thank the merciful heavens above, thank every ancestor and lost soul and dead person you’ve ever loved, it starts to move again.

Down…

…back down along the trunk in those awful slithering jerks. Something heavy drops to the ground then begins making that same repulsive, reassembling sound again — slopped and gnarly — as if that body you just heard stretch itself up the tree is rearranging into another shape now that it’s back on level ground.

Its roar explodes into the forest.

Birds burst from somewhere nearby in panicked flurries. Every insect ceases their chirping, stilling their wings and pinchers. The whole arena now seems to flinch around it.

…and then the thing moves away.

You stay exactly where you are.

For one minute.

Then another.

Then several more.

Only when the sounds get smaller and smaller and finally disappear into the huge dark body of the woods do you let yourself cry.

Not loudly.

Just enough for it to hurt.

Tears slide into your hairline and your windbreakers’ collars and the crook of your wrist. You breathe through your hand like somebody trying to survive their own body. Under the humiliation and the terror and the pain in your shin and the aching certainty that the Gamemakers are putting on a fucking show tonight because the blood count apparently hasn’t satisfied them yet, there is one brutal truth pulsing through you:

You are still alive.

For now, at least.

You lie there in your little hidden cocoon and pray the others are too.

Hannah and Jack in their cave.

Ro somewhere in the woods.

Steve with him, if God is kind.

You don’t know where any of them are. The only thing you know is who’s not yet appeared in the sky… which will have to be enough for tonight.

Either way, the creature wants blood and it will find its victim.

It will slither and crawl its way between every crevice of the earth inside this pit until it does. It will sniff out blood, flesh, cartilage and bones to keep piling together and making its deformed body bigger.

It can shrink its mass into submission…

Which is how it finds Foxface.

Across the arena, she’s asleep when the beast finds her, curled into herself beneath the low shelter of bushes and half-collapsed scrub, knees drawn in, her sharp face tucked near her wrist. Sleep for her is never deep anymore… but it’s deeper than it should be tonight because hunger has thinned her out and fear has worn her down and day four has taken enough from everybody.

She wakes to breath.

Warm breath.

Puffing over her forehead…

Her brow furrows. One hand lifts sluggishly… as if to bat away some insect’s curiosity. Her eyes crack open in irritation before understanding catches up.

At first all she sees is shape.

Huge. Blurred. Too close.

Then the rest comes into focus.

Teeth.

So many fucking teeth.

A face made almost entirely of them — teeth jammed into flesh and cartilage and wet, red folds of meat like someone took a butcher’s scrap bucket and asked it to smile. Above that, hollow pits where eyes should be. Below it… a body all wrong with itself: spider-like and human at once, eight jagged limbs built of knuckled bone and stretched sinew and strips of skin hanging in slick ropes between them. Bits of rib. Pieces of hip. Something that might’ve once been fingers… now fused into one clawing appendage. It smells like opened graves and slaughter and hot copper.

Foxface’s whole face drains white.

She does not ease awake. She is fully there now, every nerve in her body lit on fire with comprehension.

The monster leans closer.

Its mouth opens wider.

Somewhere inside that tangle of bones and flesh, a sound starts to build.

Foxface screams first.

And the creature roars right back into her face.

END OF CHAPTER <- previous part

yes, you are correct: the hospital monster from S3 gets its star moment!!!!!! [in this fic series, that monster never made an appearance to anyone else yet so it's allll new... thanks to the game makers...]

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TAGLIST: @silkholland @tangledluver @slutforpumpkins @katetimes @ratfrogs @moonlightdreamer111 @yikesmama3 @just-a-harmless-patato @ahoytherebean @sucker-4-angst @ninas-sayers @cherrys-muses @gredandforgeweatherby @shouldakissedyouanyway @fullofgutsndopamine @sambibomb @amethystxspace @ludachrissy @nicherthanu @mistylaneeee @cristy-l-blog @missmaggieb @snowtargaryen @raspberry-sunshinee @the-emma-bee @notahappystan @yerim773 @peachy-ve @glennspopeye @watermelon-online @impeterporker @doestxrs @1luvjo3 @theallisonkeery @readeronlove @strangegirl26ff  @wwylmlive @kitdjarin1 @headoverharrington @artismytherapy05 @breakingthefourtthwall 

He had just gone on a tangent about high school and how the academic side of things had always felt impossible for him. 

“I don’t know if hate is the right word? I just knew it was never for me,” Steve responded, and you nodded at that.

“That was kinda the same case for me too. I really didn’t like school, but my parents were super intense and wouldn’t let me not be good at it, so yeah,” You shrugged halfheartedly. “And I actually almost didn’t go to college, but I got a full ride to the school here, so I couldn’t turn that down. And my parents definitely wouldn’t let me do that, either.”

“And now you’re in grad school,” He said. “Is that because of them too?”

“No, no, not at all,” You shook your head. “Freshman year, fall semester, I had this psych class, and I immediately fell in love with it. The professor was amazing, and everything I learned and had to read about was just so interesting to me. And the rest is history, pretty much.”

“That’s really cool that you just immediately knew,” Steve said, leaning back a little. “I think I’m still trying to figure out what I really wanna do.”

You playfully bumped your knee with his. “The corporate insurance life still isn’t for you?”

He let out a soft laugh. “Not at all.”

You almost made another joke about his boring insurance job because he never minded you teasing him about it, but then you thought of something. 

“I now wanna make it my mission to help you find what you actually wanna do,” You told him. “I think I owe you one since you’ve been helping me study all day.”

Steve gave you an amused look. “I don’t know if me helping you study today is equal to you helping me figure out my life. You’re getting the terrible end of the deal.”

You shook your head. “No, I actually think I’m getting the more fun end of the deal.”

Steve looked at you then, like really looked at you. Maybe he was trying to see how serious you were being because a lot of your conversations easily and effortlessly fell into playful, teasing banter. However, you weren’t joking about this, and even though you two hadn’t been friends for long, Steve could tell that you were actually being serious. 

And even with how new this friendship was, you could tell that the entire gesture meant a lot to him. 

He stood up. “Now I feel more obligated to make sure you ace your test tomorrow, so let’s get back to studying.”

You were smiling as you took his hand that he outstretched for you to grab, and he pulled you up, and then the two of you were going through the window back into your apartment. 

Once you and Steve were in your bedroom, you two went back to the same spots that you’d been in practically all day; Steve a few feet away at the foot of your bed, and you in your desk chair. You weren’t sure if it was because you were superstitious or if it truly was a better spot to be more productive, but being at your desk felt like the most important part of your study routine. 

You handed Steve a small stack of blue flashcards. He took a look at the first one on top and then back at you. “Okay, back to chapter twelve.”

You weren’t sure how much time had passed, but eventually you became too tired to stay in your desk chair, so you joined Steve in your bed. That was probably when you two should’ve ended studying for the night, but you insisted that you could get through one final review of everything before passing out from exhaustion, and Steve said okay to your words, even though he was yawning and probably seconds away from falling asleep too. 

You had no idea if you two actually managed to finish one last review of everything you’d been studying all day because the last thing you remembered was lying down, head at the foot of the bed instead of at your pillows, and reciting the five main points of a child development theory. 

Maybe it was Steve who fell asleep first, or maybe it was you, but either way, you and he spent the next couple of hours accidentally napping in your bed. The position started innocently; you were asleep on one side of your bed, and he was on the other, and you two were lying opposite ways. But, as time passed, your bodies became a tangle of limbs that was much more comfortable than it probably looked.

It shouldn’t have been so easy to fall asleep with Steve right next to you— you were usually very particular about your bed and always found it kind of hard falling asleep around people. However, somehow Steve was different, and you probably would’ve stayed asleep with him until the morning if he hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night.

He softly tapped your side to wake you up too. “Hey, we fell asleep.” 

You mumbled something incoherently in response to Steve’s words as you tiredly opened your eyes and realized that you’d been using his leg like a pillow for however long you two had been asleep. You knew that it couldn’t have been too long because it was still dark outside. 

“Sorry,” You said as you pulled away from him so that he could get up. Your brain was way too tired to ponder if what you had just been doing was completely weird or not.   

“It’s okay,” Steve responded, and you noticed that his voice was groggy with sleep too. You shifted slightly in bed and watched as he started heading to your bedroom door. “I’ll see you later. Good luck on your test.”

If you were a good host, you would’ve walked him to your front door, but your eyes were already falling shut again, so you instead gave him a sleepy thumbs up. “Thanks.” 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

let me know ur thoughts<333

The mutual pining crept in slowly, then all at once.

It was the little things at first. Kurt would leave coffee made for you on mornings he knew you had early shifts, scribbling shy little notes on post-its: Hope your day isn’t too bad :). You’d catch him staring when you came home from work, still in your barista apron, his eyes lingering on the way your shirt clung from the heat. He’d look away instantly, ears red, mumbling something about editing.

You weren’t innocent either. Late at night you’d lie in bed replaying the sound of his soft voice through the thin walls as he practiced his streams. The way he’d knock gently on your door around midnight, offering half his leftover takeout “because it’s going to go bad anyway.” Your fingers would brush when you took the container, and the spark felt electric. You started wearing shorter sleep shorts just to see if he’d notice. He always did, swallowing hard and finding sudden reasons to retreat to his room.

There were almost-moments. One night after a particularly bad day, you found him on the couch spiraling about his failing channel. You sat close, closer than necessary and rested your head on his shoulder for comfort. Kurt froze, breath catching, but eventually his arm came around you awkwardly. Neither of you moved for nearly an hour. You could feel his heart hammering.

Another time, you walked in on him fresh out of the shower, towel slung low on his hips. He yelped, clutching the towel, but not before you saw the trail of dark hair leading down and the flush spreading across his chest. “S-sorry!” he stammered, but his eyes had dropped to your chest for a split second. You pretended not to notice how hard he was breathing.

The tension simmered constantly, stolen glances in the kitchen, lingering hugs that lasted a beat too long when one of you had a rough day, the way he’d compliment your laugh during movie nights but immediately backtrack like he’d said too much.

Meanwhile, the bills piled up.

Kurt’s rideshare gigs were inconsistent at best. Half the time he came home defeated, muttering about rude passengers or low tips. His streaming channel? Maybe 200 dedicated followers who mostly showed up to troll him. “Kurt Kunkle’s World” wasn’t catching on, no matter how many hours he spent editing in the dark living room, blue light glowing on his anxious face.

Your barista job covered groceries and your half of rent, but barely. Then came the triple whammy: your hours got cut, Kurt’s car needed a $600 repair, and the landlord hiked rent by $200. One night you found him at the kitchen table at 2 a.m., hoodie sleeves over his hands, staring at a final notice from the power company. His laptop showed a rejected sponsorship email.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered when you sat across from him. His voice cracked. “I keep thinking if I just push harder… get the right angle, the right content… but nothing works. People don’t want real anymore.”

You reached across and touched his wrist. He jolted like you’d shocked him, but didn’t pull away. Tension crackled in the quiet apartment, the kind that had been building for months. Unspoken want. Shared desperation. The way his breath hitched when your thumb brushed his skin.

“Kurt,” you said gently, “we’re fucked if we don’t do something drastic.”

He looked up, eyes wide and vulnerable behind his messy curls. “Like what?”

You hesitated. The idea had been floating in your head for weeks, born from scrolling late-night TikTok and overhearing customers talk about side hustles. But saying it out loud to him felt dangerous.

“What if we made an OnlyFans?”

The silence was deafening. Kurt’s face went scarlet. He stared at you, mouth opening and closing, ears burning red. For a moment you thought he’d bolt to his room and never speak to you again.

“W-with… me?” His voice was barely audible. “You mean… like… adult content? Us?”

“Yeah.” You kept your tone casual even as your heart raced. “Roommate stuff is huge. The ‘we’re just friends but the tension is obvious’ angle. You’re naturally cute and awkward on camera — people eat that up. I’m comfortable with my body. We split everything 50/50. No pressure, no strings… unless we want them.”

He swallowed hard, eyes dropping to the table. But you saw the way his thighs shifted, the subtle press of his hand against his lap. The tension thickened. Months of stolen glances, late-night conversations where you both danced around the obvious chemistry, nights where you’d lie in bed wondering if he was touching himself thinking about you in the next room. (He was. You’d heard the muffled sounds once or twice.)

“I… I’ve never…” Kurt mumbled. “Not on camera. Not with anyone I—” He cut himself off, flushing deeper. “You’d really let me touch you? For this?”

The vulnerability in his voice made your stomach flip. Not just financial need anymore. This was crossing a line you both had been eyeing for months.

-

The decision didn’t happen that night. Tension simmered for three more days.

Kurt avoided you at first, hiding in his room, editing old footage with headphones on. But the power notice glared from the fridge. You ate cold cereal for dinner. He came home from a bad driving shift soaked from rain, looking defeated. That night you both sat on the sagging couch watching a movie neither of you cared about, the space between you charged like static.

Halfway through, his knee brushed yours. Neither moved away. When you turned to say something, his eyes were already on you, dark, hungry, terrified. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” he admitted in a rush. “The idea. You and me. It’s… it’s too much. But we need the money and I… I want to. With you.”

You leaned in slowly, giving him time to pull back. He didn’t. The first kiss was hesitant, soft lips, shaky breath, his hand hovering at your waist like he was afraid to claim it. When you deepened it, sliding into his lap, Kurt whimpered. Actually whimpered. His hands finally settled on your hips, gripping like you were a lifeline.

That kiss stretched into heavy making out, clothes half-pulled aside, grinding and panting until you were both too worked up to pretend it was just “for the channel.” But you stopped before it went further. “Save it for the camera,” you whispered against his mouth. “Make it real.”

Kurt nodded, dazed and painfully hard beneath you. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s… let’s do it.”

-

Before filming, you spent an evening setting up the channel together on your shared laptop. Kurt sat unusually close, his thigh pressed against yours as you created the account.

“We need a good username,” he said, voice still shy but excited. “Something that screams roommate vibes but isn’t too obvious.”

After tossing ideas back and forth, giggling over increasingly ridiculous ones you settled on KurtsWorldWithHer. It kept his original brand vibe while making it clear you were now part of his world.

For the bio, Kurt typed carefully, cheeks pink:

“Two broke roommates turning tension into content. Shy boy meets bold girl in KurtsWorld. Real chemistry, real firsts, real messy feelings. Exclusive videos weekly. 50/50 split but 100% real. DMs open for requests. #RoommateGoals”

You added a winking emoji and made him blush harder.

The profile picture was a carefully cropped shot you took together: Kurt in his black hoodie looking flustered, you in a tank top leaning against his shoulder, both smiling at the camera with just enough skin showing to be suggestive without being explicit. Kurt kept adjusting the crop “so it looks natural but hot.”

By the end, Kurt was vibrating with nervous energy, leg bouncing. “This is actually happening. People are gonna see us. Together.”

You squeezed his hand. “Only the parts we want them to see. And we’re in this together.”

-

The first video took two days to film because Kurt kept overthinking.

He set up the ring light and tripod in the living room like it was a blockbuster production, adjusting angles obsessively. “Lighting has to be flattering,” he muttered, ears pink. “And the framing — people like authenticity but not ugly authenticity.” You wore a thin tank top and panties. He stayed in his black t-shirt and gray sweatpants. The second you stepped into frame, his hands trembled on the remote.

“Kurt,” you said softly, stepping close enough to feel the heat radiating off him. “We can stop anytime. This is just us.”

He looked at you like you’d hung the moon. “I’ve wanted this for months. Since you moved in. Every time you laughed at my dumb videos or made coffee for both of us… I felt pathetic for how much I liked it. And now we’re here because we’re broke and I still can’t believe you chose me for this.”

The camera started rolling. Red light blinking.

You cupped his face, thumbs brushing his burning cheeks. “Hey… kiss me, Kurt. Like you mean it this time.”

He leaned in, lips trembling against yours at first, soft, tentative, almost too gentle. His breath hitched when you parted your lips and invited his tongue. The kiss deepened slowly. Kurt’s hands slid up your sides, shaky but gaining confidence as you moaned into his mouth. He tasted like the mint gum he’d nervously chewed earlier.

“God… you feel so good,” he whispered against your lips, voice cracking. “So warm. I— I’ve dreamed about this.”

You straddled his lap on the couch, grinding down against the obvious bulge in his sweatpants. Kurt gasped sharply, hips bucking up involuntarily. “Fuck— sorry, I didn’t mean to— you’re just… really turning me on right now.”

You tugged his shirt off, revealing his lean, pale chest. Kurt’s hands finally grew bolder, sliding under your tank top to cup your bare breasts. His thumbs circled your hardening nipples, pinching lightly when you arched into him.

“Is this okay?” he asked breathlessly, eyes wide. “They’re so soft… perfect. Can I taste them?”

You nodded, pulling your top off. Kurt latched onto one nipple immediately, sucking greedily while his other hand kneaded the other breast. Wet, obscene sounds filled the room as his tongue flicked rapidly. You moaned loudly for the camera, threading fingers through his greasy hair.

“Yes, Kurt— just like that. You’re so good with your mouth already.”

He whimpered at the praise, switching sides, sucking harder. His free hand slipped down, rubbing you through your soaked panties. “You’re wet,” he murmured in disbelief, voice muffled against your skin. “For me. Holy shit.”

You slid off his lap and knelt between his spread thighs. Kurt’s eyes were huge as you pulled his sweatpants and boxers down, freeing his throbbing cock, thick, veined, already leaking precum at the flushed tip.

“Fuck, look at you,” you purred, stroking him slowly from base to head. “So hard for your roommate.”

Kurt’s head fell back, a broken moan escaping. “Please— I don’t know how long I’ll last. You’re too hot on your knees like that.”

You took him into your mouth, tongue swirling around the head before sinking deeper, relaxing your throat. Kurt’s hand flew to your hair, not pushing, just gripping desperately.

“Oh my god— your mouth is so warm and wet— fuck— I can feel your tongue…” He panted heavily, hips twitching. “Slower, baby, please— I’m gonna cum if you keep doing that thing with your throat.”

You didn’t slow down. You bobbed faster, hollowing your cheeks, one hand cupping his balls while the other pumped what you couldn’t fit. Kurt’s thighs shook.

“I’m close— I’m so close— can I cum in your mouth? Please let me cum in your mouth—”

You hummed approval around him. Kurt came with a loud, pathetic cry, hips jerking as thick ropes of cum flooded your throat. You swallowed every drop, pulling off with a wet pop and licking your lips for the camera.

He stared down at you, dazed and flushed. “That was… incredible. You’re incredible.”

-

The video titled “Shy Roommate Finally Snaps. First Time Crossing the Line” exploded. $1,400 in 48 hours. Enough to pay the electric bill and buy real groceries.

-

The videos kept coming, each one peeling back another layer of tension. Kurt and you explored all kinds of content: teasing “accidental” walk-in showers where Kurt would get flustered and hard on camera; long, intimate nights of him eating you out on the kitchen counter while wearing his old streaming headset; risky quickies in the car after his rideshare shifts; even soft dom/sub dynamics where you praised him as a “good shy boy” while riding him slow and deep. You guys even tried light bondage with his hoodie sleeves tied around your wrists, sensory play with ice cubes from the freezer, and plenty of creampie-focused videos that fans begged for.

Six months later the channel KurtsWorldWithHer had nearly 200k subscribers. Kurt still got anxious in public when fans recognized you two. Like the time a barista whispered “I love your videos” while handing over coffee, making his face burn crimson as he mumbled a shy “thank you” and hid behind his hoodie. Or when a group of fans at the grocery store asked for a selfie, and Kurt’s hand trembled holding the phone while you laughed and played it cool. He’d get quiet and clingy afterward, needing reassurance that you were still his safe space, but it also turned him on in private, the thrill of being seen with you.

At home he was addicted to you, to the work, to finally being seen. After one particularly intense shoot, he curled into your chest, soft and clingy again. “I love you,” he whispered. “Not just for the channel. For everything.”

You kissed his head. “Love you too, Kurt. My favorite cam boy.”

. ܁₊ ⊹ . ܁ ⟡ ܁ . ⊹ ₊ ܁. . ܁₊ ⊹ . ܁ ⟡ ܁ . ⊹ ₊ ܁. . ܁₊ ⊹ . ܁ ⟡ ܁ . ⊹ ₊ ܁. . ܁₊ ⊹ . ܁

You go to the forest, you meet up with the group and you walk. Jean asks how the week’s been and you say better and she says good and you walk through the ferns and the moss and the enormous trees and you think about fifteen emails sent into a silence that wasn’t silence at all, and you think about it’s me, Gator, and you think about the apology you’ve been given without knowing you were waiting for it, and by the time you get back to the car park you feel - not clearer, exactly, but aired out, like something’s been given room to breathe. 

The second draft happens on Sunday evening. This time you get more words out - two paragraphs, then three, the words coming more easily than you expected, which makes you suspicious of them. You read it back and it sounds like someone performing okayness; it’s written like someone who has thought very carefully about how a reasonable, healed, functional person would respond to his email and has written that response instead of an honest one. You delete all of it.

You start fresh.

The third draft is angry. Not at him specifically - or not only at him - but at the whole of it, the six years and the emails and the way it’s been dropped on you in the middle of a summer that was going so well. A summer that had Gabriel and the concert and Tom’s birthday and the cactus flowering, and now has this, this thing sitting in your office between the ocean view and the North Dakota photograph, demanding something you don’t know how to give yet. You write the angry draft in about eight minutes and it’s possibly the most honest thing you’ve ever written and you delete it immediately because honest isn’t always the same as right.

You start fresh.

Flynn, through all of this, maintains a studied neutrality. He doesn’t know about the email. He knows something about you is different - he’s been sleeping closer, checking back on you more on your beach walks, and appearing in the office doorway at intervals that seem almost therapeutic in their regularity - but he doesn’t know what it is, and he can’t ask, and you find the dog’s not-asking more comforting than most people’s asking.

In amongst all of this, your work continues at pace. The Geneva follow-up, the quarterly report for the Board, a new project beginning to take shape that will need input from all three field offices and will be, you can already tell, a huge amount of work, which is the kind of thing you normally look forward to. You mostly look forward to it. It mostly helps.

In the forest the following Saturday Elizabeth talks about her son’s visit - her four grandchildren, the meal she cooked for everyone that took all day, the way they walked into her home and smelled it. Her voice has something in it when she talks about them that you recognise without being able to name. Something that has come through loss and found, on the other side of it, that the things worth having are still there.

Right size, she says, at some point, about something else entirely, a tree or a waterfall or something. Not small. Just the right size.

You think about that on the drive home.

You open a new email when you get back and write. The cactus is still alive. It’s been flowering.

You look at it for a long time.

You delete it.

You start fresh.

****************

Gator doesn’t think about it at all.

That’s not true. He thinks about it the way you think about something you’ve decided not to think about - constantly, at the edges, in the gaps between other things. It’s there on the bus, in the counting of stops, in the halfway mark arriving when it should. It’s there in the kitchen when he’s working at his station - it’s even in the smell of whatever Michael has set up for him to cook that Tuesday. It’s there in Joshua’s office twice a week, in the leather chair that squeaks and then goes quiet, and it’s there when he’s being asked questions that he answers carefully and honestly about everything except the one thing sitting at the back of the room.

It surprises him that Joshua doesn’t push for more from him. He knows Joshua misses very little, so he knows that Joshua is as aware of his not-thinking as he is, but he never pushes for more. He notices it, and saves it for an undecided later - Gator can tell from the quality of the silences, the way that Joshua doesn’t ask - knowing that, eventually, the question will come.

The fact is, the email has been sent. It exists somewhere else in the world now, read or unread or deleted or - he doesn’t know, and he has no way of knowing. He sent it and then any knowing he may have had stopped, which is the part he hadn’t quite prepared himself for. 

Part of him - a voice he’d kept very quiet, that he’d refused to let the rest of him acknowledge - had held onto something small and naive. Not a plan. Not an expectation. Just a spark, buried somewhere underneath all the careful reasoning and the months of Joshua and the she doesn’t have to reply, I mean that - the possibility that sending it might have been the start of something. Something new. Something that hadn’t existed before.

He’d meant it when he wrote that she didn’t have to reply. He means it still. Ninety-nine percent of him means it completely, has accepted it, has built the acceptance into the architecture of his days the way he’s built everything else - methodically, practically, one Tuesday session at a time.

But the spark is still there, small and stubborn and unreasonable, the way hope tends to be when it’s the last thing left. And the waiting - the not-knowing, the silence that could mean anything or nothing, the clock that reset the moment the email was sent and has been running ever since - is slowly, quietly suffocating it.

He hadn’t thought about the clock resetting. That’s the part he hadn’t prepared for.

He tells himself he’s fine with whatever happens. He tells Joshua the same thing, in their Friday session, two weeks after he sent it. Two weeks exactly. He’s felt every minute of them.

“You’re fine with it - fine with it how?” Joshua asks, from his spot on the edge of his desk, the wooden legs creaking as he gets settled.

“Just… I’m fine. I said what I needed to say. Whatever she does with it is up to her. I’m not - it’s not like I’m sitting around waiting for…”

The silence is thick, broken only by the long sip Joshua takes from his coffee.

“What are you doing instead?” 

“Living my life,” he tells him. “The bus. The centre. The group. Cooking. All of it.”

“That’s good,” Joshua pauses for a moment, more coffee, more creaking as he shifts his weight. “And when the bus gets to the halfway mark, what are you thinking about?”

He doesn’t answer that.

“Okay.” He sets his mug down. “That’s okay. We don’t have to go there today.”

They don’t go there. They talk about the group instead - Marie’s walk that morning, what she described, the colour of the river in the afternoon light, less than last week, less than the week before. He talks about Leticia and the new person by the door who still hasn’t spoken. He talks about Robby, who came in last Tuesday with something different in his voice, something that sounded almost like the beginning of acceptance, and how he’d noticed that and hadn’t said anything because some things you notice and don’t name.

Joshua listens to all of it.

“You’re paying attention,” he says, when the silence settles.

“Yeah, I’m trying.”

“You’re paying attention to a lot of things,” Joshua picks up his mug again, and drinks whatever’s left. “Just not the one you’re pretending not to think about.”

Something that might be a smile crosses his face. “Yep, just not that one.”

His routine carries on. The bus, the halfway mark, the centre. In the kitchen on Tuesdays Michael has moved him on from burgers to omelettes, which had seemed frankly impossible the first time he’d tried - the eggs going in, the heat needing to be exactly right, no way to check by sight whether the edges were setting or burning. But the smell tells him. That’s the thing he keeps discovering, the thing that keeps surprising him - the smell tells him. He knows a good omelette now by the way the butter changes when the eggs hit the pan, by the shift in the air just before the edges catch. He knows from the smell and the sound when to take the pan off the heat and put it under the grill. He knows it before Michael says anything. He knows it before he needs to.

He gets it right more often than not now. That still surprises him too.

He meets with Dot most Fridays - coffee at the place on the corner, or lunch somewhere outdoors if the weather’s held, the easy conversation of two people who have stopped needing to explain themselves to each other. He still catches himself, occasionally, slightly startled by the ordinariness of it. That this is just a thing they do. That she just shows up and he just shows up and they drink their coffees and talk about Scotty’s band or Wayne’s fishing boat or the thing that happened in the group on Tuesday, and none of it requires effort or management or the exhaustion of being careful about it. It’s just - there. Easy. His.

She knows he’s waiting. He doesn’t say it and she doesn’t ask, which is its own kind of conversation. Joshua’s not-asking has a different aspect - deliberate, strategic, the not-asking of someone giving him room to arrive somewhere in his own time. Dot’s is simpler than that. It’s the not-asking of someone who has decided he’ll speak when he’s ready, and until then she’ll just be there, which is what she does, which is what she’s always done, which is - he doesn’t have a word for it that isn’t too large or too small. It’s just Dot. It’s just what she is.

He doesn’t tell her he checks his phone more than he used to. That he’s memorised the sound his phone makes for email notifications and finds himself listening for it in rooms where he shouldn’t be listening for anything except whatever’s in front of him. That on the bus, between the fourth stop and the halfway mark, his mind goes somewhere he’s told it not to go and he lets it, briefly, and then brings it back.

He is, by any reasonable measure, fine.

He is not fine.

****************

September arrives with the unsettledness of a season that hasn’t quite decided whether it wants to change - the mornings cooler, the light on the water slightly lower than the weeks before, the heat lifting some days but not others. You notice these things with the part of your attention that isn’t occupied by the email that you still haven’t replied to.

You’ve stopped counting the number of replies you’ve started and stopped. Some are short - two sentences, three, abandoned to the trash bin before they become anything more. Some are long, longer than his email, longer than most of the emails you sent him over five and a half years, and you read them back and delete them because they say too much, or they don’t say the right things, or both. One of them, written on a Thursday evening with Flynn asleep at your feet and the ocean audible through the open window, gets close - close enough that you save it as a draft instead of deleting it, which you’ve never done before, which feels like progress of a kind.

You open it on Friday morning, reread it three times, and then you delete it.

You start fresh.

Jean notices that your quietness in the Hoh has changed. She doesn’t say so directly - Jean rarely says things directly when indirect will do nicely - but she walks beside you on the return leg one Saturday and asks, very casually, how things are sitting with you now, and you say better, I think, and also worse, I think, depending on the day and she says that sounds about right for where you are and you walk in comfortable silence for a while and Elizabeth, ahead of you on the trail, stops beside the big old cedar and says there she is the way she always does and you think about paying attention while it’s here and you think about the draft you saved and deleted and you think soon.

Flynn has started sleeping on your bed again. You’ve stopped telling him to get down.

Sandra from Seaview calls on a Friday morning in late September, a little after nine. You see the care home’s number on your screen and answer it cautiously - in the way of someone who has been half-expecting a call like this without quite knowing they were expecting it.

“I’m so sorry,” Sandra says, without preamble. “Mrs Okafor died yesterday evening. Her daughter and son-in-law were with her. It was very peaceful, in the end.”

You sit down. You’re in the kitchen, you sit down at the table, and Flynn comes to you immediately and puts his head in your lap.

“What happened?” you ask.

“A fall,” Sandra says. “Wednesday morning. She broke her hip. She went to hospital - we had hoped, we thought there was a chance - but she was eighty-four, you know, and her heart wasn’t strong enough for the surgery, and…” You hear Sandra stop, her voice thicker when she speaks again. “She knew Flynn,” Sandra says, which isn’t a non sequitur, which is Sandra’s way of saying she was herself until the end, she was present, she was the woman you knew.

“She always knew Flynn,” you say, quietly, looking at the boy with his head on your thigh and his big eyes watching yours.

“She always knew Flynn,” Sandra agrees.

You sit at the kitchen table after the call ends and look at nothing in particular for a while. Flynn stays. The weight of his head on your lap, patient and certain, the way he always is when something has happened and he’s decided his job is just to be there.

You don’t go to Seaview that Sunday. You can’t quite face Rosemary and the farm in Idaho and the common room games, knowing that at the end of the east corridor the chair by the window is empty. You message Sandra instead - not this week, I hope that’s okay - and Sandra replies Of course. Take your time.

The funeral is on a Thursday in early October, at a church in the next town, a forty-minute drive along the coast road. You wear the dark wrap dress, the one you wore to Tom’s birthday, because it’s the most respectful thing you own that isn’t black - the family had been clear, no black, nothing sad. It was to be a celebration. You add a pink silk scarf.

Flynn is in his yellow collar, which feels right. He should be recognisable. He should look like what he is.

The church is full. Mrs Okafor had been here for nearly fifty years, had known people, had been known. You sit at the back, Flynn settled at your feet, and you listen to a service that moves between English and Yoruba, the minister switching between them with the ease of someone who has been doing it his whole life, and you understand less than half of it and it doesn’t matter because the parts that matter are universal - the love, the loss, the grief of a life that was long and full and is now over.

Adaeze speaks. She’s in her late fifties, with her mother’s upright quality and her warm smile, and she talks about the garden in Lagos and her father Emmanuel and the redwoods and the pie in the Oregon diner that her mother spent thirty years trying to recreate and never quite managed. She talks about a pale dog named Sunday who used to lie heavy and still in the neighbour’s yard, and how her mother had mentioned, in her last months, a dog she saw on Sundays - or Saturdays, she couldn’t always remember which - a big dog, very calm, very good. “I thought she’d dreamed him up,” Adaeze says. “The way she described him, I thought he was a memory she’d made more vivid than it was.”

She pauses to dab her cheeks with a tissue. Her eyes find you at the back of the church. She spots Flynn at your feet, in his yellow collar with the Therapet tag at his chest, his ears forward, his attention entirely on her.

“He’s real,” she says, and her voice does something complicated, and the church is very quiet.

Afterwards, in the car park, Adaeze comes to find you, her husband and children lingering nearby. She crouches down to Flynn, who accepts her attention with the gravity it deserves, and she keeps her hand on his head for a long time without saying anything.

“She talked about him every week,” she says eventually. “Every time I called. ‘Flynn did this, Flynn sat like that, Flynn knows things’.” She looks up at you. “She wasn’t wrong.”

“No,” you say. “She wasn’t.”

“Thank you,” Adaeze says. “For coming. For - ” She stops. “She was happy, you know. There, in Seaview. I worried about her, I always worried, but she was happy. I think Flynn was part of that.”

You don’t trust yourself to say anything so you just nod, and Adaeze squeezes your hand once and goes back to her family, and you stand in the car park in the early October light with Flynn at your side and think about paying attention while it’s here, and Emmanuel saying the trees and the marriage and the children, pay attention while it’s here, and the email in your inbox that you’ve been drafting replies to for two months and deleting and starting fresh every time.

You think to yourself, I know what I want to say.

Not all of it. Not the hard things, not yet. But the first thing. The small thing. The door left open at the smallest possible scale.

You think, soon.

****************

Gator’s denial and not-thinking holds through most of August.

He gets good at it, which is its own kind of problem. He fills the days - the bus, the centre, the group, the kitchen sessions, Dot on Fridays - and the days are full enough that there are long stretches where he’s pretty sure he’s not thinking about it, where the email and the waiting and the silence exist at a distance he can almost mistake for peace. He gets better at the omelettes. Marie describes a yellow door on her walk one Tuesday, the exact yellow of it, and he thinks to himself, she can still see the yellow. He holds onto that.

The anger arrives on a Thursday in early September, the way anger tends to arrive - not announced or building gradually to a readable crescendo, just suddenly there, huge and fully formed, looking for somewhere to go.

It’s a small thing that starts it. He’s in the kitchen at the centre, Michael behind him and slightly to the right, and he’s making something with chicken and he can’t tell if it’s cooked through and he has to ask Michael to check and Michael checks and tells him it’s fine, it’s cooked, but the asking has undone something that had been holding and by the time he gets to eat his lunch he’s sitting with his hands flat on the table and something hot and formless moving around in his chest.

He thinks about the email. He thinks, it’s been three weeks. He thinks, she’s not going to reply.

And then he thinks, I should have known she wasn’t going to reply. I should have known before I sent it. I did know, and I sent it anyway, and now I’m sitting in a café in Stillwater with chicken I couldn’t even check myself and two weeks of silence and -

He stops the spiral before it can twist too far. He picks up his fork, and he eats the lunch he cooked for himself.

He tells Joshua about it on Friday.

“The anger,” Joshua says. “Tell me about the anger. What does it feel like?”

“Like…” He stops for a moment, and then he tries again. “Like I did everything right and it still didn’t work. Which I know isn’t how it works. I know she doesn’t owe me a reply. I know that.”

“But?”

“But I’m fucking pissed anyway.” He shifts in the chair. “Not at her - I want to be clear about that. I’m not pissed at her.”

“So who are you pissed at?”

He thinks about it. “Roy. Mostly Roy. For - for all of it. For making me someone she had a reason to be afraid of. For making it so that even if she wanted to reply she might not, because somewhere in the back of her mind I’m still connected to him, I’m still his son, and -”

He stops.

“No, Gator. That’s yours,” Joshua says quietly. “That thought. That fear. It’s yours and it’s worth sitting with.”

A few weeks ago he would have left the room. He would have picked up his cane and stormed out, as much as a man struggling with sight loss in an unfamiliar building could storm out. He sticks with it now, stays in his squeaky chair, gets comfortable with the discomfort.

“Yeah, it is,” Gator says.

“Do you believe it?” Joshua asks. “That she sees you only as Roy’s son? Do you see yourself as just Roy’s son?”

He thinks about the emails. About fifteen of them, across five and a half years. About I’ve decided to let myself believe you didn’t want to.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think she does. Not sure about me yet.”

“Then the anger,” Joshua says, “might not be about her at all.”

He sits with that for the rest of the session and most of the journey home.

The bargaining comes in the third week of September, quiet and circular and worse than the anger because the anger at least had direction.

It lives in the gaps - the bus journey, the space between finishing dinner and going to bed, the twenty minutes after the group session when he sits in the café and waits for his coffee. It sounds like, if I’d sent it differently. It sounds like, if I’d said the apology more plainly, or less plainly, or earlier, or not at all. It sounds like, if I’d just left it. If I’d just let her have the last word, which was five and a half years of kindness I didn’t deserve, and been grateful. It sounds like maybe I shouldn’t have responded at all?

He brings it to Joshua in pieces, over two sessions, and Joshua listens to all of it without expression.

“What would it change,” Joshua asks, eventually, “if you’d sent it differently?”

“Maybe she’d have replied.”

“Maybe,” Joshua acknowledges. “Or maybe the reply or the silence would have come regardless, and what you’re doing right now is looking for a version of events where you had more control than you did. We’ve talked about control before.”

Gator doesn’t say anything.

“You made a considered decision. You sat with it for months. You wrote it and rewrote it and brought it here and we talked about it and you sent it when you were ready. You did everything you could do.” He waits a moment before he finishes. “The rest isn’t yours to control.”

“I know that,” he says, through gritted teeth.

“I know you know it,” Joshua says, “but knowing it and feeling it are different things. You’re allowed to feel it.”

He nods. He sits with his hands on his knees. Outside the window of Joshua’s office the courtyard is doing something autumnal - he can feel the change in the air through the open window, something crisper, the coolness of the season turning.

“What if she never replies?” Joshua asks. Not cruelly. Just directly, the way Joshua asks the questions that need asking.

Gator sits with it properly.

“Then she never replies,” he says. “And I said what I needed to say and she knows it and that has to be enough.”

“Does it feel like enough?”

There’s a long pause while he thinks about it.

“Not yet,” he eventually answers. “But I think it will.”

October arrives and with it something that isn’t quite peace but is in the same neighbourhood.

He notices it first on a Tuesday morning - the bus, the halfway mark, the patched asphalt - and he realises that he’s gone almost the full journey without thinking about the email. Not because he’s suppressing it, but because the morning is the morning and the bus is the bus and the halfway mark arrived when it was supposed to and there’s something almost - not good, but workable, about that. About the ordinary machinery of a life continuing to turn.

He tells Dot on Friday, over coffee at the place on the corner she’s started driving to meet him at, the one with the outside tables they haven’t been able to use since August.

“I think I’m okay,” he says. “Like actually okay. Not pretending to be.”

Dot is quiet for a moment. He hears her set her cup down.

“What changed?”

“Nothing,” he smiles. “That’s the thing. Nothing changed. She still hasn’t replied and I don’t know if she will and I’m - I’m okay with not knowing. I hope she’s well. I hope she has a good life.” He turns his cup a full three-sixty. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got left on it. I hope she’s happy.”

Dot doesn’t say anything for a moment.

“That sounds like something real.” 

She says it quietly, but there’s something underneath it - relief, maybe, or the warmth of someone who has been quietly worried and is now quietly not worried, and who is too wise to make a performance of either.

“Yeah,” he nods. “I think it is.”

She picks her cup back up. He hears her drink, set it down again. “You know what I think?”

”What?”

“I think that took longer than it should have and less time than I expected. Both of those things are true at the same time.”

He almost laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “That sounds about right.”

They drink their coffee. Outside the window Stillwater goes about its October morning - the ordinary sounds of it, cars and voices, the noise of an expectant Friday that knows the weekend is coming. The coffee is good. Dot is with him. That’s enough. That’s exactly enough.

He tells Joshua the same thing the following Tuesday.

Joshua listens to every word. He makes the sound that means what he’s heard is important.

“I believe you,” Joshua says. “I want you to know that. I believe you mean it.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Is that it? Is that what acceptance feels like? Because it feels very - blah.”

“Yes,” Joshua says. “There’s no big bang. Blah is exactly what it feels like.”

He’s on his way out of Joshua’s office, cane finding the door, when Joshua calls to him. “Gator.”

He stops.

“Whatever happens next, you’re ready for it. I want you to know that too.”

He nods, then finds the door handle and goes out into the October afternoon. The air is cooler now, the smell of the river and the coffee place and the season turning, and he walks the two blocks uphill to the bus stop and waits.

The bus arrives shortly after, and he gets on, and he counts the stops until he’s home again. 

He is not thinking about the email.

He is, for the first time in two months, genuinely not thinking about it.

****************

You write it on a Wednesday.

It’s late afternoon, the light already shifting toward evening, the ocean through the gap in the trees going that shade of grey-gold that only happens in October when the sun is getting low. Flynn is dozing on his bed at the top of the stairs. The Geneva inbox has been cleared. The quarterly report is filed. There’s nothing left to do that isn’t the thing you’ve been not-doing for two months.

You open the draft, with his name at the top followed by a dash and nothing beneath it. You’ve gone past the point of planning, of deciding in advance what you want to say. You’ve spent two months thinking about it, trying and deleting and trying again, and now it’s October and there’s this feeling in your stomach that feels like something close to relief. You’re ready.

You start writing, and you don’t stop. You don’t read it back, and you don’t make any changes as you go. The feeling in your stomach tells you when to stop, and when it does, you hit send on it immediately.

You close the email app and sit for a moment looking at the ocean through the gap in the trees, and then you open the Nairobi repository and get back to what’s left of the day, because that’s what you do, because the data is still the data and Flynn is on his bed and life continues, which is the thing you’ve spent six years learning to trust.

You’ve done the hard thing, maybe the hardest thing, and you don’t think about it for the rest of the day.

Or rather - you think about it the way you think about something you’ve just let go of. You’re aware of the absence of the heaviness you’ve held for two months. It’s not yours anymore. It’s out there now, somewhere in the world, hitting an inbox in Minnesota. What happens next isn’t yours to control.

You save your work at half past six and close the laptop. You look at the cactus for a moment - the left-side listing, the green arms, the windowsill in the fading light.

Okay, you say out loud.

Flynn appears at the door, ears up, hopeful.  

“Yeah,” you tell him. “Come on, let’s go to the beach.”

****************

Joshua’s four o’clock session runs a little long, which it sometimes does when something worth following comes up and neither of them wants to leave it half-finished. Today it’s the acceptance - him trying to articulate what it actually feels like, which is harder than he’d expected, language being an imprecise instrument for something this quiet and this specific. By the time he’s done he’s tired in the good way, the way that means something has been properly worked rather than avoided.

Dot is waiting outside in the car, which she’d offered that morning when she’d called. I’ll pick you up after Joshua, we’ll get Thai on the way back, Wayne’s taken Scotty to her thing. He’d said yes before he’d finished thinking about it, which is still occasionally surprising to him - how easy yes has become, with her.

The Thai place they like is a ten minute detour. She orders for both of them without asking because she’s remembered his favourites, which is its own thing, and they drive the rest of the way to Scandia with the food in bags on the back seat filling the car with the smell of lemongrass and chilli and something sweet underneath.

“Good session today?” Dot asks him between songs she insists on humming along to.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” he corrects himself. “I’m just - learning to get used to knowing things.”

She makes the sound that means she understands that completely and doesn’t need to say so.

The food is on the counter in its containers when he remembers about his phone. He’d switched it off before the session with Joshua - something he’d started doing a couple of weeks before, something Joshua hasn’t asked him about yet but he knows it’s coming. He turns it back on and the email notification pings out loudly - he’s learned the specific sound of it, has been learning it for two months without meaning to, the way you learn the sounds of things you’re waiting for even when you’ve told yourself you’ve stopped waiting.

He freezes, phone in hand.

Dot is telling him something about Scotty, something that happened at breakfast that had made Wayne laugh so hard he’d almost choked on his coffee, and she stops mid-sentence.

“Gator, what is it?”

“Email.” His voice comes out level. He’s proud of that.

“From -?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He navigates to the email with the careful precision he’s developed over months, the voice commands coming automatically now, and he finds it, and the screen reader tells him the sender address.

He sits with that for a moment.

“It’s her.”

Dot doesn’t say anything.

“It’s her,” he says again. Not for Dot. Just to hear it out loud in a real room, in a human voice, after two months of not hearing it anywhere.

He feels Dot’s hand on his arm. “I’ll just -   I’ll go upstairs. Just shout for me when you’re -”

“No. Read it,” he asks. “Will you read it to me?” He holds the phone out toward her. “Don’t soften it. Whatever it says. Just read it. I don’t want to hear it in the text to speech voice. It needs to be real. Please”

“Okay,” Dot says. Her voice is steady. She takes the phone.

There’s a silence while she finds it. He hears her breath change - just slightly, just once - and then she begins.

“Gator.

I’ve written and deleted and re-written this email a hundred times over the last few weeks, but I’ve decided that this is the one I’ll send. I’m tired of overthinking it. Let’s see what I come up with.”

He doesn’t move. He barely breathes. Dot stops, and he can feel her checking on him before she continues.

“Firstly, the cactus. Yes, I still have it. I don’t know if it got damaged in a move, or if I just bought the runt of the litter -” Dot pauses, just a fraction. “- do cacti come in litters? Anyway, this one leans to the left like it’s drunk. It flowered this summer, a cute little pink bloom at the tip of one of its arms. The flower lasted for a little over a month before the petals went crispy and dropped off. I have no idea if it’ll flower again, but for a few weeks there it was glorious. Now, it’s all green and back to normal, like it’s recovering from a burst of energy.”

In the kitchen, something settles. He can’t name it. He just feels it, the way he feels things now - with the whole of him, with the skin of his hands and the quality of the air and the weight of the room around him.

Dot keeps reading.

“I want to say sorry for the way I emailed you, especially the early ones. I’m not going to apologise for how angry I was, but your email address wasn’t the place to put it. I didn’t expect you to ever find them. I’m honestly pretty embarrassed about it. You didn’t ask to be my emotional dumping ground, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

He hears Dot’s voice do something on embarrassed. Just a slight tremor. She keeps going.

“I want you to know that I read your apology. I believe you mean it. I know that was a difficult thing to say, especially when you had to say it out loud in order to write it. So, thank you for that.”

Dot stops reading. Not for long, just for a breath. Just for the time it takes to collect something.

“You said you have a routine now. A life, or something like it I think you said? What does it feel like? Are you happy?”

The kitchen is quiet.

The Thai food is on the counter, still in its containers, untouched. Somewhere in the house a clock ticks. Outside, the October evening has settled over Scandia - the quiet of it, the trees, the distant sound of something moving on the road.

“Take care,” Dot reads, her voice very quiet now, ending with just the name.

He sits in the quiet for a long time. His hands are in his lap. He’s not moving. He’s just there, in Dot’s kitchen, with the cooling Thai food and the clock ticking and the October evening outside, and something happening in his chest that he can’t name and doesn’t need to.

“Are you happy,” he says out loud. Not a question. Just the words, turned over like he’s inspecting them.

“Yeah,” Dot says softly.

“She asked if I’m happy.”

“I know, hon,” Dot says, and he hears her place the phone down on the counter.

He sits with that.

And then something gives way inside him - the collapse of something that has been held very tightly for a very long time finally being allowed to give way. His shoulders drop. His breath changes. He puts his face in his hands and something moves through him that isn’t crying, can’t be crying - the ducts Munch had cauterised in his attack don’t produce tears anymore - but is everything else that crying is, the shaking and the sound of it, low and unsteady, the whole weight of two months and six years and everything before that coming through at once.

Dot moves without hesitation. She comes around the island and wraps her arms around him, reaching up because of the height of him, and he folds down because of the height of her, and it’s slightly awkward and entirely right, and she holds on.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

He can’t say anything. He just lets her hold him, in her kitchen, in the house she built with Wayne, in the life she made after everything Roy took from both of them, and he shakes and she holds on and the clock ticks and outside the October evening continues, ignorant of the fact that something has just broken open here and started, very quietly, to let the light in.

She doesn’t let go.

And somewhere in the middle of it all - not as a decision, just as a realisation she becomes conscious of the way you become conscious of things that have been true for longer than you knew - Dot understands that she has forgiven him completely.

She hasn’t forgotten. She hasn’t forgotten what Roy did to them, and she hasn’t forgotten what Gator did to her, to Wayne, to Scotty and the house that Halloween. Those things happened and left their marks and the marks are still there and forgiveness doesn’t erase them.

But she has forgiven him. This man, sitting in her kitchen, sobbing with his face dry and her arms wrapped around him. Who asked her to come and kept asking. Who she turned up for in prison every month for years and thought about daily between every visit. This man, who accepted her help and has stuck to every single condition that the prison, the parole board, the lawyers and therapists and Lorraine Lyon placed on him. 

This man. She has forgiven this man.

She told herself once, at a kitchen island at 3am with a legal pad and a cold cup of tea in front of her, that she would get him out of prison and then he’d be on his own.

She holds him tighter and presses a kiss to his head.

Steve clamps his jaw shut, looking over at you from the corner of his eyes.

“I agree.” Nancy nods. “I’ll go check with Mrs. Byers.”

“I’ll go,” Jonathan says. “I know where they are—she’s busy with Will.” He pauses, then sighs out the word, “Probably.”

He turns on his heel and leaves the four of you standing in a square, Robin’s shoulder pressed against Steve’s, while you look from them to Nancy, concern etched over your face. 

“This just feels,” you say, “I dunno. Bad.”

“Yeah, because it is,” Robin says. “This is like, the worst bad it could possibly be. Like, Defcon level 5 bad.”

“That’s the least bad one,” Steve says.

“What?” Robin asks, absently, almost like she forgot what she’d just said.

“Defcon 5,” Steve repeats. “That’s the lowest one. Defcon 1 is the really bad one.”

“Ok, then it’s Defcon 1,” Robin echoes him. “Whatever. Any Defcon sucks!”

The group lulls into an introspective silence until the front door to Jonathan’s house opens and he returns, clutching a handful of straws. He returns to the circle, fidgeting with the straws until he’s back between Nancy and Robin, and then just holds out his fist so you can all pull a straw from his hand.

“Three long,” he specifies, “two short.”

He offers them to Nancy first, who takes a breath, chooses a straw, and—admittedly—looks a little bit miffed that it’s not a short one.

Robin reaches out next, plucking a straw from Jonathan’s hand before you can. She tugs it free. 

Long.

Jonathan moves his hand over to you and Steve, and Steve gestures to you to pick first—there’s only one safe straw left, and he’ll suffer Jonathan if he has to, to make sure that none of the women in the little quintet you’ve cobbled together are in danger.

Taking a breath, you pinch the straw on your right between your thumb and index finger, before changing to the one on your left. You ease it out of Jonathan’s hand, and just swallow thickly when you see you’ve pulled a short straw. 

A slight tension settles over the group as you huff a short laugh through your nose, because of course that’s your luck. 

“Great,” you say, wanting to flick the plastic away but instead you hang onto it, watching as Steve and Jonathan stare each other down.

“You’ll be fine,” Nancy says. “Steve or Jonathan will be with you.” She steps closer. “Do you want to trade?” she adds surreptitiously. She’s more capable than you, she’d be the obvious choice—but you were screwed over by your own idea, so your integrity feels like it’s forcing your hand.

“No, it’s—you need to stay here with Mike. And…Will. If Jonathan ends up going with me. I’ll be ok,” you reply, glancing over at her. “Thanks, though.”

“Just pick one,” Jonathan is saying to Steve, and you watch as Steve reaches for the straw you almost chose first, taking it with no hesitation from Jonathan’s closed fist.

It almost pains you to see that it’s also short, so you’d have been going no matter which you chose. Typical.

Jonathan opens his hand to show his straw is long, just for the fairness of the game, and you turn to Steve, ignoring the way Robin is bouncing a little in place, hands curled into the hem of her sweater before she releases it and just crosses to you, putting her hands on your shoulders.

“You’ll be so fine,” she says. “Steve won a fight against a, like, Russian soldier.”

“He what?” you ask, but before you can get an answer, Steve just steps between you and Robin and meets your eyes.

“Let’s go,” he says. “We’re gonna need to gear up before we head down there again.”

&&

You end up with an old canvas jacket over a tank top, one that Mrs. Byers found for you in the back of the hall closet, the sleeves a little too long. Nancy approached you, shoving her own boots into your hands, and said you’d be better in those, as opposed to the tennis shoes you had on. Steve is still in his jeans too, now wearing an old t-shirt that Jonathan provided. It looks a little too small for Steve, his shoulders a little broader, but it’s hidden beneath his bomber jacket. He only shrugs his shoulders, stretching the fabric out over them before he leads you outside, Jonathan trailing behind, the designated driver to get you to the crossover point.

“You’ll be fine,” he says, mostly to you, because Steve looks a hell of a lot more composed than you do, your breath a little thin, your eyes unblinking as you fixate on nighttime scenery as it passes by. “It一shouldn’t be like, you know, before.”

“No bats?” you ask, almost laughing, because even though you saw the evidence of their story firsthand, even though you’ve been around long enough to know every detail they provided is true, it still sounds crazy to speak it aloud.

“No bats,” Jonathan promises, even though there’s no way he could realistically know.

“Ok,” you say, looking at Steve in the backseat. His jaw is set, and when he feels your eyes on him, he looks over at you.

“You can still sit this one out,” Steve says, and to his credit, Jonathan doesn’t speak for you.

“What do you mean?” you ask, frowning. “I一got a short straw.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says, “but you shouldn’t一have to. You’ve never gone down there, and you should keep it that way.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Jonathan glance up to look at Steve in the rearview, undoubtedly wondering if the fucking Hair is gonna try to pull him along and leave you with the car.

“It was my idea,” you say. “I pulled a short straw fair and square.”

“Having to go down there isn’t fair,” Steve says.

“Well, you went last time, so having to go again is what’s not fair, isn’t it?” you counter.

“That’s not what I said一” Steve tries to protest, but again, you speak over him.

“I’m going,” you say. “End of story. The quicker you accept that, the easier this will be. Stop一thinking about me and focus.”

Steve huffs a little noise of disbelief, but quietens down and the rest of the drive passes with just the sound of the engine and the tires speeding over the asphalt, potholes and cracks in the road making him slow the car to a stop.

“This is as far as we can drive,” Jonathan says, holding his foot on the brakes as you and Steve both hesitate, looking at the red glow of the rift a bit further up the street, the entire area abandoned and desolate, destroyed by the X-shaped fissure quadrisecting Hawkins’ downtown.

What look like ashes or fiery motes dance above the broken earth, and you force yourself to move so Steve has no choice but to follow.

You feel for the door handle, not taking your eyes off of the red glow ahead of you, and push open the squeaky door, stepping out of the car. The gravel crunches underfoot as you stand and move back a step, slamming the door. Behind you, you hear the rear driver side door creak and slam too, and you look back to meet Steve’s eyes over the roof of the car. Neither of you speaks, but neither of you has to.

“I’ll be here waiting,” Jonathan says, to Steve一he’s rolled down the window on his side. “As long as it takes. But don’t take too long.”

“No sweat,” Steve says, clapping his hand onto the roof, displacing some of the dust that’s already settled onto the car, just by virtue of idling in one place. “We got this.”

You wait for Steve to start walking forward, joining him as you traverse the rocky, destroyed street, the headlights from the Byers’ car illuminating you from behind as you go.

“What’s it like down there?” you ask, carefully stepping over a large chunk of blacktop.

“It’s…” Steve says, his voice trailing off. “Not great.”

“That helps,” you snip, because you’d like maybe a little preparation before you dive in.

“I’ll go first,” Steve says. “it’s一a little trippy. Just… give me a sec after I go through, and then I’ll catch you.”

“Catch me?” you ask, but Steve’s already adjusting his jacket, fiddling with the flashlight he’s holding, running a hand back through his hair, dusted with whatever the fine granules are that have been falling over Hawkins constantly for the last day.

“It’s一I mean, it’s called the Upside Down for a reas一you’ll see. Just. The dizziness will pass quick, promise.”

You open your mouth to say something else, but even as you do, you realize you have no idea what to say or to ask. So instead, you just watch as he crouches down beside the rift, fingers curling over the edge, and as he leans forward, you look back to Jonathan, who’s standing outside the car now, leaning against the hood, watching you both.

When you turn back to look at Steve, he’s gone.

You startle, because yes, you expected it, and yes, you knew this was all real, but for some reason his there-one-second-gone-the-next disappearing act throws you.

“You can go,” Jonathan says, encouraging. “He’ll一be ready by now.”

“Have you gone down there?” you ask.

He pauses, then shakes his head. “Not yet.”

You swallow the lump in your throat, then snicker. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

He hesitates, then smirks. “Bon voyage.”

You hold his gaze for another moment, like he’ll stop you一of course he won’t, you wouldn’t if you were him一and then replicate Steve’s movements as closely as you can remember. Crouching down. Gripping the edge. That was all you’d seen, but you close your eyes and tip yourself forward, expecting一actually, you have no fucking idea what to expect, and as your own body weight propels you forward through the rift, you feel strong hands grip your upper arms, pulling you through the rest of the way until you’re in an environment that feels colder, inherently. Like there’s no warmth here, no sun, nothing living, only death and decay and rot.

You stumble, because like Steve told you, there is a moment when your equilibrium is so completely off it’s almost like you have vertigo. He does catch you, as promised and your hands grip his arms back for a moment until your body reorients itself and you can stand without holding onto him.

“Thanks,” you say, looking around. It’s uncanny一you’re in Hawkins, downtown. It looks the same but still so drastically different that you feel as though you’ve just stepped into a nightmare.

“Come on,” Steve says, gently, and you can tell he doesn’t want to linger in one place too long. His hand is still on your arm, even though you’ve turned enough that you can walk beside him.

All of the air is stale down here, and as you walk through the inverse version of your hometown, you start to become attuned to the strange sounds of this place, the一odd clicks off to the side, a rushing roar occasionally from behind or above you, but you never see anything, never feel anything other than Steve’s fingers pressing into your arm through the jacket.

You don’t know how long you walk for, and you lose your bearings in the dimness of the Upside Down, but Steve is confidently striding forward like he knows exactly where you are and where you’re going. Between you, it’s silent, which you don’t mind一just the sound of your breathing and a few short exclamations when your foot twists on a rock, or Steve drops the flashlight, his quiet little “Oops” actually making you smile a little as he ducks down to pick it up, wiping the dirt from the lens.

You walk further, Nancy’s boots clomping alongside Steve’s quieter hiking shoes, and when you reach the base of a hill, you both stop.

“Up?” you ask, and Steve finally releases your arm. You feel the absence like a presence, because you hadn’t realized how much it was comforting you until it was gone, but he glances over at you, nods, and then gestures for you to head up first.

“I’ll follow you,” he says, “make sure you don’t slip.”

Making sure you don’t fall一It’s thoughtful in the way you expect from Steve, even though you don’t know him that well. You’re only wrapped up in this insanity because you know一no. Knew…Eddie. You knew Eddie. He was your neighbor, a couple doors over, and you were friends in that way where you waved to each other when you were grabbing the mail, or said hi if you happened to pass at the store, or noticed when a girl died in his trailer while he was screaming bloody murder and had to go on the lam. It was hard not to get involved when you’d rushed outside to see what the fuck was going on with all the noise only to watch him split seconds later, peeling out of the lot. 

Your first mistake had been even stepping out your front door that evening. Your second mistake had been peeking inside his trailer, your third had been finding that Henderson kid he had mentioned to you a few times in passing…and probably your fiftieth fucking mistake had been suggesting drawing fucking straws to see who got to pay a fucking visit to this scenic fucking shithole.

“Over there,” Steve says, as you crest the hill, pointing vaguely in the direction of a thick copse of trees. “Pretty, uh, dusty.”

He’s right: The trees are surrounded by what looks like a hazy cloud of dust, dense enough to look like fog from afar. It’s practically shimmering even in the darkness, and as Steve shines the flashlight toward it, even though you’re a good distance away, it looks like you’ve agitated it, almost like being illuminated caused the fine particles to move faster. Like observing them made them, somehow, aware of your presence.

You dig the toe of your boot into the ground below you. “So that’s where it’s coming from then,” you say, eager to leave. “Let’s go tell Hopper and Dustin and everyone.”

You start to turn, ready to head back the way you came, but Steve’s arm hooks around your elbow again. You try to suppress how having him back in contact with you does make you feel a little bit better once again.

“No, come on. We need to see if something’s…doing that.”

“It’s just us, Steve,” you argue. “We don’t know enough about anything down here to just go walking into…whatever that is. It looks like…someone cast cloudkill or something.”

Steve quirks an eyebrow at you. “Please tell me you didn’t just bring D&D into this.”

“That’s what it looks like!”

“Dustin would be so proud.” He smirks a little to himself. “Ok,” he says. “I’m gonna go take a closer look. They’ll want to know more and I’d like to be able to answer whatever questions we can when we’re back topside. Just wait here.” He takes off down the hill, minding his steps as he goes. 

“Wait,” you try to call after him, not wanting to be too loud. You watch as his flashlight beam moves over the dust again, the swirling almost appearing to move faster as he approaches it, like it wants him to reach it. “Steve!”

You hiss the word as loud as you dare, and he pauses, stopping at the bottom of the slanted ground. 

“It’s ok,” he calls back up to you. “I’ll be right back.”

“Let’s just go back!” you say, glancing around behind you as something一somewhere back the way you came from一makes a noise that disrupts the otherwise quiet landscape. That clicking sound again.

“I promise it’s fine,” he says. “I won’t be long.”

“No, Steve—” you say, and he pauses, watching with pursed lips as you start forward.

“Come on, then,” he says, resigned, waiting for you as you also make your way down, the ground uneven and the dirt sliding beneath your feet as you descend.

He’s still in the same spot when you reach him, and he holds out a hand for you to take if you need it. Your gut wants you to reach for it, for him, but you ignore the impulse; you’re back on (mostly) flat ground now, you can walk without assistance. Besides… you both might need both hands readily available if shit goes sideways. Or, uh. Upside down.

You flinch at yourself for even thinking it, because that was stupid. So stupid.

“Hold on,” Steve says, holding his arm out horizontally so you stop walking, because while you were in your own little world lamenting your dumb joke, you’d gotten even closer to the treeline and the dust is very, very much thicker here.

“Oh,” you say, because the way it’s clouded there, it reminds you of when freshwater and saltwater meet but can’t mix, different viscosities preventing them from commingling. “That’s…”

“Weird,” Steve says, and before you can suggest that this is definitely enough information to bring back to the group, he steps forward, approaching the trees.

“Steve!” you hiss. “What the hell, why are you like this?”

He looks back at you, a faint smile quirking up one side of his mouth. “I wish I knew.”

You stand outside of the range of the… dust, or whatever the hell it is, until he reaches the trees. Even from where you’re standing, you can see when he shines the flashlight over them, they look diseased, dead, the bark crumbling, the trunks covered in thick vines. They shine a little in the light, covered in sap or… something far more vile.

“Come back,” you implore him, but he doesn’t listen, and you’re not sure if he can’t hear you or if he just ignored your request. “Steve!”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Come here, it looks like… just come here.”

You don’t want to, but you do, because the entire reason you’re even here is so Steve didn’t come down into this place alone. The air doesn’t smell or taste different when you take a step forward, but it feels softer almost, brushing against your skin like baby powder, and by the time you reach Steve, you feel like you’ve been wrapped in silk, or velvet maybe, like the very air itself is cradling you.

“Look at this,” he says, moving the flashlight closer to the vines. “Do you see that?”

You look closer, not sure what he means at first, until you do see it. It looks like a stem broken off of the vine, like a flower had been there and was now gone. You can see a scattering of them all up and down the vine, and the vines beside it; the entire tree is covered in the same stems. Like it had sprouted blooms once, but they’d shriveled, losing their petals but the central disc where the pollen collected remained.

“Flowers?” you asked.

“I don’t know…” Steve said, reaching out toward one of the stems.

“Hey!” you said, grabbing his wrist with both hands, stopping him before he can touch it. “We’re not touching them. No way.”

“It’s fine,” Steve said. “Just… back up a little.”

“Please don’t,” you say, not moving. Steve extends his arm again, using it to guide you back, and then presses one of the un-petaled flower stems down. You hold your breath, but nothing happens, and when Steve moves his hand back, the stem just rises back to its previous position, unremarkably.

“See?” Steve says, looking back at you. “It’s fine.”

You exhale heavily, nervous still, even though you now have the empirical evidence that yes一it was fine.

“I guess,” you admit, and before you can react, Steve is walking past the treeline, between the old, creaking trunks, twigs snapping beneath his feet. “I swear to god, Harrington…” You mumble it mostly to yourself, and then follow him, because you don’t want to have to explain to anyone that you lost Steve because you were too scared to follow him into some trees.

Even though you’re fairly certain, like, anyone would understand.

He’s stopping at random trees, shining the flashlight on them, but every flowered vine you find looks the same as the first one一flowers, no petals, the center bare of any pollen or residue.

“Maybe we can just一take one of the stems and bring it back. And leave. Now.”

“We don’t know that’s what’s causing the dust,” Steve says, and you actually grab him, spin him around, and stare him down with your hands on your hips.

“I think,” you say, lifting your hands exasperatedly into the air, “we can extrapolate that they are what’s causing it.”

But he’s not listening. You can tell because he’s looking behind you, the flashlight just a little bit off to your left. You turn to see what’s caught his interest, and find it immediately. It’s one of the flowers, but not barren. The petals are a sickly green-blue, the same as the rest of the vines, and the disc is very clearly covered in a thin layer of pollen. Steve shuts the flashlight off and you see how he noticed it一it’s bioluminescent.

“Oh,” you say again, looking back at him. “That’s…even weirder.”

“We should bring that one back,” he says.

“I still don’t think we should touch it,” you say.

“Yeah,” he agrees, surprising you. “Probably not, but一I mean…if we can learn anything about anything it’ll be from that one, right?”

“I…” you start to say, then sigh. “I guess.”

“All right, just,” he says, handing you the flashlight. “Hold this.”

“Do you need the light?” you ask, running your thumb over the button to turn it back on.

“No,” he says, stepping past you and reaching up toward the flower. “I got it一”

As soon as his fingers touch the stem, the flower reacts一actually reacts. It appears to contract, the way you’d expect a Venus fly trap to close when its prey triggers it, and then the petals fall away, down over Steve’s hands, his face, and the pollen follows, the glimmering particles landing on him, on you, wisping away through the trees to settle, no longer glowing, wherever they fell through the stagnant air.

“Steve!” you scold him, but even as you do, you start to feel… off.

“You ok?” Steve asks, turning to you. His eyes meet yours and you feel a pull, you feel the same vertigo you felt when you first arrived here.

“Yeah,” you say, before the world slides sideways. “Wait. No.” You move to brace yourself against the tree, pressing the side of your forearm against it, letting your forehead rest there for a moment as you try to compose yourself.

“No,” Steve echoes you. “Yeah, me… me neither.”

“What the hell was that?” you ask, turning the flashlight on. With the beam lit up again, you can see how shaky your hands are, because you angle it up and despite your best effort, you simply cannot keep the stem of the flower that exploded centered in the light. “Jesus Christ,” you mumble to yourself, dropping the lit flashlight because seeing yourself so obviously affected by whatever you just inhaled is making you feel even more scared than you already are.

You register Steve moving away from you, walking around in the tight space, shaking his hands out like he’s trying to rid them of something.

You suck in a breath.

“Are you like. Hot?” you ask, pulling off the heavy jacket and draping it over your shoulder, just to have something to do with your shaking hands.

“What?” Steve asks in return, but you can hear the tightness in his voice.

You swallow, stepping away from the tree, and because whatever the fuck is happening to the two of you is happening, you bump into him just as he nears you with his pacing, neither paying any mind to the other. Where his hand brushes your arm, your skin tingles, tightens—feels like it’s going to blister. And then it happens to the rest of your body.

But just as quickly as it does, it dissolves away, leaving you feeling cold, wanting.

“Are you ok?” Steve asks again, in a way that you can tell he felt whatever that was too. But also in the way that you can tell he’s, maybe, handling it a little better.

“Still no,” you say. 

“Right,” Steve says. “Yeah. ‘Cause you just…” he trails off, and as soon as he mentions it you realize, belatedly, that the searing feeling of his bare skin against yours—your arms mind you—made you loose a moan from deep in your chest, low and unbidden, soft but heavy.

The moment hangs between you for a second, your heart hammering in your chest, an uncomfortable pressure starting to build between your legs.

“Hey,” Steve says, and you look up at him, and when you do you realize he’s much closer than he was moments ago, and he was already right beside you. “Hey, do you, um…” he trails off, and in the ambient light emanating from the flashlight on the ground beside you, you can see his gaze drop down to your lips.

Instinctually一because all of a sudden you feel like every single impulse and sense you have has been reduced to its basest level一you let your eyes lower to his mouth too, and when you see them, when you watch as his teeth worry his lower lip between them, when you see his cheeks hollow for a moment, when you catch a brief glimpse of his tongue, the same question that you’re certain he was about to ask you pops into your mind, and you answer what he didn’t even ask.

“Yes,” you say, and without further hesitation, without any thought at all, you take his face in your hands and press your lips to his.

Simultaneously you feel both immense relief and immeasurable desire, your stomach churning, your lips parting as Steve groans into your mouth. You can’t help but press your hips to his, parting your lips to let his tongue lick against yours, and your hands curl into his hair as you kiss him wildly, tongues and teeth and absolutely no reticence, the desperation clear on your part and his.

“Fuck,” you mutter as his hands tug your tank top up, pushing it over your tits, not bothering to unclasp your bra but just shoving that up and over your chest too, and you don’t even care that he’s undressing you in the middle of the weird ass woods in some alternate dimension. You don’t care that you’ve been stricken with the urge to fuck some guy you barely know, and only know because of some of the direst circumstances in history. You don’t care that he’s caging you in against the tree, the vines and bark scraping against your back as he leans down to bypass your neck completely and latch onto one of your tits, his mouth working at you in a way that you could tell on an ordinary night in an ordinary bed in ordinary Hawkins would feel wonderful, but now is only making the ache between your legs worsen, because you need part of him in contact with part of you and it’s not his mouth on your nipple.

“Steve,” you gasp, tone high, thready. “I need一oh my god, I can’t一” you stop yourself, because you know what it is that you want but you can’t very well tell him that you need his cock. You do not know each other like that, but as soon as the thought crosses your mind, he pulls back from you, shrugging off his jacket as well, letting it fall to the ground behind him as he undoes his jeans and shoves them down.

You’re on him before he even pulls his hands away from the waistband一both hands wrapping around his shaft, coaxing him to hardness even though he’s already most of the way there. Your entire being shudders with relief as soon as you feel his hot, girthy cock in your hands, and he rushes you back against the tree, mouth taking yours again as you stroke him with both hands, smearing the copious amount of precome he’s leaking all down his length. He’s so wet it coats your hands, your wrists even, as you accidentally let them brush against him as you jerk him off.

“This is”一you gasp out as he breaks away to move his lips down to your neck一“weird, right?”

“Yes,” Steve answers, but even as he says it, he’s moving his hands from your waist to your front, fingers curling into the waistband of your jeans and slipping the button. He undoes the zipper and doesn’t even bother trying to lower your pants down to your thighs like his are一he just shoves his hand into your underwear, palm skimming below your belly button until he reaches your mound, his middle finger sliding between your lips to touch your clit, the pad of his finger rubbing over it, not gently, but hard, harsh, immediate pressure that should feel good, but does absolutely nothing for you.

Strangely, you realize一you’re getting more enjoyment out of touching him, than you are from him touching you.

“God, that’s good,” Steve breathes against your mouth, and you realize he must be feeling the same一only getting any relief when he got his hands on you.

“What’s happening?” you ask, lips on the corner of his, breath warm on his cheek.

“I don’t know, I一” Steve says, licking into your mouth before pressing his forehead against yours, looking into your eyes as he thrusts his hand down further into your jeans, the force of it moving them down your hips without any help, and then his fingers are sliding through your folds. “You’re一so wet一I, I never felt anyone like, like this一”

“This is fucking,” you stammer, but the thought of exactly what it is leaves you as he curls two fingers inside of you, and he shudders in relief. You pull him closer by his cock, letting one hand move over it as you reach lower, cupping his heavy balls in your hand, massaging them and tipping your head back, eyes fluttering closed as you do.

“We should一stop,” Steve says, but you shake your head, then nod, then shake your head again.

“No, we can’t… Don’t want to,” you admit.

Steve’s voice is thick like honey, dripping with arousal as he speaks to you, tucking his cheek against yours so he can whisper directly into your ear. “Take一take everything off. Turn around.” It’s dark and deep and you reluctantly release his cock, let him slide his fingers out of you, and then the two of you strip the rest of your clothes off, denim landing on the dirt and leaves, his shirt landing in a heap as he helps you with your bra, and then you’re both naked in the cursed forest, and he’s pressing himself against your back, hands roaming your front. It feels nice but does nothing to assuage the arousal still coiling in your belly, and you push yourself into him, the heated skin of his cock smearing precome over your ass as his hips slide against you. 

“Steve,” you whine, and your tone spurs him into action, his hands landing on your hips, pushing you down, down to your knees and then all fours, and then one of his hands is sliding down your spine to stop between your shoulder blades, and then the next thing you know, your shoulders and tits are being pressed into the dirt, your ass up in the air, presenting yourself to him. You turn your head as much as you can to look back at him, straining as he holds you down.

He’s kneeling behind you, and you watch as his eyes meet yours, hazy with lust, with desperation, and he only nods once at you before you see him reach for his cock with his free hand and press the head against your weeping slit.

Your whole body quivers, and you would have pushed back if he wasn’t keeping you firmly in place, your arms trapped beneath you, hands scrabbling for purchase on your own thighs, holding onto yourself as you feel the pressure on your pussy increase when Steve leans into you with purpose.

He enters you in one deep, thick stroke, and as soon as you engulf him, as soon as you feel him splitting your walls open on his cock, you shudder and come instantly with a loud cry, sobbing from momentary relief, pleasure raining down over you as the sheen of sweat on your skin worsens. Your entire body is aflame like you’ve got a fever, and you clench around Steve's cock when you feel his hips grinding against your ass as you realize that he came too, suddenly, with a harsh gasp. 

But then he’s moving again, back out of you and then pushing in, pushing desperately, chasing the feeling again. Because your first orgasm wasn’t satisfying, barely any of the edge siphoning off despite how much it affected you, and the way he’s digging his fingertips into your hips as he pounds at you tells you his wasn’t either. He’s fucking his come back into your pussy, easing the slide, your thighs dripping with it already as flecks of his release land on your skin. 

“Steve,” you say, voice watery, because you haven’t even come down from your first orgasm and you can already feel another one cresting on the horizon.

“Do you一does this一feel good for you, t-too?” he asks, and you know he’s asking because he must feel the same as you一unsatisfied, wanting more, chasing another and another and another.

“Yeah, it一” you say, gasping as he leans over you, drilling his cock into you even deeper, reaching places inside of you you’ve never felt on your own. “You feel so一so good, Steve, please just一” You falter again, but unless you say it how will he know? How will he know how badly you want this, want him, unless you tell him? “Just keep一going, keep, keep coming in一in me, oh, god, I…” 

You’d feel embarrassed to sound so wanton and lewd if not for the way he answers you, pressing his hand more firmly against your back, sliding it up to your neck, and then finally, relenting for a brief moment so he can tangle his fist into your hair and use it to press your face down into the dirt.

“You have no一idea,” he replies, his hips snapping against your ass, his cock coated with his own spunk, your fluids, dripping down onto his balls, onto the forest floor. “How good you一you feel, around一fuck, you’re so一so一” He fucks into you again, and you feel his cock twitch deep within you, coming again, his release flooding you, his rigid cock not softening and not leaving your cunt, not fully anyway.

His voice sounds slightly more even when he speaks, but still frenzied.

“You feel that?” he asks, and you nod, sliding one of your hands up your stained thigh, sticky with your arousal. “Feel me inside you, right? Feel how一what you’re doing to me?”

“Steve,” you whimper, as he starts moving again, the wet sounds coming from between your bodies obscene, the sound of him fucking his own come loud, filthy, and it ensnares you, your lips parting of their own accord as you feel the saliva dribbling out of your mouth, but you can’t do much to stop it, not with him holding you down, with your arms tucked beneath you, with the way you’re now rubbing at your own clit because you feel so full with two loads in you that you need to come, need to feel it leak out of your hole around his cock, need the force of your orgasm to empty you so he can do it all over again on a clean slate.

“I can feel you,” Steve says, voice choked as he slams into you and stops, straightening up, releasing your head and your hair and clamping his hands down on your hips, rolling his front shallowly against yours, letting his cock just barely move out before it dips right back in, and the stretch of your slit around him, the feeling of your own hand working at your clit, finally sends you over the edge and you turn your face into the ground, hiding your shame as you realize he just came a third time, your pussy milking the orgasm from him as it spasmed and clenched down, begging it from him. The dirt sticks to your face, your lips and chin and you squeeze your eyes closed as you feel him pull out一again, not fully, only partly because you chase him, leaning back into him, wanting him to stay rooted deep within you一but even as you do, you still feel the thick drops of his come ooze out of you around him, rolling down your thighs, collecting in the crease of your knees.

“Do you feel any一better?” Steve asks, and in spite of the question, he pushes back into you, displacing more of his semen, forcing more of it out around him, staining your front along with his this time.

“Yes,” you answer, “no一can you fuck me a-again?”

Steve’s hands smooth over your back一you feel a little less heady, a little less one-track minded, but the burn is still there, the one that needs him moving into you again, pounding his front against your back, giving it to you over and over.

“I still need it too,” he says, and that makes you feel marginally better until he leans over you, letting his back rest against your front, letting your legs support his weight on top of you as he circles both arms beneath you, one hand pressing against up against your stomach, the other moving between your come-covered thighs to nudge your hand away and let his fingers work at your clit this time.

“Fuck一Steve,” you sob, because he’s not moving this time, just letting his cock sit inside you, heavy, slick with his own spunk, and his breath is heavy in your ear as he just rubs your clit, letting you squeeze down on him, unmoving inside you. Your walls flutter around him, gripping him tight, and Steve’s hand on your clit feels worlds different than your own did一your orgasm takes you over by surprise, hitting you out of nowhere so strongly that you buck back against him, wanting to feel him deeper even though he’s fully seated in you, riding out your orgasm with you until you sigh, eyes closed, cheek pressing to the dirty ground, smearing your own drool against the detritus below you.

His fingers slip away from your clit and he starts moving again, and even though you want it, you whine, the noise in your throat crackly and petulant, and without pulling out of you, needing to stay joined the exact same way you do, he holds you tight against him and rolls the both of you onto your side. He’s still inside you, and with the same arm that he’d just had looped around your stomach, he hooks your leg on his wrist, pulling your leg up to the side and holds it there, out of his way, exposing your cunt as he fucks you from behind this time, the new position just as intense but so, so much better, your back resting against his front, his skin slick with sweat as he clings to you, almost as desperate as you feel. 

“Almost一almost there,” he says, and you’re not sure what he means, because you’re still bleary with arousal, still want to come on his cock countless more times, still want to feel him lingering inside you for days.

“Please touch me,” you beg, “need you一need it to be you, it doesn’t一work when it’s me, Steve, please一”

“Sh,” he hushes you, his voice soft as he leans a little further into you, rising to prop himself up on his elbow. He doesn’t release your leg一to the contrary, he leans forward, pushing your leg further up to the crook of his elbow, holding your legs open at an even wider angle, and lets his now free hand slip between your folds to find your clit.

You sob when he does, because you come again the moment he touches it, the swollen bead throbbing beneath the pads of his fingers, kicking under his ministrations as he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow, and you rise to your peak again, barely even coming down from the first一or maybe you just didn’t stop coming. You don’t know, you don’t care, because after this many, you’re starting to feel like yourself again, but the feeling is still there, you still need more.

“It’s一so much,” you mumble, and Steve presses a short kiss to the sensitive spot behind your ear.

“You feel so good, though,” he says, his hips still curling into yours, his cock not as deep now, both of you contorted around each other, back to front, limbs entangled, his fingers on your clit, the head of his cock in the perfect position to rub repeatedly against your g-spot, and you shudder a sigh as you feel yourself come again, weaker this time, your cunt sopping and sore.

“Come in me again,” you ask weakly, because each time he did, each time he filled you to the brim and it spilled out of you, a little bit of the haze lifted, the feverish impulse lessening.

“Almost,” he replies, thrusting into you, the head of his cock nudging your g-spot and you feel another orgasm beginning to rise, but not strong enough to overtake you yet.

“Please,” you beg, desperate now that you can feel the end might be in sight. You taste dirt in your mouth and feel itchy, skin irritated from twigs and leaves on the ground below you, but they’re the first sensations you’ve felt other than all-consuming arousal since the flower disintegrated onto you both, and you welcome them.

“Just一hold on another一another一” Steve says, and you feel him circle your clit quicker as he fucks into you, his cock dragging against your walls as you tighten up around him, and when he snaps them forward, up into you, shot after shot of his come spurting from the tip of his dick, your whole body tightens, loosens, releases after another orgasm一weak, feeble, and final, you hope一and then you still. Both of you, still, filthy, sweaty messes on the ground, dirty and sticky, skin slick between your thighs, his chest sticking to your back as you pull away from him. You stay on your side, wiping your face with the cleaner of your two hands, scraping away the dirt and spit stuck to your chin. You hear Steve behind you shuffle to his feet, and then his bomber jacket is draped over your shoulders, just to give you some modicum of modesty until you can stand and dress yourself.

“What the fuck happened?” you ask, wiping at the rest of your face now, adjusting the jacket to cover yourself as you feel his spend slowly trickle out of you. You twist, looking up at Steve where he’s standing, pulling his jeans back on. He uses his shirt to wipe his dick clean, his thighs, and then looks over to you.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he says, and zips his fly before kneeling beside you, making to lift the jacket to wipe you clean with his shirt too, but you bat his hand away. You wanted him so desperately, had him, even, the two of you unable to control yourselves, and now you don’t even want him to look at you.

“Can you get me my一shirt,” you ask, pointing to where your tank top landed.

Wordlessly, Steve gets you your clothes, handing them to you and looking away as you shift yourself to your knees. You suppress the whimper as you feel yourself gaping, the sticky mess of his come falling from your pussy lips, and you try to clean yourself up as best you can, dressing yourself in your jeans and snapping the jacket closed to hide the fact that you’re now shirtless. You both leave the other soiled garments in the woods.

The first half of the walk back is silent, your stoic expression unchanging even as Steve continues acting exactly as he had before: Letting you walk ahead of him, keeping an eye on you to make sure you don’t trip, illuminating your path with the flashlight rather than his own.

“Um,” he says, once you start to see the reddish glow indicating that you’re nearing the rift. “Can we talk?”

You sigh. Heavily. “About what.”

“About一what just happened.”

“What happened?” you ask.

His eyes widen, like he’s not sure whether you’re really asking. “We…had一”

“I know what happened, Steve,” you snap. “I mean, why? What was that stuff?”

He closes his mouth, then his eyes, lifting his hand to cover his face for a moment before letting it fall to his side again.

“I don’t know. But I just一I wanted to check whether you’re ok now.”

“I’m fine,” you say, a little sarcastic, but biting it back because he got the same faceful of fuck pollen as you did. “Don’t worry, you won’t catch me begging for your dick again any time soon.”

He blanches, then takes a step toward you. “Hey, that’s not what I meant.”

“Can we not一talk about it?” you ask.

Steve hesitates, frowns. Then nods. “Yeah. Whatever you want.”

&&

The drive back to the Byers house is awkward. You let Steve sit in front next to Jonathan, let Steve answer the questions, let Steve tell Jonathan no一don’t drop you at home. You end up in the driveway of Jonathan’s house, waiting inside Steve’s BMW as he goes in and gives all the details to Nancy this time. He returns the jacket to Mrs. Byers.

He’d been careful with what he said to Jonathan. Some trees, weird flowers, some kind of pollen. It knocked you out for a little while, he explains, some kind of fever or something, that’s why you’re both filthy and sweaty. But you both feel fine now.

Sure.

Steve emerges from the house in another shirt, a polo he’d changed out of before this whole mess, and rounds the hood of the Bimmer. You watch him, wondering why you didn’t interrupt when Jonathan offered to drop you at your place. It would have been easier. You could have shut yourself up inside and never looked twice at Steve again. You only just got involved in this bullshit. You could extricate yourself just as easily.

But you didn’t.

You’d stayed with Steve even when you had the chance for an out.

You’d allowed him to insist that he drive you home, because he wanted more time to talk to you. Which you didn’t want to do but, admittedly, was probably a good idea.

The driver’s side door slams shut as Steve climbs in. You don’t move, legs pressed together, arms crossed over your chest, and Steve fiddles with the keys, not putting them in the ignition.

“So一” he starts, but you cut him off.

“I don’t want to talk outside Jonathan’s house,” you say.

“Right,” he says, starting the car and shifting into gear, heading out back onto the road. He clears his throat. “So.”

“Yeah?” you ask, and he just clears his throat again.

“Are you ok?”

It’s the question you expected but weren’t sure if he would actually ask. Because you’re not, and he’s probably not either.

“I mean, physically,” you say. “Sure.”

“I’m sorry. Obviously I didn’t一know,” he says, drumming his thumb on the steering wheel.

“I’m not blaming you, Steve.”

“It’s my fault.”

“Oh, I’m aware,” you say. “But I said I’m not blaming you. How could you have known, really.”

He glances over at you to find you already looking at him. You shrug as if to impart the age-old adage, c’est la vie. Even though it’s really, really not.

There’s another few minutes of silence, the car humming quietly in the night, and it’s almost peaceful except for the mess still between your legs, your body reminding you of it every time he hits a bump in the road and you feel sore all over again.

“That place… I shouldn’t have let you go down there. It changes you.”

“I’ll say,” you snarked, and Steve looked over at you, a little shocked at how blasé you were in that moment, then huffed an unamused laugh.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s一”

“No, for一bringing you. Jonathan should have一”

“I’d love to hear what would have happened if it had been you and Jonathan down there,” you say, keeping your face turned toward the window.

“Ok, well一that’s一” Steve stammers, and you can’t help but laugh a little.

It feels nice, actually, laughing after needing to use Steve’s body in the most perverse, insane way ever, and letting him do the same to yours.

“You didn’t have to drive me,” you say, as Steve turns into the lot where you still live, both of you averting your eyes from Eddie’s residence. Or… what used to be.

“I wanted to,” he says, simply, and when he pulls up outside of your door, he puts the car into park and turns it off, pulling the key from the ignition.

“What are you doing?” you ask, eyeing him as he reaches for the door handle and pockets his keys.

“Walking you to your door,” he says, like it’s obvious.

You want to question him, but you don’t. You just get out of the car, slam the door behind you, and wait for him to move next to you. You lead him, and when he follows you up the steps, holds the door for you when you open it, and enters behind you, you don’t question that either.

Nor does he wait for you to. “I don’t… sleep that great anymore, after… you know, going down there. Figured you might want. I dunno. A friendly face nearby. Just in case.”

You undo the jacket’s fastenings, but hold it closed, your bra shoved into the pocket, your upper half bare beneath the canvas.

“Ok,” you say, not fighting him on it, and just point at the couch behind him. “You can stay there. My mom works an overnight shift so if you can be out by 7:00, I’d appreciate it.”

Steve looks behind himself, then nods. “Sounds good.”

You wait for him to turn and settle down onto it before padding down the hall to the bathroom. The door sticks when you close it, so you never do, just leaving it barely ajar as you strip off the jacket and your jeans, the crotch still wet with Steve’s come. You leave the clothes in a pile on the floor and start the shower, waiting for the water to warm before stepping in; in the meantime, you examine yourself in the mirror. There’s still some dirt scuffed on your cheek; you try to wipe it away with the heel of your hand but it isn’t budging, so you just check yourself out otherwise instead. Your lips are still swollen from where you’d bitten them. You’ve got some bruises and scrapes on your shoulders and chest, your arms and elbows, but there’s no pallor to your skin so you figure you’re fucking fine. Just peachy.

You pull the shower curtain and step in, scrubbing your body hard, your arms and legs, focusing on the marred areas of skin, the places you know need some extra care. You wash thoroughly, your face, your thighs, everything in between them, and when you emerge wrapped in a towel, you see Steve dozing off on your couch. 

You pull the towel tighter around you, watch him for a moment longer, then call out to him.

“Hey.”

His eyes flutter open, taking in the sight of you in the hall, squinting a little like he might have missed something in the interim of sitting down and waking up.

“You ok?” he asks.

You don’t answer一at least, not what he asked you. “My bed’s more comfortable than the couch.”

He studies you一you can feel the force of his look even with how far away he is. He hesitates.

“I’m only offering once,” you say, and that, at least, gets him to move, shifting his weight to the edge of the sofa cushion.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” you say, unwavering, and he makes his way from the couch to the hall, looking down at you as he steps past you into your room. You follow him inside and close the door behind you with a low click.

In a previous, pre-prison life, he may have already let some dipshit talk him into accidentally committing another crime, but Teacake's been keeping busy. There's not a ton of stuff to do when you're broke and saving every penny you've got to move off of your cousin's couch, but his parole officer suggested taking a stroll through the local library and... well, to Teacake's surprise, the library is actually pretty cool.

Besides all the free stuff you can just get with a library card, he may or may not have taken a liking to a certain librarian. You, who work the afternoon shifts during the week, and always smiles brightly and greets him by name — his real name. You offer commentary on the books he takes out and even ask if he wants recommendations, and you recently started setting aside specific books for him to take out.

Teacake never thought he'd have a hard-on over someone because they're kind and soft and intelligent and have a beautiful smile and look like they give great hugs, but... these days, it's really all he can think about.

"Hey, Travis," you greet sweetly that Wednesday afternoon. He grins at you, feeling his stomach flip as he approaches the front desk you do most of your work behind. "How're you doing?"

"Good. I, uh, finished that one book you recommended for me. The Hobbit? It was really good, you were right. What'd you say you liked the best about it? The, um, the building?"

"The world-building?" you ask, mirroring the excited smile on his face. Teacake nods enthusiastically. "I'm so glad you liked it! I feel like you finished that one super fast. Here, lemme return it for you so I can give you something else."

Teacake nods and pulls it out of his backpack, then places it on the desk. Your fingers brush against his as you take it from his grasp, and Teacake tries not to be a total loser over something as small as touching.

"What kind of books do you like?" he asks, drumming his fingers against the table's worn mahogany. "You don't feel like a fantasy, sci-fi kinda person to me, but... I dunno, I could always be wrong. I feel like I don't always read people right, but that's very much a me problem, ya know?"

You giggle as you listen to him, typing away on the computer to locate where the next book is.

"I mean, I'm around books all day so I tend to know my way around most genres," you explain with a shrug. "But in my free time, I mainly like to read romances."

Teacake raises his eyebrows, then lowers his voice to a sharp whisper. "Like... like those sexy books with shirtless dudes on 'em?"

"No!" you exclaim, laughing loudly, and you're grateful this is a relatively dead hour for the library, "Like... I dunno, some of them have that kind of stuff in it, but they don't look like that!"

"Oh, shit, you do read sex books!" Teacake gasps teasingly. "Who woulda thought? The sweet, cute librarian reading porn in their free time?"

"Shut up!" you round the desk to gently bat at his chest, then nod in the direction of the science fiction section. "C'mon, let's go find your book."

"Is it a sexy one?"

"I'm gonna ban you from the library, Travis."

He snickers as he follows you into an empty aisle, watching you bend down to the O section. You quickly find the spine of the book, then pull it out with diligent fingers.

"1984," you announce. "It's another classic. A little darker, a little more thought-provoking, but still very good. I'll be curious to hear what you think about it when you're done."

You press the book into his grasp, swallowing as Teacake's tongue darts out to wet his lips.

"Why romances?" he asks. This time, his voice is soft, gentle — not looking to tease.

"You're really stuck on this, hm?"

"I'm just curious," he replies with a shrug of his shoulders. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to. There's things people have asked me that I don't want them to know."

You shake your head. "No, it's... I just like the idealism of it, I think. I like that everything gets wrapped up in this perfect bow at the end. I know what to expect. Sure, there's drama, but..."

Teacake's eyes soften. "But what?"

"But I never get disappointed."

You watch as his Adam's apple bobs with a swallow. Shaking your head, you place your hand on your hip and go to brush past him, back to the front desk.

"I'm sorry, that was too much—"

"No, it wasn't." Teacake says, but for once, he's stumped for words. His brain his screaming at him to say it — I'll never disappoint you, I promise, I'll do whatever I can to make you happy, I'd move mountains for you and visit you every day and bring you lunch and show you off to the world and buy you flowers — but he doesn't know why he can't get it out.

You wish he would say it, too.

The next afternoon, when you clock into work, Ella is straightening up the front desk as you're getting started.

"Oh! Before I forget, these came for you." she says, pulling something huge and wrapped in paper out from beneath the table. Your eyebrows furrow, glancing between her and the monstrosity in front of you.

"Um... are you sure?" you ask, confusion apparent in your expression.

Ella shrugs, "Some guy came by looking for you, I said you weren't in yet but he asked me to make sure they get to you. Said it's very important."

"Some random stranger came by looking for me?"

She sighs. "Well, no. I've seen him here before. Talking to you."

That only piques your curiosity even more, so you gently pull the paper wrapping off, only to reveal a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Your eyes widen when you see them — tulips, peonies, hydrangeas, azaleas, snapdragons, all in a smattering of pastel pinks, purples, yellows, and reds. You blink, then see the note stapled to the bottom. You don't think twice before grabbing it, desperately hoping it's the person you think it is.

i should've said this yesterday, but i pussied out. sorry, "pussied out" isn't a really romantic thing to say. anyway, i can't promise that i'll never ever disappoint you, but i can promise i'll always fucking try not to. for the past few months, seeing you has been the highlight of my days. sorry if that's really pathetic. if it is, then call me pathetic i guess.

anyway...again... if you aren't too weirded out by this, and maybe by the grace of god or whoever or whatever exists out there, you like me too, would you wanna go out with me? here's my number. text or call me when you get these. if you want.

travis

ps - if you don't like me and this is really weird for you, can we just pretend it never happened? please dont ban me from the library. i actually really like it here. thank you

Your job, as it has been for a few months, continues to be the physical blockade between the warring friends. To be Switzerland, the Demilitarization Zone of conflict, the human embodiment of a white flag. Your role is to never spill your own personal opinions on the arguments that you’re caught between, because if you did, the scale would absolutely tip in Steve’s favor — you’ve heard quite enough of Dustin’s barbed insults in the past year, thank you very much — but as the it was, you haven’t been around the rest of the monster hunting crew long enough for your thoughts to be valued by the wider circle.

(You do like to give Steve a reassuring shoulder squeeze from time to time though, especially whenever Dustin starts insulting him outright. You’re not sure it helps, but the soft smile you get in return is enough to settle some of the lingering guilt over not being able to do more.)

But still, you fall in step next to Steve just as Dustin surges forward, catching Nancy’s attention as he asks a question you can’t quite hear. You take the moment to cast a sidelong glance towards Steve, quietly asking, “Everything alright? You hit your head pretty hard back there when the car crashed.”

He sighs, passing the flashlight back and forth between his hands. “Yeah, I’m fine. More worried about…”

His face tilts up, and you follow his gaze forward. 

Dustin.

“I think if there were any lasting damage, he would’ve complained by now,” you offer. 

“Fair enough,” he says. A beat passes before he asks, “And you? I know you were in the backseat with Nance and Jonathan, but…”

You blink in surprise. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just got a face full of your headrest. No biggie.”

A hushed laugh escapes him, and for the first time since the crawl that got you all in this mess in the first place, the tension in his shoulders loosens incrementally, and he turns to look at you fully. “Well, if it starts to hurt, let me know, okay? I can try and scrounge around for—”

“Steve!”

Dustin’s voice cuts across your conversation, and you both turn to where he’s waiting impatiently by the entrance to the lab, hands planted on his hips as though he’s a beleaguered mother and not a sixteen year old boy.

Steve lets out another sigh, and with a nod towards the kid, settles a hand on your back as he guides you forward. Dustin disappears inside, clearly not wanting to wait for the two of you to catch up. You get to the door first, but Steve’s quick to dart forward, yanking the door open and gesturing you through with a flourish.

You smile despite yourself.

Nancy and Jonathan are already in deep conversation by the time you catch up, and you bite back a laugh when Steve gestures to the space around you, saying, “Wow, this looks promising.”

Dustin shoots back a comment you don’t quite hear as you take in your surroundings, eyeing the vines wrapping around every surface that you can see. Hesitantly, you reach over, fingers outstretched towards a thick tendril on the wall, but before you can make contact, Steve’s at your side, intercepting your hand.

You blink up at him owlishly.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” he offers in way of explanation.

“Is it dangerous?” you ask.

He shrugs and gestures towards the faded scar around his neck. “Remind me to tell you about ’86 later.”

You nod and follow him back to the rest of the group, confused to find them in an intense discussion about a movie plot of all things (Is this really the right time? you wonder) and Steve calls across the lobby, “Why are you explaining the plot of a movie that we all know, Henderson?”

“Because, Steven, Return of the Jedi is an oddly relevant movie!” Dustin snaps.

“Yeah, and we’ve all seen it,” Steve retorts.

You frown. “I’ve never seen a Star Wars film.”

Steve winces. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” you say.

“Anyway,” Dustin interjects. “As I was saying…”

You listen attentively as Dustin explains his theory — even if you’re only half following it, because you’re not quite sure what a shield generator even is — and brush your hand against Steve’s wrist after Dustin once again shoots the guy a snarky comment, sticking close by as you follow the group into a staircase.

Which, in turn, causes another debate when Steve points out, “Henderson and I need some space. New groups?”

“Are you serious right now?” Jonathan demands. “Who exactly are you planning on going with, Steve?”

Steve opens his mouth, incensed and ready to retort, but you quickly draw everyone’s attention towards you when you say, “Steve and I’ll go down, and Dustin can go up with you and Nancy, alright?”

Nancy shrugs, Jonathan nods, but Dustin only shoots you a scornful look.“Really? Send the two idiots downstairs? You don’t even know what you’re looking for, much less Steve.”

“Henderson!” comes Steve’s sharp admonishment. “Seriously, man?”

You breathe in and out of your nose slowly, tamping down your annoyance. “Steve and I know enough to not touch anything suspicious and radio if we see something. That’s the point, right? Radio if we see something odd?”

Nancy, thankfully, nods, and draws Dustin’s attention away. “Come on, Dust. There’ll probably be more interesting stuff upstairs anyway.” With one more sweeping look towards Steve, she adds, “Make sure to call the second you see something.”

“We will,” he promises, lifting up his walkie as if to make his point, and without another word, he steps off the landing and onto the staircase leading down.

You offer the rest of the group a silent wave and quickly follow after.

The two of walk in silence for a few minutes, and it’s not until everyone else’s footsteps have fully receded into the distance that Steve speaks up.

“Hey, about what I said back there, in the lobby,” he begins, clearly uncomfortable. You pause on the steps, taking in the shape of his shoulders tensing up beneath his suede coat. “About, uh, the movie. I’m sorry. If I’d known you hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have—”

“Steve,” you cut him off gently, closing the gap between you to grab his arm. “I’m not offended by it.”

But he refuses to meet your eye. “It’s not that, it’s just — that was totally rude and I shouldn’t have—”

“How could you have known that I haven’t seen a movie literally everyone else has seen?” you ask. “Trust me, I know I’m the outlier. I didn’t think anything of it.”

And finally, finally, he turns to look at you. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” you say. “Maybe being stuck down here will give me the motivation to catch up on pop culture.”

His lips quirk up, and for a moment, he looks like the twenty-one year old man he is and not the more worn version of himself you’ve become acquainted with through months of working alongside him at the station. “Maybe.”

“Anyway, I feel like I should’ve brought a flashlight with me,” you say, ducking around him. “Feels kinda stupid that I didn’t in retrospect.”

He shines the light on the next set of stairs. “Well, in your defense, it’s not like you could’ve known we would’ve gotten stuck down here when you got into my backseat. Hard to prepare for that kind of thing.”

Your laugh rings around the otherwise empty halls, and the two of you settle into an easy conversation as you go round and round, losing count of how many steps you’ve descended. 

It’s always been easy being around Steve, ever since the day that he and Robin showed up at the Squawk and announced that they were there to work at the station. You hadn’t argued — honestly, it was kind of nice to have someone else helping you out — and Steve is the kind of person who can make hours melt by in seconds. Whether he was cracking a joke to try and make you laugh, sliding a sandwich across across your desk when you forget your lunch, or seeking you out by the coffee machine for a chat between sets, time always passed a little too quickly when you were with him.

It’s, like, the one normal part of my day, he’d admitted to you once, his fingers brushing against your own as he passed over a mug. I love Rob, but her head’s in the clouds most of the time.

By the time you touch down on the bottom floor, your sweater is sticking uncomfortably to your chest and Steve, panting, says, “Jesus, that was way too many stairs.”

“What the hell even is this place?” you ask, because despite getting inadvertently roped into the group’s tenuously illegal activities, no one ever really bothered to fill you in on the finer details.

You turn in time to find Steve grimacing, face shining from sweat, and he says, “To be honest, no one’s ever really told memuch, but they were doing a bunch of experiments on kids here. It’s where El was raised, actually.”

“Oh.”

You think back to the quiet girl you’d only met a handful of times — always under the watchful eye of the former police chief, always hand in hand with Mike Wheeler — and take in your environment just a bit more closely.

It’s dreary, honestly. No windows, no way of getting natural light in at any point, and the electronic locks affixed to every door leaves no room for doubt as to how little freedom El and the other kids were given when moving about.

You take a few steps forward, pushing open a set of double doors to your left and immediately freeze at the sight in front of you. 

Steve crashes into your back, his hands immediately finding your waist to steady you, muttering, “What the hell is this place?”

Because surrounding the two of you is the starkest playroom you’ve ever seen: All white, with a rather unnerving rainbow painted across the wall. Toys are organized and put away neatly, and you can imagine that the real life version of this place smelled of harsh antiseptics.

In short, no place a kid should be raised in.

“This is creepy,” you whisper. “Like…”

“I get what you mean,” Steve says. “It’s like the set of a horror movie in here.”

You nod in agreement, reaching back until your hand makes contact with the hem of his coat. For all of your bravado and confidence walking into this situation, it’s definitely reassuring to have someone else with you as you explore this place.

Carefully, he leads the two of you around the room, shining his flashlight in every which direction as you search for… 

Something.

(A shield generator? Whatever the hell that is?)

Steve’s starting to glance towards the entrance, clearly ready to search other rooms in the basement, when your eyes catch on the open window along the back wall. More specifically, an odd bump in the wall, one that has you moving to climb through the window before you can think twice about it, ignoring Steve’s protests.

“There’s something back here,” you call out, feeling your way along the wall as he grunts behind you, the sound of his feet slipping along the floor as he catches up echoing through the room. “It’s like—”

A hidden latch pops, and the wall beneath your hands opening up enough to reveal an office tucked neatly behind it. You frown at the grime left on your hand and quickly wipe it against your jeans.

“That’s creepy as hell,” Steve comments, turning the light inside and gently stepping around you to go inside first.

“I bet that hole in the wall was, like, one-way glass or something,” you say, creeping inside. “So whoever could observe the kids.”

“Like I said,” he replies. “Creepy.”

He sets the flashlight down on the desk, dropping the walkie down next to it, and letting the glow illuminate the room as you separate. Steve goes to inspect the wall as you leaf through the sprawl of papers and notebooks on the desk, carefully setting aside anything that looks vaguely important to carry back upstairs. 

“This map looks exactly like Henderson’s,” Steve announces. “That’s weird, right? And this — this diagram thing. It’s, like…”

But before he can finish his thought, you lean down to open a drawer, seeing if you can find anything else of import, when it happens.

Something explodes in your face — some sort of dust, maybe? — and you stagger away, wheezing and coughing and choking as it settles across your skin, infiltrates your lungs, and within seconds Steve makes his way through the cloud, his hands hovering over your body as he asks, “Holy shit, are you okay?”

You hunch over, bracing your hands against your knees as you force out, “Fuck — just — breathed all that in—”

He thumps your back, which does little to help the aching in your chest, but the heat emanating from his hand feels nice even through the thick sweater draped across your torso. 

“Just get it out,” he murmurs gently. “There you go, get it all out.”

“Fuck,” you say again, tears welling in the corners of your eyes. “Fuck, that was awful. What was that stuff anyway?”

“Not sure,” he says, helping you stand back up. His fingers linger on your arms just a little longer than they ever have, and he looks almost… pained when he finally pulls away, turning back to inspect the open drawer. “I’ve seen a lot of floating dust and shit down here, but never anything like that. Whatever, it’s gone now and there’s nothing inside here.”

“Great,” you say, leaning against the wall, rubbing your chest as an odd warmth settles in your lungs. “I probably just got lung cancer or something.”

“It didn’t look like asbestos,” he says. “Though it did kind of just… disappear. So who knows.”

You draw in a shaky lungful of air. “How do you know what asbestos looks like?”

“My dad’s work — he owns some construction company,” Steve explains. “So when all those studies about asbestos came out in the seventies, I saw a bunch of pamphlets at home about what it looks like and what to avoid. Dad had to distribute them to the guys building houses.”

You blink in surprise. Steve’s never talked much about his parents, not in the year you’ve known him. You don’t think there’s really any tragic backstory hiding around the corner or anything; You’ve heard him on the phone with his mother, soft and affectionate in a way that an only child can be with the person who raised him, but he’s always seemed like the kind of person who grew out of the need for his parents’ involvement in his life far younger than other people. Independent in a way you’re not quite sure you’ve ever managed. 

And clearly not, because your lungs are still burning from whatever it was you inhaled (and you’re not quite sure that you believe it wasn’t asbestos, even with Steve’s expert opinion) and the burning is quickly morphing into something else. Something more, something you can’t quite put your finger on as you watch Steve hop up on the desk, legs swinging.

“So—” you begin, grasping at anything to fill the silence, to distract you from the heaviness tugging at your bones. “Your dad owns a company?”

“Oh, yeah.” There’s an odd note to Steve’s tone, one you can’t quite parse out. “My grandpa owned this, like, pet grooming business after the war. Successful as hell, and Dad went to Kelley down in Bloomington, got an MBA, started a construction business. I think originally he owned some realty thing, but there was more money in building or whatever.”

“That’s nice,” you say. “And your mom?”

“She stayed at home. Did a bunch of volunteer work around Hawkins, and, uh…”

He trails off, and you jump onto the next question. “Where are they now?”

“North Carolina,” he says. “They own a beach house there. Told them to evacuate Hawkins before lockdown, and they’ve been there ever since.”

Sweat beads at your temples, slipping down your face, and you can feel moisture gathering on the back of your neck as well. “Oh, wow, uh… and—”

“No offense, but,” he interrupts, strained. “Not sure I want to talk about my parents right now.”

You nod and continue to rub the space just above your breasts, feeling rather lightheaded over the lack of oxygen from your coughing fit. You press your eyelids shut, willing the dizziness to pass, but it only molds, intensifying.

It crawls down your spine, a heaviness you’ve never felt before, a heat creeping slowly through your body, from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. Honestly, you must’ve spent longer coughing than you’d thought, because you’ve never felt like this before, never felt anything like this grip all your senses to firmly, swirling around your tummy as the warmth turns up, up, up—

An uncomfortable noise echoes through the room, and it takes a moment for you to parse out that it came from Steve.

You force your eyes open, noting in an almost detached manner just how sweaty he looks. Which is odd, because it was really, really cold when the two of you descended into the basement, but now that you think about it, you’re also feeling rather flushed, aren’t you? 

His gaze meets yours, and the heat inside of you feels like it explodes, and you realize, startled, that it’s not warmth, per se, but—

“Steve.” Your voice is hoarser than you intended. “Do you feel weird?”

“Weird how?”

You swallow once, heavily, suddenly woozy from just how overpowering the feeling burning through your veins is. A feeling that you’re now able to identify with an uncomfortable clarity. “Did that dust make you unrelentingly horny too?”

There’s a sound that escapes his chest — something between a whimper and a groan, the noise of a man who prides himself on self-restraint beginning to fracture — and you blink blearily at him to find him still sitting on the desk, fingers digging into his thighs, looking just as wrecked as you feel. You glance down, unbidden, to see a rather obvious bulge in his jeans.

“Don’t ask me that,” he croaks pathetically.

“Steve,” you say. “I think we might’ve — I think we might have to—”

“No.” It comes out firm despite everything, despite the fact that the cotton bra against your breasts feels so restricting that you think you might suffocate. “I don’t care that what that shit did, I’m not — I won’t—”

“But you feel it too, right?” you ask, suddenly desperate to know. “It’s not just me, right?”

“I — yes, but—”

“Then shouldn’t we do something—?”

“No!” Sweat glistens across his forehead, and you watch with fascination as a droplet slides down his cheek, dripping onto his sweater. “I’m not going to — to take advantage of you, not like this, not when—”

“Steve.” It comes out pathetic, a whimper you can’t help as the feeling swells inside you, becoming too much for you to not do something. “Please.”

“Absolutely not,” he says, though it comes out less certain than you’re sure he intends it to. 

“Fine then,” you say, fumbling with the button of your jeans. “You won’t mind if I take care of myself, will you?”

He chokes. “What?”

You don’t bother responding though, and there’s no time for embarrassment as you shove your jeans down just far enough that you can slip a hand into your panties, finding yourself already drenched. Your heart is pounding erratically against your ribcage at the first swipe against your clit, and your knees buckle from how overwhelmingly good it feels, and you know for a fact that if you were in a more solid state of mind — if every conscious thought in your brain wasn’t slowly being eroded by the heady pressure of arousal — you’d be more concerned by how quickly the pleasure is building up in your core with only the lightest touch.

But you’re not in that state of mind. You’re here, burning up from the inside out, the fire of desperation and debauchery consuming you until it’s almost painful, as you circle your fingers faster, faster, faster until—

And as abruptly as your orgasm built, it stops dead in its tracks.

“No, no, no, no, no.” Your breath catches as your fingers slip against your clit to no avail. The pleasure refuses to grow, refuses to tip over into what you want most, refuses to let you into the sweet embrace of your orgasm. It dances teasingly just far enough out of reach to keep you on the precipice, to drive you mad with want. To drive you mad with need.

You tilt your head up, finding Steve’s gaze searing into your body, his hands still gripping his thighs tightly, and another heaving cry billows from your lips as you utter, “Please.”

He goes very, very still.

“Please, Steve,” you beg, uncaring of how you sound — not when he looks just as wrecked as you feel, not when he still hasn’t moved a single muscle. “Please, please, please help me, please — it hurts so much, I can’t — I can’t—”

Slowly, he slips from the desk and makes his way to you with controlled, even steps, and you watch as he sinks to his knees before you, his voice completely torn with need as he murmurs, “Let’s get your shoes off, yeah?”

“Steve,” you plead again. “I need you to touch me.”

“I’m not—” He cuts himself off, hands shaking as they find their way to the laces of your tennis shoes. “I’m not going to take advantage of you.”

The sentiment rings hollow in your ears.

“You’re not taking advantage of me,” you insist, tears spilling from your eyes. “I want this, I want you—”

“Whatever we breathed in, that’s making you feel this way,” he insists, and you don’t understand. You don’t understand how he’s still so in control when you’re ready to burst at the seams, ready to fall apart into a million pieces at the feeling of his breath on your thighs. “But I can — I’ll help.”

He slips one of your shoes off, then the next, stacking them neatly somewhere you don’t bother to look, and with a firm grasp, he slides the denim down your legs, helping you step out. Your panties are tugged down next, and you watch somewhat deliriously as he tucks them into his back pocket. Your brain struggles to catch up as he draws your leg up and over his shoulder, tilting his head up to meet your gaze, his fingers tracing through the thatch of hair on your mound. 

His eyes burn into yours when he says, "I need to hear it."

You whimper. “Please, Steve. I need you.”

Seconds later, you're roughly pulled down on to his face.

And as it turns out, truly all you needed was him. His nose brushing against your clit is all it takes before you clench around nothing, waves of pleasure crashing into you as you come harder than you ever have in your life. Your chest heaves as you grip onto Steve, shaking and trembling and crying until your knees buckle.

He’s quick to catch you before you fall to the ground, grabbing your hips as he slowly lowers you down onto his lap. “Did that help?” he asks, his fingers skimming under the hem of your sweater.

“Yes — no,” you whimper, your head so full of everything that you can’t think straight. “It hurts so bad, Steve, I need — need more — not enough, it’s not enough—”

“Okay, okay,” he soothes, even if he sounds a little broken as he says it. “Let me put my jacket down for you, yeah?”

You shake your head because you need it now, but Steve ignores it — ignores you — and groans loudly when you grind down into his erection, desperate and chasing any form of relief you can get as he slides his jacket off. You don’t care though, burying your face into his shoulder and breathing in the intoxicating scent of some woodsy cologne and human musk underneath, the smell of a man who has worked hard to be where he’s at right in this moment, and you roll your clit against the zipper on his jeans even harder, not paying attention when Steve lowers you to the ground, your back hitting his coat that he laid out without your notice.

It feels like it takes ages for him to settle between your legs, spreading your pussy open carefully, as if it were made of something precious, and you twitch up pathetically as his breath ghosting against where you ache the most.

“Steve,” you whine, your own hands sliding up under your sweater and beneath your bra, rolling your nipples between your fingers.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he murmurs. You meet his eyes and your arousal grows at just how big his pupils are, wide with desire as a flush spreads across his cheeks. “I’ll take care of you.”

That’s all the warning you get before he dives in once more, lapping up your wetness like a starving man. You squirm, and his grip against your thighs is bruising as he holds you in place. It’s an exhilarating dichotomy: Commanding yet so at odds with how soft he speaks to you, gentle in every word. 

And when he presses his fingers into your skin just a bit deeper, you know for a fact that his composure is cracking the tiniest bit more.

Just like with your first orgasm, it doesn’t take long for the second one to build, cresting until it washes over you with an urgency. But instead of relief, the only thing you feel is a hungry need for more — more of his tongue against your clit, more of his fingers plunging into your pussy, curling up until they hit the spongy spot that makes you feel stars, more of him — and you cry out, not bothering to wipe the tears spilling down your face as you twist your nipples, trying to extend your orgasm a little longer. 

And yet, somehow, the need that has taken over every one of your sense, the fire of arousal caused by whatever it was you stumbled into, it only grows hotter, burns brighter, and within seconds after your orgasm abates you’re reaching down, winding your fingers into his hair and begging, “More.”

Steve glances up at you, his nose still firmly pressed into the seam of your pussy, and the only response you get is one long, languid lick from your entrance up to your clit. 

A shiver runs down your spine at just how ravished he looks with his hair askew and eyes blown wide. Fucked out of his mind, even, despite the fact he's been so entirely focused on your own pleasure that you're pretty sure he's ignoring just how much the pollen's affected him.

(How does he manage to do that?)

You moan raggedly, louder than any sound you’re sure you’ve ever made before, and within seconds his head lifts from your core. A pathetic sound escapes you at the loss of touch, but he doesn’t leave you wanting long. One big hand comes up to grip the hem of your sweater, tugging it up and shoving the fabric into your mouth, hoarsely saying, “They’re going to hear you upstairs if you don’t quiet down.”

Privately, you think that you don’t actually care who hears you, but clearly Steve is still managing a level of sense that completely abandoned, because he only tucks the sweater more firmly against your tongue. Your teeth scrape against his fingers and he groans, wanton but quiet.

“Bite down,” he tells you as his hand retreats, commanding but in a way that doesn’t feel like a demand. Your pussy clenches at the tone, and you're pretty sure you'd do anything as long as he keeps looking at you like that.

So you do as told, and his throat bobs as your mouth closes around the woven yarn, his gaze lingering on your lips. He's trembling with barely restrained desire, and just as you get the bright idea to try and convince him to do something about it, your bra gets roughly yanked down, your breasts spilling into the cold air. Your nipples peak, and Steve’s mouth is on them before you can even blink, sucking one into his mouth while his hand dips back down to your pussy, gathering wetness on his fingers before dipping inside where you ache the most.

The effect is instantaneous. Fireworks explode under your skin, growing bigger and brighter when he slips a third finger inside. He moves at a slow and methodical rhythm, and entirely at odds with how he ravishes your chest, and you can’t help the pathetic mewl that escapes your throat, tears slipping down the side of your face.

He releases your nipple with a wet pop, and immediately delves into the valley of your breasts, sucking spots into your skin that should be painful, but the only thing you can think is that you want the marks to be tattooed into your skin forever, a permanent mark of the pleasure he’s giving you.

Spit trails from his mouth as he makes his way to your other breast, giving it the same ministrations. Sucking, teasing, biting until you yelp through the cloth in your mouth, and you can feel rather than hear the vibration of his laughter, even as he grinds the heel of his palm into your clit.

The third orgasm doesn’t sneak up on you as much as it consumes you, forcing more tears from your eyes as you shake and shake and shake, clenching down on Steve’s fingers as he works you through it, low, soothing noises murmured into your skin as he makes his way down.

If you were in a more coherent state, you’d recognize his actions for what they were: The further fraying of carefully kept control, because he doesn’t skip a beat as his mouth makes contact with your pussy once more, not bothering to stop and check in, to make sure you still want this.

At this point, you’re both completely aware of what you want, even if he’s still refusing to fully give into the lewdness of the situation.

You, on the other hand, let the fever consume you entirely as he sucks your clit into his mouth, cheeks hollowing, fingers pumping in and out at a steady pace, driving you completely and utterly insane.

You wonder, in a vague, abstract way, if he’s this good even without the added effects of whatever it was that infected the two of you, and you know instinctively that you’d give anything to find out. Especially when his teeth graze across your clit in a way that should be painful but just has your hips jerking against the arm wrapped around your leg. 

“So good for me, honey,” he murmurs into your pussy, twisting his hand to find that sweet spot inside you once more. “Come on, come for me, honey — come for—”

Your fourth orgasm leaves you thrashing against his hold.

Stars burst behind your eyelids as waves of pleasure crash over you, ebbing and flowing but never quite stopping, and somehow — somehow — the heat only builds, consuming the very essence of your being until you’re sobbing in earnest. You scrabble to pull Steve up, up, up until he’s hovering over you. His chin glistens with your arousal, and your chest cracks open as you weep, “Don’t you want me?”

His face cracks at your words, and all at once, you’re able to see everything that he’s been holding back: Fear, confusion, and without a doubt, complete and unadulterated desire.

“It doesn’t matter what I want, honey, I don’t—”

He cuts himself off by burying his face into your neck, the scratchy feeling of his wool sweater against your pebbled nipples doing nothing to tame the arousal burning inside you. And you realize, suddenly, that you asking for it isn’t enough, because it’s Steve — sweet, understanding Steve — who never fails to make you laugh, who always makes sure you’re safely inside after a crawl before going in himself, who has shown up time and time again in such small ways for the duration of your friendship that you know, without a doubt, that asking for it will never convince him of what you want, of your feelings.

“Steve,” you whisper, capturing his face beneath your palms and forcing him to look you in the eye. “I’m glad this was you.”

His brows furrow and his eyes tighten — once, small, pain seeping through his expression — and he throatily says, “What?”

“I’m glad it’s you here and not anyone else,” you say. “If I had to be in this situation with anyone, I’d want it to be you.”

He licks his lips, and his expression blooms into something more hopeful. “Do you really mean that?”

“Steve,” you say softly, full of affection. “I would’ve done this without the crazy dust. Just, you know, maybe not in a random office.”

He searches your face for a moment before finally breathing out, “Okay.”

You freeze, not sure you're hearing him correctly. “Okay?”

He nods, and you watch the feeling swell in him, his composure finally disintegrating in the sureness of your fingers skimming down your side, sliding under your knee to press you open just a bit more. “If you’re — are you sure that you want this? You’re completely—?”

“I want this,” you say again, firm in your conviction. “I want this with you, and I’ll want this with you even once we’re out of here, Steve.”

You watch as your confession hits him: First quietly, then all at once. He looks at you with so much affection that for the first time since you opened that drawer, your chest aches with something other than arousal. Through the haze of pleasure, he looks down at you tenderly, brushing your hair plastered to your face away and, with more regret than you expected, “This wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

But he doesn’t give you any time to question what he means before he’s surging forward, self-restraint in tatters around the two of you as his mouth crashes into yours. You taste yourself on his tongue, and as his forearms bracket your head, you reach down, scrambling to unbutton his jeans and shove them as far down as you can reach. They barely make it to the top of his thighs before you’re taking him in hand, gasping with pleasure at how big and heavy and warm he feels in your fingers and give a few, lazy pumps. He shudders against your hold but doesn’t fight when you line him up against your entrance and look up at him through hooded eyes, asking one more time, “Please, Steve? I need you.”

This is all he needs to finally snap.

You can feel the last remnants of sense leave his body as his hips thrust forward, his cock pressing entirely inside you in one swift, fluid motion, punching the air from your lungs. He doesn’t give you any time to recover before he’s dragging himself out slowly before pushing back in, and he sets a brutal pace that has any last coherent thought driven from your head as he tends to the fire that’s been coursing throughout your veins. 

And that fire — it changes. Whereas every orgasm he’d drawn out of you with his mouth and fingers had only left you aching, left you wanting for more, with his cock bullying its way in and out of your cunt, you can only feel the fuzzy pleasure of contentment, like there’s been a piece of you missing your entire life that’s finally found its way home.

You think he feels the same when he gazes at you with such adoration, such fondness as he presses your leg even higher, hitting a new, deeper spot within you that has you gasping for more, more, more.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned about Steve throughout this whole thing, is that he is nothing if not a giving lover.

He snakes a hand back down to your core, fingers slipping over your sensitive core as he breathes, “One more for me, honey?”

(Could you ever deny a request made so lovingly?)

Despite how he pounds into your pussy with reckless abandon, he’s effervescently gentle in how he circles your clit, like he’s aware of just how sore you’re absolutely going to be when all of this is said and done. 

His teeth scrape down your neck as he continues his ministrations, fingers flexing over your most sensitive spot, and it’s as he sucks a hickey into your skin that he coaxes one final orgasm from your worn body.

Your cries come out quieter this time, more exhausted as you clench down on his cock, and within seconds his hips stutter as he spills warmth inside you, and finally, finally, the fever inside you dissipates.

Steve practically collapses on top of you, only just cognizant enough to keep the worst of his weight off of your body as the remnants of whatever infected you both tapers off until the flame is extinguished entirely, leaving you sweaty and spent yet somehow feeling better than you’ve ever felt in your entire life.

The two of you stay like that for a few minutes, chests heaving as you catch your breath. You stroke a hand down his back, watching his face carefully as his eyes flutter open, exhausted but happy as he meets your gaze.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “You okay? That was…”

Intense.

It doesn’t need to be said though. You nod, dragging your hand up to his face to push his bangs from his eyes. “I’m fine. How about you? You held out super long.”

He huffs out a laugh and presses his cheek a little firmer unto your palm. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Promise. Better than I’ve felt in a long while.”

You open your mouth to say something — to confess something — though what, you aren’t quite sure, then the walkie across the room crackles to life, and Dustin Henderson’s panicked voice comes through. “Steve? Steve, are you there? We found something and it’s—”

Steve pushes off of your prone body in seconds, and you’re left achingly empty as he stumbles over to the walkie, snatching it off the table it’s rested on next to the flashlight, calling into it, “Henderson, what’s going on?”

Sticky come slips from your core, wetting your thighs.

“Don’t touch anything!” Dustin demands through the walkie. “It isn’t a shield generator, and Nancy wanted to shoot it—”

“Hey!”

“Have you found anything?” Dustin asks, ignoring Nancy’s protest.

Steve sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and spares you a sidelong glance as you sit up, righting your bra and sweater. “Yeah, I think we found Brenner’s office. Don’t come down here, though. We’ll meet you in the lobby.”

Dustin calls his confirmation, and Steve’s quick to drop the walkie back on top of the table. He makes his way back to you in two, long strides, and kneels down.

“Let me do it,” he says, batting you away and replacing them with your own as he tucks your breasts back into the cups of your bra, gently pulling your sweater down. 

You don’t quite manage to choke down a laugh when he helps you stand up and frowns at the cum dripping down your thighs, looking around to find something to clean it up and coming up short.

“It’s okay,” you say, and Steve nods as he’s forced to accept the situation.

He doesn’t bother giving you your panties back as he draws your jeans back up your legs, holding you steady as you step into each of your shoes that he insists on tying.

He’s quiet, and it takes you a few minutes too long to realize that he’s embarrassed, like you caught him doing something that he wasn’t meant to do. It doesn’t sit well with you.

But he pushes forward with methodical ease, gathering his coat and all of the notebooks that you picked out before the two of you got into this mess, and leads you from the office with the stride of a man used to performing confidence.

Except—

You know it’s an act. You’ve seen him soft, you’ve seen him pushed to the edge, and you now know the way it feels to be the center of his universe, even if only for a singular moment, and you know that you want more.

You jog forward to catch up to him just as he hits the staircase, grasping his arm and force him to look at you.

“Steve,” you gently say. “When all of this is done — when we’re back in Hawkins and — whatever — would you go on a date with me?”

He freezes, but hope still blooms on his face. “I — what?”

“Would you go on a date with me?” you ask again, firmer this time. “Maybe you can show me Star Wars and I can finally see what I’ve been missing this whole time.”

“Really?” You can tell that the question slips out without him meaning to by how quickly his face flushes, but he barrels forward. “You’d really want to go on a date with me?”

“Of course I would,” you say with a smile. “I wasn’t lying when I said that I wanted this when we were out of here. And I didn’t just mean sex, I — I want everything, if you’ll have me.”

“Oh, honey.” It comes out breathless, and in the next second he’s leaning down, pressing the softest kiss against your swollen lips. “Of course I’ll have you. I just didn’t want to assume…”

“You can assume,” you reassure. “With me, you can assume.”

“Some more than others,” Monica mutters quietly. Keys pretends that he hadn’t heard her as he walks towards Room 12.

Ever since you had started figure skating professionally almost four years ago, you had visited the ER around twenty five to thirty times, give or take. Between sprains, swollen muscles, gashes, cuts and one or two concussions, you knew the ER department like the back of your hand. You knew the doctors, the nurses, the trainees, the cleaners, the receptionists and of course you knew Doctor Keys.

When you first met him he had still been a student doctor, having just finished medical school. You had sustained a small laceration on your leg and Keys had been the one to stitch you up. You had talked his ear off about how you had gotten into ice skating after watching Ice Princess when you were a kid, how you had bought your first pair of skates at fourteen and had never looked back. Keys didn’t quite understand why you would choose such a dangerous hobby and had told you to bear more careful next time. You had come back barely a week later with another, slightly bigger laceration.

For some unknown reason, maybe fate, maybe it was simply Monica’s strange sense of humour but whenever you came into the ER, he was always your doctor. And so, you had built quite the rapport with Doctor McKey. You teased him, he scolded you for being reckless and the cycle continued—another injury, another lecture, another promise you’d be back soon. The whole department was aware of it too. Keys had even once overheard Nurse Martinez and Doctor Bennett discussing a bet on how many injuries you were going to sustain that year and how long it was going to take before Keys finally lost it.

But he hadn’t. Not yet.

“There’s my favourite doctor,” you greet Keys as he walks into your room with a smile that doesn’t entirely cover up the pain you were in.

Keys hums in acknowledgement, though his ears turn a little red at your words. That was another thing about you—you teased him relentlessly. Monica called it flirting, Keys called it annoying.

“You know, I did tell you this might happen if you didn’t rest your ankle,” Keys comments, unable to stop himself from doing so as he approaches your hospital bed to have a closer look at your ankle. He could see that the flesh was swollen, tender.

“I know but I wanted an excuse to see you,” you say with a bright smile before you tilt your head to the side. “Did you get new glasses by the way?”

Keys pauses, hazel eyes flickering over to you as a faint flush begins to creep up his neck. You were wearing a grey zip up hoodie but your skating costume beneath was peaking out—Keys could see the obnoxious glittering orange material that you had worn a couple times before.

“I did,” he answers, his ears remaining that signature red as pushes up his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“They’re cute,” you tell him. “Suit you.”

Keys decides to ignore you. Though of course you notice the way the flush had spread up to his cheeks

After a gentle assessment, Keys confirms that you had a stress fracture. If he was honest, he was pissed off about it. You hadn’t listened three weeks ago when you had come into the ER with inflammation. You had continued to be your usual, reckless self and now you were at risk of chronic pain or permanent damage to your ankle if you didn’t rest for at least eight weeks.

“Eight weeks?” You echo, your playful facade faltering for the first time as Keys notices the genuine panic in your eyes. “But this is my job! I have a competition soon, I can’t take eight weeks out—”

“—either you take eight weeks out or you risk never being able to skate again,” Keys tells you bluntly. “Your choice.”

For perhaps the first time in four years, you look genuinely worried. Terrified even and Keys starts to feel bad for being so direct with you as he watches the way your fingers curl into the sheets of the hospital bed and how you look away from him with a tight jaw.

Keys hated to admit that he cared about you way more than he wanted to. That he felt a tightening in his chest whenever he saw the words ‘figure skater’ on the triage board. That the reason he got so short with you sometimes was because he wanted you to listen to him, wanted you to take what he said seriously so he didn’t have to worry about you anymore.

And there was a part of him that felt as though he failed you every time you showed up to the ER, every time you had to wait in the waiting room for hours on end. That was the part of himself he didn’t want to think too much about, didn’t want to think about why he cared so much about a patient. Why he cared that your eyes were now slightly glassy as your gaze fixed determinedly on the call bell.

“Look—I know it sucks and I know you love your job but if you put any more stress on this ankle by doing anymore Axels or Solcows—”

“—it’s Salchow—”

“—whatever it’s called. You do more of that? You’re going to cause some irreversible damage and I wouldn’t want that for you.”

You swallow, worrying your bottom lip between your teeth before you turn to look back at Keys.

“So eight weeks?” You repeat in a quiet voice.

“Eight weeks,” Keys confirms with a small nod and sympathetic smile. “Rest as much as you can and make sure to keep it elevated. Ice it when possible. If you need to take anti-inflammatory medication I can prescribe you some to save you a trip to the pharmacy and an ACE wrap would be preferable.”

“That’s a long list, Doc,” you say with a small smile. “But I’ll try to remember. I promise.”

Keys nod, trying not to think about the way that small smile had made his entire day.

“I’ll get some medication for you and a nurse will be over soon to wrap your ankle,” he tells you. “Don’t go anywhere.”

You snort with laughter and it’s a struggle for Keys to not smile at that sound.

“Can’t anyway,” you say. “Doctor’s orders.”

You stay in the ER for the next three hours, waiting for a nurse to become available to wrap your ankle, waiting for your prescription to be ready and finally waiting to be discharged. In that time, Doctor Keys had checked up on you six times. Not that you were counting.

“Don’t you have other patients you should be checking up on?” You ask him with a smile the seventh time he walks into your room to check your vitals for no apparent reason. “I don’t want there to be a HIPAA violation because you’re worried I’m going to burst into flames or something.”

Keys goes red—now that you had called him out for it, he was beginning to realise just how much he had been checking up on you.

“As far as I’m aware, bursting into flames isn’t a symptom of stress fracture,” he murmurs. “But what do I know? I only went to medical school for like five or six years.”

It took a moment for you to realise that for once, Keys was being indulging in your playful teasing and it was so endearing to you that you couldn’t help but smile. You open your mouth to continue the tennis match of playfulness when a nurse walks in.

“Oh sorry, Doctor McKey,” the nurse says with a nod. “I have her discharge papers here.”

“Oh,” Keys says, smiling at the nurse who hands him the papers. “Cool. Thank you, Nurse Richards.”

“I’m free to go?” You ask as the door closes shut behind the nurse. 

“You’re free to go,” Keys confirms with a nod, ignoring the pit in his stomach at the thought of you leaving.

You manage to manoeuvre yourself off the hospital bed, hobbling a little to keep weight off your ankle as you grab your skating bag from the nearby armchair.

“Is someone picking you up?” Keys asks, watching your ankle carefully as you swing your bag over your shoulder. He knew your skates were in there from how heavy the bag looked. “Like your parents? A friend? A partner?”

Keys knew that the last suggestion had been loaded and that you could see right through him but you didn’t comment on it.

“No, I was just going to get an Uber,” you tell him.

Keys should have left it there. Should have told you to rest your ankle and sent you on your way. But instead, Keys opened his mouth and said something he almost instantly regretted.

“I could take you back home,” he says so suddenly that he surprises even himself. “Um, I have my lunch coming up so—I don’t mind taking you back home on my break.”

Why did he open his mouth? Why did he just offer to drive you home? Why did you have to look so damn pretty in that—

“Okay,” you say, forcing Keys out of the spiral he had been out to descend into. “Yeah. If that wasn’t a problem then—that would be great. Thank you, Doctor McKey.”

“It’s Keys,” he says gently. “Please, call me Keys.”

It was no surprise to you whatsoever that Doctor McKey—Keys—drove a Toyota Prius. It also didn’t surprise you that his most listened to artist was Noah Kahan or that the last playlist he had listened to had been called ‘Calming Mix’.

“Can you stop going through my Spotify?” Keys asks you, face red as his eyes remain on the road while you flick through the app on the screen in his car.

“You said I could be in charge of the music—”

“—you’ve also been trying to find a song for the past five minutes—”

“—in my defence, I am high on pain medication—”

“—you had one Advil like an hour ago—”

The back and forth between you and Keys carries on for the entire car journey to your apartment. In the end, you selected Staying Still just as Keys pulled into your street. 

“Thank you Doc—Keys,” you say when his car finally stops. “You really didn’t have to.”

“I know,” Keys says with a curt nod. “But I wanted to. An Uber from the hospital would have been extortionate.”

“Sure,” you say with a small laugh as you reach for the door handle. “Well—I’ll see you in eight weeks for the all clear.”

Keys watches as you open up the car door, watches as you go to step out and—

“Do you mind if I stop by to um—to check you’re doing okay?” He asks you in a slight panic because all of a sudden, eight weeks was too long to not see you. “Bring you groceries or…whatever you need.”

You had half climbed out of his car at this point but you pause at the question, turning to look back at him with a smile tugging on the corners of your mouth.

“Is this in a professional context? Like are you gonna bring a stethoscope or—”

“—no,” Keys shakes his head, feeling his face burn as he wonders what the fuck he was doing. “No stethoscope."

“Shame,” you tell him with a wry smile. “I like the whole McDreamy thing you got going on.”

“Mc—what—”

But instead of answering, you finally climb out of his car before limping towards your apartment door. And Keys begins to wonder what the fuck had he just done.

Keys waits a respectable amount of time—four days—before he first shows up at your apartment door with his arms full of groceries. He had spent way too much time and way too much money on the grocery shop for you but he told himself it was all in aid for your recovery. That he was being a good doctor.

But then he kept showing up. With groceries, with pizza from that Italian palace he knew you liked and one time, with some cupcakes he had “accidentally” bought too many of. And after the first few visits, you began to invite him in—for dinner, for a few episodes of whatever TV it was that you were watching. And Keys was happy to note that you were actually listening to his advice—that you were resting, keeping your leg elevated as much as you could and that you hadn’t been skating since the trip to the ER.

It had been six weeks since then and Keys was over every couple of days now. You found that you had memorised the sound of his car pulling up outside your apartment. You found that those days Keys came over had quietly become your favourite. And Keys found himself thinking of excuses to visit you. He sometimes left his jacket on your couch just to come over the next day or because he had found a TV that he knew you’d like and needed to tell you about it immediately.

It was a Friday night and Keys had a difficult day in the ER. You didn’t ask what had happened but you had heard about the fatal car crash that had occurred in the city earlier that day. The one that had killed an entire family. And so, you had suggested trying to make pizzas from scratch. It had gone horribly but Keys had managed to crack a smile for the first time that day.

You beam when you see it and you can’t help yourself. Because Keys had been so good to you over the past few weeks that you wanted—needed—to say thank you. And so, you set down the dough you had been kneading with your hands for the past few minutes before you lean towards him, your lips aiming for his cheek.

But at that exact moment, Keys turned his head—likely to ask you to pass the sauce or the olives or whatever, you don’t find out—because instead of your lips landing on his cheek—they plant themselves directly onto his lips.

The millisecond or so that your lips were pressed together, you find that his were soft. Pillowy. Ones you wanted to melt into.

But the accidental kiss lasts barely a second before the both of you pull away as though scolded.

“Oh god,” you gasp, your face hot as you stare at Keys with wide eyes. “Oh my god—I’m so sorry! I was trying to kiss you on the cheek but you turned and I—”

“—no, no, no,” Keys says hurriedly, his face so red that he was almost the same colour as the tomatoey sauce as he raises his hands in surrender. “Don’t be sorry! I mean—it was an honest mistake. A big, big massive mistake—”

You laugh but it doesn’t meet your eyes as the words big, massive mistake settle somewhere in your gut. Oh god, you felt awful for making him so uncomfortable but you didn’t know what to say as he backed away from you a little. And so, you tell yourself that the best thing to do was laugh it off.

“Wow,” you say with a forced laugh. “Didn’t think you’d hate the idea of kissing me that much.”

You say it as a joke—you mean it as a joke but your tone makes it sound like anything but. Keys also stops kneading the pizza dough while you look away, not wanting him to see the look of disappointment on your face. 

But before you could even think about returning your attention back to your half-made pizza, both of Keys’ large hands are suddenly resting gently on either side of your neck.

“Keys? What are you—”

Whatever you had been about to say is lost as Keys pulls you in. You barely have time to register what exactly was happening before his lips meet yours purposefully this time and suddenly? Nothing else matters.

His lips were still soft, still pillowy and they were gliding against yours as though they belonged there. You melted into him, your hands finding their way into his hair as his glasses pressed uncomfortably into your face. But you didn’t care—not as you felt his warm tongue dive into your mouth in a move that left you feeling hot all over, that left the blood running through your veins humming.

Keys kissed you like he never wanted to stop, not caring about the flour that was now in his hair from your hands. And likewise, you didn’t care about the flour that was now all over your neck. Not when kissing Keys felt this good. Not when his thumb gently traced over the skin of your neck as he deepened the kiss further, tilting your head back ever so slightly as you clung to him.

It was the sort of kiss that could have lasted for hours. But the sound of the pizza cutter that had been perched precariously on the edge of the kitchen countertop clattering to the ground was the thing that finally pulled you both apart.

You were both breathless, flustered and both unable to stop yourselves from smiling.

“I don’t remember that being on my treatment plan, Doc,” you tease him.

Keys rolls his eyes but he’s smiling. He leans in to gently press his forehead against yours, licking his bottom lip as his eyes shift between yours. “You make me sick sometimes, sweetheart,” he tells you before leaning in to press a gentle, sweet kiss to your lips. “But good thing you’re the cure for it too.”

Your stomach warms at his words and it’s impossible not to beam at his words.

“Maybe I should get stress fractures more often if this is the sort of treatment you deliver.”

Keys shakes his head before pressing a kiss to your forehead. “Absolutely not. I’m wrapping you up in bubblewrap to keep you out of harm's way.”

You laugh but you have a feeling that he wasn’t joking. Because there was no way Keys was letting his favourite patient ever get hurt again.

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As has this– the first, aching moments of the morning, when he rises promptly every day at 6 AM. It’s another habit that’s been quite literally beaten into him. 

Gator’s eyes open groggily, and he extracts one of his arms to reach over and slap the stop button on the alarm. He misses it the first time, and it disturbs you. You turn slightly, your sleeping face already pulling in a frown, and hit the back of your hand against Gator’s chest to tell him to kill the noise. 

He fights his amusement and finally gets the damn alarm off. 

You make a half-conscious noise of approval and roll back over. Gator can’t help but follow you, spend even one more minute burrowed into the heat of the bed together. He slips his arms around your waist again, nosing his way into the crook of your neck. Places a gentle kiss there, soft enough not to wake you.

Your skin is blazing with sleep, your hair fanned out across the pillow. Right now, he wants nothing more than to bury himself in that warmth, back into the gentle scent of your faded perfume, tucking you against his chest where he knows for certain you’ll be safe.

But that’s a dangerous game– and if he lets himself indulge in it, he’ll never be able to drag himself out of bed and into his day. So, reluctantly, he presses another kiss to your neck, then one each to your jaw and your temple, and slips out from under the covers. 

You make another garbled noise at the loss of warmth, flopping around a little to make yourself comfortable again. You’re an active sleeper, to Gator’s endless amusement. He fights his laugh and sets about getting ready.

When he emerges from the closet dressed in his cargos and a black t-shirt, shrugging on his vest, you’ve moved again. Overheated now, you’ve shoved the covers off, one leg thrown over them. The movement has rucked up your sleep shorts, exposing the long line of your thigh and your ass. It’s no shock where Gator’s eye goes as he drinks you in. 

He swallows, eyes tracing your supple curves, the way you’re so blissfully unaware of what you’re doing to him first thing in the goddamn morning. Fighting heat in his abdomen, he traipses over to your end of the bed and bends down, ignoring the noise his combat boots make against the squeaky old hardwoods. Gently, he brushes back a few stray pieces of your hair and presses one last kiss to your cheek. “Love you,” he murmurs into your skin.

Here in this bedroom, he almost feels like a different man. 

A man exempt from hardness. A man who can’t stand to be anything but what he’s been trained not to be– a man fitted into your grooves, melted like butter, softness in every fiber of his muscles. When he touches you, kisses you, fucks you, it’s like this, wrapped in spell-binding sheets that drain every last scrap of depravity out of him. There’s nothing in him anymore but desperate, gentle hands, pawing for affection, giving it out readily in return. In the warm, hazy spell of the morning, it’s the only thing he is. He’s gone soft, just like his daddy warned him, and somehow, he can’t get enough of it.

Gator rises, the image of you captured and preserved in his mind to antagonize him for the rest of his day. With one glance back at you, arousal and affection melding in his gut, he leaves for work.

---

"I'm serious!" Steve says, snatching the popcorn back and placing it on the coffee table before shifting on the sofa to look at you properly. "This is—this is abhorrent. Do you exclusively date selfish assholes or something?"

If you hadn't had a mouthful of popcorn, you would have probably argued with him. But instead you settle for sending him a glare as you chew what was left of the salty popcorn in your mouth.

"Do you finish when you touch yourself?"

You nearly choke on a popcorn kernel.

"Jesus Christ, Harrington!" you gasp out, your face now so hot you were surprised that steam wasn’t rising from your skin. “You can’t just ask me that—”

“—what?” Steve asks, seemingly confused why you were so taken aback by his question. “I’m trying to help—”

“—by asking me about masturbation?”

“I’m just trying to understand the situation!”

You huff because you knew deep down Steve had good intentions. You knew he wasn’t asking to be a creep—he was asking because he genuinely cared about you and wanted to help you with the situation. But talking about something so intimate with Steve made you feel a lot of things that you weren’t quite sure what to do with.

“Yes,” you say finally, determinedly not looking at Steve as you answer. “Yes, I um, I finish when I—you know—”

“—touch yourself?” Steve finishes for you and the words send heat coursing through your entire body. You shift on the couch beside him, eyes on his TV that was currently playing some sitcom you were no longer paying attention to. “C’mon, don’t be coy about it! Masturbation is normal! I do it at least three times a—”

“—Steve!” You scold him, your face somehow even hotter as you turn to glare at him. “I don’t need to know about how many times a week you jerk off—”

“—actually, I was going to say that I do it three times a day.”

You look at him and suddenly, any intelligent thought you had disappears. Because now all you could think about was Steve and what he’d look like fucking his fist with his cock. You would be lying if you said you hadn’t thought about Steve in that way before. He may be a good friend of yours but he was also stupidly attractive and wore jeans that hugged his lower half a little too well. Sometimes, if you had a chance to look at him for long enough, you could see the imprint of his thick cock over the denim. And his ass—

“You know I’m kidding right?” Steve asks you, seeming to take your lack of response as disgust—when in reality it was anything but. “I don’t—that’s just excessive. Few times a week is enough for me—”

“—okay, okay! I get it!” You interrupt, wanting him to stop talking because his words were going straight to your core and you didn’t want your traitorous eyes to shift down to his lap. “I don’t need to know your…schedule.”

Steve smiles a little before nudging you with his elbow. “It’s pretty rigorous, I’ll tell you that—”

“—Steven—”

“—sorry,” Steve grins at you before he finally looks away from you. You pray that he drops the entire conversation, that he doesn’t ask anymore questions so that you could finally take moment to relax—

“So, it’s not you—it’s just the guys that you’re seeing?”

“Steve, can’t we just—”

“—no, we can’t,” Steve says, sitting up and looking at you with a careful expression. “Listen—I know you feel awkward talking about this with me but—I just—I care about you and I care about the way guys treat you. And if they’re not making you come, not taking the time to work out what you want, then they’re not treating you right. I—I just want to make sure that you know it’s not you that’s the problem here. It’s them.”

You swallow because, god, why did he have to be so caring? Why did he know the exact right thing to say? And why did you have the sudden urge to press your thighs together?

“I dunno,” you say finally, your throat a little dry for reasons that had everything to do with the man sitting right beside you. “What if—what if guys just can’t make me come? Like I’m too complicated down there or—”

“—stop right there,” Steve interrupts, not unkindly but in a firm sort of way that shuts you up almost instantly. “What did I just say? It’s not you. You said you can make yourself come so I promise you—you’re not the problem. They are. They’re being selfish. They need to—they need to take the time to learn what your body needs. Ask you what you like, how you respond to what they’re doing to you.”

It was good advice, genuinely. But all you could think about as you listened to Steve was what he’d be like in bed. If he would take the time to learn what your body needed, if he would ask you what you liked, if he’d watch—lips parted and eyes wide—as your body writhed beneath him, as your plushy walls squeezed around his—

“I don’t know Steve,” you say quietly, worrying your bottom lip between your teeth as you try not to think too hard about the image you had of Steve’s head between your thighs, of his lips wet with your slick dripping down to his chin. “I don’t know if it’s just that. I mean—it’s not like what they’re doing is really bad because I get close, I—it’s like right before I get there—I just seize up or something.”

Steve listens carefully, his attention solely on you as you try your best to explain the issue and when you’re done, he takes a few seconds to mull over what you had just told him.

“These guys,” Steve begins, hazel eyes flickering between yours as he studies your expression. “Do you trust them?”

“What?” You ask, a little confused at the question. “I don’t know what you—”

“—do you trust them?” Steve repeats the question, not elaboration or clarification—just a small quirk of his brow as he waits for you to respond. “Do you trust them enough to let yourself go completely?”

The question takes you by surprise and you want to say yes—but the word dies on your tongue and the lack of a response was enough of an answer for Steve. He looks at you for a moment too long, hazel eyes studying you as though he was trying to look inside your brain.

“Do you trust me?”

You don’t even think as you nod—because of course you trusted Steve. You trusted him with your life. After everything that had happened in Hawkins, it was hard not to.

“Of course I—”

“—then make yourself come in front of me.”

The silence that greeted Steve’s words was deafening. You stare at him, eyes wide as you let his words truly sink in. You let yourself come to terms with the fact that you weren’t having some strange sex dream. That your good friend and guy you occasionally had inappropriate thoughts had just asked you to make yourself come in front of him.

“Why?” You ask him finally because though you were shocked—there was a large part of you that didn’t want to say no to his offer.

“I just—I think it might help,” Steve shrugs, trying to appear nonchalant but you notice the way the tips of his ears redden. “I mean sex is pretty fucking vulnerable so you might just need an experience with someone you trust who cares about you. So you know it’s okay to—to let go in front of someone.”

The way he says it—with so much care in his voice that it almost makes you forget about the whole making yourself come in front of him thing. He makes it sound so sweet that you find yourself lost for words again.

“You think it’s weird,” Steve says, shifting away an inch or so away from you on the couch—in your state of shock you had barely noticed that he had begun to inch closer to you. “I know, I know, I shouldn’t have—”

“—n-no, no, no,” you stutter out before you could stop yourself with a subtle shake of your head. “I mean—yeah, it’s weird but—as you said I-I trust you.”

Steve blinks and then—seems to realise that you weren’t completely disgusted by his proposal and sits up a little straighter on the couch. 

“Really? You—you’d want to try and—”

“—yes,” you say before he could finish his sentence because you were feeling incredibly turned on by the thought of Steve watching you touch yourself and you didn’t want to let rational thought creep in now. “It could help and if it doesn’t then—”

“—then we just forget it ever happened,” he finishes with a quick nod. “Yeah, totally. Like it never happened.”

You look at each other then, apparently both waiting for the other to back out. But when neither of you do, Steve visibly swallows as he stands up from his couch, holding out his hand out for you to take..

“You wanna—go somewhere more comfortable?”

Steve’s bedroom was surprisingly tidy considering the fact he hadn’t been expecting company. Still, there’s some clothes strewn across his bed that Steve makes quick work of tidying up.

“Sorry,” he mutters as he dumps the clothes onto his desk before gesturing towards his bed for you to sit down.

You glance down at his bed before you look back at him. Because now you felt nervous—now you were thinking about lying on his sheets and fingering yourself in front of him. And perhaps you were just starting to realise how insane that would be and—

“Hey.”

You feel one of Steve’s large hands on your arm and it pulls you back to reality. You hadn’t even realised that you had been staring blankly down at his plaid sheets, already too in your own head about what was about to happen. Steve’s gentle touch, his fingertips brushing over your skin help to ground you—remind you that this wasn’t a stranger you had met at a bar or someone you had been set up with by a mutual friend. This was Steve. Your good, totally platonic friend, Steve.

“You’re okay,” he says gently, thumb rubbing gentle circles in your skin and unknowingly turning your insides into goo. “I’m gonna put on some music, okay? Help you relax a bit. Just take a seat.”

You listen because you did not know what else to do, sitting on the very edge of his bed and watching as he walks over to his vinyl player perched on top of a chest of drawers. You continue to watch him from the back as he sorts through the small stack of vinyls he had, apparently trying to find the perfect record. 

A few moments later, the sound of Baby Now That I’ve Found You by the Foundations starts to play and you feel your shoulders visibly relax before Steve turns around to look at you.

“Really?” You ask him with a faint smile. “Is this you trying to set the mood?”

“That obvious, huh?” Steve asks you as he steps towards the bed—towards you.

You watch him, your lips parting as he stands a foot or so away from you now. The room feels five times smaller as Steve’s eyes are on you.

“What if it doesn’t work?” You ask Steve suddenly. “What if there’s something wrong if me or—”

Steve cuts you off by saying your name and the way he says it steals the air from your lungs.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” Steve says firmly, as though he believed every syllable. “Absoluetly nothing.”

You nod, choosing to believe him as you look at his face, the smooth voices of the Foundations putting you a little more at ease. “Okay so—we’re doing this. Okay. Are you just going to watch me or—”

You stop when you see Steve shaking his head. Your body suddenly feels hot, as though all the blood in your body had been replaced by fire. It was almost as though it seemed to know what Steve was going to say before he said it.

“No,” Steve says in a low voice that goes straight to your aching centre. “You’re going to show me. And I’ll show you.”

Everything became very still after that. The both of you just looked at each other—your chest heaving and his eyes flickering over your face as though trying to find any hint of uncertainty. You wanted to be the one to make the first move and you almost do, your fingers curling into the sheets beneath you as you build up the courage to do so. But before you could find the hem of your t-shirt, Steve begins to lift up his top.

The first flash of his soft stomach, of his happy trail and you seemed to forget how to breathe. God, he was gorgeous. Moles and freckles were dotted over his skin, there was a generous smattering of hair over his chest that made your thighs press together and you wanted nothing more than to run your fingers through it. In truth, you could have looked at him for hours. 

But instead, you take a deep breath before you very slowly get to your feet.

Steve is watching you carefully as you begin to lift up your own shirt. His eyes on you should have made you feel self conscious, should have made you think twice of the very unsexy bra you were wearing, should have made you think of all the parts of yourself you didn’t like. But there was something about the way he was looking at you as you let your shirt fall to the floor that made you feel the very opposite of self conscious.

And so, before you could second guess yourself—you made the next move before him.

Your fingers fiddle momentarily with the button of your jeans before you unzip them, the sound making Steve’s eyes widen slightly. And when you begin to tug your jeans down over your hips and then your thighs, leaving you in just your mismatched underwear, you watch in fascination as a faint blush creeps up Steve’s neck.

You step out of your jeans, not looking away from Steve for even a second so you didn’t miss a single facial expression. So that you didn’t miss the way the flush had crept up his cheeks and right up to the very tips of his ears, how his breathing had started to become shallow.

“You look—”

“—don’t,” you say, surprised to find that your voice was barely a whisper. 

“Why not?” He asks gently, head tilting to the side as he begins to unbuckle his belt.

You lick your lips, eyes still on his face but desperately wanting to shift lower to watch as he unzips his jeans.

“Becuase I might think that you’re just saying it to make me feel better,” you say. “Considering what we’re about to do.”

“I would never lie about how beautiful I think you are,” Steve says simply, his eyes still on you as he finally pulls his jeans down.

You barely have a moment to comprehend Steve calling you beautiful before you catch sight of him in only his boxers. He was—shit, he was perfect. You let your eyes dip down to feast on his delicious thighs, his boxers that had a large, noticeable tent in them that made your core throb.

Your throat felt dry, you didn't quite know what to do. All you knew is that Steve Harrington was hard just by looking at you. The thought sends a hot surge through your body, as though every damn nerve was suddenly burning beneath your skin. And perhaps it was that thought—the idea that you had made Steve hard without really doing anything—that you reached carefully behind you to unclip your bra.

Steve visibly swallows as your breasts spill out, finally seeing your hardened peaks as you let your bra fall to the floor alongside your t-shirt and jeans.

There was a beat and then—

He begins to tug down his boxers.

You had imagined what Steve Harrignton’s cock would look like more times than you cared to admit. But every mental image you had conjured up was nothing—nothing—compared to what was standing to attention right in front of you. His cock was long, thick and heavy, so heavy in fact it had made an audible sound when it had slapped against his soft tummy. His cock was beautiful—he was beautiful. Slightly curved in a way that you knew was made for hitting that spot inside of you just right. The ruddy tip of his cock was already leaking precum, which you shamelessly watch drool along a vein bulging along his length. Your mouth felt incredibly dry as you ogled the sheer size of him, imagining what it would be like for his thick cock to split you open—

You come to your senses just enough to discard your panties. They stick to your cunt briefly due to how fucking drenched you already were and Steve notices—his bottom lip between his teeth as he marvels at how your lips cling to the fabric before giving way, his cock twitching when he sees the damp patch your wetness had caused.

And there you both were, both finally completely bare in front of one another for the first time. Both looking shamelessly at the other’s body, both clearly desperate to touch the other but not dare to do so.

And then, without a word to each other, you sink back down onto his bed while Steve reaches blindly behind him to pull out his desk chair.

It was only now beginning to feel real, as you look at Steve’s face at the same time he looks at you.

“Still with me?” He asks you breathlessly.

You take your time to answer, spreading your legs a little wider and watching with immense satisfaction as his eyes flicker down to your soaked pussy. Another surge of something hot like molten lava surges through you as you notice the way his hand twitches towards his cock.

“Yeah,” you breathe out. “Still with you.”

You could have looked at each other for hours, days even. But your pussy was clenching around nothing and more precum dribbled out of Steve’s cock and you both knew you couldn’t wait any longer.

Steve moved first, one of his large hands wrapping around his thick cock before giving himself one, two gentle strokes. The sound of his own precum wetting his cock was obscene and it was that noise that made you trail your fingers delicately over the skin of your inner thigh before making contact with the soaked, sensitive flesh between your legs.

The relief was instant. You felt your entire body relax, your eyelids flutter for a brief moment before you made sure to look back at Steve. He was already watching you and for a moment you just smile at each other—almost shyly despite the situation—before you both focus back on pleasuring yourselves.

Your fingers glide easily through your folds, your slick allowing you to plunge two fingers inside of yourself. A breathy moan left your lips before you could stop it. You were almost embarrassed by it but then you notice the way Steve’s jaw clenches at the sound, the way he squeezes his cock a little bit tighter.

“God, you’re fucking soaked,” he grits out. “You sound—fuck—you sound fucking incredible. Please don’t stop.”

His words—his filthy fucking words—go right through you. Your cunt clenches around your fingers and you briefly wonder if you had died and gone to heaven, if Steve Harrington was really dirty talking to you right now.

“C’mon pretty girl,” Steve grits out as he pumps his dick that little bit faster, eyes not leaving yours. “Don’t hold back. Please, baby. Don’t you dare hold back on me.”

You could barely believe it, the words that were falling from his lips, the pet names he had just called you. But you didn’t question it—too busy fucking yourself with your slick fingers as you let out another soft, almost pornographic moan.

“That’s it,” Steve murmurs, the schlick, schlick, schlick of him fucking his fist filling the room as he watching your soaked fingers move in and out of your needy hole like it was the best damn thing he had ever seen. “Soak your fingers f’me. That’s so fucking hot.”

You let out a whimper at that, his words having such an impact on you that your hips buck upwards to meet your fingers, your eyes fluttering again as pleasure floods into every pore over your skin.

“Steve,” you mewl out as your fingers pump in and out of your hole, your breasts bouncing with each and every thrust. “Fuck, Steve. Feels so fucking good.”

Steve hadn’t been expecting you to dirty talk but god, had it been the most welcome surprise.

“Yeah? Gonna make yourself come for me, sweet girl?” Steve asks you, now pumping his dick frantically as he watches you roll your hips against his bed—your slick soaking his sheets. “Gonna get my bed all wet? Make me smell you on my sheets for days?”

You whimper and nod desperately as you curl your fingers, hitting that spongey spot inside of you that had you mewling out yet again. 

“Gonna touch your clit for me?” Steve asks you, breathing heavily as he tries to hold back as the sight of you pleasuring yourself on his bed was suddenly becoming too much for him. “C’mon, please. Wanna see you lose it, baby.”

It was like Steve knew exactly what you needed, almost as though he knew your body better than you did without even touching it.

Your other hand—the one that had been curled into the sheets beneath you—journeys to between your legs. And that first brush of your fingertip over your swollen, arching clit had you seeing stars. You’re pretty sure you moan out Steve’s name but it also could have been nonsense. All you could focus on was Steve’s own pleasure dancing across his face and the dual sensation of your fingers plunging in and out of your soaked cunt and the other that was circling around your clit.

Pleasure was consuming you—it was white hot and you could feel it pulsing in every nerve in your body. You could feel the blood in your veins burning as the coil in your gut was pulled tighter and tighter while you played with your swollen clit.

“That’s it,” Steve gasps out, his eyes only on you as you neared the edge. “C’mon, baby. Be a good girl and come for me. You can do it, I know you can.”

You wish that you could have held on, that you could have prolonged your pleasure by a few more seconds. But your orgasm had snuck up on you—crashing over you like a tidal wave. Your thighs shook, your toes curled and Steve’s name fell from your lips as you came all over your fingers, your juices soaking Steve’s bed.

And it was that—watching you finally trusting him enough to let yourself go completely that made Steve follow along right behind you. You watch in awe as his toes curl, as his stomach clenches and how his head tilts back against the back of the chair in ecstasy, his release spilling all over that soft tummy of his. Steve lets out a loud groan, followed by your name and you swear, you could have come for a second time from that sound alone. 

You withdraw your fingers as you catch your breath, your chest heaving and body still buzzing after the intensity of your orgasm.

Finally, after taking a moment or two to prepare yourself, you finally look at Steve’s face. He was already looking at you and smiling.

“See,” he breathes out. “Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s all about trust.”

“Steve Harrington being right for once?” You say, smiling. “It must be a miracle.”

You both laugh and though you both clean up, get dressed and promise each other nothing will change between you—deep down you both knew that after tonight? Things would never be the same again..

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Steve Harrington stands behind the counter the entire time with his arms crossed and his shoulders shaking, fighting a smile so poorly it barely counts as fighting.

Keith clocks out at eleven-oh-three even though the store opened an hour ago, but apparently he has “business” to take care of. 

The door swings shut bahind him.

Steve leans back against the counter, arms crossed, the smile no longer fighting anything, and you are already rolling your eyes before he pulls breath to speak.

This is the thing about Steve Harrington: he is not a dick, exactly. He's not cruel. He doesn't do anything that you could point to in a court of law and say there, that's it, that's the thing. What he does is flirt with every girl who walks through the door and get their numbers and then hide in the backroom when they come back looking for him.

Then there was once he told Robin— in the backroom, where he apparently believes sound does not travel— that you lack attention to detail, which is reach so extraordinary you nearly respect it. He alphabetizes by first name half the time. You have never once brought it up. Okay maybe you brought it up occasionally. Often. Maybe every chance you have.

And then there was the incident with the girl last month, when you told her Steve wasn't in because he'd mentioned feeling itchy downstairs, which, fine, maybe you embellished slightly, but Robin had found it funny and that's really all the justification you need. But since then he’s been a lot more moodier when he’s around you. Barely even speaks to you. 

Also, you don't even think he's that good looking.

He's fine. He has good hair, probably, if you're being completely objective, which you are, and you've noticed in a purely observational capacity that his arms fill out his sleeves in a way that suggests he goes to the gym with some regularity, and his jeans fit him well, and you'd have to be actually blind not to notice that. That's just having eyes. That doesn't mean anything.

He has never once flirted with you, for the record. Which is fine. Great, actually, given that you have a boyfriend. Had a boyfriend. The distinction is new as of last night, when you threw Scott's things out your apartment window and told him not to come back, but the point stands.

Steve opens his mouth.

You cross the distance between you two in four steps and put your pointer finger directly on his lips.

"Don't even, Harrington." You look him dead in the eye. "Not in the mood."

You make the mistake of leaving it there.

His bewildered hazel eyes narrow, slow, something conspiratorial moving through them, and then the corner of his mouth twitches against your finger and his lips part and his tongue drags forward, and your finger drops onto it, and he closes his teeth around it with the gentlest possible pressure and just… holds it there.

The sound you make is not a gasp. It is a sharp inhale of surprise, which is completely different.

His eyes are mischievous and fixed on yours, and up close— closer than you typically allow yourself to be— you can see that his irises aren't simply brown. There's green in there, threaded through, soft and swirling, and his teeth are straight and white and his tongue is cool and wet and— you are going to actually strangle him with your bare hands.

The bell over the door chimes.

An older woman shuffles in, making a beeline for the romance section, and you turn toward her on instinct and Steve uses the moment to take your wrist. His hand large and warm, fingers spanning easily around it, and draws your finger out of his mouth slowly, his eyes tracking the shine of it after.

You snatch your hand back and wipe it on his shirt.

You feel his chest under your palm when you do it and you remove your hand immediately.

He licks his lips. Brings his thumb up to brush his bottom one, slow, like the contact has left something there he's deciding what to do with. Something in his expression shifts— not the smirk, something underneath it— and he looks at you for a moment that goes a beat longer than it should before he says, "Was gonna ask if you spilled coffee on yourself this morning."

His eyes drop to your chest. Back up.

You look down. The vest does nothing to hide the stain on the swell of your breast, dark against the fabric, thoroughly obvious.

You say nothing. He's already walking to the customer, his customer service voice emerging from somewhere inside him like a different person entirely, warm and easy and charming, and the older woman is already smiling at something he's said, and you stand where you are and roll your eyes and then linger for approximately three seconds on the way his jeans sit on his hips before you go find something to do.

.-.-.-.

You are reorganizing the candy display for the second time when the phone rings.

You know it's him before he finishes saying your name.

Scott. Three months, on and off, mostly off in practice if not in name, and last night you'd finally had enough. His stuff went out the window, you told him not to come back, you meant it. You had stood in your apartment afterward feeling entirely certain and somewhat exhilarated and had gone to bed and slept fine.

And now his voice is coming through the Family Video phone line at twelve forty-three in the afternoon, thick with rehearsed remorse, telling you how badly he messed up, how much he misses you, how he knows he can do better—

"Fuck off, Scott."

You put the phone down hard enough that the candy display rattles.

The fluorescent lights are suddenly very bright. The slushee machine is suddenly very loud. The store smells like chemicals and artificial sugar and you need to be somewhere that isn't the front of it immediately, so you go, pushing through the backroom door hard enough that it swings back and hits the wall.

Steve looks up from his magazine.

His feet are on the table. There's a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the wrapper beside him and a Coke going warm in his hand, and he takes in your expression with raised eyebrows and then loudly turns a page.

You walk over and pick up the sandwich and take a large bite.

He doesn't react.

"Why are men—" You chew. Swallow. "What is it. What is it that you're born with that makes you—" You groan at the ceiling. "What is wrong with all of you."

Steve blinks. He appears to be running an internal calculation about whether he needs to be offended. He turns another page. "Let me guess," he says, not looking up, the smirk audible. "You and meathead broke up again."

You take another bite of his sandwich.

He holds out the Coke without being asked. You take it and drink half of it in one go and set it back down. "I cannot believe I let him get me this worked up. Who does he think he is, calling here—"

Steve laughs. Loud, genuine, the kind that makes his head tip back.

"What?" you snap, reaching up to wipe a smear of peanut butter from the corner of your mouth.

He shakes his head. "Nothing."

"Tell me."

He puts the magazine down. His feet come off the table and he shifts in the chair to look at you properly, elbows on his knees. "He knows you'll take him back."

"I won't. I mean it this time."

"You said that last time."

"This time is different."

"You'll feel lonely in two days and call him." He picks up his trash, standing, moving toward the bin. "You always do." He says it low, almost to himself, something in his voice that doesn't quite match the smirk.

You uncross your arms. "That is… that's not—" You hate that your mouth can't finish the sentence with any real conviction. "It's not true."

"It is." He tosses the wrapper. Turns around. "Honestly I don't get why you're even with him. You complain about him constantly." He shifts into an impression of you that is offensive in its accuracy, his voice going up slightly: "Robin, he never buys me flowers. Robin, I don't think he knows my favorite color. Robin, I don't even think he knows where the clit is."

The backroom is not large. There is not much space between you. He takes a step closer.

"Sounds like you need to find someone else." His eyes blink half-lidded, his lips pursing with a sassy deliberateness that makes your hand itch. "Or stop complaining."

"Oh, great advice." You hold his gaze. "When you find a single guy in Hawkins who isn't you, let me know."

He tilts his head. Steps closer. Something shifts in his face— the smirk softening at the edges, his jaw ticking once— and his eyes have gone a little sad at the corners, which is infuriating because it looks genuine. "Wait." His voice drops. "What's wrong with me?"

"Plenty of things." You keep your voice soft, wanting the words to land clean. "Surprised you haven't gotten a girl pregnant by now."

"Oh, I thought it was because I have an STD?"

Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

Something moves behind his eyes. His tongue presses into his cheek. He steps into your space.

You are against the wall and he is close enough that you can smell him. It’s woodsy cologne, laundry detergent, the faint ghost of peanut butter. He's looking down at you with his brow furrowed, his hazel eyes darker than they were a minute ago. Both palms find the wall on either side of your head and he leans in, his mouth at your ear.

"At least I'd know where you needed to be touched."

The ache that moves through you is immediate and mortifying and you are absolutely not acknowledging it. You shift your weight— not away from him, just shifting, just adjusting, for no reason— and you look directly at his face and laugh.

Loud. Right at him.

"Yeah, right, Steve." You bring your hand up to make him look at you, fingers at his jaw. "Bet you've never made a girl cum in your life."

The corner of his lips flickers.

His thumb comes up to your chin— slow, his eyes on yours the whole time— and you take him in all at once the way you don't let yourself do usually: the moles on his jaw, the chest hair where his polo buttons are undone, the way his jeans sit easy on his hips, the slight soft curve of his stomach, his thighs, his arms, the Family Video vest that he makes look less stupid than anyone has a right to. His eyes, hazel and green and completely focused on your face.

Fuck.

His hand trails down your side. Finds your hip and squeezes, warm and sure, and neither of you looks away as his fingers find the hem of your skirt and slip underneath. His pointer finger traces a slow circle on your upper thigh and your breath goes shallow and you keep your expression completely neutral through what you can only describe as heroic effort.

His hand moves higher.

His palm cups you through the fabric of your underwear and your back arches off the wall by a degree before you catch it, breathing through your nose, furious at your own body, furious at the warmth of his hand, furious at the specific and undeniable ache of wanting more pressure.

Steve Harrington is the last person. The absolute last person. You don't even like him. You don't even think he's—

His fingers slip beneath the waistband.

Oh, you think, oh no.

His finger slides between your folds and the sound you make is quiet and involuntary and you hate it and him and yourself in equal measure.

He exhales a soft laugh against your cheek. Licks his bottom lip. "You're so wet, sweetheart." His voice is low and wondering, almost private. "For me?"

"You fucking wish, Steve—"

His middle finger finds your clit.

One slow, precise circle, and the word you were going to say next dissolves completely into a gasp that echoes off the backroom walls.

He leans into you, his nose pressing into your temple, his breath warm at your ear.

"Gotcha."

"Big deal." Your voice comes out unsteady and you hate it. "You want a prize or something?"

His finger moves in tighter circles, faster, and the pressure of it unspools something low in your stomach, heat building in thick, stacking waves. His other hand is still flat on the wall beside your head and his forearm is bracketing you in and his mouth is at the corner of your jaw and you are gripping the wall behind you with both hands because the alternative is grabbing onto him and you are not doing that.

"I think," he says, low against your skin, "making you cum like this will be enough."

He works faster.

Your head tips back against the wall. Your knees make a compelling argument for giving up. The circles are tight and relentless and perfectly placed and you think, with the last functioning part of your brain, of course. Of course he's good at this. Of course.

"Steve—"

"Yeah." He coos, like he knows exactly what you need. His finger works faster still, and his mouth finds your jaw, your throat, pressing warm open kisses down the side of your neck while his hand does not let up, not for a second, his wrist moving with a patience that suggests he has no intention of stopping until he gets what he wants.

Your fingers find his shoulder.

You grip it.

He makes a quiet satisfied sound against your throat.

You feel that tension building and you shake your head, your vision going blurry, clutching him harder. "Steve, please it's too much… fucking go inside or something— shit!"

Steve's hand swipes at your entrance, and you think he might listen, his middle finger barely swirling inside, and then you hear a chuckle when you moan, clutching the green vest, fingers digging into his shoulder blades. Steve himself seems a bit imbalanced. His upper body presses into your chest, and you catch the way his eyes peek down at your blouse— something tells you he isn't paying attention to the coffee stain, but maybe the way your shirt pulls down a little, and the blue linen bra that peeks out. The flesh of your tits at the neckline.

You can feel his cock, hard and twitching, against your thigh and you really don't care. At all. You press your thigh into him— the one day you forget to wear stockings— feeling the heat of him through the denim on your skin. You mewl, obviously unintentional, because of the way Steve is still rubbing hurried circles against your oversensitive clit.

Steve's breathing hard in your hair, and you can still hear him chuckling occasionally when he pulls another cry from your lips. He tries to rut against your leg, but with what feeling you have left in it you push his hips away. "Steve… please… it's…."

You grind against his hand regardless.

"I bet it is, honey." His voice is low in your ear. "Bet you've been aching for months… and this is all you've needed. Is this why you have such an attitude when you come into work? Poor thing… probably needed Steve to show you how it's done."

"Whatever…." you gasp, burrowing your face in his neck, fisting the fabric of his vest. You try to make your thoughts go somewhere else. The last thing you are going to do is give Steve Harrington the satisfaction of cumming on his hand.

He slides two fingers inside you and makes no effort to move them, his thumb taking over in fast circles. "Stop fighting it. I can feel you. You want to cum. Do it." And it's true. You're clenching around his fingers.

You shake your head. You mutter no. However, you’re pulling him closer, making him grunt, your back pressing harder into the wall from the heat of his body. You're biting into his shoulder, listening to the slick wet sounds of him working your clit. His face is buried in your neck and he's not kissing you but you feel his mouth moving there, hot whispers against your skin.

"Come on," he says your name. "Come on, I've got you."

His hand goes fast and sloppy and you're over the edge before you realize it— you don't even feel when the band snaps, you only hear yourself cry out as he draws the orgasm out of you. His hand doesn't slow down, keeps going, and your legs are weak and shaking, his large free hand gripping your hip, rutting against your thigh— and you want to laugh at him because he's so fucking pathetic and needy.

But then he taps you gently on your sweet ache, and you feel his smile against your jaw.

"There we go," he whispers.

He's off you immediately, mouth partly open, his eyes drunk— on you— eyeing you up and down as he works his belt with both hands.

You blow hair out of your face, brows furrowed, and laugh. "What the hell are you doing?"

Steve stops and looks down, unzipping his jeans. "What does it look like? Gotta take care of something."

"Don't be stupid, Harrington. I'm not sucking your dick." Your eyes flick to his bulge before you drag them back up, hating how curious you are. "And I'm not fucking you either."

He tilts his head, something that is both amusement and wanting moving through his expression at the same time. "Might shut you up." 

He smiles. 

"Might even be nice about it."

He hasn't pushed his jeans down, but the belt is unbuckled and the zipper's all the way down and he's holding the waistband even though the button is undone. You'd think he was in charge, but really he's waiting for you. You swallow, bite your bottom lip, look down then back up.

"Why should I?"

He rolls his eyes. "Kneel."

"Excuse me?"

"You came in here interrupting my break, complaining about something I didn't even care about." He glances at his watch. "I've still got eight minutes. I'm not going back out to work with my dick tucked into my waistband, so either leave and let me take care of it, or get on your knees."

You blink at him, and if it wasn't bad enough that Steve was bossing you around— heat pooled between your legs again— and you felt your knees slowly bending. One of Steve's hands shot out and grabbed yours, electricity shooting through the point of contact. You chalk it up to static, and he helps you to the floor carefully, his eyes gentle, making sure you're comfortable. His hand grazes your shoulder, his thumb brushing your cheek. For a split second it feels almost intoxicatingly tender. Something Scott never once managed during intimacy.

Then he opens his mouth.

"Take this off." He tugs at your vest. "The shirt too."

You look at him. "How is this relevant––"

"No time to argue. Off."

You grumble and shed the vest. You look at him once before pulling your shirt off over your head. You smile at the way his throat works taking you in. You can't help it. You want to see his reaction, and it's only fair, you're about to see whatever his cock looks like, you're doing him a favor here— so you take your bra off too and let it drop beside you.

Steve's eyes widen and you hear him mutter "shit" under his breath.

He wastes no more time. He untucks his polo and brings the hem up to his mouth, biting onto it, and the sight of it— him towering over you, brow furrowed, his stomach exposed, the soft ridges and the pudge, the thatch of hair on his chest, the angel kisses scattered across his skin and one right beside his happy trail— abandons you of all good sense and you're leaning forward, pressing your mouth to it. You hear his breath hitch. You kiss more of them, nip his skin. You take your hands to the fly of his jeans and spread it open, using your fingers to drag the waistband of his briefs down, kissing just above the base of his cock. You make open-mouthed wet kisses around it, licking his happy trail and around it, and you let a dribble of spit drop from your mouth. You know you're about to ruin him from the way he whimpers and bucks his hips, gripping your shoulder. But when your mouth gets close to his cock, his hand flies to your head, pushing you back.

He shakes his head.

He pushes his jeans down himself and you help, stopping mid-thigh because there's not enough time to take them all the way off. His briefs go with them and his cock, with a bead of precum at the tip, hits his stomach. Your eyes go wide.

God fucking dammit. He's hung. And you've never thought this about anyone before, but it's pretty. The pink of the tip, the girth of it, even and full, the veins tracking the length, and it twitches under your attention like it's aware of you, and you have never once in your life thought this about anyone but you want it in your mouth. You want to feel the weight of it on your tongue. You want to wrap your hand around it and watch his face. You might, at some future point, let him put the tip inside you. For fun. Briefly. Hypothetically.

You lean forward to kiss it. You almost make it. His hand is on your head again.

He takes himself in his fist and lets his shirt fall from his teeth. Looks down at you.

"Spit on it."

You do.

He moans.

"Again."

You spit again.

"More."

You have spit running in rivulets down his length, collecting warm in the crease of his fist, dripping from the tip to the floor, and you reach forward—

His hand presses your head back.

"No. Hands at your sides. And don't touch yourself."

You only half-obey. Your hands fall to your thighs, but you push your skirt up as you settle them there, your soaked cotton underwear on full display, and you watch his jaw tighten when he sees it.

He strokes himself. One pump. Two. Watching your face.

"I wanna taste you, Steve," you say.

"Oh, now you do. Pretty sure you told me I was stupid for asking."

"Please, Steve."

He looks like he is losing the hardest mental war of his life. His hand stills.

"Open."

You open your mouth. He taps your tongue with his tip— once— and the weight of it alone makes your breath go thin. He pushes forward slowly until you choke slightly and your eyes water, and you look up at him through your lashes and he is completely, irreparably gone. You hum around him and try to move.

His hand holds you still.

His cock sits heavy and throbbing in your mouth, gathering the heat of your breath, drool pooling at the corners of your lips. He looks down at you.

"You look kinda pretty like this."

You should feel humiliated. You kind of do, actually. Except for the first time you're also starting to see it. Starting to think Steve Harrington is genuinely, actually hot. Too bad you didn’t like the guy, because maybe you’d give him a shot. Or maybe just flirt with him.

He checks his watch and sighs, drawing himself out of your mouth slowly, your lips dragging along his length, wrapping around the tip as it clears with a soft pop. A string of spit connects your lips to his cock, stretching in the low light before it breaks.

He takes himself back in hand, his other hand staying in your hair, tilting you to watch, and he strokes himself above you. Fast and purposeful now, and the sounds fill the small backroom entirely: the slick wet rhythm of his fist, schlick schlick schlick, quick and relentless, punctuated by the sounds catching in his throat that he's completely stopped trying to manage. 

"Only kinda pretty?" you mumble, fighting the pout.

Not surprising, you think. This is probably the last thing Steve wanted to—

"Always pretty," he corrects. His voice is rough and strained. "Right now you're so pretty it's gonna make me cum."

Your eyes widen a little. Your stomach flips. It's different this time, quieter than heat and want, something that makes you close your mouth and say nothing.

"Aw." He works faster, his breath coming in short pulls. "Guess all I had to do was tell you how pretty you are to get you to stop being mean to me." He whimpers, schlick schlick schlick, and a wet drop splatters right below your lip. You lick it, closing your eyes.

"You think we can be friends after this?"

Your eyes snap open.

He looks so hot— already holding back his release, his hands and forearms veiny from working, his neck strained, his chest heaving, his eyes boring into yours. The Family Video vest hugging his shoulders as he frantically strokes himself.

"As if," you scoff.

He tilts his head. "Aw, but I was so nice to you earlier. Can't we put our differences aside. Hm?"

You roll your eyes. "Yeah, sure."

"Say it."

"Say what?"

"Say we can be friends."

"I said sure—" You try to look away and his hand turns your head back towards him. His eyes are dangerously dark and clouded.

He doesn't ask again.

"Okay, whatever. We can be friends—"

Steve lets out a choked moan, your name tangled somewhere inside it. You feel warmth hit your cheek and he strokes through it fast, pearly ropes landing across your tits, and you gasp as some rolls down your sternum. Steve pants, head bowed.

After what seems like hours of silence and heavy breathing, he finally moves. His watch beeps and he silences it without looking. He leans over to the table— his neck stretching, arms flexing, the curve of his waist as he reaches— and grabs a stack of napkins. Wipes his hands. His cock. Pulls his briefs and jeans back up.

He drops the napkins on the floor and holds out his hand.

You take it and he pulls you to your feet. He grabs more napkins and holds them out toward you. He doesn't hand them over, his hand coming forward instead, pressing them gently to your chest and wiping the mess himself, careful and unhurried.

You look up at his face.

He looks up and meets your eyes and they go wide. "Oh… uh. Sorry. I didn't mean to— probably should've wet them first—"

"It's fine, Steve."

And you smile at him.

It lands on him like something he wasn't braced for. He goes still, checks for the punchline, finds nothing, and his lips turn up slowly. It’s cautious at first, then warmer, something in his face opening. He goes back to what he was doing. You look down and the mess has been gone for thirty seconds at minimum and he is very clearly using the napkins as an excuse, his hands warm through the thin paper.

"Guess after this you should get tested, right?" His eyes flick up then back down. The walls are down. His eyes are a little sad.

Guilt moves through you quiet and uninvited. You don't apologize. But you say: "I trust you." A breath. A grimace. "I mean. We are friends, after all."

He smiles bigger. And if you had known— all this time— that Steve Harrington could smile at you like that, open and unguarded, like you've handed him something he didn't know he wanted… maybe you'd have hated him a little less.

He leans toward you slowly and your hands come up between you, ready to push him away. He reaches past them entirely and swipes something from your cheek with a napkin. Holds it up. His cheeks are pink.

"Got some on your—" A breath of a laugh. "Sorry."

You open your mouth.

The bell above the front door chimes.

Both your eyes go wide and then it's chaos. It’s Steve buckling his belt and tucking his shirt in while you grab your clothes from where he's already gathered them off the floor, handing them back to you. You pull everything back on in ten seconds flat. He drops to his knees to collect the napkins from the floor and you grab him by the vest.

"Steve. It's fine, go. I'm taking my break anyway."

He looks at you. Brown eyes, long lashes, the flush still high on his cheeks. He clears his throat. Straightens his vest. "Yeah. Okay." A beat. "See you in thirty."

He turns.

You look at the back of him and grab the vest again. He turns back already rolling his eyes, already wearing the face he's had on every time he’s asked what now for the past few months.

"You know." You bite your bottom lip. "I wouldn't be totally angry if you came and interrupted the last fifteen minutes of my break."

Something flashes through his eyes, low and warm. His arms cross. His voice drops. "You think I need the whole fifteen minutes?"

You step forward and hook your fingers into his waistband and watch his throat move.

"Gotcha," you say.