♡

Dustin had commandeered over the passenger seat, clipboard on one knee, pen already uncapped and hovering. Outside, Hawkins was dark and empty, streetlights buzzing a sodium-orange. “Rope?”

“Check,” Steve drawled, throwing his head back against the headrest. His eyelids felt like they’d been scraped raw. Somewhere under the hood, the engine continued ticking with Dustin’s voice.

The clipboard in Dustin’s hand had been through hell. Coffee-stained, corner-bent, covered in Hopper’s aggressive handwriting and what looked like jelly from someone’s sandwich. The kid held it like it was the fucking Declaration of Independence.

“Flares?”

“Check.” Steve’s voice came out flat and bored. He’d been awake for something that felt like thirty-six hours and the exhaustion was crawling over him like a second skin.

“Duct tape?”

Steve let the silence stretch just because he could. Just because Dustin’s need to control every microscopic detail of this supply run was grating against his skull like sandpaper, and maybe if he waited long enough, the kid would remember that Steve wasn’t actually his employee.

“You didn’t get duct tape?” Dustin’s voice climbed half an octave.

“No shit, I got duct tape, Henderson.” Steve didn’t bother opening his eyes and just jerked his thumb toward the passenger side floor where their haul sat in a milk crate he’d swiped from behind Melvad’s. “It’s right there with everything else. So—can we just, not? I’m fuckin’ starving here.”

Dustin’s pen scratched against the paper. Check. That was both satisfying and infuriating. “Generator?”

Generator. Fuck. Fuck, this was bad. Steve’s fingers went still on the steering wheel.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, so—” Steve dragged his palms down on his face, felt the stubble he hadn’t bothered shaving this morning catch against his skin. When he finally opened his eyes, he couldn’t quite look at Dustin. Instead, he twisted in his seat, peering in the back like the generator would materialize if he looked hard enough. “That’s on me.”

For a second, Dustin just blinked, then stared. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

“Are you serious right now?”

“Look I know—”

“Steve.” The clipboard hit Dustin’s thigh. “Hopper specifically asked us to get the generator this time. That was—literally—the one thing he stressed on us getting. Did you seriously forget how long—”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Steve’s voice came out higher than he meant it to, loud enough that it echoed in the enclosed space. He caught himself and tried to reel it back. “I get it, okay? What do you want me to do about it now?”

“I want you to not forget the one thing—”

“Well, too fucking bad, Henderson—”

“Stop being such an ass—”

“Stop being so fucking annoying.”

Dustin let out a sharp breath, and Steve took that as him realizing this situation was bigger than their bickering and back-and-forth. His expression was replaced by that calculating look he got when he was working through a problem. Steve hated that look. It usually meant he was about to be dragged into something he didn’t want.

“Okay.” Dustin’s tense shoulders dropped. “Okay, what now?”

Steve stared through the windshield at the empty parking lot. There were some lights in the houses across the street that were on, while some had just turned off. Hawkins looked so unbelievably normal sometimes, it was scary what was actually going on while people went about their days.

“Well, nothing’s open.” Dustin was speaking slower now, like he was thinking out loud. When Steve didn’t respond, he added, “There’s a farm like three miles out. They probably have, like, three.”

Steve’s hand was already moving to the ignition. If that was it, then he was doing it. If not for completing the list, it was for getting Dustin to shut up.

“Hey, that was a joke.” Dustin’s eyes went wide. “Don’t go to the farm. It’s literally midnight—”

The engine turned over, rumbling to life beneath them.

“Well, you said they’ve got three.” Steve checked the rearview mirror out of habit, even though the area around them was completely empty. “What’s the problem if one goes missing?”

Dustin stared at the side of Steve’s face like Steve was about to rob a bank. “Uh, I don’t know, Steve. Maybe the part where farms actually use their generators? Cows don’t get milked, fences stop working, and suddenly we’ve got the Upside Down and horses to take care of?”

“Quit being dramatic,” Steve muttered, already backing out with one arm draped over the back of the passenger seat. “It’s a farm, not a zoo.”

In all honesty, Steve had no idea what stealing from the farm entailed. But he was sure it wouldn’t be as bad as Henderson implied it would be.

The farm materialized soon enough out of the darkness like something from a postcard; all white fence posts catching the van’s headlights, a barn that looked older than Steve’s grandparents (and they were pretty damn old), fields stretching out into nothing. Steve killed the lights before they got too close, letting the van roll to a stop near a cluster of outbuildings.

“Okay, so.” Dustin was gripping his seatbelt like it was the only thing tethering him to the world. “You go in there. I’ll stay here as a lookout.”

“Jesus—lookout?” Steve turned to stare at him. “This is a farm, not Fort Knox.”

“Exactly. Which means they probably have dogs. Big dogs that eat kids when they trespass at—” He checked the watch on his wrist. “Twelve forty-seven in the morning.”

“You’re coming with me.”

Dustin laughed, but it was devoid of any humor. “I’m really not.”

“You’re the one who suggested this—”

“As a joke. A hypothetical. I didn’t think you’d actually—” Dustin gestured wildly at their surroundings. “This is breaking and entering. This is a felony.”

“I’m borrowing.”

“That’s theft.”

Steve was already opening the driver's side door, letting in the cool night air that smelled like grass and something else, flowers, maybe. Sweet and overwhelming. "Just—keep the engine running. If I'm not back in ten minutes, I don't know, honk or something."

"That's your plan? Honk?"

Steve was out, shutting the van door as quietly as he could, which still sounded loud enough to wake the dead. He stood there for a second, letting his eyes adjust, tracking the layout. The barn was the biggest structure, paint peeling and sturdy-looking, the kind of building that weathered through decades and refused to quit. There was a smaller building that might’ve been a garage, and beyond that was rows of something. Maybe plants? They caught the moonlight in a way that made them look almost silver, organized in careful lines that spoke to hours of work.

A dog barked in the distance. Steve’s heart picked up. But it was far away, probably near the house, and after a second it went quiet again.

The barn door wasn’t locked. Of course, it wasn’t locked because why would anyone think someone would want to steal from here? He slipped inside and was immediately hit with the smell of hay and motor oil and animals, a warm, living smell that was somehow comforting despite the circumstances. Though he couldn’t see any livestock because it was too dark. He pulled out the flashlight he’d grabbed from the van, clicked it on, and kept the beam low.

The barn was bigger inside than it looked from outside, cluttered with chaos that probably meant it was organized in a way only a few people would know their way around. The tools hung on pegboards, their shapes casting strange shadows. Hay bales stacked in one corner neatly. A workbench was covered in half-finished projects; a birdhouse, a broken fence post, a coffee can full of nails sorted by size. There was a jacket hanging on a hook that looked soft and worn. The whole place had this feeling of being used, and being important.

The generator was exactly where a generator would be, against the far wall, industrial and humming, plugged into what looked like a small electrical panel. Steve made his way over, careful not to trip over the collection of tools and equipment scattered across the floor. A chicken made a disgruntled noise from somewhere above him, nestled in the rafters. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Okay,” he muttered to himself, crouching down to examine the setup. “Okay, this is fine. Just unplug it, carry it out, we're golden.”

The generator was bigger than he’d anticipated. It was probably heavier, too. And there were multiple cords snaking out of it, disappearing into walls, running to… Shit, he had no idea what they were running into. Steve reached for the main power chord and wrapped his fingers around it.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Steve’s heart actually stopped. It flatlined for a solid second before kicking back into overdrive. He whipped around so fast he nearly knocked the flashlight out of his own hand.

You were standing in the doorway. For a second, Steve couldn’t process what he was seeing.

You had a shotgun—that registered first, survival instinct kicking in as he widened his eyes and raised one hand to the side—but you were also holding a plate. A plate with what looked like chocolate cake. You were backlit by the moonlight, wearing cutoff sleep shorts and an absolutely massive flannel shirt that hung off one shoulder, hanging open over a faded tank top that said something he couldn’t read in the dark. Your hair was falling out of a braid.

Steve’s brain couldn’t process you holding a shotgun at him.

“Holy shit,” he managed to say.

“Yeah.” Your voice was softer than he’d expected. It sounded more tired than angry, like this wasn’t the weirdest position you’d been put in, and maybe was the weirdest thing that had happened today. “You wanna tell me what you’re doing in my barn, Harrington?”

“Uh—” He short-circuited for a moment, eyes zeroing in on the gun. “Can you—” When you didn’t move, he walked slightly closer, raising his hand and hovering over your arm. “Please put that down.”

Even though he wasn’t close enough to catalog the details of you, he could see a smudge of chocolate cake at the corner of your mouth and your eyes that shined bright against the angle of his torch. The flannel had small flowers embroidered on the pocket. Daisies. Definitely daisies. He knew you. Not knew you-knew you, but he’d seen you before. Definitely. Hawkins was small; you’d been a year or two behind him in school, maybe? He had this vague memory of you in the hallway, always surrounded by a small group of girls who seemed to actually like each other. Benny on the team had said something about you once, the farm girl who wouldn’t go out with him, and Steve had tuned it out because guys on his team were always running their mouths about something.

You looked at him, but you were still holding the shotgun. Your posture had relaxed slightly, like you were slowly figuring out the guy with big hair and huge ego wasn’t the biggest threat to your life. Your grip was competent—you clearly knew how to handle it—but there was something tentative in it, too, like you’d rather be holding anything else.

“Please,” he repeated, eyes flicking down to your hand as his hand hovered uselessly over it.

You sighed, tilting your head back slightly like this was the last place you wanted to be. “Not until you tell me why you’re trying to shut down half of our work.”

Steve pressed his lips into a straight line as he scrambled his brain for some words. “Can’t really talk much while I have a girl about to shoot me, can I?”

He straightened up slowly, giving you what he hoped was a disarming smile (literally, in this case). The same one that would work on girls at parties, before his life became a nightmare of interdimensional monsters and constant exhaustion. He was pretty sure he’d lost whatever charm he used to have somewhere between a Demogorgon and the Russian elevator.

You scanned his face for a moment, and Steve caught the slight roll of your eyes. Your face shined half-gold from his flashlight beam, half-silvered by the slice of moon coming through the door. Steve was distracted enough by it that he almost missed the eye-roll entirely.

“Thought these things were meant to get people to talk.” You waved the gun loosely in your palm—barrel dipping enough that his stomach dropped with it—and Steve widened his eyes.

In Steve’s experience, there weren’t a lot of life-threatening props that could get people talking if they didn’t want to. “Please. Don’t—do that,” he said carefully, tracking the movement of your hand holding the weapon. “Just set it down, okay?”

He kept his palms half-up, an instinct trained into him, he was sure, from cop films he’d watched as a kid.

“Mm, okay.” You set the gun down with the plate on a hay bale carefully. The fork clinked against the ceramic. You looked almost relieved about not having to wield a weapon anymore. “I’m listening.”

“We need it,” he said, which was possibly the weakest opening he’d ever delivered. “It’s—there’s a situation. Kind of an emergency.”

“An emergency?” Your voice was soft, and there was something in it that might’ve been concern. “What kind of emergency needs a generator?”

“The kind I can’t really explain.”

“Try.”

Steve’s jaw worked around the air in his mouth for a second, chewing on an answer that didn’t exist yet.

“I—” Steve ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit he’d never managed to break. Though tonight his hair was damp enough at the roots that his fingers just dragged flat against it, no bounce left in the strands at all. You watched the movement, your eyes following his hand and returning to his face. There was something unnerving about being looked at that directly. “I know how this sounds, but it’s important. Life-or-death important. And I swear—I swear—I was gonna bring it back.”

“When?”

“Huh?”

“When were you gonna bring it back?” You took a step closer, tilting your head, and Steve could see your eyes better now, they caught the moonlight streaming through the barn doors, reflecting it back. “Tomorrow? Next week? Or were you just hoping nobody would notice that half our farm stopped running?” You sounded a little curious, and maybe a little sad.

Steve tried to rack his brain for an answer. “Henderson said you had three,” he offered weakly.

“Henderson? Who’s that?” Your eyebrows went up, disappearing behind the hairs falling on your face. “Dustin Henderson? He’s involved in this?”

“Life or death?” he repeated, quirking a brow like that explanation may fare better.

You studied him again, crossing your arms over your chest. “Why were you unplugging the main one when there are five of them that aren’t being used?”

His brows furrowed. “There are—?” You turned your neck to the left, and Steve followed your movement and he was met with—as you said—five unused generators sitting on top of a platform closer to the ceiling than the ground. “Oh.”

The tips of his ears went hot. He met your eyes again, then said, “Can I—”

“No,” you said, and now you sounded almost exasperated. “You said life or death?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it drugs?”

“No,” Steve said immediately, because that, at least, was the truth.

“Whose life?”

Steve hesitated. He couldn’t tell you the truth about El, the monsters living under this town, or the crawls that amounted to nothing new 99.9% of the time. But he also got the feeling you’d know if he lied. There was something in the way you were looking at him, patient and expectant, that made him not want to lie, either. Shit.

“My friends’,” he said quietly. “Maybe the town’s—I don’t know. I know this sounds insane.”

“It does.” You were quiet for a minute, then shrugged. “But you sound like you mean it.”

Steve watched you move to the hay bale where you'd set your plate, picking it up again. You took another bite of cake, thoughtful, and gestured with the fork.

The smell of chocolate finally cut through the barn’s thicker smell of hay and motor oil, and Steve’s stomach gave an audible, humiliating growl in the quiet.

“My dad taught me how to shoot when I was twelve,” you said, conversational, like you were sharing a story over coffee. “Said I needed to protect myself. But I’ve never actually pointed it at anyone before tonight.” You licked the icing off your thumb absentmindedly. “I don’t think I could actually shoot someone. Especially over a generator.”

“That’s—” Steve tracked your thumb for a moment. “That’s probably good. Not shooting people. Good policy.”

You smiled at that, just a little. “So, you’ll return the generator?”

Steve’s shoulders pulled back as he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. I promise.”

Steve caught the resignation as it crossed over your features, and you slumped back to lean against the wooden wall. “Okay. If you can get it down from the shelf and carry it out without my dad or brother noticing, you’re good.”

Something in his chest loosened as he nodded slowly. He’d won the generator. Then, he realized—glumly—that this conversation was ending, which meant that he’d have to go back to the van where Henderson was doing ‘lookout,’ and deal with trying to console the uncalled for anger towards him without snapping, because that would only make Henderson’s situation worse.

He should have been halfway back to the van by now. Instead his feet had planted themselves between the hay bales and he was scrambling for something—anything—to keep this conversation from ending. He vaguely gestured with the tip of his chin at the plate. “Cake looks good.”

Something in your eyes lit up. “Yeah—yeah. It’s really good. Fresh, too. Baked it just tonight.”

“Yeah?” Steve leaned against the hay loosely, crossing his arms as he looked at you, and he found he actually wanted to know the answer when he asked, “You bake?”

You paused, fork hovering mid-air. “Yeah. Sometimes. We’ve got all the stuff for it. Makes it easier.”

“I don’t think I’ve baked anything. Like, ever,” Steve said, musing.

There was a beat of suspended silence where the barn creaked around you, wood settling and something rustling in the rafters. Steve used the pause to tilt his head slightly and look at you properly for the first time since the gun had come down—past the adrenaline and flashlight glare—and found you softer for it, sleep-mussed and unbothered by any of it.

“You want some?” you asked, holding the plate out toward him. “If you promise not to unplug anything in this place without permission.”

Steve blinked. “Cake?”

You tilted your head, nose scrunching slightly. “Unless you thought I was offering the fork.”

“Yeah.” Steve found himself moving closer without deciding to, drawn in by the casual offer and the way you held the plate out like sharing cake with a would-be thief was the most normal thing in the world.

“Yeah,” he said again, because his vocabulary had apparently shrunk into single syllables. “I’m—yeah. Hungry.”

You pulled the fork back, studied it for a second like you were just realizing you’d been eating off it, then glanced around the barn. “Hold on.” You set the plate back down on the hay bale and disappeared into the shadows near the workbench.

Steve stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, listening to you rummage through drawers. There was the sound of metal on metal, a quiet “aha,” and then you emerged back into the moonlight holding a second fork. It caught the light as you held it up, triumphant.

“Emergency fork,” you explained, completely serious. “My dad’s always losing them out here when he eats in the barn.”

“Right.” Steve couldn't help the smile tugging at his mouth. “That’s good planning.”

You returned to the hay bale, picked up the plate again, and this time you held it out, your hands holding the clean fork, too. Steve took it, fingers brushing yours for half a second. Your hands were cold, he noticed, and he had this insane urge to do something about it, like wrap them in his, maybe, or do some gesture he had no business making to someone he hardly knew.

Before he could impulsively act on anything, you were angling the plate between you both.

“Go ahead,” you said, nodding toward the cake.

Steve cut off a piece with the edge of his fork, and the second it hit his tongue he almost groaned. The rich, dark chocolate, perfectly spongy, with thick fudge frosting that tasted homemade in a way that made his chest ache a little. When was the last time he'd had something that wasn't frozen pizza or day-old donuts from the station? When was the last time he ate something that hadn’t gone through factory-like processing of stages?

“Holy fuck,” he said through a mouthful, forgetting his manners entirely. “This is—so good.”

The features across your face lit up, a smile spread slow across your lips. “Yeah?”

“Seriously. Best cake I’ve ever had, probably.” He wasn’t even exaggerating. He took another bite to prove his point. “What do you even put in these?”

You laughed slightly. “Don’t oversell it, Harrington.”

“I’m not.” He swallowed.

You ducked your head a little, and even he could feel your cheeks getting warmer. “It’s just chocolate cake. Nothing too crazy.”

“Yeah, but it’s—” Steve struggled to find the words. “It’s good. You made it good.”

The barn felt smaller somehow, warmer, like the walls had drawn in to hold just this moment. You took another bite of cake, thoughtful, and Steve watched the way you savored it, unhurried. Granted, the cake may have tasted so good because he hadn’t eaten in a few hours, but he was sure it’d be just as good after a full meal.

“You know,” you said, voice soft, “when I heard someone in the barn, I thought maybe it was a raccoon. Or maybe Clover slipped out of the house.” You glanced up at him through your lashes, that small smile still playing on your mouth. “Steve Harrington wasn’t really on my list of possibilities.”

“Yeah, well.” Steve rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “Lately my life’s been full of things that weren’t on anyone’s list of possibilities.”

Curiosity and concern flickered across your face. You opened your mouth like you were gonna ask about that, and Steve tensed up because he knew he couldn’t explain any of it, and outright lying to you just felt wrong. But before you could speak, a horn blared from outside, sharp, loud, and completely unmistakable.

“Shit.” Steve’s eyes went wide.

The horn honked again, longer this time, and you jumped, the plate wobbling in your hands. “What—”

“That’s—” Steve was already moving toward the door, then stopping, then turning back because he couldn’t just leave you there. “That’s Dustin. I told him to honk if—I told him ten minutes and it’s been—” He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. Time had gotten completely away from him, dissolved in the warm safety of this barn.

You were staring toward the barn door, fork still in hand, confusion written across your features. “Is he okay? Does he think something’s wrong?”

“No—I mean, yeah, he’s fine. I told him to honk if I took too long.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, agitated. “He probably thought I got caught or—” Dustin honked again, shorter this time. “Jesus, Henderson.”

You set the plate down carefully, that same deliberate gentleness you'd shown with the shotgun. “You should go check on him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I should.” But Steve couldn’t move immediately. He looked at you, standing there in your sleep clothes with chocolate on your fingers and concern on your face for a kid you didn’t know. “Thank you. For the—not shooting me. And for the cake. And for the generator.”

You smiled at that, amused. “Pretty low bar there, not shooting you.”

“Still.” He meant it more than he could really articulate standing in this barn at one in the morning with his brain fuzzy from exhaustion and sugar and something else.

You studied him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some kind of decision. “You guys want some cake for the road?”

“For the road?” Steve repeated quizzically, still processing the offer through the haze of interrupted eating and Dustin’s increasingly frantic honking.

“Yeah.” You were already moving, picking up the plate. “I mean, I made way too much. And you said you were hungry.” You glanced back at him over your shoulder, and there was something so shy in your gesture as you shrugged loosely. “Seems like you and your friend could use it more than me.”

Another honk split the night air, and Steve winced. “He’s really—he’s not usually this impatient.”

You shrugged again. “He’s worried about you,” you said, like it was the most natural thing ever. “That’s sweet.”

Steve hadn't really thought about it like that. He'd been annoyed, mostly, at Dustin's inability to just sit tight for twenty minutes without spiraling. But you were right, underneath all the anxiety and the need to control every variable, Dustin had been scared something happened to him. But Steve really didn’t want to leave to talk about the Upside Down and everything horrible that goes with it.

“Yeah,” he said, softer now. “I guess.”

You disappeared through a door he hadn't noticed before—the one that probably led into the house—and Steve was left standing there, listening to Dustin honk again. He stuck his head out of the barn.

“I’m coming!” he called toward the van, probably too loud. “Two minutes!”

He could see Dustin's silhouette jerk in surprise, then the kid was rolling down the window, his voice carrying across the distance. “You said ten minutes, Steve! It’s been seventeen.”

“I know! I’m getting—just hold on.”

Steve ducked back inside, running his hand through his hair, and found you returning with a wicker basket that looked handwoven. It was lined with a kitchen towel printed with strawberries, and you were carefully settling the remainder of the chocolate cake inside, wrapped in plastic wrap that caught the light.

“Here.” You pulled two glass bottles from where you’d tucked them under your arm, setting them in the basket. “Lemonade. Made it this morning—well, yesterday morning, technically.” You paused, studying the contents. “You think that’s enough?”

“No—this is—” Steve moved closer, staring at the basket like it might disappear if he looked too hard. “This is more than enough. This is—you don’t have to do this.”

You looked up at him, and your expression was so earnest it made his chest tight. “Hey, it’s no big deal. There’s genuinely too much of everything here.”

There was something fragile in the space between you, in the way you were looking at him like he was someone worth taking care of. Steve couldn't remember the last time someone had done something like this for him, not because he'd charmed them or convinced them or because they wanted something in return. Just because they wanted to. Just because they were kind.

“Thank you,” he said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.

You smiled, ducking your head again in that way that made him want to see you do it over and over. “It’s just cake, Harrington.”

It wasn’t, but he didn’t know how to explain what he meant. That in the world he’d become so accustomed to, the world with monsters and too much death, there was someone who he hardly knew offering him things just because they could tell he needed it.

Another honk, more tentative this time, and you laughed softly. The sound was like wind chimes, delicate and warm.

“You really should go,” you said, holding out the basket. “Go calm your friend down and I’ll have the generator down by the time you get back.”

“You don’t have to do that—”

“Steve.” You were halfway up the ladder now, looking down at him, and hearing his name in your mouth made his pulse stutter because you said it without the edge people often used with his name. “I’ve got this. Go.”

The walk back to the van felt surreal, the basket swinging in his hand, its weight solid and real. The night air was cool against his face, carrying that flower smell again, stronger now, or maybe he was just more aware of it. The fields stretched out on either side of him, rows and rows of what he couldn't identify in the dark, organized and cared for.

Dustin had the passenger window rolled down, his face pale in the moonlight. “Finally! Steve, I thought—” His eyes landed on the basket. “That’s not a generator.”

Steve pulled open the driver's side door, setting the basket carefully on the seat between them before sliding in. “Cake.”

“You were gone so long getting cake?” Dustin’s voice rose slightly. “I thought you were caught. I thought they were processing you through some machine—I was literally about to go in there and—” He stopped, staring at the basket. “You did get the generator, didn’t you?”

Steve pulled back the strawberry-printed towel, revealing the plastic-wrapped chocolate cake and the bottles of lemonade nestled beside it. “Yeah, yeah” he muttered absentmindedly. “Gonna get it now.”

Dustin eyed the cake. He climbed out of the van, and headed back toward the barn. You had the generator on the ground now, had somehow managed to haul it down by yourself. You were crouching next to it, coiling the cord into a neat loop, your flannel falling off one shoulder to reveal the strap of your tank top. You looked up when you heard his footsteps, and smiled.

“That was fast,” you said, standing. There was a smudge of dust on your cheek now, and your braid was even messier than before.

“He’s fine.” Steve moved to the other side of the generator, testing the weight. It was heavy, but manageable. “You got this down by yourself?”

“I live on a farm,” you said teasingly. “I’m stronger than I look.”

Steve believed it. “Still. That’s—thanks. For all of this.”

You walked with him toward the barn door, your footsteps quiet beside his heavier ones, and Steve was hyper-aware of your presence beside him. The way you moved, unhurried and graceful even in bare feet. The way you smelled like vanilla and chocolate and that flower sweetness that seemed to cling to everything in this place.

When they reached the entrance, you stopped, hanging back in the shadows where the moonlight didn't quite reach. Your arms wrapped around yourself, and Steve noticed you shivering slightly. The flannel was big but thin, and the night had gotten colder.

“Hey, be careful,” you said, soft enough he almost missed it. “With whatever you’re doing. Be safe.”

The words hit Steve sideways. Be safe, like you actually cared about what happened to him after he drove away.

“I will,” he said, and it came out like a promise.

Your smile was small and sweet, catching just enough light for him to see it. “And don’t forget to bring the generator back. My dad’ll notice in a few days.”

“I will,” Steve said again, and he meant it more than he’d meant anything in a while.

You raised your hand in a small wave, and Steve had to force himself to turn around, to walk back toward the van where Dustin was probably having seventeen different theories about mission parameters and social dynamics.

When he reached the van and loaded the generator into the back—careful not to jostle it too much, aware that you'd gone to the trouble of unplugging everything and coiling the cords—he couldn't help but glance back at the barn one more time.

You were still there, silhouetted in the doorway, watching to make sure he made it safe. When you saw him looking, you waved again, smaller this time, more intimate somehow. Then you were turning back inside, and the barn door swung shut behind you with a soft creak of old hinges.

Steve stood there for a second longer than necessary, the night settling around him, before placing the generator in the back and climbing into the driver's seat.

Dustin was already tearing into the cake with one of the forks, his eyes rolling back in his head.

“Oh my god,” Dustin said through a mouthful. “Steve, this is incredible.”

“I know,” Steve said, and let the words sit there smugly. It truly was rare that Steve got to be the one who’d actually delivered something instead of just almost screwing it up.

“Who gave this to you? And why?” The questions tumbled out rapid-fire between bites. Dustin looked almost suspicious.

He said your name, and watched a vague recognition fall across Dustin’s face. Steve started the engine, checked the mirrors, tried to ignore the way his heart was still racing. “And—I don’t know. She’s just, she’s nice.”

“She’s more than nice. I think she likes—”

Leave it to Dustin to spin this into a whole conspiracy. In the same breath he thought it, he also thought that maybe it’d been a long time since he or Dustin have been afforded kindness by a stranger, simply for the sake of it.

Still, Steve rolled his eyes, arm stretching out to cover Dustin’s mouth. “Shut up and eat your cake, idiot.”

Dustin slumped back in his seat as he continued eating the cake. Steve thought the interrogation was probably over, but after a minute, Dustin said, “She cute?”

Vey, Steve thought to himself. “Henderson—”

“I’m just asking. It’s a valid question!”

Steve rolled his eyes and didn’t answer, but there was an easiness to Dustin’s chatter he had missed. He hadn’t mentioned the Russian gates or the Upside Down, and was now simply a kid needling him about a girl, the same way a regular kid might needle his babysitter. He supposed he had you to thank for that, too.

“Do you like her?”

“I don’t—I just met her. Like literally just met her.”

“Yeah, and you got cake.”

“She also held a gun at me, so I don’t know.”

Dustin’s brows furrowed, and he acted as if that was the most normal thing ever. In the grand scheme of their predicament, that probably was. “Before or after giving you the cake?”

“Use that smart head of yours and figure it out.”

“Are you gonna return the generator?”

“Mhm.”

“And maybe ask her out?”

Steve’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as he felt his ears grow hot at the idea. “Don’t have time for stuff like that right now.” And that much was true. In between the crawls and the planning for crawls and the downtime he needed after the crawls, there was no way he could pencil in dating. All of his spare moments were spent at the WSQK—actually doing the job—or checking on the kids or helping with surveillance or just trying to stay awake long enough to function. His life wasn’t exactly conducive to dinner and a movie.

But even as he said it, Steve was thinking about the possibility of doing one thing that seemed normal. He would return the generator and the basket to you, though, because he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to see you again.

After one whole week of crawls that lead to only more nightmares and explaining to Hopper that, yes, while the generator does work just fine, but they still need a new one, Steve was able to make it back to the farm. With the generator in tow. He’d managed to squeeze this in between the two hour long gap he received between the closing shift at the WSQK and the meeting in the Wheelers’s basement.

Steve had been planning this for a week. Well, planning was generous. He’d been thinking about it all week while simultaneously trying to be safe during the crawls, dealing with everyone’s increasingly creative forms of expressing anxiety, and fielding approximately seven hundred questions from Dustin about when he was going to return everything.

The answer was now. Finally. It had to be now because if he didn't do it today, he'd lose his nerve entirely.

It was 6:03, and Steve was driving down the same dark road he’d taken a week ago, except this time everything looked different in the early evening light. The fields were gold and green instead of silver and shadow. He could actually see the farm properly now; the white fence posts he’d only just glimpsed, the sprawling fields sectioned into neat squares, the barn that looked even older and more solid in the daylight.

And the flowers. Jesus, so many flowers.

Steve had noticed them at night, had smelt them, but seeing them now was something else entirely. Rows and rows of them stretched out behind the barn, organized by color like it was a rainbow someone had planted in the earth. Even from the road he could see how carefully tended everything was, how much work had gone into making something like this exist.

He pulled up near the barn—the same spot he'd parked a week ago when he'd been trying to steal from you, god, he was an idiot—and killed the engine. His hands were sweating. When was the last time his hands had sweat over a girl? Not since Nancy, probably, and that was a long time ago in Upside-Down-years where time moved so much slower with an active threat looming over everyone.

The basket sat in the passenger seat, and Steve had agonized over it more than he wanted to admit. He couldn’t return it empty, that felt wrong, like he hadn’t appreciated the gesture. He’d spent twenty minutes in the grocery store staring at the grocery section before admitting defeat and moving to the flowers. That felt stupid now, bringing flowers to someone who grew them, and he could see clearly to what extent now. Still, the woman working the floral section convinced him that “everyone likes getting flowers, honey, even people who grow them.”

So now there was a small bouquet of daisies in the basket wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. He’d also written a thank you note, and he wasn’t sure if people did that anymore. He knew for a fact he had never done that.

Steve grabbed the basket, took a breath that didn't settle his nerves at all, and climbed out of the van.

The farm smelled the same as it had that night—like grass and earth and that overwhelming flower sweetness—but warmer now, baked by the sun all day. He could hear chickens somewhere, their soft clucking, and the distant sound of a dog barking. Closer, there was faint music, like someone had a radio on, something folksy with a woman's voice he didn't recognize.

You were in the flower fields about thirty yards out, kneeling between rows of tulips with a pair of garden shears in one hand and a basket—bigger than the one you’d given him, half-full of cut stems—beside you. You were wearing denim overalls, the kind that were slightly too big that they slouched at the shoulders, worn soft and faded from years of washing. Underneath was a white t-shirt, and you had on cream colored work boots that were clearly meant for someone with bigger feet, laces double-knotted, caked with mud at the soles. Your hair was up in a loose ponytail, strands escaping to stick to your neck and frame your face, and even from here, Steve could see the dirt on your knees, your hands, smudged on your cheek where you’d probably pushed your hair back without thinking.

You were humming along to the music, completely absorbed in what you were doing, and Steve felt something in his chest crack open.

A dog noticed him first, a border collie he'd heard barking, black and white with bright eyes, came bounding over with its tail wagging. It was curious and friendly, thank god. It sniffed at Steve's legs, decided he was acceptable, and barked once.

You looked up then.

For a second you just stared, like you couldn't quite process what you were seeing. Then your whole face transformed. Your surprise melted into something that looked like happiness or relief, and you were standing, brushing dirt off your knees and shading your eyes against the sun.

“Harrington?” you called, and even across the distance Steve could hear the smile in your voice.

He’d rehearsed something casual on the drive over—something about the farm, something breezy—and every drafted version evaporated the second your dog barked and you looked up.

“Hey,” he called back as you started walking toward him, the dog trotting at your heels.

As you got closer, Steve could see more details of you. There was a piece of straw caught in the strands of your hair. There was a smudge of something green on your jaw, chlorophyll maybe. Your hands were definitely dirty, palms caked with soil. The overalls had a slight tear in them by the waist. You looked tired but happy, worked-hard but satisfied, and Steve thought he’d never seen someone look so much in their element before that it made him happy for you.

“You came back,” you said, voice filled with a slight surprise, like you thought he genuinely may not come back.

“Yeah. Sorry it took so long.” Steve held up the basket like evidence. “Work’s been crazy.”

“That’s okay.” You stopped a few feet away, and Steve noticed you were a little out of breath from the walk over. “I figured you were busy.” You paused, and something shifted in your expression as you looked at him, eyes flickering down to the basket. “Hey, thanks for bringing it back,” you smiled warmly.

Steve shrugged. “Promised I would,” he said, returning your smile. He held it out to you, hands careful. “There’s—I put something in there. It’s not much. I just—”

You pulled back the strawberry-printed towel and found the daisies wrapped in brown paper. Your breath caught, small and off-guard, like you hadn’t been prepared for it. “Steve.”

“I know. It’s stupid, bringing flowers when you’ve got—” He rubbed the back of his neck, glancing at the fields behind you.

“Mm, it’s not stupid.” You peeled the paper back carefully, the twine still looped loose around your fingers, and brought the daisies up to check them the way he imagined you checked every petal that came into your hands. Then, you cradled them to your chest like they were precious. “These are perfect. I love daisies.”

“Yeah?” Steve felt something in his chest loosen. “Lady at the store says everyone likes getting flowers, but I wasn’t sure—”

“Lady was right.” You brought them to your nose, breathed in, eyes falling shut for just a second. When you looked back at him, the last of the sun was low enough to catch the side of your face, and your smile was so sweet it made his throat lodge “Thank you. Really.”

The dog nudged Steve's hand with her nose, insistent, and he crouched down to scratch behind her ears. She leaned into the touch, tail wagging, and Steve found himself smiling despite the exhaustion pulling at his bones.

“That’s Clover. She likes you,” you observed, voice quiet like he’d passed a test he had no clue about. “She doesn’t usually warm up to people fast.”

“I’m good with dogs, I think,” Steve said. Clover was nosing at his pockets now, snuffling with genuine conviction, like she thought he might have treats hidden somewhere.

“Sorry, girl,” Steve told her. “Fresh out.”

You were still holding the daisies, and Steve noticed you hadn't moved closer or farther away, just stood there at a careful distance like you were trying to figure something out. “Did you bring the generator back too?”

“Yeah. It’s in the van. I can plug it back in where it was, if you want.”

“That’d be great, thank you.” You glanced back toward the flower fields, then at Steve, and something shifted in your expression. “But, do you have time? I don’t want to keep you if you’re needed somewhere.”

Steve checked his watch, the numbers barely visible in the dying light. 6:14. He had until eight.. “I've got time. Almost two hours, actually.”

“Oh.” The relief in your voice was obvious, and Steve had to bite down a smile at that. “Good. That’s good.” You shifted the basket to one hip and seemed to come to some sort of decision. “Have you eaten? Dinner, I mean.”

“I—” Steve tried to remember. He’d had coffee at the station. A bag pretzels from the vending machine at around 4, stale enough to catch in his throat. “Not really.”

“Okay,” you said decisively, like you’d made up your mind about something. “You wanna stay for dinner, then?” Your shoulders pulled into your body slightly, like you were scared to ask the question.

“I’d like that—but I don’t wanna intrude—”

“You can and you will.” You were already walking toward the house, Clover trotting beside you, and Steve found himself following. “We made too much pot roast anyway, and it’s better shared. Plus—” You glanced back over your shoulder, some hair slipping loose with the motion. “You’ve looked tired both times I’ve seen you.”

Steve wanted to argue, but the truth was he was starving, and whatever you were cooking smelled incredible now that he was closer to the house, and the thought of sitting down somewhere that wasn't the station or the bench outside for a quick snack or his empty house felt almost painfully appealing.

“Okay,” he heard himself say. “Okay.”

Your smile widened like you were pleased. “Okay. But first—” You stopped at an outdoor spigot near the back porch, set your basket down, and started washing your hands under the cold water. Dirt and green streaked off your skin, and you scrubbed methodically and thoroughly. “Can’t cook with field hands. My mom would have a fit.”

Steve watched you wash, watched the water run clear over your wrists and between your fingers, and felt something settle in his chest. This was real. This was normal. Standing in someone's backyard on a Wednesday evening, watching them wash dirt off their hands before dinner. No monsters, no conspiracies, no life-or-death missions. Just a girl and a farm and the promise of pot roast. It felt almost unreal and also exactly like what he’d imagined his life to look like before Barb went missing in the woods.

“Here.” You turned off the spigot and patted your hands dry using one of the five clothes in the basket on the ground, water droplets catching the light. “You probably got dust on them from the generator. Want to wash up?”

Steve looked down at his hands and found you were right; there was some grime under his nails, grease smudged on his palm from checking the van's oil that morning. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Steve stopped needing excuses somewhere around the second week. He’d gone to the crawl right after helping you with making dinner and eating it on two small stools outside feeling giddy, despite the fact that he was on his way to the Upside Down. It was a strange feeling, and he’d tried—truly had—to get it through his thick skull that he had no reason to create another responsibility for himself, at least not when the tunnels kept swallowing more of him each time and returning less of him back. How could he, when you felt so little like a responsibility, and so much like the few unbroken hours in a week built entirely out of triage?

His van had started going for the turnoff, giving way to the softer hush of the farm’s drive-up. He’d stopped rehearsing reasons to come, and simply came. He’d started noticing how you hummed off-key on purpose, he was almost certain, testing whether he’d bother to notice. You’d never leave a row half-cut, not for food, not for thunder, not, he suspected, for much short of anything short of the actual apocalypse. Given his life lately, the latter felt less like hyperbole and more like a real caveat. Your father called you ‘sweet pea’ and Steve noticed how the man always said it so quietly, like affection embarrased him more than it embarrased you, and you would always pretend not to catch it.

Steve had become content with sitting the few hours in his week pretending he wasn’t putting his life on the line all the time he wasn’t in those few hours. He’d arrive some evenings straight off a crawl, knuckles split, a smell clinging to the back of his throat that he could only describe as wrong, and something about the promise of you would work on him like a torniquet works on a wound.

Some evenings, the light would come in low and buttered through the kitchen window while you stood at the counter doing something with your hands and for one entire second Steve had started to think you looked more like something a much older painting would’ve made an altarpiece of. He never said any of this out loud. He knew that whatever was beneath the ground only illuminated you further above ground, but he was fairly certain that if he’d met you in some other version of his life, he would’ve looked at you twice just the same. The tunnels had only handed him eyes that were able to notice.

He’d come even when he shouldn’t have come. Tonight, the sky was the color of a healing bruise all afternoon—sick yellow-gray bleeding into a deeper, angrier purple on the edges—and by the time he’d pulled in, the first fat raindrops were already smacking the windshield. He’d told himself that he should’ve turned around two miles back, for this was far from the night he should’ve been visiting a farm.

You met him at the door already laughing, hair scraped back, sleeves shoved to the elbow like you’d been in the middle of something. You were always in the middle of something. You hauled him in by the sleeve, and water sheeted off his jacket onto your floorboards. Your father made a discontended hum from the couch in the living room, watching him drip like a retriever.

“Evening, sir,” Steve said, which came out considerably more dignified than what he looked.

Your father grunted; it could’ve been an indictment or a greeting. Steve learned it was hard to tell with him. “Storm’s meant to get worse before it gets better,” he said, flipping a page. “Hope you brought a change of clothes, kid.”

“I—no, sir. Didn’t think that far ahead.”

“Clearly.” Steve could’ve sworn he’d faintly smiled before he vanished back to his newsprint. “Her brother’s got shirts in the room behind the kitchen. Take one before you catch your death.”

You were already pulling Steve in as he tried to figure out whether that had been permission or a threat, laughing under your breath.

You dragged Steve up to a little room behind the kitchen. It was a little bigger than a closet, low-ceilinged, and lined with shelves that had been through what he could only assume was water damage. Zinc buckets sat stacked along one side of the wall, a few still half-full of stems soaking, and a single bare bulb hung overhead.

You flipped the light on properly and started rifling through a shelf of folded fabric before tossing him a flannel. He caught it at his chest.

“I told you not to bother with coming when it’s so bad out,” you said, already focusing on something else as you turned to give him the illusion of privacy.

He peeled off his soaked shirt. “You told me not to bother with bringing flowers every time I come,” he murmured, using the towel to wipe down his arms and torso. “I can still bother with you.” He finished putting on the flannel in the silence you gave him. “Alright. I’m decent now.”

When you’d told Steve about the farmer’s market over a dinner, Steve had wanted badly to go see you there. It felt like the closest way to get a piece of the version of you that existed outside his orbit. He wanted to see how you were like outside the farm and then, greedily, wanted to be let in anyway.

He made the mistake of mentioning it to Robin.

“Alright, when are we going?”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Steve said dumbly. “I’m going by myself.”

“Excuse me?” Robin set down the reel of tape she’d been threading, and Steve watched as something wounded flickered behind her affronted tone. “There is an entire girl, apparently. And that’s where you’ve been disappearing to for—how long’s it been?”

Steve didn’t bother dignifying that with a response, so she added, “I had to hear about her secondhand from Henderson. I’m your best friend, Steve.”

Steve’s eyes widened as he shook his head at her. That much was true. Dustin was a blabbermouth if not anything else. That, paired with his deduction skills—Steve’s not going home, Steve looks happier, Steve met a girl that night—had him piecing it faster than Steve had pieced his own feelings on the matter, which, admittedly, wasn’t saying much these days.

“You’re crazy. You’re guilting me into this.” But he didn’t bother arguing any further. If he was honest—if he let himself sit in it for a second, past the nerves—he wanted Robin there, so he could have proof that the two halves of his life could exist in the same space without collapsing.

Selfishly, in the same feeling, he’d wanted to keep you away from anything else that was involved with the Upside Down. He thought he was already an unwelcome addition into your life, something that had shown up with a guilty conscience and never left. He didn’t want you anywhere near the rest of it.

Still, the boyish part of him wanted to have that normalcy of letting his best friend meet the girl he’s been growing sweet on, the way anyone else his age got to do it.

He figured he could have that much at least.

Saturday arrived and it was a late-summer sort of morning where he wasn’t sure if it was going to rain. The gravel lot behind the church was already filling with the hum of people completing their errands early in the morning. Steve caught the smell of your stall before he caught sight of it; it was easy after spending so much time around your work. It was sweeter and more concentrated here than it ever got out on the fields, like you’d specifically put the whole month and distilled it down to your stall.

Robin walked beside him, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, scanning the stalls. “Do you think she’ll like me?”

“God, I hope not,” Steve muttered, eyes finally landing on you.

You were mid-conversation with an older woman, wrapping something purple and spiky in brown paper, laughing at whatever the woman had said. Your hair was pulled back, a canvas apron dusted with dirt-colored smudges worked into the fabric like a permanant second pattern, and there was a chalkboard sign propped against the table in your looping, almost-cursive handwriting that said ‘DAHLIAS - $4/BUNCH, ASK ABOUT WEDDING ORDERS.’

Steve stopped walking and Robin ran into his shoulder.

“Oh.” Robin’s voice went soft, almost reverant, taking in the whole scene of the buckets of flowers sorted by color, the chalkboard sign, you. “Okay. Yup.”

He didn’t get to ask what she meant by that because right then, you looked up and found him across two rows of tomato stands. Your whole face shifted, surprised that got immediately elbowed out of the way by something warmer, something that had stopped being surprising weeks ago but clearly hadn’t stopped being nice.

“Hey.” You came around the table, wiping your hands on your apron, a little breathless. “You came.”

“Said I would.”

“You say a lot of things,” you said, a little fondly, he noted. Your eyes slid past him to Robin, who’d tucked herself behind Steve and was choosing to look at you over his shoulder. “Hi.”

“Hi!” Robin came around and stuck her hand out, entirely too bright. “Robin. I already know a lot about you, and you know nothing about me. So, we’re starting this friendship at a real power imbalance.”

You laughed and shook her hand. “Nice to meet you too, I think.”

Steve embarrasingly jutted a thumb in Robin’s direction as he looked at you. “She’s exaggerating.”

“I’m gonna go look at the—” Robin started backing away, eyes catching on something a few stalls down. Or maybe she was pretending. Steve really had no idea anymore. “—that. I’m gonna look at it.” She turned away, weaving through the crowd after her tactless way of showing she wanted to leave Steve with you for some unsupervised minutes.

You watched her go, slightly amused. “What’s she heard about me?”

“Not much,” he said, distracted as he reached out to pluck a stray leaf caught in your hair, a habit he’d built without noticing. “You’ve got—there we go.”

“Thank you.” You tipped your head slightly into the motion of his hands, an unconscious lean. “Big Saturday. We sold out of peonies before nine.”

“Yeah? None left for me?” Steve leaned his hip against the edge of the table, in no hurry now that he’d gotten here, watching you refold a stack of brown paper.

“For you, I could probably find something.” You set the paper down and crouched behind the table, rummaging through a bucket tucked in the shade where the good stems went to survive the heat, and came back up with a single peony, slightly bruised at the edge of one petal, clearly a reject you’d pulled aside rather than sold. “This one didn’t make the cut.”

“I’ll take the reject.” Steve turned it over in his hand, admiring the sheer size of it and the way the petals crowded in on each other. “It’s on-brand for me.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” you said, smiling, and you reached over to swipe a thumb along his jaw before he could ask why. Your fingers lingered at the corner of a fading bruise near his temple, one he’d forgotten was still visible. “Steve.”

“That’s from last week,” he said before you could ask.

“It’s still healing weird. You should ice it.”

“I did.”

“For, like, five minutes probably.” You crossed your arms over your chest, a knowing look on your face. “Gonna tell me what happened, or should I guess?”

“Ran into a door.”

“Good one.”

He caught your hand before you could drop it away to hold it against his jaw for a second longer than the moment strictly called for, feeling the roughness of your palm against his skin, the small calluses from shears and soil that had become as familiar to him as anything about you. “M’fine. Promise.”

He could see the want to push further sitting right behind your eyes, the same quiet worry you’d been giving him since the first time you met him—only intensified now—whenever something reminded you that his life held pieces you weren’t allowed to see. You just exhaled, letting it go.

“Just—be more careful around doors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tongue coming out just an inch to run over his bottom lip, and watched your eyes focus on everything behind him rather than him, satisfaction curling warm in him at how easy it had become to fluster you. Then, he clicked his tongue, digging for his wallet to bring out a few dollar bills. “Here.” He held out a couple bills, and you started at him like he’d offered you something offensive. “For the peony?” he clarified.

“It’s a reject, Steve, it’s basically garbage. I’m not taking your money for garbage.” You pushed his hand back toward him firmly, and he let you, mostly because he didn’t really like the idea of arguing with you, especially not over two dollars. “Put your money away before I start charging you for the ones you cut, too. Might as well, considering how many you destroyed over the summer.”

“You should,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, then slipped the bills under a basket anyway when your attention snagged away.

Robin appeared again, holding a cone of kettle corn the size of her head. “Okay, I bought kettle corn, looked at gourds, and made eye contact with a goat.”

“How’s the kettle corn?” you asked, shifting your attention toward her, resting your palms on the table.

“Life-changing.” She held out the cone to you as an offer, and you plucked a few pieces with a small, grateful sound, popping them into your mouth without breaking stride from tidying the buckets in front of you.

“This is good. They usually run out by ten,” you agreed, and gestured vaguely toward the stand. “Get in line early next time or it’s slim pickings.”

“That’s useful to know. We’ll come earlier next time.” Robin nodded, chewing along with you, and for a second the two of you simply stood there in silence, sharing the food like you’d known each other longer than five minutes, while Steve leaned against the table with a flurry of uninvited, completely optimistic thoughts swarming his mind.

“This is an interesting sight.”

Steve almost dropped the garden scissors to the ground and jumped up at the voice.

A guy was standing at the edge of the flower field, hands shoved in the pockets of a faded hoodie, work boots caked with mud that looked newer than the rest of him. He was tall—taller than Steve, maybe six-two—and Steve recognized him almost immediately, even after years. Miles, your older brother, Steve assumed, who’d been a senior when Steve was a sophomore, offensive lineman who’d protected the quarterback without much Hawkins fanfare or glory.

He wasn’t someone Steve had really known, just someone he’d existed alongside in his previous ecosystem of Hawkins High social hierarchies.

“Harrington,” Miles said, blowing out a breath as he confirmed what he was trying to figure out.

“Hey.” Steve stood up slowly, brushing dirt off his jeans. The shears felt stupid in his hand now, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “I was—she asked me to—”

“To cut her flowers?” Miles’s expression was unreadable aside from the quirk of his left brow, like he was amused. “That’s real charitable.”

“It’s not—” Steve stopped, unsure how to explain what this was, how he’d started showing up at the farm once, then twice, then somehow it had become a regular thing over the past few weeks. You’d mentioned off-hand that you were running behind on cutting because something in the air had made the dahlias and sunflowers bloom all at once, and Steve had continued to offer to help after his shifts. “She’s got a lot to do, and I had some time.”

Miles nodded slowly, studying Steve in a way that made it clear he was catching up on him in every way possible.

“You work at the radio station?” Miles asked, gesturing down to the WSQK shirt Steve was wearing.

“Yeah. Production stuff, mainly. Editing, running board.” Steve set the shears down carefully in the basket, suddenly very aware. “Been there for a while.”

“You played basketball, right? Point guard?”

“Yeah.” Steve was surprised he remembered. They’d barely overlapped, and Miles had been football through and through. “You were—offensive line?”

“Left tackle.” Miles pulled one hand out of his pocket to gesture vaguely at his own frame. He stepped into the row then, careful of the flowers in a way that surprised Steve; he’d either been taught to be or had been yelled at enough times that it stuck. “Didn’t take you for the type to stick around Hawkins. Everyone figured you’d be somewhere with a real team.”

There was no accusation in the words, but Steve felt himself gulp nervously.

“Things changed,” he said.

“Yeah.” Miles crouched a few feet away, picked up a fallen dahlia head that had snapped off its stem and turned it over his fingers.

There was a silence that felt almost uneasy. Steve went back to cutting, mostly to have something to do with his hands. He’d gotten better at it over the past few weeks; you’d been showing him where to cut, how the angle mattered, and how to leave enough stem that the plant kept on giving. His first few attempts had been something close to butchery; now his pile looked almost neat.

Miles watched him for a moment. “She teach you that?”

“Yeah. Took her a couple tries.” Steve clipped another stem. “I killed a whole row the first time. Cut too low.”

Something close to a laugh moved through Miles’s nose. “She cried when I mowed over her marigolds when she was nine. I was thirteen, didn’t know they were hers, thought it was just the edge of the lawn.” He set the broken dahlia down gently, almost without thinking about it. “Cried for a week straight. My mom made me replant the whole bed by hand to make it up to her.”

Miles let out a short sigh then. “She’s better about it now.” He tilted his head toward the far end of the field where the rows looked thinner, newer, and the soil darker like it’d been turned recently. “She’s been rebuilding those back beds since spring. The quake took the whole back third. Split the ground right down the middle of her best stuff. Bulbs she’d been growing for years, just—gone.”

Most people talked about the earthquake that way. Bad luck. An act of god. A thing that happened to you, like hail or transmission. The earth opened up and that was that.

Steve’s hands went still on the shears. He knew what had opened up the ground, down to his bones. He knew the smell of it, the cold wrong air that came up through the gates, the way the maps Hopper kept tacking to the cabin wall had a red line running right out toward the edge of town, toward the farms, toward here. He’d seen photographs of the fissures, he just hadn’t thought about whose land sat over the worst of it, whose years of work got swallowed when the thing he was supposed to be stopping reached up out of the dark and took it.

Steve had been crawling through tunnels for months chasing the source of it, and the whole time, you’d been putting back what was stolen, calling it an earthquake because that’s what they’d made you believe.

You came around the side of the barn before Steve could respond to Miles, and the timing was almost a mercy.

You had a watering can in one hand and a dish towel thrown over your shoulder; you’d changed at some point since the morning—out of overalls, into a sundress with a cardigan that definitely belonged to someone older, sleeves pushed up to your elbows. You spotted the two of them and your brows knitted together as your whole face moved into a complicated thing; pleased to see Steve and suspicious of your brother.

“What are you doing out here?” you said, eyes narrowed in Miles’s direction.

“Talkin’ to your boyfriend,” Miles said mildly, pushing himself to stand up.

“He’s not—” You went a little flustered, and Steve felt his own ears go hot, and neither of you finished the sentence. “Don’t you have a tractor to work on?”

“Tractor’s good.”

“Dad said it’s been making a weird sound.”

“Dad thinks you talking is a weird sound.” But Miles was already moving, brushing past you. He paused just long enough to pluck the dish towel off your shoulder and drop it onto your head. You swatted him without any real heat, and he ducked out of range.

For a second, Steve watched the two of you with this unnameable dull ache of standing on the outside of something that came easy to other people.

“Harrington.” Miles glanced back over his shoulder at Steve this time. “Fix your grip on those shears. You’re embarrassing her.”

“He is not,” you called after your brother, but he was gone around the barn. You pulled the towel off your head and rolled “Ignore him. He thinks he’s hilarious.”

Steve shrugged. “He’s a little funny.”

You crouched into the row beside him, setting the watering can down in the dirt. Your knee knocked his where there wasn't quite room for the both of you between the dahlias. You didn't move it. Neither did he. “He didn’t say anything stupid, did he?”

Steve thought about the marigolds. The shoebox of receipts nobody would honor. The thin dark rows at the back of the field where you'd been putting the world back together by hand since spring.

“Nah,” he said. “Just brother stuff.”

You hummed, clearly far from convinced, as you pulled your bottom lip between your teeth. But you let it go. You picked up the shears he’d abandoned, crouching down beside him, and turned them over. You held it out to him handle-first.

He took them and made a cut, and you leaned in close enough that he could smell the sun on you, watching his hands the way he’d watched yours the first afternoon. Steve found that his fingers weren’t quite as steady as they’d been a minute ago.

“Wait,” you murmured. You reached over and slid his hand down the handle, your fingers warm against his knuckles. It was so mechanical, so pragmatic, that Steve felt almost silly for the way his pulse had picked up. “There. Now you’ve got some leverage.”

You smiled at him, turning your neck slightly as you did so, and it started at one corner and took a second getting to the other. Steve had the even more unhelpful thought that he could probably map out the exact movement of it by now, knew it would pull a small crease into your left cheek before it touched your right.

He made himself look at the dahlias and tried the cut again, your hand still loosely bracketing his. You were guiding him now more than gripping. The stem gave clean this time, no ragged tear, no crushed pith. You made a small, delightedly pleased sound in your throat like you would when you’d taught a dog to sit.

“See,” you said. “Not so hard.”

He felt his own lips pick up at that. “Got a great teacher.”

“Well.” You sat back on your heels. “We'll make a farmer out of you yet, Harrington.”

“God, I hope not.”

Steve wasn’t sure if you knew that he kept washing up here more than any reasonable excuse required. He wasn’t going to be the one to tell you. Though, he was sure you already knew. From what he’d learned of you in the hours doing handiwork and talking that somehow stacked up, you were smart. You just chose, with what he considered to be very thought-out grace, what to let alone.

A bee had gotten drunk on one of the heads a few feet down, weaving in slow, dumb loops. He watched you pause to watch it with the same patient attention you seemed to give most things. He had the unglamorous vertigo of noticing that he could probably spend a very long time watching you just watch things. And another that he’d very much like to.

The sun had dropped low enough to hit the row sideways instead of from overhead, and it turned the whole bed molten at the edges. He checked his watch before he could stop himself, then blew out a short breath as he read the time.

Your head turned slightly. “You have to go?”

“No,” Steve said, lied. Sucking in a sharp breath through his nose, he added, slower, because he didn’t want to lie to you and didn’t want to leave either, “Not yet. I’ve got a—I have to run for something for a friend in a bit. Pick something up.” He turned the shears over in his hand. “But not yet.”

You pressed your lips together, and he could see you try to bite down a smile. “Always so cryptic,” you murmured.

“You want to come?”

Your brows furrowed as you blinked. “Come where?”

“On the errand. It’s—” He shrugged, going for casual and missing it completely. “It’s nothing. It’s like a twenty-minute drive but I figured—don’t know. You’ve been out here for so long. Might be nice for us to go someplace else.”

You looked at him for a long moment, long enough that he felt his own breath pick up at the sudden, ridiculous fear that he may have overstepped, that he’d misread the past month of baked goods and farm-work completely. But then, you glanced down at yourself, turning over your hand to inspect your fingernails, and said, “Let me just wash my hands quickly.”

You’d folded yourself up into the passenger seat with your knees up, the cardigan pulled over your hands, watching the farm mirror shrink in the side mirror until the road swallowed it. Steve drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the gearshift.

“You can change it,” he said, nodding at the radio, which was murmuring something classic-rock at a low volume. “I won’t be offended.”

“I like hearing what you listen to,” you said simply, and Steve saw you shrug from the corner of his eye. “Tells me about you.”

“Oh, yeah?” He let out a short chuckle. “Then I guess I’ve gotta listen to what you listen to someday. Learn more about you.”

“It’s mostly my mom’s records,” you admitted. “Patsy Cline. Some Fleetwood Mac.” You tucked your knees up higher, resting your chin on them. “Nothing you’d probably play at your radio station.”

“I’d play it.” Steve meant it more than the offhand way he said it. “We get, like, four requests a week. Two of them are some divorced guy dedicating something bitter to his ex. I’d take what you like over that any day.”

You laughed—a surprised lilt woven in it—and Steve felt the sound in his chest. The road unspooled ahead, flat and endless yet somehow still beautiful, cornfields giving way to soybean giving way to more corn, everything gone the color of scorched match. Steve had driven this stretch a hundred times without seeing it, had spent years driving it with his eyes locked on something past the windshield. It felt different with you beside him. Slower, somehow, even though the speedometer said otherwise.

“Can I ask you something?” you said.

“That’s never a good start.”

You ignored that. “Did you always want to stay? In Hawkins?”

He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No. My dad had this big plan for where I was supposed to end up.” He shrugged stiffly. “I was supposed to get out. Everyone kind of figured I would.”

“What happened?”

The world cracked open, essentially, but he couldn’t tell you that. He hated how much of it he couldn’t tell you. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted to tell you, anyway, but hated there was no option to do so. “Stuff happened,” he said instead, vaguely. “Ended up here. Doin’ pretty decently.”

“Do you wish you’d left?”

“What’s with the interrogation?” He huffed out a short breath, something close to a laugh as his eyes flickered to you. And because it felt wrong to leave your question unanswered, he said, “I used to.” His fingers tapped once on the gearshift. “Lately, not so much.”

He could feel you go still beside him.

“What about you?” he asked, mostly to give the moment somewhere to go. “You ever want out?”

You were quiet for a second, watching the fields slide by, and Steve found himself looking at the reflection of you in the window glass instead of the window itself, the ghost-version of your face laid faint over the outside, translucent and doubled.

“Sometimes. I wanted to go somewhere with mountains.” You tucked a strand of your hair back that the window crack kept working loose. “Then my mom got sick, and we wanted to be here. And then it was just—easier to stay. And then I started working on the tulips, and you know when you build something for long enough you can’t really picture leaving it? Feels like walking out on a kid.”

Steve nodded slowly. He wondered if you were aware of what you’d done with the fields, raising it back from the dead and the rupture that had broken apart the town.

He also thought he would have liked to take you to the mountains when this was all said and done, if he made it out. He’d probably forget to check the oil. He imagined you’d want to stop at every single roadside stand between here and wherever the land stopped being flat, looking at what grew where, comparing a stranger’s dahlias to your own with the little competitive squint you got whenever another stall’s stuff looked a little too good.

He thought about whether Clover would do good in a van for that long. Would Steve have to stop every hour so she could piss on somebody’s fence post? Would you let her ride up front with her head out the window the whole way?

“Like two peas in a pod,” he murmured. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you stayed.”

It was a whole lot of wanting with a girl who probably had no idea she was already lodged somewhere permanent in him. He hadn’t told you any of it because he found nothing about the way he thought, translated into words, would come out like anything but unhinged.

“Yeah?”

“Obviously.” His hand came off the gearshift to press a light touch to your shoulder. “Turns out I’m partial to farms now.”

“Just farms in general?”

“Nah. A very specific one.” He pulled his hand back to the gearshift before it could linger somewhere it had no business lingering, though the warmth of your palm seemed to stay printed on his palm a second longer than physics probably allowed. “Don’t get used to me being sappy, though.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,” you said, mouth curving. “Though I might start expecting this.”

“Only if you keep letting me bother you. I’ve gotta stay motivated somehow.”

“That’s what you are,” you said teasingly, fond.

The radio continued to hum. He wondered whether the mountains you’d wanted as a kid looked anything like the ones he’d overheard El describe to Mike once, blue and folded and endless. He was thinking about that when the walkie went off in the cupholder and his whole body stiffened up.

It cracked to life mid-static, and Robin’s voice punched out, “Steve. Harringtoooon.” He looked over at you for a second, eyeing the walkie. “You there? Pick up.”

His hand was already moving to it, his knuckles going pale on the wheel with the other. “Yup. Here.”

“Jonathan had to do something. Can you come earlier—?”

“No—” he started saying immediately, shaking his head. “I’m not supposed to be doing—” He stopped himself. He knew he’d say too much in front of you trying to argue his way out.

“We gotta be out there before—”

“Yeah. Okay,” he bit out, because he could already figure out the rest of it. Context clues and such. It had also happened too many times that he didn’t need the entire schpiel—Steve was the one that was meant to be available. “I’m finishing something. Twenty minutes.”

“We don’t have twenty—”

“Yes, we do.” The words came out harsher than he’d intended, harsher than he’d wanted to be in front of you. He’d have to apologize to Robin first thing. “I’ll be there. In twenty minutes.”

“Fine. Twenty.”

“Yeah.” Steve set the walkie back down, face-first, the little plastic click of it landing in the cup holder, a sound that sounded enormous in the silence that followed.

He didn’t turn to face you right away, doing the entire calculation of the minutes in his head. Steve—frankly—did not want to go. He wanted to keep driving toward the errand that barely existed anymore, some ten minutes to keep you in the passenger seat a little longer. He wanted the twenty minutes the Party had eaten alive to belong to him instead. He wanted, absurdly, to turn the van around and go back to your little dahlias and just keep cutting them until there was nothing left to cut, until the whole field was empty and there was no reason to leave.

You’d turned to the window, like you were making space for his conversation and his thoughts. The little courtesy made Steve’s chest tighten.

The strand of hair had come loose again, right on cue, the window crack tugging it free. This time, before he could stop himself, Steve reached over and tucked it behind your ear. You went still, and he let his fingers stay there a second too long, grazing the shell of your ear and the warm skin beneath. He felt the whole touch-and-retreat instinct he’d been running all day just stop. He let himself have it, the one soft thing he could actually give you, wordless, instead of the thirty apologies stacked up between his teeth he didn’t even have the minutes to fucking spill.

“I’m sorry,” he tried anyway, voice dipping lower. His hand finally dropped to his lap, running out of plausible reasons to stay. “I’ll drop you home. I didn’t expect—”

“Don’t apologize,” you said, voice gentle. Somehow, that made him feel it more, not less. “I know you get busy.”

“I know. I just—” He exhaled, hands finding the wheel again, gripping it a little too hard as he turned to go back. “I wanted today to just be—today. Not interrupted by anything.”

You were quiet a second, and then you said, “Why?”

He knew it was coming. He hadn’t very well expected that you’d let his unreasonable pull go unnoticed.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Guess I don’t like it when this—whatever it is—gets cut short.” His jaw worked. “Don’t like sharing the good parts of my week with—with the other stuff.”

Because you’re the only thing that asks nothing of me except to be there with you and do mundane little things; because everyone else needs me to survive something and you just need me to show up.

He glanced over quickly to check your face, trying to read if his answer had told you what he needed it to tell you. You were smiling softly, and it seemed like you’d put on that expression just for him, just so he wouldn’t get so worked up. It almost worked.

“Well, we did have today,” you said. “Mostly.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said, and meant it so much his voice went rough as he said it. “All of it.”

“Okay,” you said, and Steve felt the tightness in his chest loosen just a fraction. “I’ll hold you to it.”

He needed you to hold him to it. God, he needed you to hold him to it because he had no idea how many more of these he could get, and he wanted every single good one to be yours.

Steve knew you probably hadn’t expected this when he said he’d make up for it, but after the crawl, after the tunnel had gone on twice as long as it should’ve, after Nancy’s flashlight had died and they’d had to feel their way back along the wall, after Hopper’s face when they finally surfaced, furious with relief, after all of it, Steve had found himself driving toward the farm instead of home. His hands had done it for him, muscle memory laying out the route before his brain could think to check the time, the same way they’d turned him onto your road for a month running now without him having to think about it.

It was well past midnight now. There was no moon worth mentioning, just the van’s headlights carving a narrow tunnel through all that darkness until he cut a quarter mile out.

He had no idea what he looked like. He could guess. He knew his knuckles were split from something he couldn’t fully remember hitting, knew there was a long smear of dirt and worse down one side of his jaw. He knew his shirt had a tear at the shoulder seam. He didn’t care enough to stop and turn around and go home and clean up like any person with half a working braincell would. Some raw, unedited part of him just needed to see that you were real and unhurt and still exactly where he’d left you, and every mile he didn’t drive felt like a mile spent like lying.

Your window was on the second floor, the one with the gauzy curtain that he’d learned never closed all the way, and Steve stood beneath it in the wet grass feeling monumentally stupid—a grown man about to lob pebbles at glass like this was ‘62—until he spotted the trellis instead, sturdy-looking, laced with something climbing and thorny that he knew he was going to regret grabbing.

He regretted it immediately, and then again on the second rung, splinters biting into his palm on top of everything else the night had already taken out of his hands. But he got high enough to knock, three soft raps against the pane, low enough that it wouldn’t wake your brother or father. He just waited, heart going childishly stupid and fast in his chest.

The curtain moved almost immediately, and he wondered if you hadn’t been asleep at all.

Your face appeared in the gap, your confused face slipping sharper the second the porch light down below caught the state of him. Steve watched you register his entire person before the window slid up.

“Steve—”

“I know it’s late,” he said, voice gruff. “I know I probably look—I just wanted to see you. That’s it—”

“Get in here before you fall and break your neck,” you said through a harsh whisper, already reaching for him.

You hooked a hand under his arm, and Steve let himself, embarrasingly, gracelessly, be hauled over the sill, knee banging into the frame. He landed half on the floor and half against your dresser.

“Hi,” he breathed out, trying to force out a smile.

You pressed your lips together, eyeing him now in the new light. He watched a crease form between your brows, and he could practically hear the gears of your brain turning at his state. “Were you playing in the dirt or something?” you muttered, and there was worry laced under the dryness of your words.

“Or something.” Steve laughed breathily. “Long night.”

“Looks like it.” You crossed to your nightstand, and Steve’s eyes shamelessly tracked you in the low gold wash of the lamp you clicked on. Your hair was loose from whatever you’d twisted it in, an old t-shirt that swallowed you down past the middle of your thighs.

You disappeared behind the door, and the second you did, Steve said, “Come back.” He hated how much it sounded like begging, how little he cared.

“Getting a washcloth, not moving to another state, Steve.” You sounded warm and amused. Steve heard the water run, a cabinet creak open and shut.

He sat there on the floor, half-slumped against your dresser, listening to the tiny sounds of you moving around for his sake.

You reappared a moment later, a chipped bowl of water balanced against your hip, a washcloth draped over your shoulder like you kept one permanantly stocked for idiots like him. You nudged him with your foot until he got the hint and hauled himself onto the edge of the bed, and stood in front of him, between his knees, without being asked, setting the bowl on the nightstand.

“Hey,” he said again, rearing his head back slightly and tilting his neck to look up at you.

He saw you bite back a smile, the one that started on one side and took its sweet time getting to the other.

“You’re ridiculous.” You reached for the washcloth at your shoulder, wrung it once over the bowl, and the water made a small sound. “Head up.”

He tipped his chin obediently, and you leaned in to start at his jaw, the cloth cool and startling against a graze he hadn’t felt until it stung. He hissed through his teeth and you murmured a soft apology without slowing down, your other hand coming up to brace against his shoulder for balance.

There were sleep-worn creases at the corner of your eyes. His nose filled with the faint clove-and-vanilla smell of whatever you washed your hair with, warmer now, like the nighttime had made it easier for it to settle into your strands. The old t-shirt slid loose at your collarbone everytime you shifted your weight, giving him glimpses he was trying, with limited success, not to notice too hard.

“You don’t have to do this,” he murmured.

“I do.” You let out a short laugh and pressed the rag lightly against his face, almost affectionately. “Why else would you have come here?”

His lips pushed out at the words, because that wasn’t true. He needed proof that you were here more than he needed sleep or food or being patched up. “Figured you’d miss me if I didn’t show.”

You tugged your bottom lip between your teeth again, and Steve let his fingers absentmindedly go up to catch your chin, tugging it back down. He let it linger there, and you said, with his fingertip against your chin, “I think you’re the one who missed me.”

“Yeah,” he admitted, no fight left in him to deny it. Through an exhale, he added, “I did.”

The rag went paused against his jaw, forgotten between your fingers. You smiled, the corners of your eyes creased. “That’s a big admission for you, Steve Harrington.”

“Uh-huh, I know,” he said, ducking his head underneath to meet your eyes properly. “Your turn now.”

You thought about it, lips going from one side to the other, deliberating. “I was hoping you’d come by tomorrow.”

“Yeah?” Steve smiled, even though his lip stung. “Were you looking forward to it?”

“If I was?”

“Then I’d say we’re pretty even.” Steve’s thumb found the edge of your jaw, tracing the same path you’d left on him with the rag, no purpose to it beyond wanting to just touch you. “Both of us just standin’ around missing each other.”

“I think it’s productive,” you said, voice softening into something dimmer at the edges, matching his. You tipped into his touch just slightly.

He cleared his throat, pinching his eyes shut for a second before opening them back up to meet you again.

“Since we’re doing big admissions,” he murmured, “I wanna kiss you.”

Your eyes dropped to his mouth—to the split at his lip, the dried smear of blood—and you reached for the rag again.

“Hold still,” you said, voice barely even a whisper.

He hummed in confusion, slightly caught off-guard, but he held still. You brought the cloth up slowly, and this time there was none of that quickness from a few minutes ago. Your thumb braced at his jaw as you moved the damp fabric precisely over him, clearing the residue of the night off him.

His eyes were trained on you as you did it. He watched the small furrow of your brows, the way your eyes tracked your own hand instead of his, focused entirely on the task.

“There,” you said quietly, setting the rag down. Your thumb lingered at the corner of his mouth, smoothing over where the cloth had just been. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” he breathed out.

“Mhm.” You met his eyes, and whatever nerves had been sitting in your voice a second ago settled into something steadier. “You can kiss me now.”

Steve really didn’t need to be told twice, for he leaned in, careful, mindful of the tenderness you’d just tended to, and closed the distance between your lips slowly.

You made a small sound against his mouth, surprised more than anything even though you knew exactly what was happening, and his hand came up to curl around your waist, fingers finding the cotton of your t-shirt and, underneath it, the real warmth of you, true in a way nothing tonight—or in the past few months—had managed to be.

You shifted closer, the bowl of water wobbled dangerously on the nightstand and neither of you cared. For a second, the whole night—the coldness of the Upside Down—just fell away, replaced entirely by the fact of your mouth against his and your hands fisting loose in the front of his ruined shirt.

He kissed you slower than he’d ever kissed anyone. He kissed you slower than his own want was telling him to, because he understood that this was the last thing he should be rushing, especially not after a night that had tried, in its vicious way, to take him somewhere he might not have come back from.

Steve wanted to feel all of it, and he did; the slight catch of your breath, the way your fingers eventually uncurled from his shirt to slide up into his hair instead, nails grazing against his scalp causing a low noise to slip out of his own throat.

You pulled back only far enough to breathe, foreheads resting together, and Steve kept his eyes closed for a second as he realized he couldn’t fight the dumb smile off his face. Your uneven breath billowed softly against his temple.

He fluttered his eyes open, eyeing you. “Now you look like you went and played in the dirt, too.”

You laughed, a little breathless, and said, “It’s all your fault.”

“Completely my fault,” Steve agreed. “I take full responsibility.”

He tugged at your waist to pull you down, breaking your awkward stance of leaning your neck down. You came easily, knees hitting the mattress on either side of him before you settled properly in his lap, some careful shifting that ended with your hands braced on his shoulders and his own arms banded loose around your middle.

For a while, you two simply moved in the newfound rhythm. His mouth found the hinge of your jaw, and you tipped your head to give him more access to it. When his lips grazed the soft skin just beneath your ear, your breath audibly snagged. You tried to cover it up by a huff of laughter, embarrased by your own reaction, and Steve let his stubble drag against your jaw on the next pass.

Your hand migrated to the back of his neck and started tracing slow, absent-minded figures against his skin, your fingers restlessly wandering while the rest of you sat still and let him work. Every few seconds the movement would stop entirely, your whole hand pressing flat against his skin, like you’d forgotten it existed until his mouth did something that reminded you of it.

You curved into him slowly, knees shifting closer on the mattress, your spine losing its uprightness, and the whole of you tilted toward him like a plant did to an open window. Steve’s arm tightened again around your waist, giving you his solidness to lean into.

Steve hummed when your fingernails raked against the nape of his neck. “So nice,” he muttered, voice going loose.

“Yeah?” You pulled back just far enough to look at him, a smug thing tugging at the corner of your mouth.

“Don’t let it get to that pretty little head.”

His palm pointedly reached up from your waist to cup the back of your skull, pushing it down slightly so you could meet his mouth again.

You melted into it, your whole body exhaling into the kiss. When you broke away again, it was to press your lips against the corner of his jaw, then along the column of his throat with the barest scrape of teeth. Against his skin, he heard you murmur, “Are you safe, Steve?”

Steve went still and cracked one eye open. He tugged at your waist again, now letting his spine lay out on the mattress, taking you down with him. He knew it was a delay, you also probably knew it was a delay.

You settled half over him, your palm flat against his chest. He knew you weren’t going to let the question go. He could tell that much just from the way you’d propped your chin on your hand, watching him with an expression that had lost all its softness and was now replaced with something a little more frightened.

Steve was stupid, is what he realized then. He was stupid for getting you involved in his mess, for climbing your house instead of going home and licking his wounds alone like he’d been doing this entire time. He was stupid for letting himself want something this soft when his life had turned into a building of things that it could take away without warning.

“I’m here,” was all that came out of his mouth, and he felt like he’d been splashed with a bucket of ice cold water when he saw your crestfallen expression.

It was the truest thing he could have said. He’d learned to hand himself over cheap—Steve was the guy who took things to his face so a kid half his size wouldn’t have to—and somewhere along the way, he’d stopped keeping track of what he was worth on his own, apart from what he could absorb for someone else.

He thought about how wanting a dinner meant wanting, badly, to still be here and to still look forward to something good. He so very badly wanted to spend as long as he could looking forward to you.

He brought his knuckles up to graze your cheek, and let them rest there as he watched you lean into them. “I’m gonna keep coming here long as you’ll let me.”

Your eyes closed, and your face worked through his words. You looked far from satisfied, but almost willing to take what he could give.

“That’s not an answer,” you murmured, no accusation in it, your lips pulling down into a frown.

He let his thumb wander down to the corner of the frown. He swiped at the skin there once. “It’s the truth, though.”

You hummed, eyelashes dipping, crescents against your skin, and Steve watched you settle to let the question go without actually letting it go.

“Wanna do lots of things with you,” he added, voice going into a whisper now.

“Yeah?” Your eyes opened at that. “Like what?”

“Like ask you out on a date like a real gentleman, for starters,” he said, eyes flicking down to your tangle of limbs, how you were straddling him.

“If you ask, I might say yes.”

Steve felt every nerve in his body jump.

“Alright, then. I’m askin’.” His hands found your waist properly now, thumbs fitting over your ribs. “Would you let me take you out? To a nice dinner.”

You pretended to consider it, chin tilting. “I don’t know. The guy asking has a pretty questionable track record. Tried to steal from me the first time I met him.”

A grin crawled onto his lips. “Give him a chance. He cleans up nice.” He squeezed your waist gently, a silent urge. “So? Yes or no? My ego’s riding on this.”

His ego was also pretty fragile now, if he was being honest.

You leaned down slowly, the mattress dipping under the new angle of your weight, your hair falling to curtain both your faces. You pressed your lips to the corner of his mouth—not quite where he wanted it, deliberately drawn out and so maddening—and held it there long enough Steve felt heat climb the back of his neck.

“Yes,” you said finally.

Steve couldn’t help but feel the guilt gnaw at him even as the rest of him went giddy and lighter than he’d felt in months. The thought of you saying yes to him, all of him, while he was still handing you maybe a third of that on any given day felt like breaking your trust.

You deserved a guy who could hand over all of it. But Steve had experienced too much loss in the past few years to not want to latch onto the hope of a future with you, greedy and undeserving as it made him feel to want it anyway.

“You mean it?” he said, voice going rough.

“Don’t make me regret it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, and let his thumbs stay there this time.

Three nights with your notes spread across your desk, your pencil worn down to a nub, and your mother calling from downstairs that dinner was getting cold. Three nights reading through library clippings about school funding, college acceptance rates, and the way girls in Hawkins were politely encouraged toward “practical” futures while boys with half of your grades were told they had potential. You had interviewed four seniors, two teachers, one guidance counselor who had smiled at you with the concerned tenderness adults reserved for girls they planned to ignore. 

It was practically perfect.

You had written it carefully. Not angrily, though you had to admit that anger had lived under every line you wrote, warming the words from dpwn below. You had made it clean, sharp, and correctly sourced. You had imagined your byline on the front page. You had victoriously imagined holding the paper in your hands and seeing proof that all the hours you spent noticing things nobody asked you to notice had finally become something real.

The reaction to it, unfortunately, had left much to be desired.

Mr. Walsh held the pages in one hand and adjusted his glasses with the other. His voice was polite enough, but it held that familiar detachment.

“It’s very thorough,” he noted with a faint nod of his head towards the article.

You knew you were absolutely dead, or rather, any hopes of seeing a cover page was.

Across the table, Mark Ellison leaned back in his chair, tapping his pencil against his front teeth. His article was a soft little thing about “school spirit making a comeback,” built around three quotes from basketball players and one sweeping paragraph about how Hawkins High had ‘survived difficult years by pulling together’. He had written it during study hall. You had watched him do it while eating chips from a vending machine. You had also watched him pay more attention to his stupid Walkman than his article.

Mr. Walsh then gave Mark’s pages a fond pat from beside you. You had to physically stop yourself from letting the steam errupt from your expression, and curled your fingers into your palm. You didn't, however, hide the scoff when the teacher told the boy his next words.

“I think this is what we need above the fold this week. Something upbeat. The town’s had enough heaviness, don’t you think?”

The room moved on. You couldn't even get another word in before everything decided it was time to start up again. That only served further in building up your irritation. 

Someone asked about the sports column, someone else complained that the typewriter ribbon was fading again, and most annoyingly, Mark grinned without trying to look too pleased, which made him only look worse. You sat very still with your hands folded over your notebook, your nails continuing to press little moons into your palms.

“Maybe we can run yours inside,” Mr. Walsh added, almost kindly. You hated how he made it seem like it was somehow charitable of him to do so. After all, his excuses were always relatively  the same. “It’s strong work. Just a bit… intense for the front page.”

Intense.

You looked down at your notes until the letters blurred into a block of black.

That was what they always called girls who didn't make unfairness easier to swallow for others. Intense. Difficult. Ambitious in a tone that meant unattractive. Boys were driven. Boys were promising. Boys were leaders, even when they had to borrow a pencil to write a paragraph about pep rallies. Even when half of them couldn't even write clean enough for legitimacy on papers of loose leaf.

You smiled promptly then because you knew how to make adults comfortable. You weren't so sure your face was able to hide your growing annoyance, though. It was practically humiliating in its steady routine, but you'd learned over the years Mr. Walsh was as stubborn as the donkey he was named after.

“Sure,” you gave a small exhale alongside your smile, your tone was too light to be breezy and far too sweet to be real. “Inside is fine.”

Inside was not fine.

At lunch, you stabbed your fork into a pile of cafeteria mashed potatoes until they lost their shape entirely. With a cheek resting in hand, the sight of the sullen plate reflected your own inner turmoil. Conversational chatter flattered about around you.

“He said it was intense?” One friend asked, sitting across from you with a carton of milk she had not opened. “Everything's intense to that guy. Mr. Walsh wears the same brown sweater every day and once called Pat Benatar ‘too confrontational.’”

“He didn’t say Mark’s article was intense,” you muttered with poorly disguised disgust. Your brows twitched together and your eyes flicked up in a roll. The moment replayed in your head, Mark getting far too much praise for something he spent the better half of an hour listening to Olivia John-Newton, though he'd refuse the accusation vehemently if questioned.

“That’s because Mark’s article has the emotional range of a gym sock,” your friend Stacey said from beside you. She had bright blue eyeliner, a talent for gossip, and the terrifying confidence of someone who had never once doubted she deserved to take up space. You admired her for that.  “You need something undeniable.”

“I had something undeniable.” the response came almost petulant, and if you were still holding onto the leverage that you had a shoe-in for an article, you'd have refrained from saying it.

“No,” Stacey clicked her tongue, pointing her plastic spoon at you. “You had something true. That’s different. Truth makes people sleepy unless there’s blood on it.”

Leah made a face, looking down at the strawberry jam on her cake slice, and promptly pushed it forward. “Please never go into medicine.”

You tried not to laugh and failed halfway, the sound catching in your throat before it could become anything that felt good. For a moment, there was something besides that sense of annoyed displacement. 

The cafeteria around you churned with noise. Trays clattered, and somebody at the far end started chanting for reasons that probably involved a dare and milk coming out of someone’s nose. You let the spark of clear judgement light through your expression as you looked over to  the basketball table occupied its usual territory near the windows.

They were loud enough to own the room without having to ask, a result of years of indulged arrogance,  you could only assume. Tommy H. was telling a story with both hands, his laugh sharp and performative. A few juniors watched him the way freshmen used to watch Steve Harrington.

Steve did not sit with them anymore, that was something practically everyone noticed since last year.

He sat two tables away from the old crowd, alone with a slice of pizza gone stiff at the edges. His hair was still perfect in the way that seemed less accidental the longer you looked at it, all careful lift and feathered brown shine.

His shoulders filled out his yellow polo, but they were rounded inward today, one hand pressed against his temple while he stared at a textbook he did not seem to be reading. There was a bruise near his jaw, faded yellow at the edges. His eyes kept moving toward the basketball table and then away before anyone caught him looking.

King Steve, deposed but still dressed for court.

Stacey followed your gaze. Her mouth curved before you could shove it away off of her.

“If you want the front page,” she brightened up with a revived vigor, “you have to write about the biggest tragedy in Hawkins.”

Leah, unfortunately, looked too.

“Oh Stace’, I don't think that's a good—” she was swiftly cut off by your mutual friends voice dipped in delight

“The fall of King Steve,” Stacey finished and you gasped at her.

You snorted without ceremony promptly, her words did less to entice you and more to amuse you. If there was anything you couldn't find yourself caring less to write about, it would be about anything involving Steve Harrington. “That’s not an article.”

“It is absolutely an article! It’s got everything. Popularity. Masculine fragility. Hair products.”

Leah leaned forward then, lowering her voice. She looked besides you two with a more hesitant approach, her eyes flicked to the table a few feet away from you. “Also maybe just leave him alone? He looks one spilled pudding cup away from a complete collapse.”

“That’s the point,” Stacey had taken to promptly ignoring the two of you. “What happens when a guy builds his whole identity on being wanted, and then people stop wanting him?”

The words landed before the joke did.

You looked at Steve again. He dragged a hand through his hair, then immediately seemed to regret it, patting the front back into place with a reflex so automatic it made your chest pinch in spite of yourself. If you were to compare it to anything, it would be akin to a kid being filmed for a birthday party. It held the familiar awareness of being all too stiff, even in the singular companionship of just himself.

A whole identity built on being wanted.

The cafeteria lights flashed across the windows as usual. Outside, October had pulled Hawkins into a cold, colorless stretch of afternoon. The trees beyond the parking lot shivered with half-bare branches, leaves gathered wetly along the curb. It was a domestic background that you've memorized in routine these past four years. 

You pulled your notebook from your bag suddenly. Stacy's words had flicked on a small lightbulb in your brain.

Leah's  brown eyes blinked wearily on you as the next few minutes were received in silence from your side, only the sound of pen to paper filling your ears. “Oh, God. Stacey, you broke her.”

You rolled your eyes at that.

“I inspired her.” Stacey gave a self assured correction, her fingers going up as if it would further solidify her point.

There was no real attention paid to your friends for the next whirlwind of time, and you clicked your pen every so often in an attempt to soften the strokes of ink.

At the top of a previous blank page, you had written:

The Lifecycle of a High School God: why a crown crushes a king.

Stacey leaned over your shoulder and let out a delighted gasp.

“That is disgusting,” Leah immediately. Her eyes widened and she threw you a look that your promptly avoided. 

“It’s not, it's anonymous… and a work in progress,” you murmured in weak retaliation, already thinking faster than you could write. “Stacy's  right, it'd be a good article. How we make gods out of boys and then act shocked when they don’t know how to be human.”

Leah’s expression softened in a way you did not want to look at too closely. Realistically, you realized this might be a bit too cruel. But you were already on your verge, and no matter how absurd the idea had seemed before – you could admit held strong potential. 

“And Harrington?”

You watched him push his tray away untouched, and your gaze was less detached than you had been before.

“Steve is the case study.”

You told yourself that made it cleaner, and you also told yourself a lot of things that week. Things that in hindsight, might’ve been necessary to proceed with caution.

—

You approached him after basketball practice on a Wednesday, when the hallway outside the gym smelled most strongly of rubber, sweat, and floor wax. Most of the team members had already spilled toward the locker room, their voices echoing against the cinderblock walls. Steve came out last, a gym bag slung over one shoulder, and damp hair falling looser than usual around his forehead.

He looked tired enough that the sight of him made your plan wobble. It was one thing to think this out carefully and assume control, and it was another to actually act it out. 

Then, finally, he glanced up and saw you waiting by his locker.

You pushed off the wall before you could think better of it. Any further delay would only serve in faltering you more. 

“Harrington,” you called out firmly, letting your voice carry the boldness you had practiced in your mirror. Though, you weren't entirely sure you properly hid the wince that came with addressing him like that. “I’ve been looking for you.”

His eyebrows lifted then, that was what you'd noticed first. His face seemed to twitch in a complicated way, his face didn't hold a smirk, not right away at least. Surprise was there first. Real surprise, open and unguarded enough to make you feel briefly cruel. Your tried not to ponder on him for too long.

“For me?” his voice held a sincere curiosity that had you irritated at repeating yourself.

“No, the other guy with gravity-defying hair and a tragic aura.”

That got him.

A breath left him, almost a laugh, you saw the movement happen in real time. He leaned his shoulder against the locker, trying to recover his balance by looking casual. His thumb hooked into his belt loop. His shining eyes flicked over your face, landed on your mouth for half a second too long, then jumped back up.

You really had to refrain from the scoff that wished to escape you. 

“Tragic aura,” he repeated, his eyes twisted in a regained stability. His voice was more awkward than you remembered it being,  strangely that'd been your first true thought of him. “Wow. That’s, uh… that’s new.”

You gave a low hum in response.  “I’m a journalist. We notice things.”

“Is that why you’re here? To notice me?”

The line should have been smooth. You could actively hear him reaching for an older version of himself, the one who would have tilted his head and let girls do the work of melting. But his voice caught on the last word. Not much, but it was just slightly enough that you felt something in you feel successful.

You smiled, the formation stretched across your face as you cleared your throat softly. “I need help.”

Now, he seemed a bit confused,  his head tilted slightly in a way that reminded you of the neighborhood poodle. You let a smile turn slightly genuine at the semblance found between the two. 

“With?”

You stepped closer finally, and you stepped close enough to see the faint line where his tan had started to fade at his throat, and certainly close enough to catch the smell of clean soap beneath sweat and cologne.

“Understanding someone.” the words came out a bit hesitant, not at all like the suaveness you had practiced by standing in front of your bathroom mirror.

His gaze sharpened a little. Instinct took over him well. “Someone?”

“A boy,” you said quickly. Whatever it was that appeared in your face seemed to have gotten to him.

You saw the ghost of King Steve ever so slightly stir in movement in him. His mouth curved, one corner first, then another. It was almost unfair how quickly he could change expressions, and even worse so, that each expression of his seemed to cause your nerves to fray.

“Well, lucky for you, I happen to be an expert.”

Your eyes flickered to his, though not before you let your gaze find the small details of his face that were only exposed up close. “You do?”

“Former expert,” he amended, and something dry entered his voice. “My credentials are under review.”

You laughed before you meant to. You couldn't help it at the moment. It came out too genuine and his face changed with it. Not entirely dramatic, though. He just went still, the way people did when a sound touched some starved part of them. His own pools of hazel seemed to be too flittery for someone you were sure had done this plenty of time before. Still, against your better judgment, you kept staring into his eyeline.

You should have written that down later, a faint voice echoed through your head. Not the eyes part, you quickly denied and even got upset at yourself for supplying the image. You really should have been memorizing any small part he'd exposed, even more of the behavior you were out to conquer.

Instead, you remembered the exact angle of his shoulder against the locker, the wet curl slipping toward his eyebrow, the way he looked at you with confusion and cautious interest and a kind of bruised hope that had no place in your article.

You tilted your chin, chewing on the bottom of your lip by pure instinct. By now, you were close enough to have to tilt your head up to meet his gaze. You blinked, breaking whatever power he seemed to have had momentarily to have you swept up and cleared your throat.

Your voice was back to being confident again, since practice made perfect. “Pick me up Friday?”

His mouth caught in a faint sputter, you could tell you had caught him completely off guard. Faintly, as if it were a bodily response, you softened your smile into something smaller, tilting up at him for the silent moment.

“Friday,” he said after a beat. Steve’s voice seemed to have taken a breathless edge now. It did something all weird and wonky to you. “Yeah. I can do Friday.”

“Seven.”

“Seven,” he repeated, and appearing to remember he wasn't an apparition, Steve's body seemed to lean toward yours as he continued. “Where are we going?”

You hadn't thought that far. Instead of deciding on the spot, you bit the inside flesh of your cheek as an amused exhale escaped your lips.

“You’re the expert, Harrington. Impress me.”

You walked away before your nerve gave out. You could feel him watching you down the hall, could feel the whole plan beginning to take shape behind your ribs. You had even taken to looking through your sosters old magazines for inspiration. Hot and cold. Interest and withdrawal. Private sincerity, public disruption. All those where supposed to be tactics to reuse interest in relationships,  but you figured that the same could also be said for an indirect character study. 

Observe the subject under changing social conditions. Note responses. Analyze, that had been your plan split up into groups.

You were very good at making terrible ideas sound academic.

—

On Friday, his Beamer waited by the curb under a sky the color of sad, wet cement.

He got out when he saw you, which you hated because it was exactly the kind of performative gentleman routine you had expected, and also because he did it without checking if anyone was watching. That complicated your observations, causing a flutter to go through you. He wore a brown leather jacket over a striped shirt, jeans that fit him too well, and that expensive cologne that seemed built into the mythology of him.

Ralph Lauren, Stacey had said with the authority of a girl who knew these things and lived vicariously through others. It mixed with the leather and the faint sweet smell of cherry chapstick when he opened the passenger door.

"Aren't you going to get in,” Steve gave you a wounded look. His head was tilted down slightly towards you and it seemed like he was more offended you had even made an attempt to reach for the door. 

You looked at the open door in his hand, feeling less like a mastermind and more like a nervous girl.  “Do you do that for all your dates?”

Steve's hand went up to run the back of his neck as he let out a weak exhale,  the ghost of a smile on his face. “Only the intimidating ones.”

You slid into the car after that, tucking your notebook deep inside your bag where he would not see it. The seats were cold through your skirt. The dashboard glowed amber when he turned the key, washing his face in soft light as the engine rumbled awake.

He didn't take you to Enzo’s, where everyone went to be seen. He drove past the diner, past the arcade, past the bright places where Hawkins pretended it had a pulse. The town fell away into dark stretches of road bordered by skeletal trees and damp fields. Eventually he pulled into a small overlook above the park, where the swings moved gently in the wind below and the streetlamps made small gold circles on the path.

“This is your idea of impressive?” you couldn't help the baffled tone that took over as you asked, but your voice had taken a softer lift.

He shrugged, fingers resting on the steering wheel. “You said you wanted to understand someone. Hard to do that while watching someone like Tommy try to fit an entire breadstick in his mouth.”

“You’re not friends with him anymore?” you didn't really need the answer, everyone practically knew the answer by now. But still, it's different to have someone tell you something by choice than admit knowledge by association.

His thumb moved along the stitching of the wheel. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Not really.”

“Why?”

He gave you a sideways look. “Wow. Straight to it.”

“I told you. Inquisitive.”

“Right.” He exhaled through his nose, not quite laughing. The smile on his face was soft in its hesitancy. “I don’t know. Stuff happened. I got tired. He got meaner. Or maybe he was like that, and I just stopped thinking it was funny.”

The words fell between the two of you in a hush.

You watched him in the dashboard light. Away from school, he seemed younger and older at once. Without the noise around him, without the audience, the space he occupied seemed to changed shape. He rubbed a hand over his face, then caught himself before he ruined his hair and dropped it to his lap. He did that a lot.

“You okay?” he asked suddenly, breaking you out of your trance. You quickly gave a few hard blinks to refocus, you seriously had to stop doing that around him.

“What?”

“You’re shivering.”

Were you? You hadn't noticed much besides him. “I’m fine.”

“You’re obviously not fine.”

Before you could answer, he shrugged out of his leather jacket and draped it over your shoulders. The weight of it settled around you, warm from his body, lined with the smell of him so completely that your next breath came slower than the last.

“You’ll get cold,” you said, a frown finding its way on to your face. It was a cold evening in Hawkins, the chill more prominent than usual. Your worry was quickly shoved down by him.

Steve seemed to just fidget by habit now. The muscle in his forearms tensed and gained your attention as his arms crossed against his chest. He gave a slight shove and his smile was all teeth and unintentional charm.“I’m tough.”

Now, you didn’t even bother to hide your scoff. A challenging twist of your brow appeared and you pointed out the faults in his words. “You just complained about the heater not working.”

“I’m selectively tough,” his grin stayed and was backed up by a small chuckle. 

You looked at him, and he looked back, and something quiet opened in the car.

The conversation shift quickly after that. You asked questions you had meant to use later. What did he want after graduation? He did not know. Where did he want to go? Away, maybe. Or nowhere. What was he afraid of? He made a joke at first, something about being left unsupervised with fireworks, and then he went quiet long enough for the windows to begin fogging at the edges.

“I don’t think I’m good at anything,” Steve told you after that. He said it plainly, almost casually, which made it worse. It was easier to dissect him clinically when he didn't wear that expression that caused you faltering to gain back control. 

You shifted toward him, eyes dragging over him.  They seemed darker with the setting say, but somehow they had something stored away that made you want to push back on his words.  “That’s not true.”

He gave you a look that unnerved you. “You don’t know that.”

You didn't let it get to you. You pushed through because for some reason, you felt like you couldn't stay silent. “I know you noticed I was cold before I did.”

The words had you faltering from the truth it held.

Steve gave a wry exhale, his head tilted back against his seat with his eyes on you. “That’s not a skill.”

Your voice felt firmer now. “It is, actually.”

He stared out through the windshield. Below, the park sat empty and silvered by frost. You couldn't really focus on that, not when Steve sat besides you looking less like the king you knew and more like a boy you wanted to know. You couldn't even process the words before Steve continued in. “Nancy used to say I had good instincts when I got out of my own way.”

Nancy.

There it was. The bruise beneath the bruise. It wasn't  one you were exactly shocked to hear, the whole sum of Hawkins new about the romance between the Wheeler daughter and him. Still, you weren't going deny the tinge of discomfort you felt at the mention.

What? Why were you uncomfortable? You immediately shut down the thought. A hard clearing of your throat helped stabilize yourself. You had to remind yourself that you weren't here for whatever reason that your body seemed to mistake. Instead, you focused on the task at hand, or at least tried to. You should have leaned in then when his head bowed slightly. You should have gathered the quote, traced the wound back to its social function, and built your thesis brick by brick.

You settled on something else, because strangely, anything else seemed harsh. “She sounds smart.”

“She is.”

The words carried no bitterness. That threw you off. You'd have known guys to turn completely hostile after break-ups, and you couldn't even remember a time where someone from Steve’s circle stayed genuine for the moment. You'd completely expected him to talk badly about her, about the situation, and frankly just about anything and everything that came up. To place blame in everything that never warranted it. 

You'd have felt more comfortable if he reacted like that. He didn't notice your turmoil.

“She’s also right,” he added, turning back to you. His hazel eyes mesmerizing in its softness. “I get in my own way a lot.”

You wanted to ask how. You wanted to ask why. What came out was a stupid joke about how his hair probably counted as a separate obstacle. “How, by looking in the mirror and not finding your face under all that hair?”

His laugh wasn’t loud, it certainly was not the cafeteria laugh you'd have known, not the old one that announced him from across the room. It was small and startled and breathless, given to you without polish. It didn't help you when he leaned back against the seat, smiling at the roof of the car, and your pulse betrayed you completely.

What happened next made you feel less like you were playing him and more like he was playing you. When he reached over to tuck a loose piece of hair behind your ear, he did it slowly enough that you could have stopped him.

You didn't. You didn't stop him.

You told yourself it was because you were playing an act.

His knuckles brushed your cheekbone, working in breaking you out of your mind. Steve’s hand lingered there, his thumb moving once over your skin, it barely had any pressure. He watched the place he touched instead of your eyes, and the careful uncertainty of it burned through you harder than confidence would have.

For one long second, you wanted him to kiss you so badly that you forgot why you were there.

Then a car passed on the road behind you, headlights cutting through the windows, and both of you shifted apart.

Steve cleared his throat, his head turning to look out the driver's side.  He seemed to have looked aware of just how vulnerable the moment was,  and didn't know how to navigate it.  “So. Did I help?”

You looked down at his jacket wrapped around you. It made feel warm in ways you almost wished it didn't. 

“Yes,” your voice came out all wrong,  small and breathless. “You did.”

You wrote three pages that night and hated all of them. It was as frustrating as it was complicated.  The problem was not that Steve failed your test. You found that out quickly. 

The true problem was that he kept passing in the wrong direction.

—

In public, you performed coldness with the sharp dread of a person setting a match to her own sleeve. Or at least, you truly hoped it looked like that. 

Monday morning, Steve found you near your locker with a bright, almost boyish smile that made you glance away before it could hit directly.

“Hey,” he leaned besides you near the locker. “I was thinking maybe after school we could—”

You shut your locker too hard.

“Can we not do this right now?”

His hand, halfway extended toward yours, stopped in the air. He dropped it quickly, trying to make the movement look natural.

“Do what?” his voice had you wanting to falter. God, since when were you this weak?

“This.” You gestured between you, impatient and vague. “The whole thing.”

People moved around you in the hallway, a current of denim jackets and textbooks and perfume. Someone bumped your shoulder. Before you could stumble, Steve stepped closer, placing himself between you and the rush of bodies. It was an unconscious movement. Protective without announcement.

Your stomach turned. You bowed your head to ignore looking into his enrapturing eyes. A warmth came instinctive in your stomach standing in such close proximity with the boy in front of you. You tried to push it down.  

Keyword, tried.

His voice dropped, his head leaning down to yours in an attempt to meet your gaze. “Hey. What did I do?”

His voice had you feeling weak already. “Nothing.”

“Okay, well, I’m getting a pretty strong not-nothing feeling here.”

You looked past him toward Stacey at the end of the hall. She watched with wide eyes, silently mouthing something that might have been commitment or abort. Her hands moved in front of her in a weaving gesture. You weren't sure what she'd been trying to convey, so you only assume she wanted to to keep going.

You crossed your arms, forcing your tone to turn cold and far away. No words really landed cleanly in your head for inspiration, so you took the first ones that would stick. “Maybe you don’t have to be so… much.”

Steve blinked.

His jaw tensed with movement,  your eyes drew to the action by unfortunate reflex now. He glanced down, then back up, searching your face with a focus that made your skin feel too thin and your act feel too hesitant. 

“I’ll fix it,” the words came quietly. You were sure your expression was dumbfounded, sure you had been acting like this on purpose – but what did he gain from doing that? You were so rapidly expecting a textbook fit. Instead, you got patient murmurings. That was worse than any possible anger.

“I don’t need you to fix it.”

“Then tell me what you need.”

His breath warmed your forehead. His hazel eyes showed no sign of any true hostility. They were worried and confused, and there was something heartbreakingly earnest in the way he tried to solve the version of the problem you had invented. You liked that. You liked that he seemed to act like that by instinct.

And so, because of that, you almost reached for him.

You willed yourself to iron quickly. Wetting your bottom lip, you finally looked up at him. eyes. The action had you remembering just why you were so hesitant to meet his gaze, having a look that could melt anything in them. Instead, you stepped around him and walked to class with your throat tight enough to hurt.

At lunch later, you made notes that took up new space in your writing notebook.

He responded to social rejection not with aggression but accommodation. Attempts repair. Shows confusion when expected script fails. Public status seems less motivating than personal connection.

You underlined personal connection so hard the paper tore.

Even detached on paper didn't feel right.

— 

The next test, as the girls had dubbed it, was supposed to be funny. You were sure it was meant to be, but it still held an underlying issue. It was Stacey’s idea, though you were the one foolish enough to do it.

The party was at some fellow senior’s house on Maple Street, loud enough to rattle the windows from the street. Steve picked you up with his hair arranged into what could only be called architecture. He seemed nervous about the party in a way he tried to bury under commentary about the radio, the road, and the fact that you were late even though you had been ready for ten minutes and had simply stood in your room wondering when exactly you had become the villain in your own story.

It was a rough start to say the least.

When you got there, he came around to open your door.

You stood and tried not to let the deep inhale of breathe be heard. The last thing you needed was to look as nervous as you felt. And quickly after that, you took one look at his carefully styled hair, and before you could lose courage, reached up and ran both hands through it. A smile found its way on your face, practiced and teasing, mirroring the girl in the catalogue of your People magazine.

The brush through his hair wasn't gentle, although his hair certainly was. Seriously, you had to ask later on what his secret was. 

The structure of its volume collapsed instantly, and Steve froze. His head still remained in its bowed position from where he leaned down from the passenger seat door of his car. His brows twitched together as your hands ran along his temple. You froze too, fingers still threaded into his hair.

For one second, you waited for the familiar snap. For the old King Steve to step forward with wounded pride and a cruel mouth. The porch light hummed above you. Inside, someone shrieked with laughter. His friends, or former friends, or whatever they were now, could see you from the living room window.

Steve looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the car. He let out a small sigh, and the familiar heart fluttering charming grin appeared on his face. Steve's eyes shut for a moment but his expression didn't falter, even as a series of laughter escaped him. The sound felt warm to you, and your body responded in turn.

“Better?” Steve then fluttered his pretty eyes back open, his head tilting with curiosity. “It was exhausting keeping that up anyway.”

Your hands fell quickly, your finger tips missing the way his hair felt against your skin instantly. The joke died so completely that you could almost hear it hit the pavement.

He glanced at you, the ruined hair falling soft around his face only enhancing him.  “Does it look terrible?”

“No,” you denied, and it came out too quickly. You winced at that, a small noise escaped Steve. 

His mouth twitched. “That was very convincing.”

“I mean it.” you did. 

He looked younger again. Not smaller, exactly. Just less fully arranged. Another strand fell over his forehead, and you had the sudden, awful urge to smooth it back with care instead of strategy.

The party behind you roared alive, and Steve heard. His shoulders tightened, but he didn't turn toward them like you thought. He looked at you instead, waiting for your reaction, which somehow made you responsible for the whole fragile moment.

You reached up and fixed one piece of hair near his temple. Something in you liked doing that. 

“There,” your voice was stronger now, and your smile had turned real moments ago. “Better.”

The smile he gave you was crooked and private. It really was nothing in comparison to the rest of the party, but it lingered. You spent the next few hours trying to get him to smile like that again.

You didn't take notes that night, or any of the other future nights.

You just remembered things instead.

You remembered the blue flicker of a movie screen across his face two nights later, when he sat beside you in the theater and kept his arm over your shoulders for the first half hour because that was what Steve Harrington knew how to do. Smooth. Easy. Practiced. Then, sometime after the second reel started rolling, his fingers stopped drumming against your sleeve and settled there with a hesitant weight, not claiming, only asking.

You remembered the way he drove with one hand when he was showing off, then switched to both hands when he told you about the time he forgot about his gym clothes and his coach made him wear an extra one two sizes too small. You remembered that he kept cherry chapstick in his glove box beside a flashlight, two old cassette tapes, and a receipt from a gas station outside Indianapolis. You remembered him stealing fries from your plate at the nearby diner and pretending to be wounded when you kicked his shin under the booth.

And in the next important memory, you remembered rain.

It came hard one random Thursday night, turning Hawkins into a blur of headlights and slick black roads. Steve’s house was empty in the way large houses could be empty even before you stepped inside. It was too clean, and far too quiet. The kind of place where expensive furniture sat untouched, waiting for adults who came home late and left early.

You ended up in his bedroom because the living room felt too much like a showroom for you.

His room was warmer than you expected, messier in an unapologetically human way. A baseball glove rested comfortably on the nearby dresser. Records stacked crookedly near the stereo. A half-open drawer with socks spilling out. Hair products lined along the bathroom counter with an intensity that might have been funny if it did not now seem faintly sad. Still, you had gotten a few quips out in hopes of cracking a smile from him.

The storm rattled the windows deeper into that even when conversations died down. You sat on the floor with your backs against the thick wooden frame of his bed, sharing a blanket that smelled faintly of detergent and his cologne. It was a familiar scent to your mind now. His knee pressed against yours beneath the fabric. 

Neither of you moved away. 

“I used to think this place was cool,” Steve had mentioned offhandedly after a moment, looking around the space of his room.

You didn't quite follow why his tone seemed far away, to you, his words were still holding up. “It is cool.”

“It’s big.”

Your head turned to face him, a hum on your lips. “That’s usually part of cool.”

He shook his head, the slight shake of his hair reminded you of how you missed touching it. You shook your head and focused once more when he spoke again. “No, I mean… it’s just big.”

You understood what he meant.

Near his large bedroom window, thunder rolled low over the town. The room flashed pale for a second, then settled back into the lamplight.

You rested your cheek against the edge of the mattress, warm eyes pouring into yours as he mimicked your actions. “Are your parents gone a lot?”

“Yeah.” Steve then picked at a loose thread in the blanket. His next words came out short and detached, so unlike the guy you've known. “Dad travels. Mom goes with him when she’s tired of pretending she likes Hawkins.”

You didn't like how his eyes dimmed.  “And you?”

“I stay.”

The word sat between you.

He laughed once, it was without humor, and rubbed at his eye with the heel of his hand. His voice held that rasped edge that sent tingles down your spine.  “God, that sounded pathetic.”

“It didn’t.” The reassurance came so quick it shocked you. You attempted to play it cool, repeating the words slower. 

“It did.” He looked down at his hands, the same ones you found yourself wanting to hold without the premise of a lie. “I just… I don’t know what happens when this is over. School. All of it. Everybody keeps acting like we’re supposed to know.” You didn't know what to say, it was the first time you've seen him so visibly wrecked.  “College, jobs, whatever. And I’m sitting there thinking—what if this was it? What if being King Steve was the only thing I was ever good at, and I wasn’t even good enough to keep it?”

Your chest tightened, it seemed like the world was laughing at you. Her he was, sitting on his bedroom floor besides talking about his insecurities all while you were actively trying to back on them. 

The article was in your bag downstairs. A draft. A title. A guillotine made of clever sentences.

“Steve,” the name came of gentle from your lips. 

He would not look at you, he kept staring at a spot on the floor. 

“Nancy figured it out before I did,” he went on, his voice lower now. His shoulders carried his tension clear as day. “That all the stuff people liked about me was just… noise. Parties, basketball, the car, the hair. The Harrington house. I thought that meant something. Then it didn’t, and it was—”

He stopped and didn't continue any further. You knew the signs before it came, and the room quieted down. 

His throat moved, a small, forcefully restrained noise finding its way out. The rain that thudded against his window filled the silence for him. And for you. 

You reached for his hand quickly.

He looked at your fingers covering his, then turned his palm upward and held on. You opened your mouth to speak, but not much came out. His grip was still foreign to you,  but it was different right now. It wasn't smooth, and it didn't feel like it held any kind of plan. His grip tightened once, almost too much to be soft, but then he quickly loosened it.

You shifted closer.

That was all it took.

He pulled you into his lap with a suddenness that stole your breath, then seemed to realize what he had done a second after doing it. His hands hovered at your waist.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

You settled there instead of moving away. Your own eyes were blown wide and mirroring his. You tried to speak but it came out all airy. “It’s okay.”

His breathing changed when yours did. Steve's eyes seemed to track your face, and the air seemed to turn into something deeper. 

For a moment, neither of you spoke up again. He lowered his forehead to your shoulder,then to the curve of your neck, his breath warm against your skin. The response that you gave was instantaneous, a rapid rising and falling of your chest went through the warmth of your body. His hands gripped your waist through the blanket, not possessive necessarily, you thought it felt more like clinging. Tethering.  The storm made the windows tremble. His hair brushed your jaw.

You lifted a hand and threaded your fingers into the back of his hair. The return of the welcome feeling was pleasant in your grasp.

He went still under your touch, and for a moment. Then he exhaled, deep and unsteady, and held you closer. Your faces were breaths away now, the bridge of his nose softly touched yours.

“Hey,” your voice came out weak. It was too soft to be teasing like you'd hoped. 

Steve’s eyes softened instantly. You saw it happen. You saw the moment the small, genuine grin stretched across his face. His voice came back whispered, as if scared to break the moment. “Hi there.”

When he finally pulled back, his eyes searched your face with an openness that made lying feel entirely  impossible. You knew he was about to kiss you. You knew that you really should stop him. You knew the truth should come out before his mouth touches yours, before this became another thing you had stolen under false pretenses.

But you'd been stupid, and so you didn't stop him.

The kiss began softly, almost carefully. His lips were brushing yours once before returning with more certainty. He tasted faintly sweet from the chapstick he pretended not to use. The kiss felt like it was bewitching your body whole. His hand rose to your hair, fingers sinking in with a restraint that kept breaking and returning. You gave a slight laugh against his lips before calming down. You felt him trying not to rush, trying not to take more than you gave, and the effort undid you more thoroughly than any practiced confidence could have. Because it was just so him.

You kissed him back.

Not for the article. Not for the headline. Not because Stacey would demand details or because Mr. Walsh would have to admit you knew how to find a story

You wanted to, you truly wanted to..

You kissed him because his hand was warm against your back and his breath caught when you touched his face. Because the room smelled of rain and leather and laundry soap. Because his mouth moved against yours with need and care tangled together, and your whole body answered before your conscience could organize a defense.

When you pulled away, his forehead rested against yours. The faint flush from his skin felt nice against yours

He smiled, small and dazed. You added that of the list of expressions you liked to see on him.

“Does this mean I’m helping with your boy problem?”

A laugh broke out of you, shaky and real. You pressed your face into his shoulder to hide it. With a lightness in you chest you lifted your head up as you rolled your eyes. Your hand moved on its own account now. It slid up to grasp the side of his face, your fingers sliding against the shape of his jaw.

“Shut up, Steve.”

His arms tightened around you, and his lips found yours once again. His own lightness expressed through the laughter that filled the echoing bedroom. "Ouch, you wound me."

For a few minutes, the world narrowed to the storm, his heartbeat beneath your palm, and the terrible knowledge that you had done something you could not write your way out of.

—

The article sat unfinished for two days.

You told yourself you would kill it. You also told yourself that you had time. Then you told yourself you would revise it.

So you sat in the newsroom after school, staring at the draft title until the faniliar letters turned cruel.

The Lifecycle of a High School God: why a crown crushes a king.

It sounded brilliant in the cafeteria. You distinctly remember thinking that. But now? Now it sounded mean. 

No, mean was too light of a word. It felt cruel.

You pulled the pages from the typewriter, folded them once, and shoved them into your folder. You would tell Mr. Walsh you had changed direction. You would write something else. Anything else. A review of the cafeteria pizza. A profile on the marching band. A blank page with sorry written in the center.

The front page spot didn't seem so enticing anymore when the cost came so harsh.

You were reaching for your bag when Mark appeared in the doorway, looking over at you. You didn't bother to hide the deep exhale you gave, you whole body tensing on on instinct.

“Working late?”

You stiffened and corrected him. “Leaving, actually.”

His eyes dropped to the folder in your hand. You immediately shut the folder, not liking the look in his gaze. “Is that the mystery column everyone’s whispering about?”

“No.”

“So yes.”

You tucked it against your chest. You had truly no paitence for the boy. You had been feeling horrible all last night yesterday, well, even more so last night than usual. “Move, Mark.”

He held up both hands, smiling. You didn't like his smile. It was nothing like the comforting presence of Steve's. The thought only made your mood worsened. “Relax. I just wanted to see what was so important that Walsh was considering bumping my school spirit piece.”

“He wasn’t.” You wished you sounded as steady as you needed to, but the flicker in your voice betrayed you.

Mark noticed. Boys like Mark always noticed weakness when it benefited them. And Mark himself no doubt would revel in any chance of taking an empty shot at you.

“Come on,” he clicked his tongue in a way that made your blood boil from its condescension. “We’re all on the same staff.”

“No, we’re not.” You pushed past him quickly. 

You did not know, however, that then one folded carbon copy had slipped from your folder and landed beneath the table, half-hidden by the trash can. You did not know Mark found it ten minutes later. You did not know he read it standing under the buzzing lights with his mouth slowly opening into the delighted shape of opportunity.

If you knew, you certainly wouldn't have lived through the reoccurring nightmare you've been having for the past few weeks.

You found out the next morning when Hawkins High came alive with your words.

Not the final version of your words, for it surely would've had a different result. It wasn't even the whole draft.

It was the worst version, the sharpest version.

The version written before you knew the way Steve looked when he gave away his jacket and pretended not to be cold.

Copies appeared on lockers before first period. Someone had run them fast and dirty, the ink uneven, the margins crooked. The title screamed from the top in bold type.

By second period, everyone had read it. By lunch, they were reading it aloud. You pushed through the hallway with your heart hammering so hard your vision pulsed at the edges.

A boy near the trophy case laughed. “Listen to this part—”

You snatched the page from his hand and you were sure the rhythm of your heart could be heard from miles away.

There it was.

Your article.

Your voice, sharpened into a blade that you couldn't even begin to imagine dulling.

The Lifecycle of a High School God: why a crown crushes a king

Every high school builds a throne, though no one admits to carrying the wood to make it. We vote with our eyes, our invitations, and our laughter at jokes that are not funny enough to deserve it. We create a boy and call him a king because it is easier than admitting we are the kingdom that is faulty.

The high school god is rarely born exceptional. He is assembled meticulously. A good car. A good face. The right jacket. The right table. Enough people saying his name in the right tone until even he begins to believe there is something sacred in being wanted. These continue to enforce how sincerity rarely makes the cut.

But worship is not love. Anyone will tell you that, and those who disagree would be dumb enough to face the consequences. Popularity feeds on performance, and performance rots whatever is underneath the layer given. A boy taught to survive by being admired will eventually mistake attention for affection, control for confidence, and loneliness for proof that everyone else has failed him

When a crown falls, what remains is often not a villain, but something more ordinary and more frightening: a boy with no language for himself beyond what other people once applauded and now isolate.

Hawkins High should ask why we keep making kings out of boys who do not know how to be human — and why we act surprised when the weight of a crown crushes them to dust.

You had written every word. It would have been easier to say that Mark embellished over your words, and exaggerated for journalist effect. But he didn't,  you were the one to do that. It was the worst part of the draft he could have chosen, simply because of the fact that you had left out everything you saw after.

You had also left out every human thing that would have saved him.

You found Steve in the print room a few hours later. And before you could assume any sort of hope of a clean explanation, it was shot and dead in front of you. You almost wished he hadn't gone there.

But of course he would have gone there, and of course the place where your betrayal had been made public still smelled of ink and metal and hot paper. It was proof of the now posted article that you didn't even want out. Faintly, you could hear something loud with the clacking press that someone had forgotten to turn off. Steve stood near the long table, one of the copies in his hand, the page trembling slightly between his fingers.

He looked up when you entered and you almost wished he hadn't. 

His eyes were red.

Not crying, not exactly. Worse. It made your heart drop and panic spike up into you. It seemed he intended to hold back so hard that the effort had hollowed out his face.

“Steve–” you didn't recognize your voice. It was so desperate and and pleading. You opened your mouth and tried to stammer out any explanation that came into your head, but there was nothing you found coming to mind. 

“Steve, please! Just listen, I–” He interrupted you and laughed, but it shook you. It wasn't like the laughter you had come to live,  this one had no warmth in it. It was so unlike him and you hated it. You hated causing that. 

“Was any of it real?”

You stopped short, any explanation does quickly in the tip of your tongue. 

He held up the article for you to see. As if you needed to be reminded of what you'd have done, a small breath part of you mouthed off bitterly. 

“When you looked at me like that. When you stayed with me. When you—” His voice caught, and he looked away, jaw tight. You immediately took to shaking your head, the implication of his words just. Because they were true.  And because they weren't. “Was that just material for your front page?”

“No!”

“No?”

“It started—” You hated yourself before the words finished forming. “It started as an article, but—”

His face changed and your heart seemed perpetually lodged into your ribcage. There were some truths that did not deserve the dignity of a full explanation. Steve just exhaled out sharply, his head finally facing you. The reaction wasn't what you wanted, you wanted–no, needed to explain yourself.

He nodded slowly, eyes dropping to the floor. Steve didn't give the you the chance to continue. “Right.”

“Steve, I was going to stop it. I didn't even turn it in! I swear, I wasn't going to hand it over. Mark found an old draft, and he—”

“Don’t.” He looked at you then, and the quiet in his voice hurt more than shouting would have. The word held so much that you froze on instinct. Your eyes stung viciously as you opened your mouth but nothing came out. “Don’t make this about him.”

Your mouth closed then. You felt utterly helpless, which might have been deserved. You desperately wanted to tell him everything,  wanting him to understand that it was real – is real. But your eyes, wide and frantic, just froze. He stepped closer, the paper crumpling in his fist.

“Everyone else wanted to see me for my status,” Steve began with a sharp inhale. You felt the stinging turn more prominent in your eyes, you tried to take a step forward but that was rejected when he almost flinched back two steps himself.. “The car, the parties, the game. Whatever. I got that. I was stupid, but I got it.” His breath shook. Steve’s voice cracked  nearing the end, and that was the last thing you heard before your vision blurred into spots. “I thought you were the only one who didn’t care about it.”

“I did! No, I mean–I do, you have to believe me, Steve.” Your voice was surely pathetically small. Everything else seemed to turn into static silence in the empty printing room and you desperately needed to fix it. You wanted to, but you felt so utterly unsure of your next steps. You reached for him on instinct.

Steve flinched back.

The movement was small. Instinctive. As if his body no longer registered you as a comfort, and that split something open in you. You felt the first few tears fall from your lashes, each blink dropping tiny little pearls. Steve made a noise you couldn't properly translate, his eyes were on yours but they held a thousand words and emotions in a single look. His own hand twitched open and shut before being brought up to bury itself in his hair, Steve then forced his eyes shut and his head turned to the side. He couldn't decide what hurt more, being hurt by you, or seeing you hurt.

He was the one that came back sharp and strained.

“Turns out,” Steve’s voice was so rough, it could have been unrecognizable. You opened your mouth immediately to shut down whatever he would say, but he beat you to it.  “you just used me for a headline.”

The press clattered behind him. A sheet slid loose and fluttered to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, your voice cracking and stinging from feeling utterly defeated. Because he was right, you did. You did get to know him for a chance at a headline, so that was why you could only apologize. But you wanted nothing to do with that stupid article, and regret washed over you at the thought of him thinking none of it was real. Because yes, it was messy, but it was real for you. “But–fuck, Steve... please you have to understand that–” you were cut off before you could even continue. 

He stared at you for a long moment, and you could see the part of him that wanted to believe you fighting with the part that had learned too many times what wanting cost.

Then he turned and walked out.

The room didn't become empty when he left, there was no relief that came with him leaving. And the room didn't become calmer in his disappearance; instead, it filled with him.

The absence of his cologne. The missing warmth of his jacket. The ghost of his hand at your cheek, careful and uncertain, before you had earned any of it. All of the little things that were so present just a moment ago were gone and let the physical trail of what happened.

You were left alone with the faint clacking of the room's machinery. And for a moment, you were so ready to run out to try and plead. To explain, to tell him every complete thing he was missing in hopes of him understanding. But you couldn't do that, not when you were already reason enough that he was hurting all over again.

With a loud curse, you found yourself feeling completely lost in a room that you've only ever compared with a haven. 

— 

For two days, Steve Harrington became visible to you in a way he had never been as king.

You saw him at his locker the next Friday morning, hollow-eyed and quiet, pretending not to hear the whispers. You saw him in the cafeteria, sitting with a younger boy you didn't know for exactly six minutes before the younger boy said something animated enough to make Steve almost smile. Then Steve caught sight of you across the room and the almost vanished.

That hurt like a stab to the heart. 

Then came the other little things that made you feel significantly worse.  He stopped coming to the parking lot after school until the buses had left. He stopped looking down your hallway. He stopped being available to your guilt.

You tried to corner Mark. He denied leaking it with the loose, oily confidence of someone who knew proof mattered more than truth. Mr. Walsh gave a speech to the staff about journalistic ethics while refusing to meet your eyes. Stacey apologized three times, then stopped because the apologies had nowhere to land when she held you while your sobs filled your bedroom. Leah sat beside you at lunch without talking much. That was the kindest thing anyone did.

By Friday afternoon, the newsroom felt smaller than it ever had for you. More suffocating. 

The printing press sat under the window, still and waiting. Dust turned in the late sun. Your original ambition lay around you in stacks of paper and headline sketches and discarded layouts.

You looked at the front page proof with Mark’s article on school spirit and felt nothing.

Not disappointment. Not anger.

Nothing.

That truly scared you more than pain did.

You had thought giving up the article would be enough. You had thought killing the story would count as a moral act. But the story was already alive, crawling through Hawkins High with your fingerprints around its throat. You didn't know what to do, the words were already there for everyone that listened. 

You sat at the typewriter.

For a long moment, you did not move. Shortly after a fit of tense silence, you finally rolled in a clean sheet. The keys struck hard enough to ache in your fingers.

This time, you did not write anonymously because you were clever. Or because you were trying to be witty or cruel. You wrote anonymously because the confession was not meant to redeem your name. It was meant to give him back his.

By the final bell, the flyer was everywhere, curtesy of your desperate and frantic efforts. 

It wasn't approved, it certainly also wasn't polished. Id didn't become formatted with Mr. Walsh’s careful little rules. It was just a single page copied until the machine jammed twice and your hands were black with ink that you couldn't scrub off

Students grabbed them from the tables, from the lockers, from the floor where they skidded under shoes. After all, no one loved potential hidden stories more than Hawkins High

You didn't wait to watch them read. That had been the least of your priorities. There was more important things that you cared about than who read a piece of your work now, and he had been gone from your sight long enough.

So, you ran.

The hallways exploded around you with the annual end-of-week chaos of Hawkins High School. Lockers slammed open, someone yelled about a shared ride, and a freshman dropped an entire stack of books and cursed with such feeling that a teacher shouted his name from twenty feet away. The sun poured through the front doors in a white-gold sheet, way too bright after the fluorescent dimness of the hall.

Steve was not at his locker. He was not outside the gym. He wasn't by the trophy case or the pay phones or even the side entrance near the band room. Your lungs burned by the time you shoved through the heavy double doors and stumbled into the afternoon.

The parking lot sprawled ahead of you, shining under the cold sun. Cars backed out in crooked lines. Girls shouted through open windows. The air smelled of gasoline, damp leaves, and somebody’s cigarette. It was all nothing that you cared about. The one thing you did seemed to be missing from the scene. Your eyes squinted in the light as it traveled across the parking spaces of the lot, failing to find what your heart desperately wanted to see.

At the far end, the BMW’s engine roared to life.

“No,” you breathed with pure adrenaline rushing through your veins. Steve sat behind the wheel, one hand on the gearshift, his profile hard through the windshield. 

Before you even knew it, you started running. 

It was stupid, rushed, and entirely filled with desperation. Your shoes slapped the asphalt. You heard Leah faintly calling your name, but you didn't turn back. The wind tore at your hair. Your bag bounced painfully against your hip but you paid it no mind. You cut between two parked cars and nearly slipped on loose gravel.

“Steve!”

He did not hear you, or pretended not to. You gave a groan of loud annoyance, but it still did little to deter you.

You reached the car just as the reverse lights flashed.

Without thinking, without dignity, and definitely without any plan beyond the awful certainty that if he drove away now something inside you would never forgive you, you threw yourself in front of the driver’s side door.

The car jerked to a stop and Steve froze behind the wheel.

Through the glass, his beautifully bright eyes  widened. Hurt, shock, and stubborn pride moved across his face so quickly you could barely separate them. Then his mouth tightened. You could tell he wasn't expecting your actions, and you couldn't exactly say you were the most sane person now.

The window rolled down slowly, the crank turning under his hand with mechanical, agonizing patience.

“What are you doing?” his words came loud and filled with unresolved frustration. Steve’s voice was rough. Thick in its tension. He wouldn't look straight at you. You refused to settle for that, the days spent with the familiar feeling practically left you numb and empty. 

“Go back inside,” Steve’s eyes and words seemed to contradict each other. He shifted back into looking into his dashboard instead of you. “Go celebrate your front page.”

You shoved the crumpled paper through the open window. It landed in his lap.

“I don’t care about the stupid article, ” you said, breathless enough that the words broke apart. “I don’t care about the front page. Just–read it. Please.”

His jaw flexed. For a second, you thought he would throw it back at you. Then Steve looked down at the copy of printed words.

You watched his eyes move over the page.

Correcting mistakes:

There was an article circulating this week about a king. It was clever in the cruel way people mistake for intelligence when they are too afraid to admit they have been wrong.

The girl who wrote it thought she was exposing a system. She thought it clever and brilliant. She told herself the boy at the center of it was an idea, a symbol, a lesson with good hair. She thought distance made her fair and judicial. She thought observation made her honest.

Then the boy gave her his jacket when she was cold.

Then he admitted he was afraid of being forgotten, and the girl realized she had been so busy studying the crown of his that she had ignored the weight of it on his own head.

The first article was right about one thing: Hawkins High School makes kings out of boys and then punishes them for not knowing how to be anything else. That wasn't the mistake here. But it was wrong to confuse a boy’s damage with his character. It was wrong to turn trust into evidence. And it was wrong to take the softest things he offered and sharpen them for public consumption.

This is not an apology meant to earn forgiveness. This is meant, instead to fix the record.

The boy was never a god. 

He was kinder than any story allowed him to be, and he was kinder than she deserved. 

Steve stared at the paper.

His chest rose and fell under his yellow polo. His rings glinted where his fingers gripped the page. Around you, students slowed. A few openly stared. You could feel the parking lot turning toward you with the appetite of a place that loved spectacle.

For once, you really, truly, couldn't care.  

Steve’s eyes lifted to yours,  and you could weep just from that alone. “Why should I believe you?” he asked.

The question was quiet enough that no one else could hear. You stepped closer, hands gripping the edge of the open window. Your own voice want any better, it was loud and messy, and undeniably real. A breathless bount of laughter escaped you “Because I was playing a game and I lost, Steve.”

“I lost.”

His throat moved but you hadn't seen it.

“And I lost you,” you sighed with your head hanging low in shame near the open window, voice shaking now, “and I regret it. I was supposed to push you away, but every time you held my hand, every time you looked at me like I actually mattered, I—”

Your breath caught, and you forced it down in order to continue.

“I don’t care about King Steve. I don’t care about the crown or the table or the stupid front page. I want the guy who gets cold in his own car because he gave me his jacket. I want the guy who pretends he doesn’t use cherry chapstick. I want the guy who worries too much and fixes his hair when he’s nervous and acts tough until somebody he cares about needs him to be gentle.”

The words were embarrassing in their vulnerability, and it didn't help that Steve just stared at you. But even small battle wins were tremendous to those who were cautious.  The defensive hardness in his face trembled.

You leaned closer, not touching him. Though God knew you wanted too. But you wouldn't take what he had not offered.

“I just want you,” you said and the words hung there in the bright afternoon.

For a second, nothing happened. That scared you.  Because if even though all of this, he didn't believe you, you were sure that would break you entirely. You didn't understand how looking at him now, with his beautifully enrupturing genuine gaze and constellations of freckles so faint kissing his skin with blessings, you could have been so stupid.

Your panicking monologue was cut off when Steve let out a breath that broke halfway into a laugh.

It made you falter momentarily. You wouldn't exactly describe it as fully happy or clean. Instead, it was more ragged. Disbelieving. Full of relief that came so sudden it seemed to knock the strength out of him. He looked down at the crumpled printed again, then back at you. You saw the exact moment when whatever he had been holding together for two days came apart in his hands.

“You’re insane,” Steve held his head in his hands. The heels of his palms dragged to his eyes, and that when you noticed the concealed redness there. Your panic was a quick guest arrival as your hand hesitantly went over the threshold of the open window and found its spot tangling through his hair at his temple.

Your voice came out soft. “I know.”

“You ran in front of my car.” Steve's was returned in a disbelieving laugh. The sound on instinct made you smile.

“I know.”

“I could’ve hit you.”

You weren't quite so sure you believed that. And it seemed like neither did he fully either. The both of you stared through the air between you “You're not exactly driving donuts with your Beamer in a school parking lot, Harrington. You were going four miles an hour, max.”

His mouth twitched and your heart found its comfort. There he was. That was the boy you wanted to see, the one who was sincere and silly and all of the words in between.

The moment didn't truly feel fixed all the way, and it didn't feel so easily forgiven so neatly that the hurt could be vanished beneath a kiss. But there, beneath the bruised pride and the red eyes and the stubborn set of his jaw, was the boy from the park. The boy from the rainstorm. The boy who had laughed quietly when nobody asked him to perform.

He shoved the car door open.

You barely had time to step back before he was out, hands catching your waist. Steve lifted you clean off the pavement, and a startled sound escaped you as your hands grabbed his shoulders.

“Steve—”

“Shut up,” he rasped, but his voice broke around the smile. Then kiss that came next didn't surprise you. But it certainly didn't prepare you for it either.

It was not exactly graceful, but it was completely and utterly impassioned.

Someone in the parking lot whooped. Someone else yelled something that sounded suspiciously like “Harrington!” A horn blared because a car was stuck behind his open door. The reminder of just how crazy this whole situation was roared in your ears. 

Steve didn't seem to hear any of it. You had a feeling that he did, but just pretended he didn't. That made you smile on reflex against him.

His hands held your waist with desperate certainty, then slid up your back, pulling you close enough that the cold afternoon disappeared between you. Your fingers tangled in his hair, ruining it again, and he made a sound against your mouth that was half laugh, half relief. He tasted the same sweet cherry chapstick you started buying for yourself and breathless warmth. The kiss carried every unsaid thing neither of you knew how to organize yet. Anger. Want. Hurt. Forgiveness beginning somewhere far off and walking slowly toward you.

When your feet touched the ground again, you were dizzy. It was a good dizzy, and the pounding in your side was a welcome pleasure now. 

Steve rested his forehead against yours, breathing hard. His hands stayed anchored at your hips, refusing to let you drift away. Up close, you could see the faint details scattered along his neck, the tiredness under his eyes, and the careful hope he was trying not to show too quickly.

“You really printed that?” The question broke you out of your stupor. You were still so dazed from his touch that you distantly found yourself nodding. Your hands refused to leave their spot in reaching for him now that there wasn't a lie justifying it.

“Over Mark’s stupid school spirit thing?”

Your words came mechanical,  as if offended he'd even question it. “Technically under it. Around it. On top of some of it.”

“I made a stupid amount of copies.” The confession came paired with you momentarily dropping your hands where they were wrapped around him to hold up the black ink stains on your fingers.

His smile spread, crooked and real enough to hurt. And you swore that it was the most beautiful sight in the world.

“Good.”

You laughed weakly, your hands finding their way back into sliding to the back of his nape. “That’s what you took from the public confession?”

“I’m processing.” His thumb moved along your jaw, slow and familiar. “Also, I liked the cherry chapstick line.”

“I hoped you would,” you felt like a cat relishing in caresses. The smile that mirrored his came quick and teasing on your mouth.  His eyes stayed on yours, and his smile softened at the edges.

“You’re a terrible writer.”

Your brows lifted in instinctive defensiveness of your craft. “Excuse me?”

He brushed his thumb beneath your chin, eyes bright with that old Harrington charm, gentler now, and clearly worn in rather than performed.

“You didn’t even come close to losing me.”

The ache in your chest loosened all at once.

It would not be so easy for you to say it was gone, you would still have to apologize without speeches. He would still have to decide what trust looked like after being turned into copy. 

But Steve was standing in front of you with his hair wrecked by your hands and your confession folded against his car seat. He was looking at you, really looking, not the way a king looked over a crowd, but the way a boy looked at the girl he was still willing to let close enough to hurt him.

You rose onto your toes with a soft shake of your head and grin. “Just shut up and kiss me, Harrington.”

His grin flashed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Deep and guttural, dragged up from somewhere starved. His hands clamp around your waist, fingers digging into your ass as he hauls you flush against him. Denim rasps against the inside of your thighs when he rolls his hips up, grinding into you.

That thick, heavy bulge makes itself known, humiliatingly honest.

Blood in his mouth. Dirt under his nails and the sour, rotten tang of that other place still caked in his hair. 

And he’s hard.

Something in him is broken that way.

Years of surviving by the skin of his teeth—beaten and concussed and tortured and choked and drowned and devoured—it’s fucked up the wiring in Steve Harrington’s brain.

Pain tolerance shot to hell. Fear braided with dopamine until his nervous system can’t tell the difference anymore.

Getting hurt no longer scares him.

Now, agony comes hardwired with clarity. That split second before impact, when adrenaline screams through his veins and he’s teetering on that razor-sharp edge of death, that’s when he feels most alive.

Your thumb presses into the fresh cut on his lip, smearing his blood back into it. His lashes flutter. His hips jerk up, rutting against you like you’re fucking him.

You grab his jaw, fingers digging into the sharp hinge to force his gaze down to yours. His pupils are blown impossibly wide; barely any color left, drowned beneath an endless wash of black.

“Yeah?” you whisper, venom-sweet. You drag your thumb down his throat, feel the jut of his Adam’s apple jump under your touch. “Does that feel good?”

He nods.

Doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. Whatever scrap of self-preservation he’d once possessed hollowed out by hunger—by that sick, reckless void inside him that only ever seems to ignite after he’s survived something that should have killed him.

A cruel cosmic coin toss that keeps landing in his favor—and instead of gratitude, it leaves him burning for more.

You lift your knee and press your thigh into the seam of his pants. He sucks in a sharp breath through blood-slick lips, head tipping back, throat bared.

You despise it.

You despise that this is the language his body understands. That he can shove you out of the way without a second thought—dangle over two hundred feet of empty air because he decided your life was worth more than his—and still get hard when you hurt him for it.

You drag your bloody thumb to your mouth and suck it clean, eyes never leaving his.

He watches you do it, watches your lips wrap around the pad of your finger to taste, to swallow—swallow his blood like it’s yours, like he’s yours, like the world could never take him from you.  

Like he hasn’t already tried to give himself away.

Only this time... it was for you, wasn’t it?

Hurled himself into the abyss without hesitation, fingers scraping at metal while the yawning darkness waited below.

One second slower. One fraction of a heartbeat, and—

Your palms slam into his shoulders.

Just like his had slammed into yours.

Bile surges up your throat as you claw at muscle and bone, shoving and shoving until his balance falters.

He stumbles back, heel catching on the edge of the bed. Momentum betrays him for a second time and he falls back onto the mattress with a startled grunt.  

Your stomach falls with him. Phantom vertigo clawing up your spine, even now.

And the moment you close your eyes—

You’re standing on top of that tower.

You remember the look on his face.

That awful, quiet resolve of someone who had already made peace with his fate.

You remember his hands on your shoulders. The firm press of his fingers, the way he held on just long enough to make sure you were steady, to make sure you were far enough away.

Far enough that you couldn’t reach him.

Far enough that you would live.

And then he let go.

You remember the force of it careening you backward, your boots scraping against the metal platform as you fought for balance. You remember the cold bite of the railing against your back. You remember watching him move in the opposite direction, his own momentum carrying him toward the open edge.

You remember his hand shooting out on instinct, searching for anything that would keep him there. His palm scraping against rusted steel, leaving streaks of red behind as his fingers curled desperately around the railing.

The same hands that had pushed you away.

The same hands that had held yours on the way up, guiding you over every rung of that ladder when the height made your stomach twist.

You remember his mouth opening like he might say something—your name, maybe—a goodbye, something he needed you to know—but all that came out was a broken, ragged breath.

You remember the color draining from his face as he looked down, the terrible understanding settling in his eyes.

You remember lunging for him without thought.

You remember Robin’s arms locking around your waist, holding you back so tightly it bruised, her grip the only thing keeping you from following him over the edge.

And then his fingers slipped.

You stalk toward him now, trying to outrun the memory, fists clenched so tight your nails carve crescents into your palms.

He’s sprawled across the sheets, chest heaving, arms flung wide in surrender.

“Why?” you demand, climbing over him, straddling him with an anger so raw it shakes your whole body. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

He lets out a quick breath through his nose, incredulous. Raises his brows like you’re the insane one.

“Seriously? You’re seriously asking me that.”

He’s smiling.

A crooked, boyish thing, manic brightness behind the eyes, adrenaline still lighting him up from the inside out.  

It detonates something in you.

You slam your weight down on him, knees digging hard into his sides. The mattress groans, the air punching out of his lungs in a sharp grunt.

You fist the hem of his shirt and yank it up.

The sight underneath steals your air right back.

It never gets easier to see.

Bruises bloom fresh and vicious across his ribs, inky purples bleeding into sick reds. New hurt swallowed by old hurt, skin that never gets the chance to heal clean before something tears it open again.

Jagged crescents from teeth, ropes of pale, warped ridges that split the tan of his skin like fault lines, ready to crack him open. That chunk of puckered flesh on his right side that never healed right—and it never will.  

Your fingers drag down the center of his chest, shaking.

“What was the plan this time, hm?” you spit, nails scraping over the soft plane of his stomach, catching on one of the scars. “What was the fucking plan, Steve?”

You hook your fingers into his belt buckle and rip it loose, hard enough that the metal clangs against itself.

“Answer me. What would you have done if—if Jonathan didn’t catch you? If you slipped?”

His head falls back, exposing the flushed column of his throat, pulse hammering wild and alive under skin you’ve kissed a hundred times.

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” he pants. “Let you fall?”

“You didn’t know I was gonna fall!”

“Well I wasn’t gonna fucking wait to find out, alright?”  

The mattress groans when he pushes himself upright too fast, pain flashing across his face before he buries it immediately, one hand flying to his ribs on instinct.

“I can’t... I’m not gonna just stand there and wait for something to happen to you.”

Your body goes still.  

The bright sting behind your eyes arrives right on cue, the fury choking off in your throat until all that’s left is grief.

“You know,” you whisper, quieter now. “You know I’m not just talking about the tower.”

There’s a moment of recognition in his eyes as the words sink in, a flash of something that might be guilt if he ever let it sit long enough.

He knows exactly what you mean.

Then, just as fast, he shutters himself. Lets the feeling die before it can root.

His gaze slides away toward the ceiling.

“No, don’t... don’t do that,” he mutters. “Don’t make this into some... suicidal thing. It wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No.”

“You could’ve died tonight.”

“But I didn’t.”

“That’s not the fucking point!”

“Well what do you want me to say?” he fires back suddenly, frustration cracking his voice. “That I’m sorry I stopped you from falling?”

“I want you to stop acting like your life means less than mine!”

He clamps his mouth shut, an audible click of his molars as he frowns, incredulity settling behind his wide eyes. His brows pulling together as he stares at you like he can’t understand why you could possibly be saying this.

Steve doesn’t consciously believe his life matters less.

He would never say that.

But somewhere deep down—in the ugly marrow of him, in the abandoned, lonely places built inside him when he was a kid—he believes it instinctively.

You’ve known that for a long time now.

Steve grew up starving.

Not for food.

For affection.   

A reason to believe he mattered even when there was nothing he could offer except himself.

Love, in the Harrington house, was conditional.

And at Hawkins High, he traded one kind of emptiness for another.

Built himself a throne out of borrowed attention and hollow praise.

Then the world ended, and suddenly everybody needed him.

Needed his fists, his strength. Needed the frightening way he could take hit after hit after hit and still stand back up bleeding.

Steve latched onto that feeling with both hands.

And his body became a type of offering.

A thing to spend.

You’ve lost count of how many nights ended exactly like this.

Both of you stumbling back home, adrenaline clawing through your veins, slick with sweat and blood—yours or his, it doesn’t matter anymore. Shaking so hard your teeth chatter while you scream at him, fists slamming into his chest.

Screaming and shoving and crying and kissing and begging—begging him to please, please stop being so fucking careless with your life. What’s the point of any of this shit if you’re dead, Steve?      

It always ends the same way. Your anger dissolving into something wetter as Steve reaches for your waist with bruised hands, dragging you against him, mouthing apologies into your throat he’ll never say aloud. Fucking you on top of bloodstained sheets while the smell of iron hangs thick in the room, face buried in your neck, every thrust a word he won't say.

Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

You stare at him now, chest heaving, lungs scraping for air that won’t come.

Then you reach down and pull his wrists together.

The leather creaks when you thread his belt around them.

Loop, thread, pull, cinch.

Survival knots perfected in the dead of night, in basements and back rooms, hands slick with sweat while you practiced until it stuck. So when the time came, you could hold down something thrashing and dangerous.

Because hesitation is what gets people killed.

It makes sickness crawl up your throat, how naturally your body remembers.

How this world has taught you to restrain someone you love—and taught you well.

You yank his arms above his head, the strap biting into his skin, pulling tight until the leather creaks and his skin pales underneath.

Steve doesn’t fight it, doesn’t even try. Just lets his head fall back against the pillows, wrists falling limp over dark linens.

Has the fucking audacity to smile.

“What,” he breathes, wrecked in an entirely different way now. “You gonna punish me?”

You yank the belt tighter.

He hisses softly through his teeth, brows creasing in a fake show of pain, hips stirring in anticipation.

“Okay, easy, easy,” he mutters breathlessly, grin crooked. “Jesus—easy, honey.”

“Oh, so now I’m honey?”

You shove his wrists harder into the pillow, then drop your hands to his pants, fingers rough and impatient. The button fights you before snapping loose, his zipper dragged down with a harsh metallic rasp. He sucks in a breath, back arching as the pressure eases off his swollen cock.

“Baby...” he tries, a soft laugh in his voice. “C’mon, you don’t have to, just—”

“Shut up.”

You shove him back into the mattress, gaze burning furiously through him.

He just stares back, that reckless, adrenaline-drunk smile still clinging to him like he hasn’t learned a single fucking thing.

So you wrap your hand around his throat.

Four fingers digging into warm, sweat-slick skin. Your thumb presses into the hollow beside his windpipe until you can feel it.

The frantic thump-thump-thump of life.

Life he throws around like loose change.

“S-shit, babe...” he chokes softly, lashes fluttering, eyes rolling back, the fucked-up wires in his brain firing off all at once. He uses what little leverage he has to lift his hips, grinding against your ass until you tighten your grip, a crease of real strain forming between his brows as his breath snags under your palm.

But even then, he doesn’t push you away. His bound hands strain downward, fingers grasping uselessly at your wrist, tugging you forward so he can get you closer, grind up harder.

You hate him.

You love him so much it makes you violent.

And he’s still fucking bleeding.

Face covered all over in fresh cuts and bruises, illuminated by the soft blue glow of the dinosaur nightlight in the corner—same one he’s had since he was five.

This bed once held your first kiss.

Your first time.

Steve laughing breathlessly into your mouth at sixteen years old because he kept fumbling the condom wrapper with nervous hands.

Whispered promises under blankets about senior year and college.

A hundred different somedays and maybes.

About a future that didn’t look like this—didn’t include gates or monsters or watching the boy you love come within inches of disappearing, over and over again.

Now you’re choking him in it.  

Straddling him with your hand around his throat because you don’t know how else to make him understand that you cannot survive loving somebody who keeps choosing death.

It won’t leave you alone, the image of his face on top of that tower.

Not an inch of hesitation.

Like it wouldn’t have mattered, either way.

Your other hand comes up, circling his throat fully now, pressing in. 

Your eyes sting as you narrow them, forcing yourself to hold his gaze.

Barely a whisper, the words cut you on their way out.

“Fuck you.”

Some days you think about killing him yourself.

Ending it before the world gets to.

Precipitate the inevitable doom that is loving a man who would bleed for you, break for you, die for you—

But won’t live for you.    

At least it would be quick, then.

At least you wouldn’t spend the rest of your life waiting for the inevitable moment where his luck finally runs out.

It’s unbearable.

Loving someone who would move mountains to keep you alive, but cannot understand why you’d want the same for him.

Calm in the face of oblivion, martyrdom fits him like a second skin. 

That’s what terrifies you most.

Because somewhere deep down, you know he doesn’t fear death the way he should. The way a normal person would.

Sometimes, you think a part of him finds peace in the idea of going out useful.

And it’s all so completely, irreparably fucked, because you don’t love him despite it.

You love him because of it.

Loving Steve Harrington feels like standing on a fault line, waiting for the ground to split wide and swallow you whole.

It’s a special, exquisite kind of torture, to be so in love with a man who throws himself at death like it’s a dare.  

And it is love, undeniably and irrevocably so.

You love him.

By god, you love him.  

Because his martyr complex is just a twisted language for devotion. When he throws himself into danger, you know it isn’t bravado—it’s instinct. A reflex burned into his bones, older than logic, older than fear.

Love is the only language Steve Harrington has ever been fluent in, and he speaks it with his whole body.  

It turns his skin into armor, his heart into a blade. Sharp enough to carve permanent lines inside you—wounds that might close, someday, but never fade.

And he really does believe it.

That this is what it looks like, loving somebody.

But what good is devotion if it buries you?

What good is love from someone six feet under?

Your hand loosens around his throat, just enough for him to drag in a ragged breath. His chest heaves under you, pulse still racing against your palm.

His Adam’s apple bobs, sending ripples of light over the pale rings circling his neck, thin and white against his flushed skin. Scars that still have him jerking awake some nights, clawing at his own throat, gasping like he’s still back there.

Nightmares that leave him staring at the ceiling until four in the morning because every time he closes his eyes, he sees vines threading around broken bodies. Migraines that get so bad after trips to the Upside Down he has to sit alone in dark bathrooms, forehead pressed against cool tile, breathing through the nausea until the room stops tilting.

His hands still reach for a nail bat when the house creaks at night, before he's even fully awake.

Fear has never made him run. It only ever taught him to step forward.

And the tear you've been holding back all night finally slips free, landing on his bare stomach with a soft, awful plop.

Steve flinches like it’s acid, muscles clenching underneath you.

“Baby...”

You let go of his neck fully as you sink back onto his thighs, fingers gone numb, teeth digging into your lip until copper floods your mouth.

“You didn’t even hesitate.”

You watch as his expression immediately sobers, brows drawing together, eyes flicking between yours.

“Y-you never do. You never fucking hesitate,” your breath starts coming in tight hitches, catching in your chest. “And it’s like—it’s like—”

The rest of the words slip free, torn loose now that everything’s exposed, out there in the open, your handprint around his throat and his wrists bound in leather.    

“...It’s like you don’t even care if you leave me here.”

Steve goes silent for a moment, shoulders slumping with a quiet breath.    

You watch—eyes burning, body trembling—as he slowly reaches for you. The leather belt creaks as his wrists slide down until his fingers brush yours.  

You feel the metal burns on his palms against the back of your hand—his skin split from gripping the railing so hard he tore himself open just to keep from falling.   

He whispers your name on a soft breath.

“Baby, if I ever lost you?” He shakes his head faintly. “That’d be it for me.”

You sniff hard, refusing to blink.

“I mean it.” Light pools in his eyes, trembling along the lower lashes until they glimmer like wet glass. “I’d never… I’d never leave you behind. How could I?”

He closes his fingers gently around your wrist, thumb brushing over your pulse.

“I love you. More than... more than anything. You know that.”

You lift your gaze slowly to meet his.

“Do I?”

Two words, but it’s the ugliest thing you’ve said all night.

It's suffocating, the silence that follows.

“Do you ever think about us? About me?”

Because that’s what this is really about, isn’t it?

For all the names you’ve thrown at him in your worst moments—reckless, stubborn, idiot, a selfish asshole with a death wish—

It’s you who feel selfish.

For wanting him to stay.

For wanting to keep him in a world that seems determined to take him first.

For wanting him to choose you over the next disaster that crawls out of the dark.

Because you’re terrified that when the moment comes, when it’s you or the world, he won’t have to think about it. That the world will always reach for him first—and that one day, it’ll win.

Or worse, that he’ll choose you instead.

That he’ll stop running toward danger because of you. That loving you will make him hesitate.

And you’ll be the reason he changes.  

The reason the world breaks.

Steve’s expression changes in a flash.

The belt creaks as he tries to sit up, a real wince cutting across his brow when his bruised ribs take the pressure. He sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, dragging himself upright.

“Look at me.”

You turn your head instinctively, but he follows.

“Hey. C’mon. Look at me.”

Hazel burns molten in the dim light, the shine in them trembling.

“Of course I think about you,” he whispers, breathless. “You don’t think I think about you? Hey, hey, look at me—you’re all I think about. You’re in my head, all the time. Every fucking second.”

Your tears spill harder, falling freely now, dripping from your chin onto the dark brown fabric of his cargo pants, leaving small damp spots that bloom between you.

“Every time something goes wrong, or—or I’m thinking about doing something stupid, you’re there. First thing. Your face, your voice. Telling me to stop being an idiot, telling me to think—"

You shake your head, a broken sound catching in your throat.

“And if I just stood there tonight,” he presses on, eyes locked on yours, brimming with tears but never flinching, “If there was even a chance you could fall, and I didn’t do anything?”

He swallows.

“I couldn’t live with that. I mean it, honey. I couldn’t.”    

A tear slips loose and slides down his own cheek. He doesn’t wipe it away.

“Baby, I... I wasn’t trying to die. I was trying to end this. All of it. So we don’t have to keep doing this forever.”

His mouth twitches faintly.

“You remember what we talked about? About college? That stupid road trip idea I had with the camper van?” He shakes his head, letting out a quiet laugh. “Six kids, right? Or... whatever insane number I said.”

His hands come up as much as the belt allows, clumsy from the strain in his shoulders, and cradle your face. His thumbs drag across the wet heat beneath your eyes, catching tears as fast as they fall, rubbing salt into flushed skin. 

“That’s the goal. That’s always been the goal.”

He leans forward until his forehead presses against yours.

For a long moment, he says nothing. His hands stay on your face, thumbs brushing softly over your skin, his breathing uneven in the small space between you.

Then, almost too quietly to hear:

“I would’ve jumped with you.”

You recoil immediately, shaking your head hard, eyes squeezing shut.

“Don’t. Don’t fucking say that.”

Steve pushes on, voice low and terrifyingly calm.

“If you’d fallen off that tower tonight, I would’ve followed you.”

His thumb brushes under your eye again, catching another tear before it reaches your jaw.

“Wouldn’t even think about it. I’d just go.”

“Steve—”

“I’d go.”

Your eyes snap open.

Those big, stupid hazel eyes bore into yours.

That stupid nose. Those stupid thick lashes and those stupid moles and those stupid lips.

And underneath all of it, that huge, catastrophic, stupid heart crammed inside a body that keeps throwing itself into danger like it doesn’t belong to him.

Your chest aches just looking at him.

You’ve spent countless nights staring at Steve Harrington while he slept beside you, wondering if loving him would always feel like standing barefoot on train tracks.

Waiting.

Feeling the vibrations underneath your feet before the impact ever comes. Knowing that something massive and merciless will come racing toward you and there won’t be a damn thing you can do to stop it. 

Sometimes you’d trace the slope of his nose with the back of your finger. Follow the shape of his eyebrows. The tiny scar under his chin from a T-ball game when he was six.

You’d study the dip of his cupid’s bow, the soft curve of his lips as he breathed into his pillow, completely unaware of how thoroughly he’d ruined your life for anyone else.

And you’d torture yourself with the same impossible question.

If someone had stopped you before all of this, taken your face in both hands and said:

Here, this boy is going to become the center of your entire world.

He's going to make you laugh so hard your ribs hurt.

He’s going to kiss you like you’re the last person on earth, and he's going to love you so completely you'll forget there was ever a version of yourself that existed before him.

He's going to look at you like you're the only thing worth finding at the end of the world.

Then one day, he’ll start throwing himself in front of monsters and nightmares beyond comprehension. 

He's going to throw himself off a tower without hesitating if it means you get to live.

Would you still choose him?

Would you still let him in, knowing one day he might not make it back?

Would you willingly hand your heart to someone who would protect it with his life—

But never his own?

And even in the quiet space of that hypothetical, the answer had never changed.

You would.

Every fucking time. 

“I love you,” the boy in front of you whispers.

The words slice straight through you, scraping against everything frayed raw inside your chest.

“Shut up,” you breathe, eyes squeezing shut.

Because if he loved you, wouldn’t he try?

Wouldn’t he try?

“I love you.”

“Steve, s-stop.”

“I love you. There’s nothing—nothing—that matters to me more than you.”

“Steve, I swear to god—”

“You’re it for me. And if it came down to it again—”

“Please, stop—”

“—I’d choose to jump. Every time.”

It feels like a seam is splitting inside your chest.

Your breath caves first—a sharp, stuttering inhale that catches in your lungs hard enough to hurt—before your body moves on instinct.

You surge forward, the mattress groaning beneath the force of it as you crash into him, fists tangling in the front of his shirt.

“Fuck you,” you sob.

Steve sucks in a breath as you pound weakly at his chest, his restrained hands jerking uselessly between your bodies.

He can’t hold you properly. Can’t wrap his arms around you the way he wants to.

Still, he tries.  

He shifts forward on the mattress, pulling you between his thighs. The leather around his wrists creaks when he strains to hook his arms around your waist.

You bury your face against his neck.

His entire body folds around yours, chest pressed flush against you so tightly you can feel the frantic hammer of his heartbeat through his sternum, the uneven rise and fall of his lungs where your bodies are crushed together. He presses his cheek against your temple, breathing hard through his nose.

“I know,” he murmurs hoarsely into your hair. “I know, baby. I know.”

“N-no, y-you don’t,” you choke out.

Your hands claw at his shoulders hard enough to bunch the fabric beneath your fists. You need him closer. Closer than skin, closer than bone. If you could unzip his ribs and crawl inside his chest just to keep his heart beating yourself, you would.

“You don’t know,” you sob against his throat. “You d-don’t know what it f-feels like—”

“Hey,” Steve whispers shakily. “Hey, c’mon. Breathe for me, baby. Please.”

You curl tighter against him, fists twisting in the soft cotton of his shirt until your knuckles throb from the effort. The tears don't stop. They soak into the warm skin at the base of his neck, your breath catching against him in broken, uneven pulls until your throat burns and your ribs ache with every desperate inhale.

Steve gathers you as close as his battered body will allow. Every so often, he presses another lingering kiss into your hairline, your temple, the crown of your head, each one quiet enough to say what words can't.

“I’ve got you, baby,” he murmurs into your hair. “M'right here, I got you. Not going anywhere.”  

You let his words settle over you, one shaky breath at a time. The sobs begin to lose their violence, splintering into uneven hiccups that leave your chest sore and hollow.

When you finally pull back, it's only far enough to see him. 

Your hand trembles when you lift it to his face.

Steve goes still as your fingertips ghost over the scrape on his cheek, tracing down the line of his jaw. He doesn’t so much as flinch when your thumb brushes over the split in his lip, featherlight over the broken skin there.

The first kiss is soft.

Nothing like the frantic, bruising collision from earlier.  

But it’s worse like this, somehow.

Wet with tears, with blood, salt and iron passed between soft, shaking kisses. Steve sighs into it, a trembling sound that vibrates against your lips as he tilts his head and follows you deeper. His nose nudges against your cheek, his kisses careful, almost hesitant in how tender he’s being with you.

And it’s funny, really.

How grief can change shape in the span of a heartbeat.

One moment it's lodged beneath your ribs like broken glass, your body still trapped on that radio tower, watching Steve disappear over the edge.

The next, it's here.

In the careful way he kisses you, the warmth of his breath against your mouth.

In the slow, wet drag of his tongue against yours, your fingers hooking into the open button of his pants. The zipper presses cold against the side of your hand before you push deeper, slipping beneath the elastic of his briefs.

He’s already half-hard. Heavy and thick and burning hot against your palm, velvety-soft skin twitching when you wrap your fingers around him. The soft curl of hair at his base brushes against your knuckles when you adjust your grip.

He pants openly into your mouth as you slide your other hand into his hair, gripping tight, yanking his head back at the angle you want it.  

Nose to nose, lips brushing even as you’re not kissing—only sharing air and spit, slick between swollen mouths.

And your eyes stay open, watching him.

Darkened hazels and helplessly fluttering lashes, his is a face that will haunt every version of your future. The one you almost lost, the one you’re still begging the universe to let you keep.

“Show me.”

He blinks at your words, lips parted in soft pants.

“Show me how much you love me.”

He swears under his breath, eyes clenching shut.  

“Fuck…” he groans, shaking his head slowly, side to side, grunting when you drag your thumb across the sensitive tip. “Baby, please... just untie me,” he pleads, straining against his binds again. “Please—fuck—let me touch you—”

“No.”

“Please, baby—”

“No,” you repeat, wrist rolling as you start to stroke him harder, feeling him swell fully in your grip.

He grunts, brows creased in pleasure as you continue to squeeze and glide your palm up and down his length, lips parted to keep kissing you in this obscene way, tongues sliding together in slow, wet strokes.

“God, you’re so... so pretty when you’re mad, you know that?” He huffs against your mouth, almost a laugh, throat gone hoarse and dry from how hard he’s been panting.

“You get this look like you’re—ah, fuck—like you might actually kill me.”

You squeeze your grip around his cock, dangerously tight.

“Maybe I should.”

Something catches in those soft hazel eyes, then.

Pinning you in place with nothing but their unblinking stare, almost unnervingly steady.

You watch, helpless, as he lifts his own hands up toward his mouth. He spits lewdly into the hollow of his right palm, shoving his waistband down just enough to free his cock, replacing your hand with his own.  

Wrists still bound, he slicks himself in slow, wet strokes, eyes never leaving yours.

"Yeah?" he asks quietly. "You gonna punish me?"

He tips his chin up toward you, lashes nearly brushing your skin when he blinks.

“You gonna use this cock, baby? Take it out on me?”

He uses what little range of motion he has to rub his tip up and down your glistening slit, obscene schlicks that fill the space between your breaths, spurred by the impatient grinds of your hips.

And the moment he pushes inside you, he breathes the words against your skin.

“I love you.”

His mouth swallowing your whimpers at the stretch of taking him this way—no prep, no lube, just spit—yours, his, it doesn’t matter anymore.

“I love you. I love you. We’re... we’re gonna be okay, baby, I promise. We’re gonna be okay.”

Your hands shake as you reach for the belt around his wrists, the buckle catching under your fingertips before releasing with a muted clink. He cups your cheeks as soon as it does, cradling your face, pressing his lips against yours. 

“I love you,” he repeats against your mouth, over and over. “I love you. I love you.”

Grief really is a funny thing.   

It burns until there's nothing left to consume

And the anger that had kept you upright for hours—the frantic, desperate need to make him understand how terrified you'd been—begins to crumble beneath the weight of what you almost lost.

Your strength gives out in increments. Your fingers slowly uncurl from his biceps, the crescents your nails pressed into his skin easing away. Your forehead finds the warm slope of his shoulder instead, eyes slipping shut as the last of the fight drains from your body.

You sag forward, soft whimpers and low groans exchanged between your lips as you rock back and forth on his cock, letting it fill up the hollowed-out places inside you.

And when you get too tired to do even that—when your strength gives out, thighs trembling with the effort of lifting yourself up and sinking back down—he’s there to catch you.

One arm sliding securely around you as he eases you onto your back, the muscles in his shoulders rippling under your fingertips as you wind your arms around his neck. You cling to him as he kisses you hard and deep, exchanging punched-out breaths as he starts up his thrusts with newfound fervor.

"Gonna marry you," he pants suddenly, stealing what little breath you have left.

You gasp against his mouth, caught between a disbelieving laugh and another sob. “Steve—”

“I mean it,” he insists, hips snapping into the mattress, barely pulling out before burying himself back in. “I-I want all of it. That house with the... the porch. That trip we keep talking about, in the camper van, and—”

His face screws up and he has to stop moving for a second, drawing in a shuddering breath.

“I’m gonna marry you and—fuck—gonna give you a baby.”   

You choke on the words, a helpless sound catching in your throat as you cling to him, bruisingly tight.

“Yeah?” He strokes your hair back, cupping the crown of your head with his palm. Smoothing the sweat-slick strands away from your face, thumb lingering at your temple as his eyes search yours. “You want me to give you a baby?”  

You nod into him, unable to find the words.

“How many?”

His pace is unrelenting—thrusts hard enough that the bedframe is thudding repeatedly against the wall, hard enough that you know the wallpaper’s going to show it tomorrow.  

“Tell me,” he grunts, voice rough with emotion, like he needs to hear you say it out loud. “How many?”

Sweat shining along his skin, hair a damp mess across his forehead, but he never once looks away.

“F-fuck, I don’t...” you break on another sob, eyes clenching shut. “Two. Maybe... maybe three.”

“Three,” he repeats to himself, and his hips snap a little sharper. “What about... what about four? Make it a—mm, fuck—make it an even number.”

And it’s hardly new—the kind of bullshit he spouts when you’re both this far gone, when adrenaline has burned through every last nerve and neither of you are thinking straight anymore. He’s always been prone to making wild promises in the heat of the moment—spinning out impossible futures and reckless dreams, building an entire lifetime in the space of a few breathless minutes—just to get you both off.     

But tonight, they don’t feel like a fantasy at all. 

“You’d look so... so fucking pretty,” he pants, voice breaking. “Pregnant with my kid. Jesus.”

“Mm, close...” you whisper weakly, face scrunched at the unbearably mounting pressure in your lower stomach.  

“Yeah? You’re close? You gonna come for me?”

You nod, burying yourself closer, clinging to him harder. “T-tell me again.”

“Tell you what, baby?”

“That you... that you love me.”

“Fuck,” he groans, thrusts turning sloppy as he buries a loud groan against your lips. “I love you. Love you so fucking much. I don’t even know what I’d do without you. I—shit, a-are you coming? Oh, fuck, that’s—that’s it. That’s my girl.”

Your orgasm hits hard and blinding. A broken groan ripping out of you as you clamp your thighs around his waist, mewling into his skin. You blink your eyes open just in time to see his gaze fixed on you—expression reverent, chest heaving as he watches you shake underneath him.

And as you go to kiss him, feeling the labored grunts of his mounting pleasure against your lips, the weight of his breaths and the slick drag of his cock against your heat—

When you press your lips to his and whisper for him to come inside you, make me yours Steve, get me pregnant, keep me, love me, stay with me, stay, stay, please fucking stay—

When he presses inside all the way to the hilt and lets his own pleasure overtake him—

You finally whisper the words back.

Three syllables against the enormity of what lives inside your chest.

Three syllables trying to hold every sleepless night and every quiet morning, every time you pressed your lips to the places on his body that hurt and wished that love alone could take his pain away.

They cannot carry it all.

They never could.

But when he closes his eyes and tips his forehead to yours—his weight melting against you as he presses an exhausted, dazed smile against your lips—you realize maybe the words don’t have to hold it all.

Maybe he can feel the rest.

· · ·

The seal breaks with a sharp snap, the plastic ring splitting loose and skittering across the bathroom floor.

You turn the bottle over in your hand, staring at it for a moment.

It’s the good kind—the expensive kind stored in heavy glass, the label still clean. You haven’t touched it since the day Steve brought it home months ago, back when you could still ask for things like Epsom salt and a box of chocolates at the general store without anyone looking at you like you’d lost your mind.

He’d shown up at your door that afternoon grinning like an idiot, grocery store roses tucked under one arm and a paper bag in his other hand that clinked when he lifted it.

“Thought we deserved something nice,” he’d said, holding up the bag with that stupid, proud little grin. “We haven’t done a proper date night in a while, right?”

But you hadn't used the bottle then.

You'd saved it.

For a night that felt right.

For a night where you weren’t just surviving long enough to see morning.

Your hands shake a little as you tip the bottle now.

Pouring more than you should, watching the pale liquid ribbon into the rushing stream of water, swallowed by the force of it before slowly blooming back to the surface in soft, frothy bubbles.

The smell hits a second later. Sweet, heavy lavender that clings to the back of your throat, swirling with the clean heat of the water.

For a moment, you let yourself go back.

Back to the day Steve bought this because he wanted to take care of you. Because he wanted one normal night where you could both pretend the world hadn’t changed.

A night where the biggest problem was what movie to put on.

Then, the sink creaks behind you.

You turn immediately, heart jumping.  

Steve’s reflection is blurred in the mirror—shoulders slumped, chin dipping toward his chest. He’s got one hand braced against the counter, knuckles pale from how tightly he’s holding on. The other fumbles with an orange pill bottle.

“You okay? You need help?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I got it.”

The words are automatic. Steve’s favorite answer to anything that worries you.

He tips a couple pills into his palm, fills the glass beside the sink, and swallows them down.

You watch his face tighten afterward, eyes squeezing shut as he waits for it to pass. His throat works hard, his whole body briefly tensing, muscles bracing against something that should have been painless.

You step closer, hands settling carefully on his arms as you turn him toward you. 

He doesn’t argue when you crouch in front of him.

You start with his shoes.

Fingers working at the laces, easing them loose before pulling them off one at a time. They hit the tile with a quiet thud. His socks peel off next. Then his pants, the buttons still undone. His briefs.

He stays silent through all of it, one hand resting lightly on your shoulder.

It’s not much pressure, but you feel the way his weight leans into you, the slight sway when you shift back, like he’s having to constantly correct himself just to stay upright.

Helping him into the tub takes time. You stay close while he steps over the edge, one hand gripping your arm, the other braced against the wall.

Slowly, carefully, he lowers himself into the water.

The second it reaches his ribs, he hisses.

“Shit—”

His head falls back against the tile, eyes squeezing shut as a sharp breath slips between his teeth. His hand tightens reflexively around your wrist.

Foamy water laps against his chest, darkening the hair across his sternum, rising and falling with each careful breath.

“Too hot?” you ask quickly, already reaching for the faucet.

He cracks his eyes open, shaking his head.

“’S perfect.”

You keep watching him, searching his face for the slightest sign that he's only saying it to spare you.

Then, little by little, the strain begins to loosen its grip.

The hard line of his jaw softens first, his fingers easing around your wrist. His shoulders sink another inch beneath the warm water, the tension slowly melting out of them as the heat works its way into his muscles.

His next breath comes easier. Then another.

After a long moment, his eyes drift open again.

They're hazy with fatigue, heavy-lidded and unfocused, but they find you where you're perched beside the tub, knees tucked against your chest.

He squints, mouth twisting into a petulant frown.

“What?” he murmurs. “You’re not getting in?” 

A smile tugs at your lips. “You want me to?”

He gives you a slow, incredulous look—the classic Steve Harrington stare.

“Uh, yeah,” he mumbles, like it’s obvious. “How else am I supposed to feel better?”

You roll your eyes, but you’re smiling as you stand.

Your hands aren’t as steady as you’d like; you notice it more now, with nothing else to focus on.

You pull your shirt over your head, and immediately hear the quiet shift of water beside you, a soft slosh.

By the time you glance up, he’s already looking at you.

Sitting a little straighter than he was a moment ago, chin lifted despite the exhaustion pulling at him. Steam curls between you, softening the edges of his face, but his eyes never leave yours. They follow every movement with boyish concentration, fixed on you in a way that’s not even pretending to be subtle.

You huff a quiet breath through your nose, fighting a smile as you tug the rest of your clothes off.  

“Seriously?”

The corner of his mouth quirks, all innocence.

“What? Sue me.”  

He shifts deeper into the tub, water rolling around him as he eases back, making room between his legs before patting the space in front of him.

You step in carefully, goosebumps prickling as the heat climbs slowly over your ankles, your calves, your thighs. The water embraces you inch by inch until you're lowering yourself fully beneath the surface, warmth wrapping around you like a heavy blanket scented with lavender.

The moment your back brushes his chest, his arms find you.

They slide around your waist with familiar certainty, one settling securely across your middle to draw you closer.  Your hand rises on instinct, covering his forearm where it rests across your stomach. His skin is warm and damp beneath your fingertips, the fine hairs catching against your palm as your thumb strokes absent circles over his wrist.

His chin grazes your shoulder as he nestles closer, his next breath warming the side of your neck.

“This is nice,” he hums, body growing heavier where it rests against yours.

You let out a slow breath. “Yeah.”

You let your weight settle back into him completely. He answers by tightening his arm around your waist, one hand gliding up to squeeze your side as he draws you a fraction closer.

You take the other one for you to keep.

Turning it over slowly, relearning it by touch. The familiar roughness of his skin, the broad span of his palm, completely swallowing yours whenever he laces your fingers together. Your thumb glides over the callus at the base of his index finger, the thickened patch of skin from years of gripping weapons he never should have had to hold.

You rub over it absentmindedly, once, twice, then again.

“How do you know?”

The words come so quietly you're not even sure you've said them aloud.

“Hm? Know what?”

“How do you know...” You swallow, unable to lift your eyes from where the water laps gently over your joined hands, pale violet opalescence that ripples around you both. “How do you know this is real?”  

He goes still at that, the only sound between you the soft ripple of water and the rush of your own thoughts filling the space.

“We could still be down there,” you whisper, the words gathering speed the longer you speak.

“Maybe... maybe we never got out. Maybe Vecna just made us think we won by giving us...” You gesture around the room. “...this.”

The lavender.

The warm water.

Him.

“What if none of it's real? What if he just—what if he made us think we were safe because it'd hurt more when he took it away? I mean, how would we even know?”    

Your chest feels tighter with every word.

“What if we're still—"

“Hey.”

Steve's voice is so soft that you almost miss it.

“Hey. Look at me.”

His face is drawn with exhaustion, pain lingering in the tightness around his eyes, in the careful way he holds himself, like every breath reminds him of another bruise.

But they’re still his.

Still that same warm hazel you've spent so many nights memorizing, never daring to believe you'd get a lifetime of looking into them.

“You know how I know?”

Your throat goes tight. “How?”

“Because you’re scared.”

Your brows pull together, fingers tightening around his. He squeezes your hand back, gentle but certain.

“That’s how I know. Because you’re sitting here trying to figure out if this is real instead of just being happy that we’re okay.”

Steve watches you for a moment before looking down between you, at the lavender bubbles drifting around your joined hands.

A bead of water clings to his lashes before he blinks it away.

“I mean…” He draws out a slow breath. “I don’t know if I can prove it. How could anyone, right? After everything that happened? I don’t think any of us are supposed to just wake up the next day and be like, ‘Cool. Guess that’s over.’”

He pauses, a small smile pulling at his mouth.

“But then I look at you and… and I just see you doing that thing.”

You blink. “What thing?”

He lifts your joined hands from the water, droplets sliding down your wrists as the surface ripples around you.

“This.”

He gives your hand a little squeeze, lacing your fingers together more securely. 

“You always start messing with my hand when you’re freaking out.”

Your brows pull together. “What?”

He lets out a soft laugh, reaching up with his free hand to gently tuck a damp strand of hair away from your face.

“Yeah, you grab my hand and then you start doing this weird little... I don’t know. Thing. Like you’re inspecting it or something.”

Only then do you realize your thumb has been moving back and forth over the same callus on his palm, tracing the same small patch of rough skin.

“...Oh.”

“Yeah.”

There’s something teasing about his voice now, his smile.

The same Steve who’d make an absolute idiot of himself just to get you to roll your eyes. Who could make you laugh in the middle of the worst days of your life.

His smile softens as he looks down at the water, where your fingers are still tangled together.

His thumb brushes slowly over the back of your hand.

“I guess… I guess that’s how I know.”

The steam curls around you both, blurring the edges of the room until there’s nothing left but this.

His hand in yours.

His heartbeat steady against your back and his voice low and certain beside your ear.

“Because I know you.”

He tightens his fingers around yours.

“I know you.”

· · ·

Eventually, the warmth of the bath starts to fade.

The water isn’t quite as hot as it was when you first climbed in, the lavender bubbles breaking apart into a faint, delicate layer.

You’re still holding his hand.

Neither of you has let go.

“Hey,” he murmurs after a while, giving your fingers a small tug.

“Hm?”

He lifts your joined hands out of the water, turning his palm toward himself.

Then he starts tracing something, slow and awkward, brow furrowed as he studies the lines crossing his palm.

You can tell he’s searching for something—squinting at the grooves in his hand, trying to remember a detail you’ve explained to him once or twice before, maybe more.

You watch him for a second, then mumble:

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“I’m doing it wrong?”

“Yes.”

He turns to look at you, eyebrows raised, genuinely offended in that exaggerated way he does when he knows he’s being teased.

“How can I be doing it wrong? It’s my hand.”

You give him a look.

“Because you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

He glances back down at his palm, then back at you.

“Okay, fine, genius,” he huffs, holding his hand out toward you. “What’s this one mean?”

You smile faintly.

“You don’t remember?”  

“No, I do. Just... tell me again? I remember you said mine was good.”

You did. Sitting cross-legged on the couch years ago, his hand stretched across your lap while you traced the lines in his palm. You’d laughed the whole time because you didn’t actually believe in any of it. But Steve had listened like it mattered, eyes serious, hanging onto every word.

You adjust your grip now, turning his hand so you can see it properly. Then you take his index finger between yours and guide it slowly along the deepest line on his palm.

“Here,” you murmur.

His finger follows where you lead it, brushing over the groove that starts just beneath his pinky and curves upward across his hand.

“This is your heart line.”

Steve doesn’t look at his hand.

He looks at you.

“It’s deep, and it doesn’t break. That means you feel things deeply. You lead with your heart.”

He hums softly, leaning forward to press a soft kiss to the top of your shoulder.

You keep tracing, guiding his finger toward the end of the line where it curves upward.

“And here, it turns up.”

You press lightly into the space beneath his index finger.

“See that spot?”

“Mm.”

“That’s called the Mount of Jupiter. And when your heart line curves up like that, it kinda means you’re... a hopeless romantic.”

You don’t even have to see his face to know he’s smiling. You feel it in the small twitch of his fingers around yours, in the quiet huff of amusement against your shoulder.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

You follow the line with your own thumb, pretending to study the grooves of his skin like they might reveal something you don’t already know.

But the truth is, you're not really reading his hand.

“It also says you don’t know how to love halfway.” Your thumb follows the line one last time. “When you care about someone… you give them every part of yourself.”

When you glance back over your shoulder, he's already watching you.

Something achingly fragile settled over his expression, a quiet wonder in his eyes as though he's seeing himself the way you always have.

“Yeah?” he whispers.

You nod.

“Yeah.”

You lean in to close the small space between you, brushing your lips against the uninjured corner of his mouth.

It’s a delicate thing, more of a press than a kiss.  

His fingers tighten around yours beneath the water.

“Tell me what else.”

You smile, looking back down at his palm.

“You want me to read everything?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

You turn his hand back toward you, guiding his finger to another line.

“Okay. This one is your head line.”

Steve settles back against the tub, his arm tightening around you as you continue tracing the little grooves and curves in his palm, explaining what they’re supposed to mean.

The truth is, none of this is anything you don’t already know.

You don’t need the lines in his hand to tell you who he is. 

You’ve known for a long time.

So you tell him what you've been carrying in your heart for longer than you can remember.

That he’s stubborn.

That he’s brave.

That he loves harder than he knows what to do with.

That he’s always seen himself as ordinary when he’s anything but.

And Steve listens.

· · ·

You stay there together until the water goes cold around you.

And though the lavender fades from the bath, the scent still clings to your skin, lingering long after the warmth has left.

Outside this room, there will still be reminders.

Things neither of you can outrun.

Memories that return without warning, scars that ache long after the wounds have closed.

Maybe some things never fully leave.

Maybe they don’t have to.

Because the bad things are not the only things that get to stay.

And when the first light of dawn slips through the bedroom window the next morning, washing everything in soft gold, Steve is still there.

Beside you.

His hand wrapped around yours.

The man’s wet, ocean eyes flit between your face and the food in your lap. A rogue brown curl fell over his forehead as he nodded down towards you. “What’s, uh… What’s that?”

“My mortal enemy,” you answered gravelly, before turning away. “It’s a Pear Mille-Feuille… I thought maybe I could finally get it right before we closed…”

Carmy blinked owlishly at your profile. “…Well, did you?”

“Nope…” you answered through a heavy sigh, popping your lips together. “The pastry’s too soft. But somehow the pears are still overdone, so… I can’t win.”

Carmy looked it over with an inquisitive eye — the thin gold layers of puff pastry, all stacked neatly atop one another; pears poached to the perfect amber color; thick cream piped with a near impossible precision. It looked like something straight out of a magazine. And, if Carmy had to guess by how hard you were on yourself about the whole thing, it’s entirely likely you’d been published in one before.

“Well, it looks good, at least.”

“That’s only ‘cause you’re standing six feet away.”

Carmy scoffed a quiet laugh and found his breath coming more easily to him. “Here,” he offered, shoes scraping the worn pavement as he approached you. “Let me try it.”

Your head snapped in his direction. Your wide eyes raised to follow his form as he loomed suddenly over you, black blazer rippling in the cool, late-summer breeze. The night air filled suddenly with the scent of him — deep cologne, cigarette smoke, and nicotine gum.

“Wh…What?” you stammered.

“Sometimes you just need a fresh perspective, is all. Like, uh… A new pallet, you know?”

Carmy reached a tattooed hand in your direction, leaving little room for argument. You got the feeling that he must run a restaurant of his own as you passed him the ceramic plate, fingers trembling. You watched anxiously as he took the fork in his large hand and cut himself a slice of the pastry.

He shoveled it into his mouth — an explosion of butter, vanilla, pear, and caramel — the near-perfect balance of elegant and comforting. Just refined enough not to impose too much on itself. 

His cheek jut softly out as he chewed. He nodded to himself until the words caught up to him. “Yeah, this is… incredible, Chef,” he said through the mouthful, laughing slightly through his nose. The sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.

You didn’t believe him, not entirely, but the line in your taut shoulders relaxed slightly at his praise anyway. Sometimes, feeding others felt like a leap of faith. Sometimes, feeding someone felt like handing over a piece of yourself to them, and hoping they found something worth keeping.

—

Months later, Carmy realizes that there are only two kinds of things a person holds onto in this world — things they can’t bear to lose, and things they never meant to keep.

Mikey belongs perpetually in the first category. And, ever since you started working here, he’s begun to realize that you belong in the second. Maybe that’s why he felt himself on the verge of a panic attack for the third time today, ‘cause he was spending his evening excavating his brother’s office like an archeological dig, and found himself surrounded by both at once.

This office had belonged to Mikey, and would be the last thing that ever truly did.

Carmy thinks, knows, that’s why he put off cleaning it out for so long — like keeping it exactly the way his brother left it would preserve his ghost there in some way. This place was practically his tomb, made of four concrete walls faded to the color of old dishwater, an ancient desk so cluttered you can barely see its surface, and a bunch of dented filing cabinets that haven’t been organized in at least three presidential administrations.

They’re all half empty now, organized in boxes with Mikey’s frantic scrawl left on every crumpled receipt, invoice, and payroll record. Soon this office would match the rest of the place — clean, sleek, erased — and what’s left of his brother would be gone.

Carmy slouches against the cool brick with his arms propped on his bent knees, holding the last of Mikey’s things in a tattooed hand. A prescription pill bottle with the label scratched off, which he found while grave-digging through the cabinet drawers. He clutches it tight in his fist, holding the remnants of addiction as if it were his brother’s hand.

The grey, mildew-and-coffee-scented abyss of his grief is abated only by the sound of your laughter, which bounces off the concrete walls and finds him like the rays of milky-orange sunlight filtering through the stained window above his head, which turns his wild curls a more golden shade of brown.

His heavy ocean eyes lift and find you instantly — the way they always seemed to do — and his features flood with horror when he finds you with his sketchbook in your hands.

“What’s all this?” you wonder with a quiet laugh, beneath the subtle thwipping of the pages as you flick through them with your thumb.

Inside are random lists, phone numbers, and mock-ups for the restaurant, all in Carmy’s scrawled handwriting. Then you stumble upon a series of sloppy portraits — some of them of the others in the kitchen; most of them of you, like he was trying to capture you just right.

They feel like memories in some way, moments stolen when no one else was looking. They’re slightly messy, as if drawn by a loose and absentminded hand. It’s quite strange, looking at yourself from another person’s perspective. But even still, you don’t think you’ve ever looked so pretty, so alive, than on these pages of smudged ink.

“I didn’t know you could draw.”

Carmy shrugs lazily with his pink mouth softly jutted, feigning an air of indifference despite the red tint speckling across his cheeks.

“I can’t,” he mumbles through a huff as he stands to full height again, bracing himself on the cleared-out desk beside him. He tucks the pill bottle into the front pocket of his slacks and clears his throat when he feels his pulse skipping there. “N-Not really.”

“Well, I beg to differ,” you scoff and turn another page.

Another scribbled portrait of you sits in the center, drawn in blue ink this time. You’ve got the eraser end of a pencil in your mouth and another sitting behind your ear, concentrating on coming up with a new dessert menu. You were captured quite beautifully, even in your subtle frustration. “I didn’t think I was capable of looking this good until now.”

“You look good all the time,” he dismisses quietly, curls swaying when he shakes his head at you.

He grimaces at himself right after the words spill from his lips, face flaring hotter when the expression on your face shifts slightly in response to them. He lacks the courage to meet your eyes as he looms before you, smelling of stale cologne and sweat from days of renovation.

“What do you, uh— What do you usually draw?” you stammer and pass the sketchbook back to him.

“I don’t know…” Carmy mutters. “Whatever’s, you know, on my mind, I guess—”

Your heart lurches in your chest, both at his words and at the office door slamming suddenly open across the room. Your heads snap to the side in tandem to find Richie towering in the narrow doorway. “Cousin, I swear to god, I’m about to fuckin’ lose it, man—”

“You’re so dramatic, Richie, jeez…” Sydney sighs as she walks past him and further into the newly renovated kitchen, to busy herself with actual work.

Carmy hangs his head and closes his eyes, digging his thumb and forefinger into the sockets in a quiet frustration. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t come to me with any problems while I was in here—”

“I know that,” Richie shrugs. “It’s not a problem.

“—I don’t have time for this shit right now, Rich.”

“Well, it’s not a fuckin’ problem, Carm! What do you want me to say?” the older man repeats, louder now.

“It’s literally a problem,” Syd monotones from somewhere further inside the kitchen.

“Well, Ms. Know-It-All over here wants less tables in the dining room— says it’ll fuckin’… make it more systematic or whatever, I don’t know,” Richie rambles, gesturing wildly with his hands. “But I told her we’re opening a restaurant here. Not a library. More seats means more customers, which means more money— Which we’re slowly running out of, might I add!”

He turns over his shoulder to yell into the kitchen. You wince when his voice bounces off the bare concrete walls.

“Yeah, Syd’s right,” Carmy nods.

“Thank you!” the girl calls distantly.

Richie blinks slowly in offense. “…What?”

“Syd’s right—”

“No, I heard you—”

“Then why’d you say what—?”

“‘Cause you’re fucking with me,” Richie scoffs an emotionless, half-delirious laugh.

“I’m trying to be efficient here, Rich—”

“You’re all fucking with me—”

“We can turn over tables quicker if there’s less of them,” Carmy explains, much more calmly in response, though there’s a sudden bite behind his words that you don’t miss. He keeps one hand propped on his waist while his other gestures with the sketchbook between his fingers. “Which means more customers, which means more money, which… we are running out of…”

Richie laughs like it’s funny. “Well, that’s real funny, Carm, ‘cause I bet if I brought Claire-Bear in here, and she agreed with me — which she would, by the way — you’d change your mind like that—”

Carmy flinches when the man lifts his hand to snap in his face. He swats him away with a little more aggression than probably necessary. “Get your hand out of my face— What are you twelve?”

“Yeah, you’re mad ‘cause you know I’m right.”

Your head tilts to the side like an intrigued puppy at the foreign name, which you haven’t yet become acquainted with in your weeks working here. Your wide eyes dart between the two men in front of you. Your smile trembles slightly at the edges.

“Who’s… Who’s Claire-Bear?”

Carmy’s head snaps in your direction. His mouth parts, but nothing comes out for an embarrassing fraction of a second, as if he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. Bringing her up in front of you feels wrong in a way he can’t explain.

“She’s uh… She’s— She’s no one,” Carmy stammers.

“Oh, please,” Richie scoffs, dark blue eyes flitting in your direction. “She’s his girlfriend.”

Your stomach sinks, even despite Carmy’s arguing.

“For the last time, she’s not my fucking girlfriend. Richie—”

“Well, not for lack of tryin’, cousin—”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Carmy repeats, this time only to you. There’s a solemn look in his light eyes, like he’s trying to make sure you really hear him. “She’s, you know, an old friend. A family friend. That’s all.”

“Oh,” Richie laughs. “I bet Claire-Bear would love to hear that.”

“Fuck off, Richie,” Carmy spits.

“Oh, there you are.” A softer, deeper, more foreign voice breaks through the boyish bickering in an instant. Luca appears in the doorway behind Richie — golden locks pushed over his forehead, physically built beneath his white undershirt, looking a lot less plagued by the chaos of the kitchen than the rest of them. His pink lips quirk into a smile at the sight of you. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you— I need an expert opinion on this lemon-blueberry trifle I’m trying out.”

“Yeah, put this girl out of her misery. Please,” Richie scoffs drily, then turns back to you with a warm, sympathetic hand on your shoulder. “I apologize for my cousin, Sunshine. I did warn you he could be a bit of an asshole—”

“Richie.”

“It’s… okay,” you murmur with a sheepish laugh, before glancing over at Carmy beneath your lashes in a sheepish look. “Are you… okay in here?”

Carmy’s expression shifts slightly, like he’s about to say the exact opposite of what he really means. He feels his chest stinging with a pinch of misplaced jealousy — because he knows you spent time in Copenhagen with Luca some years back, and the idea of someone knowing parts of you that he doesn’t feels a little like a punch to the stomach.

“Yeah,” he nods anyway, slightly strangled, like his body’s trying to keep him from saying the words. “Yeah, I got the rest of it. Go ahead.”

You flash the boy a smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes as you go. Carmy watches you trail behind Luca out of the office and back towards the dessert station. Richie watches Carmy watch you.

“So about the tables—”

“Enough about the fucking tables, Richie!”

II. ORANGE BLOSSOM HONEY.

There were only two times in your entire life that you swore you’d never bake again: first, when you got your first scathing review that sent you on a downward spiral for longer than you’d like to admit, and second, when Ever closed down for good.

There was still joy in it, somewhere deep down, you just couldn’t find it anymore. Honestly, you had trouble finding it most days in most anything. Which is probably why Luca told you to give The Bear a shot in the first place.

“I’ll tell him you’re stopping by, alright?” he’d told you over the phone that evening. “Just talk to Carmy. See the place out. And if you hate it, I will personally fly myself across the Atlantic so you can say ‘I told you so’ to my face.”

“That sounds very expensive, Lu.”

“Well, it’d be worth every penny.”

So there you were, weaving through a restaurant that seemed more abandoned than not — as though someone had taken a perfectly good kitchen and detonated a small explosive in the center of it. Walls had been torn down. Floors were covered in sawdust. Extension cords snaked across the room like vines. The smell of drywall and fresh paint grew stronger the further you went.

For a moment, you worried that no one was inside waiting for you, and that you had accidentally committed a breaking and entering — until you spotted a curly-haired stranger hunched over a metal counter in the not-quite kitchen, scribbling at a notepad with his pen.

He glanced up at the sound of your footsteps, dark curls hanging over his eyes. A mixture of surprise and confusion flashed in his gaze, brows raising and lowering again.

You lifted a hand in an awkward wave. “Hi…”

“Hey…”

“I’m sorry. I let myself in— I… I tried to knock, but I guess you couldn’t… hear me…” You trailed off with a wavering smile, scratching anxiously at the back of your neck. “Uh, Luca was supposed to call you, I think...”

Realization flooded the sharp edges of Carmy’s face.

“Oh. Right,” he nodded. “Yeah, for the, uh...”

“Yeah…”

Carmy swallowed hard, tapping his pen along his palm, no more anxious than you are now. “Well, uh, I— I hope he warned you that we don’t have much of a kitchen yet...”

“Yeah…” you answered with a breathless laugh, eyes wandering across the spray-painted tarps hanging as makeshift walls as you strolled further inside. “I just… I thought he was exaggerating a little bit.”

A short laugh escaped him then as he rounded the counter in front of him. “Yeah, this is— basically a construction zone more than a kitchen at this point, so… Sorry in advance.”

“Well, if we’re sharing apologies, I’m sorry for not bringing a résumé,” you confessed sheepishly, struggling to meet the man’s gaze when he stood before you. The scent of paint and sawdust clung heavily to his navy sweatshirt. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want me working here.”

“C’mon. I know your résumé,” Carmy scoffed. “I’ve actually eaten your food before, remember?”

“The desert I was crying over at Ever, you mean?”

His lip twitched into a soft smile before he turned away, too shy to say this to your face:“Well, in my opinion, something that perfect is worth crying over.”

You grinned at the back of him, wider than you realized. “You’re still sparing my feelings after all this time…”

Carmy planted himself on the right wing end of the soon-to-be kitchen and turned to face you again. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but… This is gonna be our dessert station. Hopefully. If this entire place doesn’t cave in—”

‘Ours,’ he said, as if it were already yours in some way, too.

“—That’s a joke. Sorta,” he said, scratching at the back of his wild curls. He glanced up at you once more. “Have you tried making it again since we met?” he wondered suddenly. “You know that… pear… mill-fill thing?”

A giggle sputtered from your lips before you could stop it. Your hand flew to your mouth, as if you were trying to put it inside.

Carmy grinned shyly at having earned the pretty sound, despite his mild embarrassment. He fidgeted with the pen in his tattooed hands and gave you a sheepish look in response. “Help me out here…”

“It’s French,” you told him. “It’s mee-fwee.”

His brows lowered with a visible hesitation. “Mee… foy…”

“Close enough,” you laughed with a shake of your head. “And, to answer your question, no. I haven’t made it again. And I probably never will— I’m too fragile for another defeat.”

The grin that tugged at the corner of Carmy’s mouth then was brief, but no less genuine. “You will,” he said, like some kind of an oath, with so much conviction you couldn’t help but believe him.

—

“You seem happier here.”

Luca’s observation comes suddenly. His English-deep voice cuts through the soft quiet of the empty restaurant, renovated to near completion now. The two of you lie supine on the cool hardwood, the tops of your heads nearly brushing, as you put together Carmy’s newest splurge — which his uncle called “expensive, ergonomic, fuckin’ hippie tables.” You screw each bolt in by hand. You can feel your fingers threatening to cramp around the screwdriver clutched between them.

“Happier than Copenhagen, I mean,” he continues.

You scoff. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure any version of me is happier than I was in Copenhagen…”

“Oh, c’mon…” Luca lilts lowly. “I wasn’t that bad company, was I?”

“You know it wasn’t about you…” you mumble.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I know…”

It was the fault of that goddamn critic, and the devastating review he left that seemed to compliment everything but your work alone.“The pear mille-feuille reads less like a dessert and more like a young chef begging for validation,” the publication read. “For all its technical accomplishment, the pastry never once feels human. It is difficult to imagine, dear reader, a pastry with so much insecurity baked into each of its layers.”

Your world seemed to shrink after that. The singular paragraph of disapproval lodged itself somewhere deep within your psyche, along with all the cynicism and sorrow that built a home inside you, too. Every other failed recipe somehow led back to it, and every success thereafter felt purely accidental — until, eventually, baking stopped being fun and started being the one thing most capable of hurting you.

It hollowed you from the inside out. You worked the kitchen like a ghost returning to its haunt. You wanted to quit, in virtually every sense of the word, and it was Chef Andrea who convinced you to stay — by sending you four thousand miles away to Copenhagen, that is, to remember a world without critics and service and non-stop perfection; to remember what it felt like to exist without constantly needing to prove yourself.

It was there that you met Luca, who taught you what it meant to approach food with curiosity again. And it was here now, in the bones of The Bear, that reminded you how to love the work again — the simple joy of making something with your bare hands and sharing it with the people who mattered most.

“I’m just glad you didn’t stop cooking…” Luca continues with a quiet grunt in the back of his throat as he slides out from under the table. “And I’m glad Chef Andrea sent you over to my neck of the woods.”

“Let me?” you scoff, tilting your head back against the floor to look at the boy upside down. “She practically forced me on that plane.”

“Best thing she ever did,” the boy croons with an air of sarcasm to mask his sincerity. He rises to full height and dusts his palms off on his slacks. “I’m headed out for the night… Need a ride?”

“I think I’m gonna stay here for a while…” you sigh.

“Suit yourself,” he huffs and walks away. “Just don’t overdo it.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will be very upset with you,” he deadpans with faux-solemnity.

“Oh, the horror!” you call to his disappearing figure, right before the door shuts behind him.

Silence returns when he’s gone. Your chest deflates with a heavy sigh, a held breath you didn’t know you were keeping, as you return to your work — twisting the screwdriver in your fist and reveling in the burn in your wrist, the only thing keeping you from thinking.

About that critic. About Copenhagen. About Carmy’s sketchbook, about Carmy and the girl called Claire-Bear.

You rise onto your elbows with a huff when you’re done, stretching out the aching tendons in your neck. You vaguely hear the kitchen door swishing open and shut again before a sudden voice calls out. “Oh, hey—”

The sound of Carmy’s voice startles you for a reason you can’t name. You sit further up on instinct and slam your head against the table with a whack that jostles one of the screws.

“Ow...” you whimper.

“Shit—” Carmy rushes to your side, catching the wooden top when it wavers. His long, tattooed fingers curl around the edge of it to keep its weight from falling back on you. He ducks his head to look at you, features twisting with a sympathetic grimace as you rub at your aching forehead. “Sorry… Didn’t mean to scare you…”

“You didn’t scare me…” you assure him weakly.

His mouth lifts into an amused half-smile. “No?”

You shrug, lips jutted in feigned apathy despite the newfound pounding in your skull. “Not even a little bit...”

Carmy’s grin widens, but he makes no further argument. He just crouches down in front of you and keeps the tabletop steady while you lie back to realign its leg. You spend the next minute or so screwing the loose bolts back into the blanched oak, hands going clammy around the screwdriver at the proximity between you now. The air grows considerably warmer accordingly, filled with the familiar scent of him — of cologne, garlic, and cigarette smoke. You have to keep reminding yourself to breathe.

“You, uh— You never told me,” Carmy starts suddenly, as if he’d been sitting on the words for some time and only now got the courage to say them. He swipes at his nose with the back of his free hand and mumbles shyly behind his fingers.“About, you know, why you almost didn’t come here… Why you went to Copenhagen...”

Your breath hitches faintly in throat. You hope he doesn’t notice. The screw twisting itself back into the pale wood above you becomes the most interesting thing in the room. “It never came up…” you answer quietly. “It was stupid anyway…”

“No, what the asshole critic said was stupid.”

You turn your head against the floor to flash him a playful look, hiding behind the veil of your sarcasm. “There you go again…”

“There I go again?” he echoes.

“Sparing my feelings.”

“No, I— I’m serious.” Carmy stammers with a breathless laugh. “And I know I’m right because I’ve had your stuff before.”

“Yeah,” you scoff and turn away again. “That stupid fucking pear dish that I still can’t get right.”

“No, it was, uh…” Carmy trails off and shakes his head, going distant with recollection. He rests the elbow of his free arm on his bent knee and drops his wild head into his palm. He digs his thumb and forefinger into his eyes as he struggles to recall the name. “It was, uh… It was the— the Bordeaux, I think?”

He lifts his head to glance down at you once more. Your arms fall to your lap, eyes narrowing in confusion as your lip twitches into a shock half-smile. “The Canalé de Bordeaux?” you repeat with much more ease.

“Yeah,” Carmy nods, brown curls swaying. “It was right before I took over here— when I was, you know, eating everywhere I could, trying to learn as much as I could, and I…” His mouth lifts into a distant smile; his eyes glaze over at the memory. “I didn’t even place it until you made it for the kitchen the other day… Don’t think I would’ve noticed otherwise…”

“That was… God, that was forever ago,” you say with a laugh of disbelief, rising back up onto your eblows. “I’m surprised you remember it now.”

“I remember everything,” Carmy shrugs.

“That sounds… terrifying,” you scoff.

“It is. Sometimes,” he jokes with a breathy chuckle. “But, I don’t know… Now I’m starting to think it’s not so bad…”

His light eyes lock with yours. You lose your breath almost instantly, chest aching as your lungs struggle to find it again. You feel like the distance between you has vanished in a blink; each of your breaths feels like inhaling him in some way. You feel like you can taste him, almost, and your mouth waters at the thought alone, parting for his on instinct.

With your heavy eyes settled on his glassy ones, you catch the soft blue of his irises flick down to your lips. You think he might kiss you. You want so desperately for him to kiss you. And you hate how badly you need it.

“I-I don’t think this is a good idea,” you hear yourself blurt.

Carmy’s brows lower in confusion as you scramble suddenly out from under the table. You rise to full height on shaky legs and place several feet of distance between the two of you, crossing your arms over your chest in a feeble attempt to soothe your racing heart.

Carmy rises slowly from his crouched position, blinking the lingering haze from his eyes. “Wha… What are you talking about?” he stammers with his hands splayed in front of him, approaching you again the way someone would a stray puppy.

“Because of, you know… Because of… Claire.” You whisper the name like it’s a curse of some kind.

The confusion etched on his features only deepens further. “Claire?” he echoes, face screwed. “Wh—What does Claire have to do with this? Claire is— Claire is nobody—”

“Does she know that?” you press, brows raised.

“Yes!” he answers without missing a beat. “Because nothing ever happened between us! Because nothing will ever happen between us! Because I— I’m not into her that way!”

“That… way?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, tattooed biceps straining against the sleeves of his undershirt as he rests his hands on his hips. “You know, the— The way I’m into…”

He trails off when he catches himself. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he swallows. His unwavering stare bores into yours as he weighs the words in his head, wondering briefly if he should say them aloud. His wild curls sway as he shakes his head to himself. “You know what. Fuck it. The way I’m— The way I’m into you.”

Your chest warms at his words. So furiously, it feels someone has taken a white-hot blade and pierced your sternum with it. You can feel the heart flaring in your face, too, as your mouth curls into a wide, slightly apprehensive smile.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Carmy nods firmly, though something in his gaze seems distantly surprised by his own forwardness. He scratches at the back of his curls and looks down at the table just beside you. “Are you, uh— Are we you good here?”

You nod rapidly until the words to speak catch up to you. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Good,” he hums. “Do you… Do you need a ride, or…?”

You hesitate on instinct, nose scrunching sheepishly. “If it’s not too far out of your way…”

Carmy scoffs like it’s funny. “You’re never too far out of my way,” he says and turns on the heel of his sneaker to walk away, as if he hadn’t just taken all the breath from your lungs right with him.

III. ALMOND PRALINE.

Your hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

You pressed your back hard into the rough brick behind you, letting it snag against your chef whites in a feeble attempt to ground yourself. You tipped your head back for further assistance, and fought every instinct that told you to beat your skull against the concrete as your heart thrummed wildly in your throat — as though it were trying to burst through the delicate tendon there altogether.

Adrenaline soared through your veins. The starry night air refused to pierce through your burning skin, face burning red-hot while your fingers turned to ice.

You had survived a million dinner services much harder than this one, The Bear’s very first. You had survived Carmy’s anger, Richie’s shouting, and the entire kitchen learning how to operate itself. But it was the food critic that nearly killed you — the man who came in older than you remembered, greyer, and a little skinnier than you recall.

It took you a long moment to remember to breathe as you watched Fak seat him through the kitchen window. “I need you back at your station, Chef,” you heard Carmy telling you from the expo, though his voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. “Back at your station, Chef! Now!”

You listened, but your body seemed to work on autopilot. You broke out the baking sheet, the jelly roll pan, and the perforated pastry tray without thinking. You patted out the puff pastry and fired the pears like it was muscle memory to you. You had Richie deliver it to the man, on the house, and tried to expel the rest of it from your mind.

You forgot how to be human thereafter, hardly more useful than a fumbling ball of panic. Carmy told you to get out of the kitchen when you dropped a bowl of sourdough starter you’d been tending to for nearly two months. And now there you were, post-shift, with all the anxiety of a prey animal being hunted for sport.

And the worst part was, you couldn’t tell if you were terrified or exhilarated. Or both.

The heavy metal door beside you squeaked slowly open. A familiar voice broke through the memory. “There you are…” Carmy hummed as he walked out, chef coat hanging open, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to reveal the expanse of his tattooed arms.

His wild curls were still damp from sweat and steam, glowing a more golden shade beneath the amber streetlights. The exhaustion of the shift seemed to carve into all the chiseled edges of his face. But his eyes were heavy with relief at finally being alone with you all the same.

You grew sheepish as he stood before you, struggling to meet his gaze like a scolded child. “I’m sorry, by the way. For… all that.”

Carmy shrugged and cupped his palm around the cigarette he pinched into his mouth. His lighter clicked a few times before it lit, basking his features in a flicker orange hue. “It happens,” he mumbled before inhaling the nicotine into his lungs. The grey smoke left through his nostrils a few seconds later as he flashed you a sterner look. “Just don’t let it happen again, Chef.”

You nodded once. “Heard, Chef…”

Carmy flicked the orange filter with his thumb. His eyes fell to your lap, where you wrung your hands together in a feeble attempt to keep them from trembling. Concern surged through his chest instantly.

“Jeez,” he mumbled.

Your eyes followed his form as he crouched to set the newly-lit cig to the sidewalk, leaving it burning there as he rose to full height again.

“What?”

“Your hands… You’re shaking…” He closed the brief distance between you and took your hands in his warmer, larger ones. The contact stole the breath from your lungs. You’re still getting used to touching him so freely. “God, you’re ice cold.”

You laughed breathlessly. “Because my nervous system is shot.”

Carmy began to rub the warmth back into your fingertips. His palms felt like velvet, calloused from years of burns and knives and hard labor. The gesture was so gentle that it made you feel the crying. Again.

“He liked it, you know,” he told you. “The critic, I mean.”

Your stomach fell as anxiety flooded your veins once more. “I appreciate the sentiment, Carm, but… You can’t know that…”

“No, he said it. Cousin cornered him on the way out— asked him about it,” Carmy confessed. “And after he answered, Richie defended you. Said the guy was an asshole, and that he was a pretty shit critic if he didn’t know what good food tasted like.”

Another startled laugh sputtered from your lips. “That means we’re definitely getting a bad review outta him, you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “But it’ll be worth it.”

Quiet settled between you. The city grew louder on either side of you in its wake — wind whipping warmly down the alley, cars passing distantly, a train rattling against the tracks somewhere further away. Carmy still hadn’t let go of your hands; he just kept holding you there as his eyes flicked down to your mouth.

He spent a long moment just staring, as if silently trying to will some courage into his body.

Your lips curled slowly into a sheepish smile. “You gonna kiss me, Bear?” you wondered lowly, almost inaudibly.

He nodded for a moment, then pinched his brows to ask. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

“I always want you to kiss me,” you laughed.

His mouth twitched shyly. “Then get over here then.”

Your chest swelled when he urged you forward with a gentle tug at your hands. You pressed yourself to his chest as his mouth ducked down to yours, tasting of nicotine and garlic and boy. You moaned at the feeling of him against you, fingers twisting in his silky brown curls. His larger, tattooed hands splayed along your waist, a little less confident in comparison.

The metal door shrieked open once more with little warning. The droning of ten different conversations filled the air as the rest of the kitchen staff spilled out all at once. You and Carmy sprang apart quickly, losing any and all ability to play it off.

The conversation quietened in an instant. You turned away, wiping at your mouth with the back of your hand and refusing to meet their eyes. The three or more seconds of silence that went by felt like a lifetime, until—

“Pay up, assholes!” Richie shouted, fist pumping triumphantly in the air. He continued gloating through the chorus of laughter and groans of failure. “I knew you idiots were dating, and everyone acted like I was losing my mind! But the house always wins, baby!”

—

Carmy sat along the top of the booth with a plate of Canalé de Bordeaux in his lap. Family was your turn tonight, and you’d opted to make the first dish of yours that Carmy had ever tried for the rest of the kitchen. No one knows just how much tenderness is cooked into the caramelized crust and soft custard. No one, perhaps, other than Carmy.

His sneakers dig into the smooth pleather booth below as he props his back against the wall behind him. The rum-vanilla dish melts in his mouth as he surveys the bustling dining area, filled with his family and friends, some of whom were halfway strangers to him a few years ago. His eyes fall to you without trying as you deliver an alcohol-free dessert to a heavily pregnant Sugar. A distant smile tugs at his mouth as he watches your lips move with a conversation he can’t hear from here.

The soul music playing on the radio drowns out your conversation, but not the sound of Richie’s voice as he slides into the booth next to Carmy. His long, graceless limbs bump against the table as he goes, trying to cut a bite of dessert to shovel into his mouth at the same time.

Annoyance twists in the younger boy’s features on instinct. “I’m not cleaning that up if you spill it—”

“I’m not gonna spill it!” Richie argues boyishly, with his mouth full of food, as he settles into the booth a few inches from Carmy’s sneakers. He nudges the boy’s leg with his elbow. “And get your feet off my booth, you fuckin’ animal... Jeez, I don’t know what that girl sees in you…”

“You’re a fuckin’ asshole…”

“No, I’m serious!” the older man laughs with amusement glittering in his dark blue eyes. He shovels another too-big bite into his cheek and talks through the yellow custard clinging to the sides of his mouth. “I don’t know how you managed to pull that off, cousin— There’s no way you even know what to do with all that.”

Richie turns away, still laughing through his nose at his own stupid joke. He cuts himself another bite, already calculating a retort to Carmy’s inevitable argument on the matter — only one never comes.

The younger boy just stabs absentmindedly at his plate, distracting himself from the topic under the guise of forming the perfect bite.

Richie pauses with his own fork to his mouth. He turns slowly over his shoulder, brows raising to his hairline until four wrinkles line his forehead. “Oh, shit,” he scoffs after a few moments. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

“Shut up…” Carmy murmurs under his breath, taking another aggressive bite.

“Oh, c’mon! Don’t tell me you’re not gettin’ your dick wet, Carm—”

“Keep your voice down, fuck-o!” he spits through his mouthful, eyes darting anxiously to make sure no one else had heard him — that you hadn’t somehow heard him, from your spot all the way across the room, laughing with Sugar and Tina. Carmy turns away with a lazy shrug. “We’re just… We’re taking things slow. Not that it concerns you, FYI.”

“Well, FYI, you guys have been dating for months—”

“Oh, thanks for keeping track. I had no idea.”

“—And if she isn’t getting it with you, she’s gotta be getting it from someone else,” Richie rambles absentmindedly as he turns back to his plate. “I mean, I don’t even swing this way, obviously, but if I were a chick, I’d be all over that Luca guy—”

Carmy’s chest stings with a misplaced jealousy. He shouldn’t listen to Richie; he trusts you far too much for any of that. But maybe it’s his own lingering insecurity coming through — the cynicism that always lingers in the back of his head like a shadow, telling him that he’s unworthy of touching you, and then berating him for not being man enough to try.

He huffs. “Well, this is making me feel a whole lot better, cousin. Thank you.”

“I’m just sayin’!” Richie says, muffled through the dessert wadded in his cheek. “She’s obviously crazy about you, man— She looks at you like you hung the fuckin’ moon! I’m just sayin’, you know, trust your instincts. That’s all.”

“…Trust my instincts?” Carmy monotones.

“Yeah,” the older man shrugs. “You’re a chef. Isn’t that supposed to be, like, your whole thing?”

Carmy just blinks at him. “Your point?”

“My point is… She likes you. And you like her— I’m pretty sure half of Chicago knows that by now. So just… Stop getting in your own damn way before you ruin somethin’ good, alright? She picked you, cousin—”

Carmy leans back when Richie gestures too closely with his fork.

“So if you can’t trust your own judgment, at least trust hers.”

Richie’s words pierce him almost physically, giving him that surge of courage he’d been lacking these past few months with you. It makes him want to stop dissecting each of his feelings, for once, until they’re just lying there ahead of him, dead and useless.

Carmy’s light eyes narrow suspiciously. “You know… You’ve gotten, like, really good at giving advice since becoming house manager. You know that?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s freaking me out, too,” Richie deadpans, stabbing at his plate. “Sometimes I hear myself talk and I’m like, who the fuck said that?”

IV. PUFF PASTRY.

The first time you spent the night at his place, Carmy had a panic attack.

It started as a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe a memory. It played through static like an old film — Christmas Eve at the Berzatto house, beneath glowing Christmas lights and smoke from his mother’s cigarettes and something she burnt on the stove. He could smell the nicotine hanging in the hair, and the thick smell of tomato sauce, and Cicero’s expensive nose-stinging cologne.

Carmy was sitting at the head of the table, unable to move from his chair. The rest around him were empty, save for the one at the opposite end. Mikey’s seat. The ghost of his brother was laughing one moment, then screaming at him, then crying the next. Carmy was terrified — the kind of terrified he got as a kid when his mother got in another one of her moods — but he was comforted, at the very least, that his brother was here.

Alive.

Then the lights went out, for only a fraction of a second. And the Christmas lights were glowing again, but his brother’s seat was empty. And the silence was worse than the screaming.

Carmy woke with a sharp breath to a bedroom filled with a navy blue darkness. He rose to his elbows, chest aching as he waited, for a fleeting moment, for the Christmas lights to come back on. Then he realized that he was back in his bedroom, and his brother’s still dead; but you were beside him now, and that was enough.

As his eyes adjusted, he found you lying beside him, bathed in the dim glow of the muted streetlamp outside his window. You’d kicked off the sheets, revealing the expanse of your bare legs and the softness of your stomach from where your shirt had ridden up — one of his, which you wore with a plain pair of cotton underwear. Your mouth was softly parted; your breathing was even and slow.

He tried to match each of your exhales, but the panic dug deeper into his chest. His lungs refused to fill properly. His skin felt too tight. The air was too hot, but his teeth were still chattering. He couldn’t ask you for help if he tried.

The walls spun around him as he rushed immediately to the kitchen. He bent over the sink, gripping the counter hard enough to blanch his knuckles with one hand, while his other scooped handfuls of freezing water into his mouth. He was not sure how much it was helping.

The muscles in his back tensed when a warm hand settled suddenly between his shoulder blades. Carmy didn’t realize you’d followed him out until then; until he heard your voice in his ear, cutting through the wild pounding of his heartbeat.

“It’s okay,” you told him. “Just keep breathing. You’re okay. It’ll pass.”

His breath came easier to him after that. The kitchen soon filled with the sound of his trembling pants and the loud hissing of the kitchen sink. Carmy’s shoulders loosened slowly under your hand.

“Do you need me to do something?” you wondered quietly.

He shook his head, curls hanging over his eyes from where he was still hunched over. “No, I— I got it— I’m… I’m good now.”

He waved you off with a trembling hand. You couldn’t help but notice the way he avoided your gaze; the way he fought every instinct to tense again when you rubbed along his spine. You wondered if you were only making it worse.

“Do you want me to go—?”

“No,” Carmy blurted instantly. His head snapped in your direction. He blinked back at you with wet ocean eyes. “Please. D-Don’t go. I just— I had a bad dream. I’m okay, I swear.”

You didn’t look convinced, and, honestly, neither did he.

“No, you’re not, Bear…” you murmured gently, with a sleepy smile that bordered on sympathetic. But you didn’t ask him to explain the feelings he didn’t have the words for. You just stood beside him and asked if he wanted breakfast.

—

Carmy’s apartment always smelled different when you were in it. Less like an ashtray and more like warm sugar, and your fruit-sweet perfume, and whatever sweet treat you’d spent the service dreaming about. Tonight, it was homemade churros.

Carmy can smell it down the hall when he exits the bathroom. The shower steam mixes with that sweet cinnamon wafting from the kitchen — where he finds you standing at the stove, tapping a socked foot to the synth pop on the radio, and stirring a pot of glossy chocolate syrup with a wooden spoon.

“Only a psychopath spends all night cooking just to come home and cook some more,” he says to announce his presence as he leans against the doorway, replacing his uniform with a sweatshirt and a pair of plaid boxers. “You know that, right?”

“What can I say?” you grin as you glance over your shoulder at him. “You’re rubbing off on me, Bear.”

Carmy exhales a quiet laugh and spends a long moment just watching you, with all the attentiveness of someone who watched sunsets come or go or mapped constellations in the starry sky. You occupied his kitchen as if you’d been there this whole time, in a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed to your elbows, big enough to hide the less-than-flattering underwear you’re wearing beneath it. You look like home, in every sense of the word.

“You know…” Carmy starts lowly, swiping at the tip of his nose with his thumb. “For a while there… I kinda thought I was done with all this…”

Your spoon slows as it slides along the bottom of the pan. “…What do you mean?”

“Cooking,” he answers. “There was a stretch where I couldn’t even look at a stove without… hoping it would blow up.”

He laughs at himself, though, admittedly, the words sound slightly more concerning leaving his lips than they did in his head. He swallows hard, grateful when you don’t press him on the matter. You just eye him with a carefulness that makes him shift his weight on his bare feet — uncomfortable at being so foreignly vulnerable.

He crosses his arms over his chest in a childlike attempt to hide, scratching along the expanse of his bicep. “Yeah, I, uh… I just— didn’t enjoy it anymore. I didn’t enjoy anything anymore.”

“What changed?” you press gently.

“You came around,” he confesses. “And I watched you learn to love it again— have fun again, and it made… realize why I loved doing what I do.”

Your mouth lifts in a sheepish half-smile. You turn away, grinning wide at the pot of dark chocolate below as it ripples beneath the spoon.

“Well, I probably wouldn’t have learned to have fun again if I didn’t start working at The Bear…” you tell him. “It’s very likely I would’ve stopped baking altogether. I mean, Copenhagen was great and all, but… you, and Syd, and Richie— watching all of you work… I feel like I could do this forever…”

Carmy’s eyes soften as he watches you. A strange emotion surges warmly through his chest and up into his throat. He feels like he could cry.

“Yeah,” he hums, half-strangled. “Me too…”

Your smile turns shy when you look back at him, nodding your head to beckon him over. “C’mere. Come try this.”

Carmy obeys instantly, as if every muscle and bone in his body was made to be under your command. You twist the spoon to gather the liquid chocolate and hold it out toward him, cupping your free hand beneath it to catch any rogue drizzles. Carmy’s pink mouth parts for a taste — the syrup is warm on his tongue, silky and rich as it coats his mouth.

A low sound of approval sounds in the back of his throat. His damp curls sway as he nods.

Your smile widens instantly, eyes crinkling at the edges. “Yeah?”

“Mm,” he hums. “Hell yeah.”

His smile falters slightly when your free hand reaches suddenly towards him. Your thumb brushes the corner of his mouth, gathering the bit of chocolate lingering on the corner there. You press the pad of it to his lips without thinking, and Carmy drags his tongue against it just the same.

The motion was more instinctive than not. He didn’t realize how charged the moment was until your eyes flickered with it — going glassy and heavy in an instant. Even still, you don’t part from his stare as you bring your hand to your mouth, licking the remnants of chocolate on your thumb that was more of Carmy’s spit than anything.

Carmy’s ocean eyes darken in a flash. The cynical, uncertain thing that lingered in him like a shadow seemed to vanish, as his racing heart lurched with an emotion that bordered on primitive. He decides not to think — to follow his instinct, as it were.

He ducks down to kiss you, hard, with the bridge of his nose smushing against the side of yours and his tongue licking into your mouth.The spoon in your hand clatters hopelessly to the tile floor when he urges you back against the counter with a pair of wide hands splayed along your waist.

Behind you, the chocolate continues to simmer.

V. SPICED PEARS.

The first time Carmy had tasted any part of you was at Ever.

It wasn’t long after Mikey died, and he was making his tour around the city to try new food — seeing what changed and what hadn’t — and trying to take his mind off all the rest. He sat alone at a small square table, finishing up his lemon chicken piccata, when another plate was slid suddenly in front of him.

“Oh, I— I didn’t order this,” he stammered.

Then his eyes lifted to find Chef Terry standing before him, with a smile much gentler than he remembered.

“This one’s on the house,” she’d told him. She did not mention the death of his brother, but Carmy knew that was likely why she came over. “Figured you might appreciate something with a wee bit of alcohol in it. I had our pastry chef whip it up for you—” Her eyes flickered with warmth at the mention of you, who Carmy had not yet met. “I’m quite proud of that one.”

She left him with a pat on the back and nothing more. Carmy eyed the dessert before him, studying it.

The burnished bronze pastry sat on the small plate ahead of him like a tiny piece of architecture. The caramel on the ridged exterior gleamed in the candlelight. The shell cracked audibly beneath his fork, a delicate snap that most chefs spend weeks trying to perfect. The inside yielded immediately — golden custard oozing from its center.

Carmy scooped a bite into his mouth, and his world stopped for a fraction of a moment.

The deeply caramelized sugar hit his palate like a memory; a taste of nostalgia accompanied by a satisfying crunch. The silken custard melted on his tongue, rich with vanilla and warm with dark rum. A brittle shell followed by an impossibly soft heart.

Carmy thought, at the time, that it was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.

But it wasn’t.

—

You were.

His face burns hot between your thighs, which tremble on either side of his flushed cheeks from your previous orgasm (that he gave you with two of his fingers, a lot quicker than you’re willing to admit to.)

“Can you take another?” he’d asked, right after pulling his hand out of your underwear and licking your cum off his fingers, which glistened down the knuckle. You whined at the sight of it, half-scared at the warmth still lingering in the pit of your stomach. “C’mon. Let me taste it, yeah?”

You lift your head from the pillows to watch the boy slink down your body, still wearing all of his clothes despite you lying half-naked in the center of his unmade bed. He slides your panties to the side with a pair of tattooed fingers and licks a fat stripe up your pussy, from your pulsing hole to your already sensitive clit.

Your whine fills the lamplit bedroom as your hips buck to follow him.

Carmy pulls off wearing a barely-there half-smile. “Good?” he asks, for the hundredth time or so since you started.

“Yes…” you moan, head tipped back.

And then he starts eating you. Like eats you, eats you — with his mouth wide and his broad nose smushed into your clit. He’s led by nothing more than primal emotion and pure instinct as he laps all the honey you leak for him. The lewd wet noises of his mouth are only slightly muffled by your contented sighs and his own moans, as he rocks his hips against the mattress in a feeble attempt to relieve the ache in his boxers.

Your fingers tighten in his wild curls, as though you mean to pull him off of you, though your hips chase his tongue all the same. His lips latch on your clit, sucking the delicate button, and you cum with a drawn-out sound you didn’t know you were capable of making. He pushes your knees to your chest with a pair of wide hands to milk the orgasm from your pulsing confines.

“No— No more,” you whine feebly, watching with a pained sort of look as he continues licking at you. “It’s too much, Carm—”

“Just let me taste it, baby,” he says, half-muffled against you.

He’s wearing your glittering cum down to his chin when he crawls back up your body. It’s a mess of awkward, tangled limbs as you drag his sweatshirt up his torso from the hem while he reaches into his nightstand for a condom (a feat made more difficult by the fact that the box is still wrapped in its plastic). He kneels between your thighs, open and wet, and tucks his heavy balls under the hem of his plaid boxers.

You watch him as he rips the foil open with his teeth and rolls the latex on. Your eyes trail down his tattooed torso — over the sparse brown hair along his sternum and down to where it trails along his stomach in a thin line. His cock is heavy in his fist, glowing crimson with desire at the tip and leaking drops of pearly-white.

You should tell him that it’s been a while for you — long enough that you’re not sure if you can take something so thick — but you don’t want to stop the momentum you have going, not even for a second. You just curl your arms down and over his shoulders, palms splayed along his sweat-slick back, and fall back with him when he leans down over you.

His gold chain brushes your chest as he ducks down to open his mouth against yours. He rolls his hips forward and back, gliding his cock through your velvety folds, before piercing you fully.

There’s a fleeting, burning sensation as your cunt stretches around him — which quickly floods into a warmer, fuller feeling when he’s seated fully inside you, with his tuft of coarse hair pressed mercilessly against your throbbing clit.

“Oh, fuck—”

Carmy’s words sound less pleasured and more terrified.

Your eyes snap open. You catch a mere glimpse of his profile as his lips smudge along your burning cheek. “You okay?” you ask through panted breaths.

“Y-Yeah. I just—” The words come out strangled and half-muffled against your neck. “It’s just… been a while for me. I can’t— I can’t move.”

A delirious grin tugs at your mouth. You rake your nails gently along the expanse of his spine, until he shivers on top of you. “You can move, Carm,” you tell him.

He laughs breathlessly, though it comes out more like a punched-out breath. “I can’t, babe. I— I really can’t.”

“It’s okay if you’re close,” you murmur gently, smearing your lips along his flushed cheek. “You already made me cum— twice. This is about you feeling good, too, you know?”

Carmy makes a strangled noise, as if your words had hit him physically somehow. He lets himself go at your permission to feel good and rolls his hips against you. There is little rhythm or precision to his thrusts. They’re shallow and quick and a little sloppy, never pulling all the way out, as he buries his moans into your neck. The bed creaks below you like it might break.

“Fuck,” he groans like it hurts him, like he’s half-scared of his own orgasm.

“That’s it...” you coo in his ear. “I know you’re close, Carm. It’s okay. Just cum for me—”

“Fuck!” It comes out like more of a whimper this time, because he’s trying to calculate how long it’s been — two minutes, if that — but his brain’s too fogged and his stomach is starting to cramp from how hard he’s tensing to keep the feeling going a little longer.

Carmy doesn’t warn you when he cums. Not that you need him to. His heavy body just tenses on top of you, forearms shaking beside your head. You exhale a contented sigh when you feel him pulsing inside of you. “There it is…” you whisper in his ear. “Give me all of it, bear. C’mon. Doing so good for me…”

As your hands rub soothingly along his spine, you feel his bare shoulders shaking a little harder than before. It’s like he’s laughing to himself, or crying maybe. Then you feel something warm and wet drip along your neck.

“Bear?”

“Fuck—” He clears his throat when his voice breaks, lifting one hand to wipe at the tear running down the bridge of his nose. He laughs wetly at himself. “Fuck, I’m so lame. I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?” you whisper, as if anything too loud might break him.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he assures you, sniffling as he pulls slightly off of you. “It was just— a lot, you know?”

“Yeah,” you nod.

“I wasn’t lying when I said it’s been a while for me.”

“Wow,” you hum sarcastically. “You’re telling me the anxious-avoidant chef who keeps his jeans in his oven isn’t absolutely drowning in ass? In this… very illustrious bachelor pad?”

His laugh is more humorous this time. “Fuck you.”

“You already did,” you remind him with a cheeky grin. “Unless you’re askin’ for round two— which I’m not opposed to.”

His mouth twitches into a more sincere grin. His glassy eyes soften further as they dart across your features, memorizing the wrinkles beside your squinted eyes and how your smile sits a little crooked to the left.

He shakes his head, ocean eyes still a little wet, as he smooths his fingers over your temple to brush away an invisible strand of hair there. “You’re gonna kill me, you know that?”

“Oh, but what a sweet, sweet way to go,” you croon as he ducks down over you again.

But if loving you is a slow death, why does kissing you taste like salvation?

Your polite smile widens a little at the nickname. “You paged?”

“We’ve got a three-year-old girl. Suspected meningitis,” Robby briefs in a monotone, each word coated in a thick layer of fatigue. “High fever, lethargy, neck stiffness— labs are ugly, too.”

Your features soften instantly. “Oh, poor baby…”

Your eyes dart to the window. You catch only a sliver of the family through the edge of the curtain — young parents, likely in their early twenties, faking teary smiles for their sick baby, who sits in a too-big bed in a too-big hospital gown patterned with so many cartoon puppies.

“Parents are freaking out, obviously,” Jack adds gently, never once taking his eyes off of you. “We thought you could walk them through the admission process before we take her upstairs.” 

“Of course,” you nod, with a voice as gentle as you look.

Jack passes the clipboard over to you and allows his calloused fingers to brush your softer ones for a beat longer than probably necessary. Though if you notice it, you make no mention of it as you flip through the thin pages and follow behind Robby into the dim room. 

The chaos outside muffles when the door clicks shut behind you. 

A young mother — Nia, the form tells you — sits in a chair beside the bed with a wadded tissue clutched in her trembling hands. Her husband, Malcolm, sits on the edge of the hospital bed, wearing the long day all over, as his daughter curls lazily into his side. Ruby Turner is clammy with fever; her round eyes are heavy with it, too. And beneath her chubby arm, is a stuffed animal wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope around its long neck.

“Hi, there…” you greet in a gentle lilt, crouching beside the bed until you’re eye level with the toddler, who eyes your warm smile with a weary suspicion. “I have to say, that is a very serious giraffe you’ve got there, Miss Ruby.”

The girl blinks back at you with sleep-weary eyes; the same dark brown as her mother’s. “Pickles,” is all she can make out through her hoarse throat. The words came out like dry gravel, which rattles harshly in her chest when she coughs hard a second later.

Her dad pats her gently on the back with a wide hand and flashes you a tired smile. “She named him Pickles,” he clarifies.

“Pickles?” you gasp. “I had a dog named Pickles when I was growing up— He looked a little like that one there.”

You motion to the shaggy white dog on her hospital gown. The girl tilts her curly head down and begins pointing at each puppy herself, aptly naming each of them Pickles. It’s the first time the child has been moderately alert, or otherwise has been willing to engage, since she arrived some hours ago. Watching you work feels a little like watching a magic trick.

“Sorry. Hi. I should probably introduce myself,” you laugh warmly and rise to full height again, shaking both of the parents’ hands. “I’m one of the pediatric caseworkers upstairs— My job is basically helping families know what’s happening next. You know, all the boring insurance details, and making sure you guys aren’t going through things alone.”

The mother nods, wiping her nose with the crumbled tissue in her fist. “So what happens now?” she asks, voice teary and trembling.

You nod with a polite smile. “Yeah, so the pediatric unit is gonna start preparing a room for her upstairs, so our doctors can give her the full evaluation she needs— They’ll probably monitor her over the next few nights, too, just to make sure everything’s okay. And you’ll be able to go with her once transport comes, of course, we’ll just need to get everything squared away with insurance while she’s getting tested.”

“So she’s gonna be okay?” the father presses, half-strangled.

You never lie to families. Not ever. It was, as you saw it, the golden rule in any hospital. Jack noticed that about you, too — because he couldn’t help but notice everything about you. But he saw how hopeful you were without ever being dishonest, without ever making promises you knew you could not keep.

“She’s exactly where she needs to be,” you answer carefully. “And she has the best doctors I know taking care of her now. You guys made a great decision by bringing her when you did.”

The mother beside you sniffles. Her exhale leaves her mouth in a quiet sob, which she buries behind her hands before her daughter can see her crying. It’s not quite sad — certainly not as much as it had been earlier that day — but rather it’s a cry of distant relief; the first time all day she hasn’t felt like the worst mother on the planet.

Robby exhales quietly through his mouth behind you — scruffy cheeks puffing, obviously eager to leave. Jack, however, just keeps on staring at you, as you turn back toward the little girl with your voice now lowered in a feigned sort of seriousness.

“Now, Miss Ruby, I’m gonna need your professional opinion on this, okay?”

The girl blinks slowly back at you.

“…Do you think Mr. Pickles needs his own hospital bracelet, too?”

Jack sees the young girl laugh for the first time all day when you’re helping her wrap a plastic arm band around the giraffe’s stuffed leg. It’s basically your superpower, the way you make all the terrifying things feel halfway manageable. By the time you’re stepping back out into the hallway, with Jack and Robby at your side, the family is a little bit steadier than they were before you arrived.

Jack eyes you up and down for a moment, before leaning in to nudge your shoulder with his broader one. Your soft sweater grazes his bare arm, and he gets a faint whiff of your pretty perfume before he leans away again.

“When did you get so good at that, huh?”

Your head whips to the side. You blink like an owl up at him “…At talking?”

“Sure, yeah,” he laughs. “At talking people off the ledge.”

“Oh.” You bounce a shoulder in a lazy shrug, then reach to pull the neck of your sweater back up again when it slips off your collarbone. “I don’t know, I just… try not to sound like a hospital brochure, I guess.”

“Hear that, brother?” Jack quips, reaching behind you to clap Robby on the shoulder. “Try not to sound like a hospital brochure next time, yeah?”

The older man says nothing. He just lifts his hand and scratches at his temple with his middle finger, discreetly flipping him off.

You laugh under your breath and head back towards the elevator, pretty skirt swishing around your ankles. “Try not to traumatize anyone while I’m gone, alright?”

“Can’t make promises like that down here, Sunshine,” Robby calls back. “You know that.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think we should just keep you down here permanently,” Jack says with a lazy shrug. His freckled biceps flex slightly when he crosses them over his broad chest, swaying back and forth on his feet. “You know, just— bring you into every room before the doctors go in. We’ll call you the Emotional Support Coordinator.”

“Oh, would you?” you scoff a faint laugh and hit the button for the upper floor. 

The doors part with a soft ding a second later. You step in through the threshold and turn to face him once more, giving him a much better view of the smile on your face.

“I mean, it’d certainly make me feel better,” he jokes.

“Well, you’re not the patient, Dr. Abbot,” you retort with a devilish grin. “I’m pretty sure you’ve got a few more years before your geriatric assessment, right?”

“A few,” he echoes sarcastically, light eyes squinted. “My opinion still counts, though.”

You shake your head at him despite the soft grin still dancing on the edges of your mouth. “You’re funny, Dr. Abbot,” is all you say, as you press the panel on the inside of the lift. The doors whir when they slide shut; your grin remains visible between them until hatch closes just ahead of you.

Jack drops his head with a chest-deflating huff when you’re gone.

Robby tries and fails to choke back his laughter. 

“You are officially 0 for 6, brother,” the man jokes. He claps Jack on the shoulder, hard, as his dark eyes squint under the weight of his smiling. “It’s honestly getting a little painful now.”

Jack turns to flash him a deadpanned look. “Shouldn’t you be clocking out now?” he wonders in a monotone.

“Not anymore,” Robby scoffs. “It’s just starting to get fun.”

The pediatric floor was quieter in the mornings, you found, after switching to the day shift some weeks back. It was never truly silent, exactly, but it was still a little bit softer, as the panic from the overnight patients faded into a calmer sort of quiet. 

Cartoon reruns play quietly behind closed doors, while lively children’s music can be heard from further in the main area, down the hall to your right. A softer set of lullabies, meanwhile, plays more distantly from the nursery behind the double doors to your left. And, somewhere within the soft sanctuary of it all, a wailing baby is fighting a losing battle against taking their liquid medicine.

It’s all confetti to you, really, from where you sit behind the reception desk with three different charts open on the monitors ahead of you. 

There’s a highlighter in your hand, a pen behind your ear, a paper cup of cooling coffee between your teeth, and approximately fourteen unfinished tasks glaring at you from the computer screen. 

You have not yet properly woken up — the same way the sun has not quite yet risen over the horizon. Your hair has been haphazardly dealt with, for one. Your cherry-colored sweater is bunched awkwardly at your waist, for another, while the white button-up you wear beneath it sticks out over top of your plaid-patterned bottoms. You vaguely noticed that your socks were mismatched when you slid into your scarlet flats, but were much too tired to bring yourself to care.

You don’t even flinch when the phone rings beside you. You reach for it with your free hand without looking, missing twice before finally plucking the plastic from the hook.

“PTMC—” You falter when you realize you still have the paper cup between your teeth. You scramble to set it back on the desk with the hand not holding the phone. You clear your throat and try again. “PTMC Pediatrics— How can I help you?”

“Morning, Sunshine.” 

Jack’s low voice crackles from the other line. You can practically picture him downstairs in the E.D. just now — leaning against the workstation with a computer glowing before him; with his messy silver curls, and his tired blue-green eyes, and that stupidly handsome half-smile he gets every time he talks to you.

You’re smiling at the thought alone before you even realize it. 

“Dr. Abbot?” you answer. “Do you need something? What didn’t you just page me—”

“Weren’t you the one who said I can call just to say hi before you switched to the dark side?”

(The day shift, he means.)

You scoff quietly and lean back in your swivel chair. “Well, I guess, that is preferable to getting paged about sick babies, so… I’ll take it.”

“Wow…” Jack croons drily. “You always say the sweetest things to me, you know that?”

“Well, what can I say? I’m very charming before seven A.M.”

“I think you’re very charming all the time, Sunshine.”

You falter for a brief moment, unable to tell if he’s flirting with you or if he’s just being nice and you’re the weirdo for thinking otherwise. So you shake the thought from your head and change the subject entirely.

“You sound tired, old man— Isn’t it almost bedtime for you?”

“Almost…” His sigh crackles through the faint static of the landline. “But unfortunately, there’s this case manager upstairs who won’t stop distracting me…”

You exhale a frustrated huff, utterly oblivious as you begin to gossip with him under your breath. “Is Hastings bothering you, too? Because she’s been hounding me about clearing beds up here since I came in an hour ago.”

There’s a long beat of silence on the other line, filled by the sound of distant chatter from the E.D.

“…I’m talking about you, Sunshine,” Jack clarifies.

“Oh…” you trail off, face burning hot. Your brain scrambles further when the light starts flashing on your desk, another call waiting. “That’s, uh— Sorry. There’s— There’s just someone on the other line.”

“Oh.”

You tuck the phone between your shoulder and cheek, fingers whizzing across the keyboard as you type with practiced (only now slightly anxious) hands. “So if you wanna have a conversation, you’re gonna have to trek all the way up to pedes, unfortunately.”

“Damn…”

“Yep…” you hum absentmindedly. “It’s a real difficult journey. Very treacherous elevator ride.”

“Well, you’re making a pret-ty compelling argument here, Sunshine.”

“Goodbye, Jack,” you lilt with a big dumb grin on your face, that you hope isn’t as audible in your voice.

“See you soon, Sunshine.”

You think nothing of his words when you decline his call and take another. You hardly expect to see him now, not when he’s still wrapping up the long night and briefing the day shift that’s trickling slowly in downstairs. He’s about half an hour shy of going home and collapsing face-first into his mattress — and you’re hardly special enough to lose sleep over.

Jack, however, respectfully disagrees. 

And so does Dana, who saunters into the workstation to start her morning, only to find the man hanging up the desk phone with a lazy grin hinting at the edges of his mouth. 

“What’s that look for, huh?” she croons in place of a greeting, shrugging off the jean jacket she arrived in and spreading it on the back of her chair before her.

Jack looks up from where he’s shoving the phone back into its cradle. “What look?” he scoffs. “I don’t have a look.”

“Oh, you most certainly have a look,” she argues.

“I have a face, Dana.”

“Uh-huh,” the older woman deadpans, half-distracted, as she logs into the monitor ahead of her, with her glasses sitting low on her nose. “And right now, that face looks like you’re the main character at the climax of a Nora Ephron movie.”

“…What’s a Nora Ephron?” Jack wonders with furrowed brows.

The corner of Dana’s mouth lifts in a crooked half-smile as she peers at him over the top of her clear frames. “Go ask Little Miss Sunshine about it. She’ll tell ya.”

Jack’s light eyes narrow in a smug sort of look as he strolls slowly past her. “Thanks for giving me an excuse to go up there, Evans,” he quips. 

“Oh, please,” she scoffs. “You were already on your way.”

There’s a newfound skip in his step, along with a faint limp in his prosthetic from the long shift, as he makes the elevator ride up to the pediatric floor — where he’s greeted instantly by soothing lullabies, children’s laughter, and reruns of old cartoons.

He’s swaddled instantly by the dim lighting and the soft warmth — both of which are rare to find in the cold, sterile chaos of the unrelenting E.D. just a few floors down. It’s like entering a whole new world when he steps out of the elevator.

Jack hears your voice, distant at first, but growing louder the further he treks down the hall. “No, I understand the policy, sir. You don’t have to explain it to me again—”

You exhale an annoyed sigh when the man on the other line prattles on, anyway, talking in a slow monotone as if you hadn’t understood him the first time. Despite your irritation, you perk instantly when Jack enters your vision, still in his black scrubs from the night shift, with a new exhaustion etched across his scruffy face.

He greets you with a tight-lipped smile anyway.

Your chest swells with a funny feeling accordingly.

“Sorry,” you mouth apologetically. “Just— one second.”

Jack waves a hand in your direction. “You’re fine,” he mumbles and turns away, idling awkwardly some feet away with his hands in his pockets, pretending not to hover. He marvels at the paintings on the walls, vivid scribbles from children of all ages, as he shifts on his weight — trying to relieve the distant pressure in his artificial limb.

You return to your phone call some feet behind him: “Yes, I get that. But this is a six-year-old going through extensive leukemia treatment— Delaying authorization for inpatient care would—”

You grumble an annoyed breath and drop your head into your hand when the man on the other line speaks over you once more. Jack glances over his shoulder at you, features softening instantly.

“—No, why should his parents waste their time fighting insurance, which should already be in place, by the way, when they could be spending it with their son? How is that fair?” you continue, obviously angry, but still so soft in your way. There’s a few seconds of silence as the person on the other line responds. You nod wordlessly to yourself at whatever they’re saying. “Yes, I will absolutely call back when your supervisor comes in— and every day until this is handled. Alright? Great. Bye…”

You set the telephone back on the hook with a huff.

“…Asshole,” you grumble around your breath, then get all sheepish again when your eyes find Jack’s. You cower under his softened stare. “Sorry… This insurance company’s trying to deny extended coverage for one of our oncology kids— because apparently compassion is illegal now, so…”

Jack musters a weak smile as he closes the distance between you. “I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

“Hopefully…” you sigh, a little embarrassed now, as you shrink further in your swivel chair. “So, uh... H-How was your shift?”

“Better now,” the older man croons, folding his arms along the countertop ahead of you, and leaning in until you can smell the cologne lingering on his skin — a mixture of leather and sandalwood.

“You’re such a suck-up, Dr. Abbot,” you say with squinted eyes.

His face twists into a look of faux-offense. “Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say to someone trying to invite you out for lunch, now is it?”

You brighten instantly. “Wait, really? That sounds so fun! Are Shen and Ellis coming, too— I haven’t seen them in ages!”

Jack’s smile falters slightly at the edges. “Well… Well, no, ‘cause I.. I thought, you know, it’d be just us. You know, you and me. Like a date.”

You blink owlishly back at him. “Oh…”

“Unless— Unless you don’t want to—” Jack stammers, quickly losing his ground.

“Of course I want to!” you blurt, a little louder and a far quicker than you mean to. “I just… I didn’t— I didn’t realize that you, you know, that you… liked me.”

His brows lower in confusion because, to him, it couldn’t have been more obvious that he was into you. He’d spent months tripping over himself to get your attention, including the time he ran into a crash cart ‘cause he was too busy staring at you to notice that it was in his way.

A chuckle sputters suddenly from his mouth accordingly. “I’ve been flirting with you for weeks! I mean, I’ve been calling up here just to talk to you since you changed shifts!”

“I thought you just liked bothering me!” you giggle in return, face burning hot.

“Yeah, well,” Jack tilts his silver head. “I do like bothering you, actually.”

“I like when you bother me, too…” you murmur sheepishly, struggling to meet the man’s unwavering stare as you swivel anxiously back and forth in your chair. You catch yourself smiling wider than you realize when you tell him, “And lunch sounds great, by the way.”

“Great…” Jack exhales a breath he didn’t know that he was holding, that he feels like he’s been holding in for weeks now. “‘Cause Robby’s kinda been threatening to ask you out for me if I didn’t do it myself, so… Happy to save myself the embarrassment.”

Your eyes widen with a girlish sort of horror. “Wait— Robby knew?”

“Sunshine,” Jack grins. “I’m pretty sure the entire hospital knew.”

Because Steve never hesitates.

Never acts like affection is something shameful.

Love pours out of him, as naturally as body heat.

If your hands are cold, he interrupts himself halfway through a story just to catch your fingers and tuck them into his jacket pockets alongside his own, rubbing warmth back into your knuckles while continuing his sentence without missing a beat.

If you yawn during movie night, his arm is around your shoulders before the sound can finish leaving your mouth. “C’mere, sleepy girl,” he murmurs automatically, pulling you sideways against his chest.

If your shoelaces come untied in the middle of the sidewalk, he drops immediately to one knee with a distracted, “hang on, baby.”

Rainwater hisses along the curb while he reties the bow tighter this time, fingers quick and practiced, one hand steadying lightly against your ankle. His knuckles brush your skin through your sock and you have to stand there, holding your breath until your lungs ache with it, staring down at the concentration pulling his brows together.

Wondering what it must be like to love someone with your whole heart and not feel like it’s going to break you open.

He’s warm everywhere, your Steve. Warm hands, warm mouth. Warm stomach pressed against your back beneath blankets. He smells like laundry detergent and faint cedar cologne rubbed into the collar of his jackets. Sometimes vanilla chapstick, sometimes mint gum. Always Steve.

And the kisses are constant too.

Quick, thoughtless ones, born entirely from fondness.

The corner of your mouth while waiting for the microwave to beep. Your forehead when he passes behind you in the kitchen. Your shoulder while you lean over the sink brushing your teeth side by side. The back of your neck when he reaches around you for orange juice in the fridge, mumbling a sleepy, “morning, honey,” against your skin before kissing beneath your hairline.

Sometimes he just looks at you for a second. Expression softening imperceptibly, like some private thought crossed his mind, and then he leans over and kisses your cheek with this quiet little hum in his throat.

Like loving you tastes good.

And god, the neck kissing.

It’s terrible.

And right now, in the middle of a museum gallery so quiet you can hear shoes squeak against polished floors, he’s doing it again.

You’re trying to read the plaque beneath some enormous renaissance painting—something about divinity and grief, oil on canvas—but Steve is behind you, arms folded around your waist while he scans the museum brochure one-handed.

One of his hands has slipped beneath your cardigan, warm palm spread low across your stomach.

“Okay, so,” he murmurs near your ear, voice low enough that the sound vibrates through you, “there’s the Greek sculpture thing upstairs, or... there’s apparently a room with these like, tiny dollhouses?”

You wrinkle your nose. “That sounds horrifying.”

“Right?” His lips brush the shell of your ear as he speaks. “Like what if one of them’s haunted?”

Then his mouth finds the hinge of your jaw.

One lazy, distracted kiss.

His lips are soft, slightly chapped from the cold outside. Warm breath spills across your skin afterward, making your pulse jump beneath his mouth. He lingers there, nose nudging lightly against your neck while he keeps mumbling off different sections of the museum.

You feel the shape of his smile against your skin when he finds another ridiculous exhibit.

“Apparently there’s a room that’s just chairs.”

“That can’t be true.”

“No, I swear to god.”

Then his mouth drifts lower.

Open-mouthed kisses this time.

Slow enough that warmth blooms beneath every press of his lips. You feel the faint scrape of his teeth catch your skin playfully before he smooths over it with another softer kiss, his thumb stroking across your stomach.

Your entire body tightens around the feeling.

The worst part is knowing that he isn’t trying to fluster you.

Steve isn’t performing intimacy.

He just never second-guesses affection.

Unlike you.

For you, every touch feels catastrophic.

The second Steve touches you, awareness crashes through your body all at once—your pulse, your breathing, the weight of his hand, whether your hair smells okay, whether your stomach feels too soft beneath his palm, whether someone across the gallery can see this.

Whether you deserve to be loved this openly at all.

“....and Robin said there’s some painting of a guy eating his own son which honestly seems kinda—”

He stops, hand stilling against your stomach.

“Babe?”

You blink hard, staring at the plaque without reading a single word.

Steve leans back, concern creasing immediately between his brows.

“Hey,” his hand slides higher, rubbing gently over your ribs. “You okay?”

“Hm? Mhm.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Another lie.

Your skin still burns where he kissed you.

And underneath all the panic is something worse.

Fear and hunger, knotted so tightly you can’t separate them anymore.

Wanting him closer, wanting him to keep touching you forever. Wanting to crawl inside every warm, gentle thing he gives you and stay there.

Not knowing what you’d do if he ever stopped.

Because as terrifying as it is to be loved this softly, you think losing it might actually destroy you.

“You wanna sit down for a sec?” Steve asks quietly. “I think I still have that granola bar in my bag if you’re hungry.”

You almost laugh, because of course that’s where his mind goes.  

Care.

Always care.

“No, I’m okay,” you say quickly, forcing a smile. “We can keep going. The uh, Greek sculpture thing sounds good.”

He watches you for a beat longer than comfortable, thumb rubbing against your hipbone through your jeans.

“Okay,” he says finally.

His hand slides up your arm, gently fixing the cardigan slipping off your shoulder. His fingers brush your neck in the process, absentmindedly smoothing your hair back into place too.

And then, because he’s Steve—because affection lives inside him so naturally he doesn’t know how to love except with his whole body—

He reaches down and interlaces your fingers with his.

Warmth immediately fills the spaces between your knuckles, his callused fingers curling around yours with steady, secure pressure.

He keeps holding your hand the entire walk toward the staircase, thumb stroking across your skin while he talks about haunted dollhouses and ugly marble babies and whether you think ancient Greek people had chest hair.

And isn’t it terrifying, how quickly your body has learned what safety feels like in someone else’s hands?

...

It isn’t just the touching.

You almost wish it was.

Because that would be easier to understand.

A touch can be explained away:

Steve’s just naturally affectionate. Steve likes physical contact.  

But it’s not just that.

It’s the way he loves you without condition. Without making you earn it first.

A few weeks into dating, he showed up at your apartment carrying a bouquet so enormous it nearly blocked his entire face.

When you opened the door, all you could see were flowers.

Soft cream roses crowded against pale pink delphiniums, petals curling delicately at the edges like silk ribbon. Deep burgundy dahlias bloomed low in the arrangement, velvety and dark as spilled wine, white baby’s breath drifting between everything like tiny bursts of snowfall.

And hidden right in the middle were your favorites.

Blue hydrangeas.

Dusty-blue petals clustered together like storm clouds at dusk, edges fading lavender where the light caught them.  

You had pointed them out exactly once while passing a florist downtown.

Three seconds, maybe.  

You remembered slowing briefly in front of the shop window because they looked beautiful beneath the warm yellow display lights. Rain had just started misting softly against the sidewalk and Steve had been halfway through ranting about some middle schooler trying to rent an R-rated horror movie with a fake ID. You’d smiled at his story before murmuring, almost absentmindedly, “Those are so pretty.”

That was it.

You hadn’t even thought he heard you.

But Steve Harrington has a habit of holding onto the tiniest details about you like they're something precious.

“Baby, I swear to god,” Steve was saying now as he stepped inside your apartment, nudging the door shut with his foot, “I had the craziest day today. This guy at work tried to return a tape completely melted.”

The bouquet landed in your arms before he shrugged off his jacket.

“Melted,” he repeated, horrified, running a hand through his hair. “Like, fully warped. Looked like somebody cooked that thing in a microwave.”

You stared down at the flowers.

The bouquet was heavy enough that you had to support it with both arms. Thick stems pressed cool and damp against your palms beneath layers of cream florist paper, the wrapping folded slightly unevenly around the flowers and tied together with rough twine that looked suspiciously hand-done.

Not florist-perfect, but Steve-perfect.

The flowers smelled dizzyingly alive: sweet rose perfume softened by rainwater and the cool, earthy scent of freshly cut stems.

“…um, Steve?”

“—and Keith asked me if I did that,” he huffed, toeing off his shoes. “I mean, can you believe that shit? What does he think I do at work all day, destroy tapes for fun?”

“Steve.”

“Yeah?”

You blinked at him slowly.

“What’s…” Your throat tightened strangely around the words. “What’s this for?”

He looked down at the bouquet like he’d genuinely forgotten he walked in carrying it.

“Uh…” His brows lifted slightly. “Flowers?”

He laughed softly after saying it, confused.

But you didn’t laugh.

Because your brain was already doing what it always did: rummaging frantically for conditions. For expectations and hidden meanings tucked beneath kindness.

Your heartbeat started creeping unpleasantly high in your throat.

Was it an anniversary?

Oh god.

Had you forgotten something?

Your stomach dropped, dates scrambling uselessly through your head too fast to follow. One month? Six weeks? Was there something couples were supposed to celebrate this early? Had Steve done something thoughtful and now you were standing there empty-handed like the worst girlfriend alive?

The cellophane crackled beneath your tightening grip.

“Did I…” You cleared your throat quietly. “Did I forget something?”

Steve’s forehead wrinkled.

“Huh?”

“The flowers.”

“What about ‘em?”

Your voice came out impossibly small. “Why’d you get these?”

“Uh, ‘cause I…” He huffed a tiny laugh through his nose, head tilting. “’Cause I wanted to?”

His confusion only made your chest tighten more.

“Is it our anniversary or something?”

His frown deepened. “What? No.”

“Then… why?”

Steve stared at you for a second, slightly open-mouthed now, the soft amusement on his face fading into gentle concern.

“Baby, they’re just flowers.”

You stared back helplessly.

“But why?” you asked again, quieter this time.

“Well, I…” He shrugged one shoulder slightly. “I saw them. And I thought about you.”

The apartment suddenly felt very quiet.

You looked back down at the bouquet in your arms.

The hydrangeas were even prettier up close, petals shifting between pale blue and soft lavender depending on how the light hit them. Tiny sprays of baby’s breath caught between larger blooms like stars scattered through clouds.

A single sunflower tucked near the back, drooping sideways because Steve probably had the bouquet strapped into the passenger's seat on the drive over.

Your throat burned.

“That’s it?” you asked quietly.

Steve let out a soft breath through his nose.

His socked feet whispered against the floor as he stepped closer, one hand rising to cup your cheek.

Big enough to hold the entire side of your face, his palm enveloped you in warmth. Your lashes fluttered at the feeling of his thumb sweeping beneath your eye, brushing over the apple of your cheek, soothing something there without even knowing what hurt.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “That’s it. I saw ’em and thought you’d like them.” His mouth tugged into a small smile. “You stared at those flowers for like, ten minutes.”  

You huffed weakly. “It was not ten minutes.”

Steve’s smile widened, encouraged by the sound of your laugh.

“There was this whole wrapping station thing too,” he added, gesturing proudly toward the bouquet still overflowing from your arms. The cream paper rustled softly as he touched it, uneven folds bunching around the stems where the twine had already started slipping loose on one side. “The lady kept trying to help me but I told her I could handle it.”

He tipped his head, inspecting his own work. “Pretty good, right?”

You looked down again.

The wrapping really was crooked. One corner folded inward strangely while another flared too wide, baby’s breath poking free through gaps in the paper.  

It couldn’t have been more beautiful.

Steve’s grin turned sheepish, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. “Honestly, I think she stopped helping 'cause I was stressing her out.”

A quiet bubble of laughter escaped you, and the second it did, you noticed the way his face changed. Grin softening, eyes gone warm at the realization that he’d made you smile.  

That was the other unbearable thing about him.

How carefully he watches for your joy, waiting for the next chance to do it again.   

He really had done all this just because he wanted to.

No special occasions—he just saw something beautiful and immediately thought of you.

You blinked quickly, staring down at the velvety rose petals before he could notice the dangerous sting gathering behind your eyes.

Nobody had ever remembered little things about you before.

Not enough to act on them later.

Certainly not enough to drive across town carrying an absurdly oversized bouquet because of one passing comment you barely remembered making yourself.  

But Steve noticed everything.

The tea you always reach for when you’re sick. The songs you hum in the car without realizing. Which side of the bed you like to sleep on. Which sweatshirt you wear when you’re sad. The way you peel pepperoni slices off pizza before eating.  

The flowers you paused to admire for three seconds on a rainy sidewalk weeks ago.

Your fingers tightened carefully around the bouquet.

“Thank you,” you managed quietly.  

Steve smiled, stepping closer until the bouquet crushed lightly between your bodies, cellophane crinkling in the quiet of the apartment.

“Yeah. Anytime, baby,” he hummed, bending down to press his smile into the curve of your mouth, as natural as breathing.

...

You don’t know why you get like this.

Why your body reacts like it’s bracing for impact when all he’s doing is being gentle. Why his affection makes your chest ache the way it does.

Why your first instinct is always to freeze.

Body going stiff whenever Steve wraps himself around your back in grocery store checkout lines, chin hooked over your shoulder while he complains about magazine prices and rubs his thumb beneath the hem of your shirt.

Sometimes he brushes your hair behind your ear mid-conversation and keeps talking without even realizing he did it. Sometimes he reaches for your hand in his sleep, eyes still closed, finding you beneath the blankets when his body notices your absence before he does.

And you wonder why, in all those sweet, wonderful moments—when he kisses your forehead while waiting for the microwave to beep, when he pulls you against his chest during movies, when he drops to his knees on dirty pavement because he doesn't want you to trip over your laces, when he holds your face in both hands like it’s something precious—you feel this horrible urge to apologize afterward.

Sorry I’m difficult. Sorry you picked me. Sorry you don’t realize yet there are easier people to love.

Love had always arrived transactional before him.

Conditional.

Dependent on being easy enough, pretty enough, quiet enough, useful enough.

But Steve loves you without condition.

And being seen that intimately by someone so good—someone as warm and earnest and sincere as Steve Harrington—feels unbearable sometimes.

Maybe that’s why nights like this overwhelm you so badly.

A fancy dinner downtown stretches long past sunset, candlelight flickering gold across Steve’s face while he steals bites from your plate despite insisting twenty minutes ago he was “seriously so stuffed.”

Wine leaves his cheeks faintly pink by the time you leave the restaurant. His tie hangs loose, crooked around his throat, top buttons undone and sleeves rolled to his elbows. Summer heat still clings to the sidewalks even this late at night, thick with blooming jasmine spilling from flower boxes outside storefronts. Somewhere farther downtown, music drifts through open bar doors, muffled bass and laughter carried through the warm air.

Steve's hand never leaves your lower back, fingers flexing gently against you whenever the crowd thickens, pulling you instinctively closer to his chest.

By the time you drift into the park, your heels are dangling from one hand and your body feels pleasantly heavy from the wine.

The grass is cool beneath your bare feet. Damp earth presses between your toes as you wander deeper along the meadow paths, fireflies blinking through the dark around you like floating embers.

Steve is halfway through retelling some ridiculous story his students had told him earlier that day, pausing every other sentence because he keeps getting distracted trying to kiss you.  

Grass stains smear across the knees of his expensive slacks when he finally pulls you down beside him into the field.

“Steve,” you protest weakly, glancing at his pants.

“What?” he asks innocently, tightening his hands around your waist.

“Those are gonna stain.”

“Mm.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, grin lazy. “Worth it.”

You lose track of time there.

Talking between kisses, lying shoulder-to-shoulder in the grass while Steve points out constellations he names wrong on purpose just to make you argue with him. His fingers comb slowly through your hair while your head rests against his shoulder, skin sticking together in the humid night air.

And by the time he gets you home, you’re half-floating.

Steve crowds you against the apartment door before the lock has even clicked shut.

Both hands on your waist, lips sealing over yours. The force of it nudges you softly into the door, his body fitting against yours as he grunts low into your mouth like he’s been holding himself back all night.

Sweet burgundy wine still lingers on his tongue when his lips part against yours.

He’s warm everywhere.

Warm hands sliding beneath your dress, warm mouth against your throat. Warm breath ghosting over newly exposed skin every time he pauses to look at you.

And he does pause, constantly.

Heavy-lidded hazel eyes drag across your face, your throat, the curve of your body beneath his hands, lips gone slack from that third glass of Merlot though his smile tells you he’s drunk on more than just the wine.

His palms skim along the back of your thighs while he kisses down your neck, the soft scrape of his stubble pulling a shaky breath in the shape of his name.

He smiles against your skin, feeling your fingers clutch tighter at his shoulders.

“C’mere,” he murmurs softly.

The bedroom lights stay low when he walks you backward toward the bed.

Blue comforter wrinkling beneath you when he eases you onto your back, following you down, kissing over every inch of exposed skin while your heartbeat stutters harder with each press of his mouth.

Broad palms smooth upward beneath your dress while his lips trail lower, the slow descent of it dizzying; his mouth dragging across your collarbone, the center of your chest, down your stomach, your ribs, each kiss separated by warm breaths and playful nips that make your muscles jump.

And when he kneels at the foot of the bed—nudging your legs apart carefully, lovingly, thumbs stroking slow circles into the soft skin inside your thighs as he settles himself in between—he lets out this quiet little sigh.

Like nowhere else on earth could possibly compare to this.

“Pretty girl,” he murmurs against you, pressing the words directly into your skin. “You’re so beautiful.”

His fingers hook beneath the waistband of your underwear while he glances up at you through heavy lashes, tongue darting briefly to wet his lower lip.

You reach for his hair quickly, panic flaring.

“Steve,” you whisper. “Wait.”

His hands still immediately where they rest on your hips. “What’s wrong?”

You swallow hard. “Nothing, I just...”

Your head spins pleasantly and horribly all at once from the wine and the heat and the sweet boy kneeling between your thighs looking at you like you hung the moon.

“I should shower first.”

His brows pull together. “Why?”

“Because,” you laugh weakly. “I’m sweaty.”

Steve smiles at that, like it’s the sweetest thing he’s heard all day.

He leans in even closer, nose brushing over your clothed mound before he presses a slow kiss there.

“Baby,” he murmurs against you, “I don’t care.”

“Steve...”

“I mean it.”

His hands glide upward along your waist, warm and heavy as velvet, fingertips grazing your ribs on the way up.

“I like you like this,” he says softly.

Then he takes in a breath.

A deep, deliberate pull through his nose, the warm drag of air against the damp fabric making your thighs twitch around him.

“You smell good,” he murmurs, kissing you there again. “Like summer.”

Your face burns, but Steve only smiles wider, already halfway gone.

“Just stay,” he whispers. “Let me take care of you. We can take a bath after, promise.”

He turns his head to the side, nose nudging affectionately along your inner thigh before he closes his lips around the sensitive skin there. The suction is soft at first, teasing warmth into you before the pressure deepens just enough to sting pleasantly.   

A new love bite starts to bloom, petal-soft and tender, like a flower kissed awake by rain. His mouth traces over it, soothing the flush of it back into softer color with gentle, unhurried pecks.

“So pretty,” he murmurs, pressing another kiss over the bruise-tinted skin. “My perfect girl.”

To be loved this intensely feels like it could swallow you whole.

Like the warmth of it could burn straight through you.

You don’t even realize you’ve started crying until your breath catches sharply in your chest, a raw, jagged gasp tearing from your lungs.

Steve’s head snaps up instantly.

You jerk your face away in horror, both hands flying to cover your eyes before he can see.

God.

Oh god.

Not now.

Why now?

“Baby, are you—”

His voice cuts off the second your breath stutters again, louder this time.

The mattress jolts beneath you as he pushes upright, fast enough that the bed frame gives a small protesting creak.

“Hey, hey—what’s wrong?”

You can feel him at your side immediately, his quick, uneven breaths brushing against your hands where they're pressed tight to your face.

“Baby, what happened?”

His fingers curl around your wrists, firm but impossibly gentle.

Always gentle.

“Did I hurt you? Did I do something?”

“N-no,” you choke out immediately.

“Then what?” His voice starts to break slightly, turning sharp with worry. “What is it? Honey, what’s wrong?”

You shake your head helplessly, unable to form the words, unable to explain.

The lamp clicks on beside you. Warm amber light spills across everything at once: rumpled sheets and discarded clothes, Steve kneeling beside you, shirt open at the collar, belt buckle undone and tie hanging loose around his neck.  

The flowers from dinner are on the dresser.

Slightly uneven in their vase, waterline crooked, the hydrangeas beginning to open wider in the warmth of your apartment.

Embarrassment crashes over you like a wave.

Perfect.

A night he’d planned so carefully—reservations at the candlelit Italian place downtown, your favorite wine already waiting at your table, flowers arranged before you’d even walked through the door—

And now you’re crying halfway through sex because your brain can’t handle something as simple as being loved.

You turn your face away again instinctively, shoulders curling inward, but the tears don’t stop. They come harder, messy and humiliating, gasps of air ripping through your chest no matter how hard you try to swallow them down.

You feel Steve’s hand slide up your spine.

Slow, slow passes between your shoulder blades, fingertips pressing gently.

“Hey,” he whispers. “Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to hide, okay? You don’t have to hide from me.”

“I’m sorry,” you choke out, wiping at your face uselessly. “I-I don’t know w-why I’m—I’m sorry, fuck, I’m sorry—”  

“No, hey, don’t apologize, baby. Don’t say sorry.”

You resist him weakly when he tries to gather you in his arms.

You can’t look at him.

Can’t stand the thought of seeing the concern on his face after ruining this.

“I just—” You let out a shaky breath, voice cracking completely. “Fuck, I-I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Steve stills at that.

Then slowly, carefully, he takes your wrists fully in both hands.

You let him this time. Arms trembling the entire way down as he lowers your hands into his lap. You still refuse to meet his eyes, staring instead at the heavy rise and fall of his chest. His crisp white shirt is wrinkled, open at the collar, a faint pink bite mark just above his collarbone where you kissed him during the taxi ride home.  

His gaze presses into you, heavy and intent, trying to read what you can’t say.

“I need you to look at me,” he says quietly.

“I can’t.”

“Yeah,” he answers immediately. “You can.”

Another tear slips down your cheek. He catches it without hesitation, wiping it away with the pad of his thumb.

“Please,” he whispers, softer now. “Look at me.”

You finally do.

Steve’s hair is a mess, chestnut strands falling across his forehead where your fingers had been tangled moments ago.

His eyes—warm honey and green and amber all blurred together beneath the low light—are pained, tight with worry and unbearably expressive.

“There's nothing wrong with you,” he says, unshakably certain. “Nothing.”

His lips are swollen from kissing you, parted slightly with how hard he’s breathing.

It’s so painfully clear, how panicked he is.

Steve’s face never hides anything

It doesn’t know how to.

When he’s happy, it shows in the soft wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

When he’s worried, it gathers in his brows, in the tight set of his mouth.

And when he loves, it radiates from him so naturally it feels endless. Like sunlight.

You wonder what that must feel like.

To love someone without fear.

To offer tenderness without expectation, without the quiet dread that grows the more there is to lose.

He reaches up slowly, clearing tear-sticky strands away from your temples, thumb brushing beneath your eye. Still trying to read what hurts, the furrow in his brows asking without words.

You want to tell him.

For him, you’d try.

But the truth feels monstrous once it reaches your throat.

How do you explain that being loved by him feels unbearable sometimes?

That every touch lands somewhere deep inside you that still expects pain?

That he gives and gives and gives, asking for nothing in return, and yet some terrified part of you waits for the bill to come due?

How do you explain that it makes you feel broken, not knowing how to take something he gives so easily?

You part your lips, throat dry and aching.

Steve waits, thumb rubbing soothing circles into your wrists.

Patient.

Always so fucking patient with you.

“I just...” Your voice shakes. You stare at his mouth instead of his eyes, because it’s easier than being seen.

“...I just really love you.”

It rushes out so quickly.

And in a horrifyingly beautiful moment of clarity, you realize it’s the first time you’ve ever said it to anyone.

Ever.

Steve goes still. His brows soften, eyes drooping at the corners. His lips part soundlessly for a second.

“Oh,” he breathes.

You feel his hands twitch against yours, squeezing your fingers unconsciously.  

“I love you too,” he says, immediate and certain. “I... I love you so much it’s kind of insane.”

He watches you for a moment, thumb rubbing slow over your knuckles.

“Is that... is that why you're crying? 'Cause you love me a lot?”

A small, startled laugh breaks through your tears; it sounds so simple when he says it like that.   

It isn’t simple.

But maybe it also is.

So you nod, watching him visibly come back to himself, drawing out a shaky breath, shoulders dropping heavily like he’d been bracing too, just in a different way.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay. C’mere.”

This time you don’t hesitate.

You fold into him, feeling his arm wrap securely around your back, the other cradling the back of your head.

And what you always used to brace against—tonight, you sink into willingly.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs into your hair.

You let your eyes slip shut, burying your face in the crook of his neck, fingers crinkling his shirt as you hold on tight.

“I love you,” you whisper again, the words pressed softly against his skin.

Thank you, you mean.

Thank you for being gentle with me. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for loving me like it’s easy.

Thank you.

You shuffle against his hips. He hisses, and he laughs. “Honey, enough. Two minutes, let me make sure Dariyay’s gonna be alright with Robin.” 

“It– it is hot–”

“I know, I can feel it. Feel you,” he says quietly.

“Please, just– upstairs with me, now, and– Robin and Dariyay go.”

“I gotta tell Robin first, she’s gonna be pissed that I’m not giving her a ride–”

“Dariyay can drive her.”

Steve tilts his head to the side. “Shit, yeah. She can take her. You’re a smart girl, you know?”

Your hips rock more insistently at the praise, even if he’s teasing. “Now, fast, kiss me and kiss more.” 

Steve holds you tight by the hips to ease you back. “We’ll get caught,” he says with a big laugh. “This heat, I actually have some questions–”

“What question?” you ask, allowing the space he desires while the heat in your stomach melts like lava, slow and blistering. 

“Well, you’re fucking boiling in your skin, babe, so I guess I’m wondering if it’s hurting?”

You press your hand to your tummy. “Small hurt. Lots want, lots sensitive?”

“Huh.” He’s so pink you’d think he was the one cooking in his skin.

You take his hand on your hip and begin dragging it over your tummy, but you don’t get far, interrupted by a quiet creak of the door.

“Sister?” Dariyay asks.

You both flinch. Dariyay is standing in the kitchen doorway with her empty plate, and she’s frowning, but it’s friendly for her. If she were mad, she’d be scowling. 

“Oh,” she says, hesitating when she notices your position atop him, “sorry.” Then, in Mer, “I thought I heard my name. Are you okay?” 

“I think it’s the heat,” you say. “It feels awful.”

She bites her lip. “Oh, okay. Do you– will you be okay, with him? You don’t have to choose a courting partner now if you’re not sure.”

Steve has a great talent for turning hot and heavy into gentle, steady. He shifts you downward and holds you close like you’re sick, not horny. It’s funny as it is assuring. 

“I love him. He’s not the awful part,” you say. 

Dariyay shoves her plates onto the nearest countertop. “Then it’ll be fun. Just be careful, okay?” 

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” you say. 

She offers a real smile. “That’s so gross. I will go, then, and play at being a human at the ray-dee-oh. Maybe I can get Eddie to come and be my entertainment.” 

“He can be your courting partner.”

“I think he is destined to be my best friend,” she says, which is not a rejection. She says it like it could be a joke, or equally like Eddie might end up her husband. You’re wondering how okay with that Eddie’d be as the rattle of a bike being shoved against the front of the house echoes from the foyer. 

“That’s Robin,” Steve says. 

You let your embarrassment overtake the heat for a little while, forehead to Steve’s chest, listening to Dariyay scamper down the hall. She and Robin have a stilted conversation that ends with both girls laughing, and Robin shouting, “Happy for you, dingus!” down the hall.

“What say?” you ask his chest. 

Steve tips your head back by the nape.

Your eyes go owlish. You’re unbelievably warm—Steve feels cold in contrast when he slips his arms under your thighs to lift you, but it’s not want or need you feel as he carries you upstairs, it’s adoring. He carries you without complaint, doesn’t huff about how heavy you are, nor the mess you leave in the kitchen. He may love to bitch but Steve’s never complained about looking after you, and doesn’t sound anything but eager as he elbows open the bedroom door, laying you out on the bottom of the bed. He’s laughing to himself. You’re inclined to feel it. 

“Kiss?” you ask. “Please. Please? Please.”

Steve takes too long to lean down, but when he does the kiss is slow, his tongue working into your mouth while his hand curls behind your neck, leaning his weight into you carefully. 

“Kiss,” you insist. 

“This is kissing.”

You don’t know the human word for what you want, but there’s a thrumming in your chest and you know where you need his hands, his entire body. You wriggle up the bed with his shirt screwed in your gasp, forcing him to climb and follow. The kiss you take then is searching, your nose pushing against his nose until he returns the kiss. 

He’s too gentle. 

“Kiss,” you murmur into his mouth. 

“Baby.”

“Please, kiss me.” 

Steve frames your face in his paw of a hand, his eyes dark, his lashes kissing in their corners as he squints. “You remember what ow means?” he asks, which is patronising. You pinch him. He laughs. “Yeah, ow. I hurt you, you tell me no. Is that okay? Can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” you say under your breath, so hot now that it’s uncomfortable. The only place even mildly cool is the apex of your thighs, your panties moving slick against the crease of your cunt as you search for traction. “Please. Kiss me.”

You take his hand where it’s resting at your hip and pull it to your tummy, wanting to force him lower and scared to at the same time. 

Steve looks between your bodies. His thumb draws a circle into your navel, flicking your shirt over your belly button to expose the heaving plane of skin there. It’s not low enough.

“Touch you?” he says, so quietly it’s almost a whisper. 

“Please.”

“Yeah?” He rests his hand over the bump of your cunt. “Here?”

You squirm. 

Steve laughs nicely, shaking his head, and fits another kiss against your mouth, his hand drifting up to tease the hot skin of your stomach, a frustrating diversion. 

You’re mildly annoyed and overly excited, your eyes squeezing closed as Steve kisses you so fiercely you can’t breathe. It takes long seconds, maybe a whole minute of kissing before you’re wondering how much air a human boy can go without, another minute to get him panting over your mouth. You make a noise into his kissing, a pleading, beggy sigh, your hips rolling up to find him hard above you. 

There’ve been many mornings where you’ve woken to find him already hard behind you without so much as a kiss, but more recently you’ve started teasing it out of him, just to hear the hitch in his breath when you touch him, all pained longing. 

You feel cruel, now. This is the pained longing. 

You scrabble for his hand and guide it down again. “Please,” you whisper, practically choked with wanting, “need you, I need touch.”

“Sorry,” he whispers back, resting the tip of his nose on your cheek, like he’s collecting himself, “‘m I making it worse? Is it still hurting?” 

“No, feels like… like it can hurt later, not now.”

“Like it could hurt, if you don’t– if we don’t fix it?” he asks. 

“Mm,” you hum. 

“Well, we can’t have that,” he says, the hint of his smile on your cheek as he pulls up. 

His eyes are blown, cheeks full of red and the beginnings of dampness in the hair by his ears. It’s getting warmer in here, but you don’t want to ask him to open the window or turn on the fan. You can't picture the absence of him. 

“You know what this is?” he asks.

“Mm?”

“This, baby,” he says, his hand turning, fingers laying over the softness of your cunt. “You know what this is, yeah?”

You know what you have, if that’s what he’s worried about, but you’re thinking he’s asking about sex, instead. “Dariyay tell me,” you say, “told me. The heat, and the– the fit?” 

“Yeah. How we go together? She explained it to you?”

“Yes. Know it.” You knew of sex before, but Dariyay had given you specifics, because she’d seen the way you looked at Steve. Coupling is not much more complicated than you’d imagined.

“And that’s what you want?” he asks, tilting your head to the side with the flat of his palm, before dragging his pinky finger along your cheek. 

“Yeah, that’s what I want,” you say, softly and quietly, happy to be touched however he wants to do it. 

“Yeah? We can go slow.” That pinky finger drags down your neck, where he lays his hand at the base of your throat so gently it’s a wonder you can feel his touch at all. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Do you hurt me?” you ask him. 

“No, never.” 

You want him to realise that this is you knowing everything you want, despite the heat, the tug inside you begging to be taken. You wanted all of him before your insides began to melt. “You don’t hurt me,” you say. 

He turns his head to the side, gathering your cheek again in his big hand to hold you. “You remember what love is?” he asks. 

“Inside of love. Me and you.”

“Yeah, me and you. So this is something I need your help with.”

You settle back into soft sheets. He’s so pretty. You aren’t sure what to do now beyond let him have you. “Not know how to help.”

“Just talk to me, baby. That’s all I need. Can you do that?” 

“Yeah, I can talk you.” 

He smiles at you strangely. Strange for Steve, so somber and measured. “I love your voice. Love your voice.” He kisses your cheek, your jaw, and your throat. “Here, your voice. It makes everything you say… It’s beautiful.” 

You like this game. Exactly how it went when he kissed you that first time, the trail of kisses and praises down your wrist to your shoulder. He kisses you now, at the base of your throat and your chest despite the clothes, over your heart, his hair already a brown mess from your eagerness. You stroke it out of his eyes. 

“Talk to me,” he says gently. 

“Love your voice.”

“Yeah?”

“Warm, and… smooth.” You rub his back, demonstrating in the same way he had when he introduced the word. “In mornings, voice is– is not smooth. Like most.” 

Steve’s hands are shaking. 

You catch them, one on your tummy, one by your heart, and you hold them tightly. Can practically feel both your pulses beating in the press of your palms. “You are okay?” you ask him. 

Steve breathes out suddenly. “No. I mean, yes. I mean–” He laughs. “I just want you and I’m scared I’m gonna– I’m scared you won’t know what you need, that I’m gonna hurt you, and I want you. Fuck, I want you.” 

You laugh. “I am not scared,” you say. 

“No?” he asks. 

“No. So you– you kiss me, now? Please. And me and you, not scared. Not scary.” You squeeze his hands. “Sorry I not know how say.” 

“You’re sorry? Don’t be sorry, are you kidding? You’re amazing. You’re so much– you’re more than I–” Steve giggles and tips down to rest his head on your chest. He squeezes your hands back, “I’m sorry I’m such a loser, I used to be so fucking cool and I knew how to do this, but you are really important to me, and I’m fucking so nervous.”

“Nervous word?”

“Like little scared.” 

“Me?” you ask, lifting your chin, shoving at him until he’ll look at you. “Scared me?”

“Scared of me,” he says. 

You laugh. “You are not scary, I say that. Listen me. You tell me talk, I talk, you do not listen.”

“Alright!” he says, laughing again, bringing your hand to his mouth to kiss. “I’m listening now. Nobody’s scared.”

“Little scared,” you say softly. 

“Yeah?” 

“Little.”

“Do you want me to talk you through it?” 

Your lips part of their own accord. “Talk through?” 

“Do you want me to tell you how we do it, before it happens? I don’t mind, baby.”

“Tell me,” you say. 

Steve rubs your stomach slowly. “Sex is easy. It should be easy.” His hand sinks lower. “It’s mostly touch, yeah? And your–” He swallows around nothing, squares his expression, and lets his voice drop and droop into honey. “I can make you feel good with my hands, or my mouth, or I can fuck you. It doesn’t have to be fast, or rough, we’ll start slow. It’s just me and you in here.”

That’s the togetherness. You nod surely. “I know.”

“You do?” He licks his lips. “I figure first I’d warm you up, you can figure out what feels good and I can learn how to do it to you.” Steve laughs like it bubbles up. “Shit, I’m so fucking hard, I think you’re killing me.”

“Hard?”

Steve takes your hand and presses it to his stomach. 

You laugh, but it’s all air, all breath as you feel down the solidness of his front. You’re not brave enough to touch him.

He shakes himself in front of you like he’s trying to dry off. “Alright, I’m gonna make a mess in my pants if I don’t take them off, so– so– I’m gonna take my shirt off.”

He begins pulling off his shirt and the damn breaks—you get your elbow in your shirt to yank it off, lift your hips and kick out of your skirt, searching behind yourself for the catch on your stupid bra until Steve’s taking you by the wrists. “I can do it.”

“Off?”

“Right now, let me get it.”

He lifts you up toward him, his forearms either side of you as his fingers slip under the line of your bra. It brings his face into reach again, any hesitation forgotten while you kiss his jaw, your lips parting, bottom teeth scratching upward as you bite him gently. 

“Fucking thing,” he mumbles, letting the catch of your bra fall open. 

“Fucking thing?”

“You. You’re such a fucking thing, you’re a nuisance, you…” Steve takes a very deep breath as he sits up and looks down at your naked chest, your bra having fallen into your lap. “You’re everything.”

Steve ducks down to kiss your chest, and you startle so hard you burst out laughing. The laughter doesn’t last, wobbling into weariness as he places half-moon kisses over your sternum, his hand just above it forcing you into the sheets. It wanders after that. 

You flinch from his touch, right over your heart, then lower, and lower. 

Steve doesn’t worry, but he does rest his face on your tummy and look up at you to ask, “Okay?” 

“Sensitive.”

“Yeah, really sensitive. Feel good?” 

“Do again?” 

Steve runs his fingertips over your nipple, brushes his thumb into it roughly, smiling as you shudder. He kisses under your breast again then downward, hands swiftly following. He kisses your belly and your hip, kisses the band on your panties and rubs his nose into the fabric. You seize up, worried he’ll feel the wetness there and laugh, wanting him to be faster, wanting him to strip it away from you. 

“Touch?” you ask. 

He kisses your stomach with the same tenacity he’d have kissed your mouth, hand skirting around all fluttery and warm. You want him to go lower, but he doesn’t. He kisses and kisses and scratches at you with his teeth. He even eases the panties down to kiss along the line, anywhere but where you need him. You’re aching. Your heart is starting to go again, that neediness you felt at the kitchen table returned triple fold right there at the apex of your thighs. 

“Gonna take these off, yeah? Give your cunt some attention,” he says quietly. 

Cunt. That’s the word Dariyay had said, seceretive-like under her breath. Steve says it without shame, like it’s nothing to be ashamed of, so you don’t think as you ask, “Please, kiss?” 

“Kiss you here?” he asks, hand on your thigh now, fingers slipping into the leg of your panties and hand coming up, forcing the fabric down. 

You can’t help giving another giddy laugh. “Kiss me all place.” 

Steve brings your underwear down to your knees and goes silent above you. 

You press your legs together automatically, unsure, but Steve braces his hand on the softness of your inner thigh and eases the mere millimetres apart. Your heart lurches, but you aren’t as shy as you’d imagined. Maybe it’s Steve’s clear, rabid adoration, maybe it’s because he’s seen it before in simpler moments, maybe it’s the rampant tugging in your tummy and your cunt. It feels like you’ve needed this for hours. 

“Jesus,” he murmurs, hitting at your thigh with the back of his hand, like a pat, worse when you shift your leg to the side to oblige him and feel the slickness that’s wetting you spreading over your thighs, “aw, Jesus, fuck. Fuck.”

“Fuck ow?” you murmur back. Or fuck now? 

“Fuck like beautiful,” he says, his thumb ghosting up the softness of your cunt. You jump, tickled, and his eyes flash to your face. When he sees your bitten lip, he brings his thumb flat to your cunt and feels at you all over again. “You’re so wet.” 

“Wet, I know,” you worry. 

“No, it’s good. It’s pretty.” 

“Kiss?” 

“Can I?” 

“Ask and ask and ask.”

Steve rolls your panties the rest of the way down your legs with some manoeuvring, kisses the inside of your knee, and suddenly pulls one leg over his shoulder, his face seeking into your cunt unabashedly. 

“Ah!” you say, startled by the hot, wide press of his tongue, not sure what you were expecting as you’d begged to be kissed, but surely not this. “Steve.” 

A nose pressed hard into the petal folds of you, his tongue against wetness, plushness, kisses up to the apex and then– 

“Fuck!” you say, your heel digging into his naked shoulder. “Oh, no!” 

“Oh no?” he asks, pulling away fast, wetness shining on his chin and cheek. “Hurt you?” 

“No stop,” you say, taking his face into your hand and yanking. Don’t stop, you mean, but the words aren’t clear right now. 

“Felt good?”

“Yes!”

“Don’t say oh no, you scared me.”

“What– hah–” You shiver, a burst of pleasure as he kitten licks your cunt, right against the sweet spot at the very top. “What say, honey boy?”

“You can say Steve?” He laughs, and you sigh, wondering if the pulse of wetness from you is visible to him where he’s ducked eye-level to your cunt. “Say anything. Say you like it.”

“I like it.”

“You like it?” he asks, brushing over your clit with his thumb. 

You dissolve into some squirmy version of yes and discover it can feel even better than it does. Steve lays down, the entire lower half of his face to your cunt and kissing, working up to your clit to suckle until you squeal. Then he pulls away and licks at the wetness he’s spread around with his face, around your thighs and everywhere except where you need him. It’s ten times more sense than whenever you’ve touched yourself. (Not often, and never as expertly as Steve touches now, never constant, occasionally curious after he’s kissed you and disappeared to the bathroom.) 

There is an exceptional Mer word for this sort of pleasure, and it slips from you in a whiny moan. He laughs into your cunt, kisses you again, the tip of his thumb at your opening now and feeling through wetness like he’s playing. It’s– it’s hotter than you’d thought. Fuck, your knee kicks in toward your chest as the pleasure gets burning and– and cresting, like it’ll hurt. You seize up and Steve pushes your leg into your tummy, murmurs, “Relax,” as the very tip of his thumb presses into you and his lips close around your clit and he sucks. He’s barely pushed into you when you’re crying out, startled, reaching for his hair to hold as the climax he’d been working you toward tenses your tummy and has your cunt pulsing over and over, weirdly tight. 

It goes on for ages, has you half-crying beneath him, “Steve, oh no, oh–”

“Baby–”

“–Steve, Steve.” You cover your eyes, then immediately peek at him through your fingers, panting for air as the pleasure eases but doesn’t wane, not too fast. 

He pulls away from you, his lips and chin and nose a shocking red, his thumb pulling out of your cunt with aching care. “Sorry,” he says, his eyebrows yanked together in fear, “did it hurt? I was just trying to–”

“In again,” you say, scratching at his scalp. You’re so in love with this stupid human you could shake him. “Is perfect. You are perfect.” 

His lips flatten into a smug smile. “You’re perfect. Prettiest cunt I’ve ever seen. I knew… I mean, I know what you look like, but this is different.” He kisses your thigh, your tummy, then sits up and over you to bend down and kiss you on the mouth gently. “How was that? Are you feeling better? Less hot?” 

“No.”

He kisses you again. “That was fast, so I guess it is about, you know, being ready for, you know...”

“I know?”

“Mating?” he asks reluctantly. 

“Oh. Yes. Ready now, can you kiss me?” 

“Can I kiss you? Or do you need another word? I’m starting to think you don’t mean kiss.”

You think about it for a second, chest still heaving under his hand. “Kiss me, angel,” you say. 

Steve leans in and kisses you, tasting of you, smiling. 

—

Steve is gonna cum in his pants like a fucking loser if he doesn’t get a hand on himself. 

He unbuttons his jeans as he kisses you and shoves his hand into his boxers, squeezing around the base of his cock in a desperate bid to stop the worst thing that could ever happen from happening.

There is no word in the English language to describe how it felt to have your cunt pulsing down on his thumb. It’s not as though he could’ve entered you too deep like that, felt like a safe bet, and it sank into your heat without a problem. It felt like heaven. Steve’s pretty sure he’ll cum the second his cock even touches your cunt, but that’s a problem for Steve in five minutes or so. 

That is, if you still want him to fuck you. He’s kinda shit scared he’s gonna hurt you. He hasn’t had sex with someone inexperienced in years and never with somebody so… oceanic. 

You wrap your arms around his back and sigh, your face slinking down into his neck, kiss broken. Steve’s wondering if the foreplay was enough for you, if this painful heat is over, but you giggle and mumble into his chest, his ears piqued like a bloodhound at the sound. 

“Together,” you say. “What word say before? Fuck like not ow… fuck me.” You’re voice is quiet and raw enough to force a bead of precum over his fingers. 

“Jesus Christ,” he says. 

“Please, Stevie?”

Oh my god. Steve whites out. You whine something in Mer and Steve grabs you under the arms to get your head on a pillow, you poor girl laid out in the middle of the bed this entire time. He not so expertly kicks off his jeans, and his boxers slip down his hips, his cock hard and aching as it bends up toward his stomach. Steve doesn’t wanna, like, shove it into your hand, but it might be nice for you to see it. He widens the gap between your bodies just enough to show you. 

“This is how I’m gonna fuck you, honey,” he says, “I’m gonna work you open with my hand, and then I’m gonna ease into you, okay? ‘Cos you’ve never done it before, it’ll be so slow, yeah? So careful. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Take it now.”

“No, you can’t. You can’t, listen to me.”

You pout, but Steve laughs, kissing your sweaty forehead with a smack. 

“Fuck me now and now, and slow, ready now,” you promise. 

Steve grins at you with all the adoring he possesses, cannot express to you how much he wishes he could spread you open now and have you, but Steve’s not about to hurt you for the sake of five minutes. Maybe ten. Maybe fifteen. He entices you in for a pulling kiss, the distracting kind, head turning this way and that as he licks into your mouth and runs his hand over your hip, to your cunt, to all the slickness there. 

The first finger pushes in easy. He does it slow, waits for pain. You huff a little but kiss him the same, so Steve gives a careful pump and drives in with a second finger. 

That’s when you shudder. 

“How’s that?” he asks, pausing. 

“Fine.”

“Fine?” Steve slows the rock of his hand. “Hurting?”

“Good, just–”

“Just different, huh?” He twists his hand a little to press his thumb to your clit. “You tell me if it hurts you, honey girl,” —you melt like sugar at the name, as saccharine as it is— “I don’t wanna hurt you. You gotta talk to me, you know?”

“Not– not much talk, much, hah–” 

That little hah sound has gotta be his favourite noise you’ve ever made. Like a shiver through a smile, not half as sweet as your urgent moaning with a thigh clamped around his head, it reminds him of your stupid laugh whenever you’re pleased. Totally self-indulgent. 

He doesn’t try another finger for a while, isn’t sure how long, just kisses you and works into you until his wrist is aching from the upward thrust. Right toward the front, where he knows you’ll– 

“Oh.” You turn into Steve, weight on your hip and torso moving into his touch to take it quicker. “Ah, Steve, touch please, touch there.”

He circles his thumb against your clit.

You flinch. Cry out a little at the pleasure and press your face into his shoulder as Steve eases that third finger into your cunt. He’s in ecstasy, his cock throbbing erratically against his stomach, head weeping and red as you whimper into his skin, his name on your tongue, your cunt dripping slick between the cleft of your ass.

“Wanna cum again?” he asks. “Say? Can you take it again?” 

His thumb is dedicated now to your clit, rubbing in tight, wet circles as your thighs twitch, and twitch. You cum before Steve can hear your answer. It’s honestly faster than he meant. This heat in you is like a dial set to eleven. 

This time, you’re annoyed. Laughing and angry, you shove at his chest and Steve wishes he had a camera to get your smile for keeps. “Said was ready! Tummy jump, now, you did.”

Steve kisses your nose. “Will you shut up? You liked it, didn’t you? You’re such a complainer.”

“Not complain! Ecstatic! Want Steve ecstatic, together, fix my ow.”

“You said it doesn’t hurt.”

“Need you, Steve. Please.”

How many times can a girl say please before Steve cums in his hand? Apparently, he’s got one more please left before he shoots. He has to squeeze himself especially hard to make that happen. Doesn’t have a chance in fucking hell to last, but (and he feels like a bitch even thinking it), it’s not like you’ll know he’s cumming fast. You haven’t exactly held out, here. 

“Can you stay still?” he asks. 

“No.” 

“Okay, awesome,” he says, pinching your chin in his hand, forcing your eyes to his. “You don’t let me hurt you.”

“I love you,” you say. 

Steve feels his eyes get hot and his nose burn right at the back. “Yeah?” 

“Most,” you confide, wrapping yourself around him. 

Steve gets his arm behind your neck, pulling you in for a kiss. It’s unbelievable, he thinks, that the crook of his elbow fits your head perfectly. That the girl he’s been searching for was waiting at the bottom of the ocean. With his free hand, he reaches down to squeeze his aching cock again, and you must know enough to lift your leg over his hip and close the gap. 

“Ready?” he asks softly. 

“Yeah, ready.”

Steve strokes your cheek. “I love you,” he says, “a lot.”

Your smile is especially bemused. “I know, tell me much and lots, tell me all time, do lots tell, always inside of love with me.” 

“It’s true all the time,” he says with a pout. 

“Steve!” 

“I know, I know, I’m just making sure I tell you back.”

You nuzzle your nose into the side of his. “Tell again,” you say quietly. 

“I love you,” he says, taking a wonky kiss from the corner of your lips. 

Steve lines up and presses in. 

You’re wet enough and relaxed enough that he could sink to the hilt, but he knows he can’t, and he won’t. He lets your chests touch but keeps your hips apart and rocks into you slowly, lets the pleasure in his stomach lick up his spine and take over every bit of sense he has left. He’s surprised it took this long to tell you he loved you plainly. It comes to the surface and lingers now, love you love you love you as you choke on a moan and hide under his jaw. Steve can’t let you stay there too long, drawing you up with murmured pleading, come back, let me see you, miss your face too much when you’re hiding, like an angel, real pretty sweetheart, tries to gauge your feelings as you take it. As he gives it, really. He feels like you’re not taking anything so much as you’re just there with him, his girl. It’s sex, messy and simple, but it’s your first time, and this is more new to you than it would be to most. All Steve wants is to make it gentle. You take it sweetly, breathing out right in his ear, your voice colouring each breath with an addictive pull. It makes it hard to last. Makes going slow the only way he’s gonna get through this. 

“Okay?” he asks, when you’ve been quiet far too long, and he’s slowed to a pause inside you. 

“Love,” you say, aiming for a big kiss. 

Steve matches the kiss for every thrust and feels his thigh muscles go tight as violin strings as he sinks straight past any resistance to the hilt. He should not have done that, did not mean to, you’d rocked your hips down and he’s already pulling out, murmuring, “Sorry, angel, I’m sorry–” as you whisper a fervent, “Again, please.” 

He checks your face. 

“Again,” you say, eyebrows drawing together in pleasure. 

So Steve sinks in and he fucks you slow, like a drag, a rut into heat and wet and plushness that makes him groan. Hits into resistance and feels how much you like it. Steve groans. 

“Sound good,” you whisper. 

“Can’t help it.”

“Beautiful.” You draw a hand over his abdomen. “What word?”

“Handsome?” he teases. 

You reach down to his quads and pull at him, prompting another heavy thrust. Another. Steve takes a couple of kisses while he’s still breathing, but then he’s so close to heaven he has to stop. 

“Okay?” 

“Gonna cum,” he squeezes out. 

“Cum,” you say, like you know what it means, and it doesn’t matter. Steve was too chicken shit to explain it, but he did ask you first, didn’t he? You pick up everything quickly. 

“Can’t yet. Can’t. Didn’t fuck you like you wanted.”

“This what I wanted,” you say, abandoning his hip to take his face into your hand. You’re clammy and cool, now, not burning like you were. Your thumb rubs into his cheek slowly, like he’s made of glass. Like one of those Venus flower sponges from the ocean, thin and delicate as drops of ice. “Me and you. This is all what I wanted, okay? You fixed me.”

You smile at him with stars in your eyes as your hips shift and Steve has to pull out, cumming in his hand a second later, panting like his life depends on it as strings of cum line his fingers. 

You stare in surprise. “Oh. Not happen to me.” 

“It’s a boy thing,” he rasps out, dropping his forehead against your shoulder. 

You reach between your legs to touch yourself, laughing as you do, like you’re drunk or high or something, giggly-soft as Steve tries to catch his breath. 

You give up on whatever light exploring you’d desired and offer your arms for a real cuddle, hips flat together and sticky. “Hold me?” you ask. 

Steve wipes his hand in the sheets with a sigh and gathers you into his arms. “Yeah.”

—

Did you know when a boy who loves you fucks you, it kind of feels like you’re the most beautiful girl who ever existed? 

Steve fucked you and held you and kissed your cheeks and cuddled you to him and he never stopped asking how it felt, and if you were okay, and his hand had drifted down to your chest to touch you, to make you feel good, and all of it felt like a honeypot coil in your tummy getting tighter. ‘Mating’ or getting ‘fucked’ by someone who’s in love with you is better than all your best firsts. It’s like finding a new way to swim, like feeling the sun on your skin through the depths with a hand in your hair, raking it back. It’s like being kissed all over, all the time. 

If merpeople developed the ability to change just to do this with one another, you totally get it. 

Steve hugs you for a good ten minutes while you doze, tired, sated after a big meal, and then he gets up on his knees and puts his nose to your forehead without kissing you. “I’m gonna get you some water, and check that I set the alarm on the door. Do you want something to eat?”

“Do not go.”

“I’ll be fast.”

“Stay. Hold me more.”

So Steve lays down and holds you until you fall asleep. 

You wake up again an indeterminable amount of time later to many different things. There’s a glass of water on the nightstand opposite you, a bowl of rice with cut slices of bright, fresh fish beside it. Steve is rolling deodorant onto his armpits in a pair of boxers sitting by your legs. You need to pee, a pain like a knife between your legs. 

“Hurt,” you say softly. 

Steve turns to you, his mouth puckered in worry. “Yeah, what hurts?”

“Pee.”

“Oh. That’s normal. Want me to carry you?”

“No,” you say with a laugh. “Not broken.” 

“I can see that.”

You realise that he’s wiped you clean as you stand, which is oh so nice, and not at all a surprise from your kind boy, earning him a kiss behind his ear as you rush to the en-suite bathroom. You close the door but don’t lock it and do your business quick. 

You’re delighted to find the extremely sensitive feeling and all your slickness is over. You wash your hands and face before opening the door some to peer at Steve through the gap. “Stevie?” you ask softly. 

“What’s up, beautiful?”

You aren’t sure. 

He scratches a hand through damp hair. “Come here,” he prompts when you fail to return, “come on, you can sit in my lap and eat something. You didn’t eat anything at breakfast.”

“You not eat anything. I had pancake.”

“You had a bite of pancake, that’s not enough.”

You head back to him and sit in his lap as he’s asked you, not worried about falling considering the speed with which he pulls you close. “Best bite of pancake ever. Ever. You feed me, best pancake.”

“Theyre not as good as the pancakes you made,” he says. 

You shake your head, tracing along his beauty marks with a pearlescent fingernail. Thinking very hard about each word before it comes out, taking time to sew the sentence tightly, you say, “When you feed me pancakes from plate, your plate, it is important. Understand? Word, I think, like love. Mermaid feed you, mean…” 

“Like a kiss?” he asks. “You kiss sometimes to share food, right?”

“Sort of like kiss, like, swear you care for me.” 

“Hey, speaking of kisses, I got to thinking while you were sleeping. How come your spit doesn’t magically glue my mouth closed whenever we kiss? Isn’t it like, super strong?” 

“What?” you ask. 

“Your spit! You fixed your tummy with it, and my foot, but when we kiss we don’t get stuck together.”

“Only fix when hurt, duh.” You roll your eyes. “Whatever. Silly boy, not want talk to you.”

“Rude.”

You can’t fake a huff. You’re currently too heavily imbued with happy hormones to do anything besides sit here and wish he’d tell you he loved you again. 

He taps at your nose with the tip of his until you lift your lips, kissing you briefly, then slotting his head over your shoulder, his hand spread and waving against your back. “So this sharing from the same plate thing, that’s important to you?” 

You smile. Glad he can’t see it. He’d know you’re totally gone for him if he could. “Important for mermaid, inside of love, yeah? Many important.”

“Is that what made you… you know, excited?”

“Heat not s’posed happen but is wait happen, also? Make me, when share.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not be sorry. Not ever, please.”

“I’m not sorry about this,” he says, patting your shoulder, “just sorry I made you uncomfortable doing something I should’ve done before. We never shared before?”

“Has to be with want. Not like, uh, share foals and flounder.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Has to be… go of love?” 

“I have to do it because I love you?”

“Yes. Have to do because you love me, care me, give me.”

“Well, I’ve cared about you for a really long time, and I’ve been feeding you since we met, baby.”

You shake your head, picking gently at a mole behind his shoulder blade. Not to hurt him, only to feel it. “Plate. Feed me your plate.”

Steve leans into you with a loving sigh, smelling your neck. “I think I understand. It’s symbolic, like a tradition.” 

“Tradition?” 

“A tradition is something you do that has rules. You do it because it’s important, and because people have done it before you? Or, like, humans get married. You remember that from Watership Down? They say promises and exchange rings because it’s important to them. I understand it now.” His voice warms your skin. “You could’ve told me. I would’ve shared with you off of the same fork months ago.” 

“Months!” You’re scandalised. You and Steve have not known each other for more than four months, you’d say. 

Four months, and he is already so special to you. Just four months. 

You figure you’ll explain the intention of the courting process some other time and encourage his head back instead, meeting his brown eyes, their almond shape gone soft from his long eyelashes. There are too many places on his face you’ve failed to kiss. You know you’ve never kissed above his eyebrows before, leaning up to rectify the issue quickly. “All Steve need kiss,” you say decidedly. 

He offers his hand. 

You kiss every finger, knuckle to tip, then his palm. 

He holds your face in it when you’re done, giving your chin a little wobble. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks. 

“Okay.”

“And you slept okay? Not tired?”

“Slept nice. Want you sleep and me next time.”

“Sleep with you, next time.”

“I know,” you say quietly. “Can tell something?”

“You can tell me anything. Not kidding.” 

You hold your hands together against his tummy. “Feel… sad, now and before and before, when I can not… give word, right word. Feel like me and Steve, very important, and can not give words important.” 

Steve draws along your face with a single fingertip. “Not give words important,” he repeats. 

“All wrong word. I am sorry.”

“You don’t ever have to be sorry. Not for anything, and not for how you tell me what you need.” 

“You have…” Steve deserves to hear how loved he is in perfect sentences, but you’re just not there. You understand almost every single word he offers up now, but it is so hard to recollect what joiner word to say and what order to say them in when you aren’t hearing them. “I learn more word, swear.”

“Are you kidding?” he says, shifting your legs over his lap to hold the small of your back. “I don’t know a single word in Mer that isn’t your name and you’re apologising to me? Do you hear that? You learned how to speak a new language so you could talk to me. You stay with me, you want to be here, and you think you need to be sorry about how you talk?” He tilts his head to better meet your gaze, ducking a touch, forcing your full attention. “You told me you loved me, earlier. You think that’s not good enough? That’s fucking everything. I don’t need you to say the right words, I only want you to tell me how you feel. As long as I know what you need, and you can complain, we’re fine. We don’t need anything else.”

Really? you want to say. Irony is you can’t think of the word. “You are okay?”

“Yes, beautiful, I promise you. I promise. Yes and yes and yes, you’re perfect.”

“Perfect most beautiful.”

“Most,” he says, raising his eyebrows at you. 

It gets tiring, always learning. Some days Dariyay or Dustin try to teach you knew words and you cannot be bothered to ingest them, but it was worth it, in the end, to let Steve teach you. There are times like now where you’re trying hard to make sense and forgetting words you knew, and messing up the simple stuff in an attempt to use the more complicated. 

You wonder why it bothers you. Steve knows every part of you, now. This is it. He has everything, and he wants you just the same. 

“Need you,” you mumble, pressing your lips to his muscled shoulder. He is made up of such amazing shapes.

“Have me,” he says, rubbing a path down your spine, up again, slow as honey. “I promise, you’re everything I need like this.”

You glance at him sideways. He’s nosing down your arm, his eyes fluttered closed as though he’s forgotten where he is. 

“You want share rice me?” you ask.

He smiles into your arm. “Yes. It’s important, right? From now on, me and you, we eat from the same plate. Good?”

He could lay you out right now and have you, that’s how good it is. 

You wonder if he’d like that. 

—

It’s a few hours later when Steve gets you into the bath. 

All fucking remained gentle, yet you look like you’ve been through the ringer by the time you’re done. Steve wanted to see if he could get you to cum six times, and he achieved his arbitrary goal all too quickly. 

You, while pleased, have the air of a woman who needs electrolytes. Steve gives you a glass of apple juice and you sip it in the tub, submerged to the waist in bubbles and blinking beautifully slow blinks.

Whatever it was that was making you want to be fucked so badly has certainly dissipated. You’d gone sore and achy in the middle of a second tryst so Steve had pulled out, kissing at the hurt he caused until you cried, real, big-drop tears that fourth time, and then the fifth. Steve sniffled his way through that fifth one with you, murmuring love into your skin, enchanted by the sight of you with your hands running over yourself. 

The sixth was mostly accidental. Lazy, lazy kisses turned to a hickey which you’ve apparently never had, turned to you hot against his leg, your hips rolling. He didn’t have to touch you much to draw out a last climax, but the sound you made was borderline pained, so he didn’t try again. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, kneeling beside the bath with his hand braces at your hairline, stroking. 

“Yes.”

“Can you use a couple more words?”

“Feel full.”

Steve laughs, stroking down your cheek with the back of his hand. “Sated?” 

“What mean?”

“Means you feel satisfied, like, everything is fixed. Like full, but without the feeling of, like…” Steve pets your cheek, then lets his hand fall further down. “Pressure.” 

“Pressure?” 

Steve squeezes your shoulder. “Like this?”

“Squeeze me.”

“Yeah, I’m applying pressure.”

“Oh.”

You take another mouthful of apple juice, but your question is loaded up before you’re done, and he can hear you swallowing as you ask, “Are you okay, angel? Did I hurt you?”

“Did you hurt me? Never, why would you think that?”

“You ask me lots times. Think if sex maybe hurt,” you say. 

“It doesn’t usually hurt. Only sometimes, and most of the time by accident.”

“Oh.”

“Want me to wash your hair now?” he asks. 

“Yes, please. Thank you. Best boyfriend.”

You’re not kidding, is the worst part. You close your eyes and offer your glass to him blindly with a content smile on your face, waiting for him to pour water over you and wet your hair. 

He’s pretty sure you’re the first girlfriend he’s ever had to think this highly of him. He wants to earn it.

Steve taps your chin and kisses the slight bruise of a hickey, gentle, lest he hurt you twice. “You are really perfect,” he says. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” 

He washes your hair carefully but quickly, wanting to get you out of the bath fast. He showered after your first fuck but needs to wash off again now, so he wraps you in a towel once you’re done and tells you to climb into bed, that he’ll sort everything out for you when he’s done. 

He showers and dries off, returning to the bedroom with a towel around his waist and a smile. You’re cross-legged on the bed with one of your encyclopedias in the dip of your legs, the towel falling down your chest some, your written list of phonetics poking out behind the cover, but you aren’t studying. You’re tracing pictures with your finger, eyebrows lightly pinched. 

“Wet hair,” you say. 

“Yeah,” he says.

“Fix.”

“‘Bout to.”

“About,” you correct. 

Steve chuckles to himself. “Yeah.” 

“About means… same, means close, means like new word.”

“Kind of. It’s a hard word to explain.” 

“About to go to bed,” you say. “Have in Mer, kind of.”

“You do?”

“Not so different.”

Steve dries your hair and does his best to fix it. Dariyay fixed it for you this morning and he wouldn’t have gotten it wet, only the sex seemed to have knocked it out of place and frizzed it to high heaven. He gives it his best shot and you trace shapes into his stomach where it stays near your hand. Steve won’t ask to fuck again, but your touch and the fresh memory of what it felt like to do that to you has his cock stirring. He wills it down. Wonders if he’s a sex pest now, or if you’re just that beautiful. 

It’s funny. You’ve been pretty this whole time, but Steve can’t believe how much worse it’s gotten over time. He didn’t think you could get any prettier. 

“Ecstatic,” you murmur. 

He tips your head back. “You are in love with me.”

“Yes?”

“No, like. You’re a loser. You’re gone for me.”

“What is loser, gone, shush. Say mean thing, think I not know, I know.” You scowl at him. “You are loser.”

He wrinkle his nose. “Am not.”

“Yes. Much loser.”

“Wanna get dressed? I have the softest pajamas ever with your name written all over them.”

“Name all over?”

“It’s a saying. Like… if I say I’m jumping for joy, I’m not really jumping, but I could be.”

“Joy happy?”

“Yeah.”

“We jump for joy, mermaid. Swim up to surface, jump, swim down. Fun.”

“It sounds awesome.”

“My name written all over, not real, but mine, mine a lot, so. Saying.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“More saying human? Mer not have much saying. Mer more–” You pause. “Yes and yes.”

Steve takes the time to sort it through. “You guys say what you mean. Humans are funny. We have lots of sayings. We have one that goes, ‘he drinks like a fish’, which means he likes a lot of beer.”

“Fish not drink beer?” you say, laughing. 

“No, they don’t. It’s stupid, it’s because people think fish drink a ton of water. Hey, should we go swimming later?” he asks, digging through the top dresser drawer until he finds the sweet blue pajamas he has hiding away. They’re for your hard days, of which you don’t have many, but the softness never fails to draw your awe. He thinks they’ll be nice for the occasion, extra comfort after a big first experience. “It’s been a while.”

“Not swim. Dariyay tell, after heat, water and me make tail.”

Steve snorts at the joke, even as he falters. “You’ll get your tail back, huh?”

“Have… what call? Foal.”

“Baby. You’d have a baby.”

“Right. Oh, forgot. Two means.”

His stomach jolts uncomfortably at the idea of you changing back. “Yeah, it’s one of those words… Shit, you’ll really get your tail again? I don’t want you to leave, yet. Dariyay said you have to go home soon, didn’t she? But there’s so much you haven’t done, I wanted to take you on a real date, and on a rollercoaster, and to the movies, take you rollerblading. There’s so much stuff. I don’t want you trapped in my pool again, but maybe I can go with you?” He can’t think of a way to stay with you. “Don’t go yet. Please.” 

You give him your own rare brand of puppy dog eyes. “Not want go, Steve. Tell you. You and me tomorrow and tomorrow, and love you, and– not want. Miss tail, but miss you more,” you say, shrugging. “Get dressed now? I am cold.”

Steve gives you your pajamas and diverts the conversation from changing. He has the feeling that he is being very, very selfish, but he cannot bring himself to let you go. 

The second he sits down, you get on your knees and shuffle around, pausing, shy for potentially the first time in your whole life. “Can I hold you?” you ask.

Steve lays down and you follow, interlocking on your sides like commas. You wrap your arms around him very specifically; the bottommost one looped around his matching arm, and the upper over his neck, your hand on his cheek, holding him like you’d asked. 

“Best thing,” you say, turning your hand to stroke his cheek. It is such a light touch that, for a second, he wants to squirm away. He relaxes the longer you do it, coaxed into total stillness, his eyes growing heavier and heavier. “My boy.” 

Your fingers tumble down to the thin line of a scar that spans across his neck. 

“Hurting?” you murmur. 

He closes his eyes. Lets himself melt into your chest. “Nah. Not for a long time.” 

⋆𓇼⋆.ೃ࿔:⋆

“Can I just talk to him? It would just be for a few seconds, I swear— Please, Mike, I need to do this.” You beg, hands wrapped around your frozen figure as the frigid temperatures wash over you.

You had slipped away from the others at the cabin and snuck down to the shed where they were keeping Josh, you had to talk to him. There had to be some sense in what he was doing— you need to know why.

Why…

“I’m not sure that’s a good Idea. He’s lost it, he’s fucking insane. I don’t think you’re gonna get anything out of him.” Mike holds steadfast.

He knows the person in the shed isn’t the friend you all once knew, it was the psycho that tortured them all and killed Jess. He also knows no good can come from letting you talk to him, he’d probably just ramble on about God knows what.

“I know, I just… I just need to try. Please just give me ten minutes to try to talk to him and then, I swear, I’ll go back to the cabin.” You plead once more.

You and Josh had been there for each other ever since his sisters went missing. Hannah was your best friend so your whole world was shattered by her and Beth’s disappearance. You had bonded with Josh over the shared loss, it was clear to the rest of the group that, besides Sam and Chris, you were the closest to him— Mike can understand why you’re so insistent on speaking with him, even if right now he wasn’t the Josh you were close to.

“Fuck- Fine. Ten minutes, that’s it. Don’t listen to anything he says, he’s off his meds and dude’s lost it.” Mike concedes, stepping aside from the door and letting you pass.

“Thank you, Mike— I’ll try to be quick.” You mutter, walking past him and bringing a trembling hand to push at the shack’s large wooden door.

You hadn’t spoken to Josh since he unmasked himself, revealing that he had orchestrated this whole weekend to punish all of you for the prank that resulted in Hannah’s disappearance. You had been woken up by Mike while you laid, tied up on the floor, next to Sam. The last thing you remembered before coming to was hyperventilating over what happened at the séance you had taken part in with Ashley, Chris, and Josh.

Before discovering that it was all just another part of Josh’s elaborate plan, things had gotten out of hand— You thought Ashley had actually contacted the spirit of Hannah, your missing best friend you had, however naively, thought could still be alive. It was all too much for you and you ended up having a panic attack. Then you remembered that after all that commotion Josh had given you some sleeping pills to calm you down. After that everything had gone dark and next thing you knew, you were waking up to the news that Jess was dead, and some crazed lunatic was culpable only later to find out that crazed lunatic was Josh.

You didn’t know what to think, you still don’t— The Josh you knew wouldn’t be capable of killing anyone, but you also thought he wouldn’t have been capable of doing all the other fucked up things he admitted to…

Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do.

You muster up the courage to push the door open and go inside, shutting the door behind you with a heavy thud and slowly turning to face him.

“Well, well, well, sneaking up the trail to visit little old me while I’m all locked up, I hope it’s a conjugal visit.” Josh taunts, looking up at you from where he’s tied up to one of the sheds wooden posts.

“Josh, please… talk to me, I don’t understand. You said you were doing better, you said you were getting help- Why? Why’d you do this?” You ask, keeping your distance from him. Even though he was restrained you didn’t feel safe being alone with him, this didn’t feel like your best friend’s goofy older brother Josh, the person Infront of you felt like a stranger. You’re starting to think coming to see him was a horrible idea.

“Why, why, why, why, why— she wants to know why! You know why. Hannah and Beth, ring a bell? Or have you forgotten them too?” Josh sneers at you.

“Josh, you know I haven’t. I think about Hannah every minute of every day!” You shout, your voice breaking into a cry. “You know how much I regret getting that drunk and not being there for her that night and I know you feel guilty too but, Josh… Mike said you killed Jess. I just-I need to know, did you?”

“Does it matter? The police will come in the morning, and you’ll all point your fingers, Right there officer! He’s the murderer! He’s crazy! And off I go to the loony bin.” Josh mocks.

“Of course it matters, Josh! We care about you, I care about you. I can’t believe you would kill Jess, I don’t believe it… Please just tell me the truth. I’ll believe whatever you tell me, just please- I need to know.” You beg, stepping closer to him.

“I-I don’t know.” Josh answers, his head dropping between his shoulders as he averts his gaze from you.

“Josh, what do you mean you don’t know?” You press further, your face twisting in concern. How could he not know you ask yourself, of all the responses you could have anticipated this was the one you were the least prepared for.

“I don’t know! I don’t think I did, I would probably remember if I did, right? Fuck, I’m losing it. I wouldn’t kill her- I didn’t kill her, you believe me, right? I’m not crazy.” Josh asks, his voice shaky.

You rush over to his side, bending down to his level and caressing his face with your cold yet comforting hands,

“Josh it’s okay, I believe you- I believe you Joshie, you’re not crazy. This whole night was just some big mistake, I know that and the others… They’ll realize it too soon enough.” You try to console him, wrapping your arms around him in the best embrace you can manage given his current bondage.

“I knew you would believe me— you’ve always been there for me, you know me… but the others, they won’t believe me. They’re gonna tell the cops I did it, then they’re gonna take me away. I need you to do something, one last thing for me before they come.” Josh mutters leaning forward and resting his head against the crook of your neck.

“Sure, Josh, I’ll do anything.” You breathe, attentively awaiting his request with wide eyes as you hold him in your arms.

“Show me your tits.” Josh whispers against your ear, his teeth brushing against your skin as his lips spread in a wide grin.

“What?” You exclaim, scrambling to break away from him and falling onto the floor behind you in the process.

“You heard me, show me your tits— You said anything, right?” Josh coos, smiling down smugly at you.

“Josh, I can’t- I don’t- Why would you ask me that?” You stutter, your cheeks growing red.

His emotional whiplash has you off kilter, of all the years you had known Josh, you would’ve never expected him to say something like that to you. You always assumed he just saw you as an extension of his sister, no matter how hard you tried to get him to see you otherwise… Sometimes he would even call you his little sister, tell you to call him big bro.

“Come on— this is probably my last chance before they take me away, lock me up, and throw away the key. We’re family, aren’t we? So, just do your big bro Josh a favor and show me your tits.” He smirks, a playful glint in his eyes.

You felt like you were pinned to the spot your knees met the hard concrete floor. There was a version of you who would’ve done anything if Josh told you to, you were sweet on him ever since you first met him through Hannah back in grade school. You’d felt like such a cliché, having a crush on your best friend’s older brother. Back then all you wanted was for him to notice you— But ever since Hannah disappeared, all you’re left feeling are the sharp pains of guilt gnawing at your insides. Guilt for wandering off that night to get drunk with her brother and his friend, guilt for getting so wasted to impress him that you passed out, guilt for not being there to stop her from meeting Mike, or keeping her from storming out into the cold, or warning her about the prank, or anything…

Anything at all.

Sometimes you think everything that’s happened since that night has been your fault… Maybe, if you had just stayed with her that night none of this would have happened. The more you think about it the more you start to convince yourself that this really is all your fault— You’re the reason Hannah and Beth are gone, you’re the reason Jess is dead, you’re the one that fucked everything up, Josh was here because of you and your stupid crush…

“…Okay.”  The word hesitantly slips past your lips, barely above a whisper.

An amused expression crosses Josh’s face, his eyes trace over your kneeled figure curiously— He wonders just how far he can push you… Would you truly listen to anything he has to say, do anything?

He’s eager to find out.

“I’m sorry, what was that? Could you say that louder, please?” Josh teases, turning his ear to face you and leaning as close to you as his restraints allow.

You push yourself from the ground and back up on your unsteady feet. You turn your back towards him as you let your coat slide off your shoulders. You dip your nervous fingers beneath the back of your sweater, trailing them up to your bra and releasing the clasp of it. As soon as the flimsy fabric comes undone you hurry to maneuver it off your body before your paper-thin courage wears off. You manage to slip your bra off from under your sweater without removing it, placing your undergarment gently on top of your fallen jacket before turning back around to face Josh as he watches your actions attentively.

You inhale deeply, allowing the icy wind to penetrate its way into your lungs as your shaky hands grip the bottom of your shirt. You meet Josh’s piercing gaze, his expectant eyes trained on you and urging you to hurry. You roll the thick material of your sweater over your breasts, your nipples hardening as the cold air that penetrates the weathered walls of the shed washes over the sensitive flesh. Josh’s eyes greedily drink up the sight, shamelessly ogling your bare chest.

“So that’s what you’ve been hiding under that sweater, huh? Porn star tits.” Josh smirks up at you.

Despite the cold, you can feel the heat rising into your cheeks at his comment. You avert your eyes from him, looking anywhere but his face. You’ve never felt more vulnerable than you do right now— Your naked breasts completely open to his scrutiny, his eyes free to poke and prod at every inch of your newly exposed skin.

“Why don’t you get closer? Let me see them up close.” Josh urges you.

You look back at him— He looks pleadingly up at you, like a starved dog begging for food. You sigh, hesitantly taking a small step forward.

“Come on, get over here, I don’t bite.” Josh smiles, his teeth glinting in the dim light of the shed as he tilts his head and gestures you closer.

You take a few more cautious steps towards Josh, pausing a few inches from him. Your legs feel like jelly, you never expected that the first guy to see you topless would be Josh— Especially tonight, after all the shit that happened.

You feel like you could wake up in a cold sweat at any moment, only to find out this had all been some sort of weird dream. But the gusts of frozen wind biting at your exposed skin lets you know that this is all too real.

“Closer.” Josh instructs, his voice no longer as passive as before.

You let out a small huff, you were embarrassed enough as it was, having your chest out on display like this… Anyone could walk into the unlocked door and see you practically shoving your breasts against Josh’s face. A small part of you wonders if he’s just doing this to humiliate you. But still, you obey his command, walking the rest of the way forward and closing the distance between the two of you— Your legs brushing up against his.

“Yeah, that’s good. Come, come here, sit— Let me look at you.” Josh breaths softly as he juts his hips out slightly, signaling you towards his lap.

Your eyes widen at his request. You’re beginning to wonder if this is going too far, maybe you should just walk away, rationalize that this has all just been a momentary lapse in your judgment, but something buried deep within you doesn’t want this to stop.

You pause for a moment before positioning your legs on either side of Josh’s, reaching your hands out shyly and placing them on his shoulders to steady yourself as you lower yourself onto his lap.

“Shit… look at you.” Josh exhales, his breath warm against your skin as it grows colder under the punishing wind.

His jaw clenches as he resists the urge to sink his teeth into your plush chest, swallowing hard as his hands twist against his restraints. His touch would be all over you if he could move— but, unfortunately for him, he doesn’t think you’re stupid enough to untie him.

He leans forward, resting his head against your soft breasts. The unexpected movement causes you to flinch as you instinctively go to reach for the back of his head. You hesitate for a moment, still unsure if he would welcome your touch despite your current position before gently running the tips of your fingers against his hair.

“I could die a happy man right now.” Josh chuckles softly, his lips brushing against your skin.

Your heart feels like it’s about to beat out of your chest, the sound of it filling Josh’s ears and echoing in his head. Josh presses his mouth to your breast, kissing at it. His lips feel like they’re burning into your skin, a soft moan leaving your throat at the sensation. Your hand flies to your mouth, covering it in an attempt to muffle your involuntary sounds. Josh lets out a low chuckle, the sound rumbling against your skin.

“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed— Don’t cover your mouth, I wanna hear you.”

Josh continues placing sloppy kisses on your chest, leaving a trail of saliva in his wake. He kisses up to your neck, gently teasing at your skin with his teeth. Your breath hitches, the seat of your panties damp with your arousal— Suddenly your jeans feel too constraining.

What are you doing?

You don’t even have the slightest clue anymore. Right now, your head is only filled with thoughts of Josh, and the feel of his mouth against your skin. You know you shouldn’t be doing this, you should be back at the lodge with the rest of the group.

“Josh…” you interject quietly.

If he can hear you, he makes no indication. His sole attention remains on the feel of your flesh against his teeth. Josh lets out a groan into the crevice of your neck, your scent overwhelming his senses. His tongue traces over the soft skin of the column of your neck, scraping the edges of his teeth harshly against it.

 You let out a shaky gasp at the sensation— It was all starting to be too much.

“Josh, wait…”

But once again your plea falls on deaf ears. His kisses get more abrasive, his mouth harsh against your chilled skin. Josh’s lips trail anywhere they can reach, sucking at your satiny skin and leaving small, red bruises which mark his erratic path. You were intoxicating to him, your taste, the sound of your squeaky whines and heavy breathing, the way you were squirming against him, you were consuming his every thought… Despite his position, his fractured mind can only think of you— He wants to take you, needs to take you, make you his, and mark you as his own…

He can no longer restrain his urge— He sinks his teeth into your tender flesh, your blood pooling in his mouth as his canines draw blood.

“Josh, stop, please!” You hiss as you tear yourself from his grasp, your eyes wild with shock as the realization that he just bit you settles in.

Pain throbs in your neck as arousal drips from your aching cunt— Blood pearls at the shallow wounds, falling in warm, viscous drops against your spit-slicked skin.

“We should stop… You’ve had enough haven’t you, Joshie?” Your voice trembles despite your best attempts to sound stern.

“No way, baby. Now that you’ve given me a taste, I want all of you. Come on, I mean you’ve always liked me anyway.” Josh smirks, glassy eyes fixed on your face as it twists into a horrified expression.

He knows…

“W-What?”

“You seriously thought I couldn’t tell? All those longing looks, all those sleepovers with Hannah you spent talking to me instead, all those times you snuck into my room while you thought I was downstairs and fucked your fingers into that tight little pussy on my bed… I saw all of it, I mean It’s so fucking obvious— everyone can tell.” Josh’s voice is condescendingly sweet as his cruel words tear into you like a serrated knife into flesh.

Tears prick at your eyes as your face grows unbearably hot, your humiliation on bright-red display. This whole time he knew, so did everyone else apparently… God, they must think you’re pathetic. You’ve never felt more ashamed in your entire life, were Josh to finish what he started and rip your throat out with his teeth, it would be a mercy compared to the horrible sinking feeling in your chest.

“Awe, don’t cry, sissy… Don’t you see it? Now’s your chance to get what you’ve always wanted. I’m all tied up, I couldn’t stop you if I tried, so why don’t you just hold me down and fuck me.”

“I can’t!This is all just too much and Mike’s right outside the door- plus, I’ve never even…”

“You’ve never even what?” He pauses for a moment, taking in the way more blood rushes to the already reddened skin of your cheeks and the way your gaze shifts between different areas of the weathered shed as you desperately attempt to avoid making eye contact with him— That’s when he comes to the realization as to why you’re so nervous.

“Oh my God, don’t tell me you’re a virgin?” He asks giddily, his teeth on full display.

“… Well, yeah— I’ve never, you know… done it with anyone, okay? Now can you please lay off it? I’m humiliated enough as it is.” Shame tugs at every fiber of your being as the words leave your tongue, your treacherous body letting a tear fall from your eye down your burning face.

“This day just keeps getting better and better. Now we have to do it what kind of big brother would I be if I didn’t pop your cherry before they haul me off— Fuuck… I’m so hard right now,” He groans, rutting against you and grinding the prominent bulge in his pants against your clothed heat.

“Mmm… I-ah… I don’t- Josh, this isn’t right!” You try to object but you can’t deny how good his hardness feels as it rubs against your aching cunt, your voice broken and desperate as you whine into his touch.

“Come on stop being such a little tease, you got me all hot and bothered putting your smoking hot tits in my face and with your little virgin act... Plus you owe me for not snitching on you rubbing one out on my bedsheets, finish what you started you fucking pervert-slut.” He moves his hips quicker against you, frantically searching for release as his cock strains against the crotch of his overalls.

Your mouth hangs open, panting like a bitch in heat as the seam of your jeans catches on your clit over the damp fabric of your underwear— Your thoughts become hazy with desire, all reason going out the window as both your body and mind start to give into him.

Logic be damned, you want him.

Need him.

“Fuck, fine… I’m sorry, just- just tell me what to do” You mutter, finally allowing yourself to give in to your own perverse desires.

Josh’s mouth curves into a wider smirk, his lips stretched wide over his teeth, amused by your lack of resistance.

“Relax, baby— I’ll make it real good for you, I promise. Take your pants off and then you can help me with mine.” The words drip sweet off his tongue like honey as he tells you what to do, his voice significantly softer than it was just moments ago, almost patronizingly so.

You lift yourself from his lap, removing your hands from him as you begin to fumble with the button of your jeans. You undo the fastening, pulling down the zipper before you begin tugging down the cold denim down your legs.

“Slower.” Josh heaves, breathless as his cock twitches at the sliver of skin peeking out from your unbuttoned pants.

You eye him over your furrowed brow, annoyed with his ceaseless demands despite your eagerness to feed the throbbing ache between your thighs. You bite the inside of your cheek, obliging him and hooking your fingers under the waistband of your jeans along with your soaked panties— You peel the tight fabric down gingerly, unveiling the smooth skin of your thighs inch by inch tantalizingly slow. Denim pools around your ankles as you finish rolling your pants down, kicking them to the side and timidly clasping your hands over your now bare mound— The burning in your face spreading to the tips of your ears as your bottom half lays bare before his starved gaze.

“Show me your ass.”

You hesitate for a moment before shyly turning your back to him, letting him drink in the swell of your ass. You cross your arms over your chest as a chill runs through your mostly bare body, you yearn for the warmth of Josh’s body.

“Bend over.”  Josh instructs, licking his lips in anticipation like a wolf eyeing its injured prey.

“Josh-”

“Bend. Over.” Josh’s voice turns harsh as he cuts you off before you can finish your objection.

You begrudgingly bend over, knowing better than to try and reason with him when he seemed so keen on studying every inch of your flesh.

“Holy fucking shit, your so wet— Is that all from me, baby? Get back here before I blow my load in my boxers, I wanna get inside that perfect little pussy.”

You sigh as he finally allows you to return to his body’s warmth, stepping between his open legs as you bring your eager hands to the straps of his overalls — You unhook them, pulling down the tattered garment just enough so they rest below his ass. You pause for a moment, the only thing keeping your bodies separate now is the thin fabric of his patterned boxers. A wet stain pools at the front of his underwear where his swollen cock begs to be freed. You don’t bother looking to him for permission before you begin to peel the soiled garment down, allowing his flushed length to spring free against his stomach. You catch a quick glimpse of his blushing head before quickly averting your eyes, your heart hammering against your chest so hard you think your ribs might break.

“It’s okay, you can look at it— look at it.” Josh stares at you through half-hooded eyes, his cock twitching desperately against his stomach as if begging your attention.

Your eyes trail down his clothed abdomen all the way down until they reach the swollen flesh between his thighs. His sticky tip gleams in the dim candlelight of the lantern hanging above. Your body is a wreck of nerves and sweat as you bring a hand between the two of you, wrapping your fingers around the intimidating thickness of his length and giving it a hesitant pump— He bucks into your hand with a desperate cry, his precum coating your clammy palm.

You straddle his lap with a deep inhale as you try not to lose the nerve you’ve built up, hovering your hips over his as you drag his leaking head over your slick folds. You guide him towards your entrance, gritting your teeth as you slowly lower yourself onto his lap. Pain shoots through your body as you sink down on his cock, your face scrunching up in obvious discomfort as you try to bite back a pained cry. Your body tenses around him, as it tries to adjust to the foreign feeling…

Just then you feel something warm dripping down the inside of your thighs— Looking down where your cunt stretches painfully wide around him, you’re met with red.

Blood pools at the base of his cock.

Your blood.

“Shit- you’re bleeding, that’s so fucking hot I didn’t know virgins actually bled.” Josh chuckles. His hips jolt up into you, spurred on by the sight of your viscous crimson coating his cock.

“Josh, stop- Jesus fuck! It hurts…” You try to hold down his hips with one hand as you cling to his neck for dear life with the other.

You’re beginning to wonder if this is really what you fantasized about all those years. All those times you laid awake at night touching yourself to the thought of Josh taking your virginity, you never imagined it would hurt this much.

“Well duh, it’s supposed to, dummy— It’s your first time. Just move, it’ll get better.” Josh groans through gritted teeth as he keeps trying to fuck up into you despite your hand holding him down.

You take his advice, reluctantly lifting your hips before sinking them back down— You repeat the motion until the rhythmic sound of skin slapping against skin fills the shed, your pain slowly fading away into reluctant pleasure. Josh’s cock drives into your poor cervix with every wet slam of your hips against his, splitting your once virgin cunt open around him. You roll your hips against his, grinding your clit over the small patch of dark coarse hair peaking out from under his shirt.

Your cunt clenches tightly around him like a vice, making Josh’s head fall back against the wooden post behind him as a strained whimper falls from his lips. His hips buck sloppily into yours, nearing his end embarrassingly fast as your bleeding walls swallow greedily around him. You notice the change in his movements as he trembles beneath you, you know he’s close.

“Josh, should I pull off?” You ask breathlessly as your hips move ceaselessly against his, chasing your own high.

“Don’t you fucking dare… Keep it in, I wanna-mmm… fill you up, you dumb… fucking slut.” Josh pants incoherently as he loses all control of his body, fucking mindlessly into you like your cunt is nothing more than a sex toy for him to fill up.

“Let me cum inside, let me cum inside, let me cum-” He repeats the words like a mantra, before being cut off by the sounds of his own whiny grunts as he comes undone and his warm, sticky come spurts into you.

You ignore the potential consequences of Josh finishing inside of you, instead bringing a hand to your slit and working at your aching clit desperately— Your orgasm comes quick and devastating, racking through your body as a voice you barely recognize as your own bounces off the walls of the dingy shed, most likely alerting all outside to what the two of you are doing…

Well, did.

The crimson of your blood mixes with the sticky white of Josh’s seed as it spills from your weary walls, pooling where the two of you still connect. Josh’s gaze rests between your bodies, eyes fixated on your cunt wrapped around him as it drips with your mixed fluids before they flick up to your face. He bites his lip, looking up at you with blown out pupils and glossy eyes as your chest heaves and your skin glows with the warm hue of the fading lantern above, to him you look almost angelic.

“Kiss me.” Josh says, the words leaving his mouth pleading and soft.

“What?” You pant, bewildered by his request in the midst of your post-orgasmic tremors and sticky skin.

“Kiss me, please.” Josh begs again, his eyes looking up at you with genuine affection for the first time since you came to speak with him.

He’s somehow managed to catch you off guard once again, from the way he was tearing you apart and causing you to hurt, you almost forgot he could be gentle. It’s why you fell for him in the first place, wasn’t it? You were always susceptible to his charms, pliant to his every whim if only he were to look in your direction.

“O-okay…” You agree, eyes wide as you look down at him.

You lean forward, touching his chapped lips to yours and connecting them in the kiss you’ve yearned for since you were a kid. As his mouth moves against yours your heart briefly returns to the state of girlish exuberance you thought had died when you lost your best friend.

The kiss is short and chaste despite your current position.

“Thanks…” Josh says, leaning his damp brow against yours as he releases your lips.

“Yeah… no problem.” You smile breathlessly, allowing your weary body a brief respite before pulling yourself from him.

You grab your panties off the floor before walking back to him, kneeling in front of him and wiping at the mess you left behind before tucking his softening length back in his boxers and helping him back into his clothes. You take your now thoroughly soiled underwear, slipping it on over your still trembling legs before turning from Josh to collect the rest of your clothes scattered on the ground.

 Josh’s eyes follow your every movement, the shame and guilt of what he’s just done dawning on him as he watches you redress.

“Please don’t leave, I’m sorry for… everything. I don’t know why I said all those things, please don’t leave me here alone… You’re the only person who still cares about me.” Josh pleads, his remorseful gaze meeting yours as you turn to face him.

“Josh, it’s fine. I’m not mad at you or anything, I just have to go back before everyone starts wondering where I went… I’ll come back, I promise.” You bend down, your lips brushing softly against his cheek as you press a comforting kiss goodbye to the stubbled skin.

You walk towards the door, plunging yourself into the shocking cold that lays waiting outside it before your resolve gives way and you find yourself unable to leave Josh’s side.

As soon as you step foot outside Mike’s disgruntled face greets you.

“That didn’t sound like talking to me.”

“Who is Reo?” There was noise on the other end of the line, like the caller was fumbling the phone.

Nagi wordlessly tapped at the screen, then pointed the camera at Reo, who tried valiantly to smile through his terror and held up his hands like, haha, not guilty.

“Were you kidnapped?” The voice was a little more hushed now, as if Reo wouldn’t still be able to hear. Some kind of savior Nagi had.

“No.”

“But you’re in a different country.”

Nagi shrugged lazily, pointing the camera back at himself and swaying a little so you could see the background.

“We’re going skiing. Or snowboarding. I dunno.”

“You’re doing physical activity,” said the caller incredulously. “On purpose. Okay, I’m calling the cops.”

“Alright, alright,” Reo butted in, trying to edge into the frame. “Hold on. Can I talk, please, because you’re clearly fumbling this and my parents hate it when my friends do things that make them have to call in the lawyers.”

“No,” Nagi hissed, twisting away from him. “That’s my sister.”

“So?” Reo blinked at him.

“You’re gonna be weird,” said Nagi. “Everyone always is when they meet Onee-san.”

“You are literally convincing her that I’ve kidnapped you to international waters!” Reo yelped as Nagi dodged him again, forcing him to stumble forward a few steps. Nagi’s athletic prowess—his ability to maybe even surpass Reo, who had never had to work for anything in his life—was why he loved him so much, but right now it was really biting him in the ass. Reo told him as much.

“You’re already a freak about me!” said Nagi, backed into a corner and using their slight height difference to hold the phone as far away from Reo as he could. “You can’t have my entire family—”

“Aww,” Reo said fondly, tone dripping with honey, stopping in his tracks. “Do you want me all to yourself, Sei-chan?”

“Ew,” said Nagi. He thrust the phone out at him.

“Okay,” you said, squinting into the camera. “Well, that was really embarrassing evidence that my brother could definitely fight you off if he wanted and probably is not having a mental health crisis, so. No cops. Take care of him.”

“Ha!” Reo laughed, way too loudly. He brushed a lock of hair behind his ear and then back, unsure if it was better to reveal more of his handsome face or to show off that he would have a full head of hair well into his eighties. “Um. That’s a relief. Thank you. so much. Thank you.”

Nagi took the phone back while Reo’s words continued to squeeze out of him like a towel used to mop up milk and hung up without saying goodbye. Reo’s hands were still hovering as if he was looking into the camera, shaking slightly. He couldn’t quite get his eyes to focus, your image superimposed over everything like a bad photo doctoring job.

“I feel weird,” he said, words slurring together slightly.

“You disgust me,” said Nagi, pushing past him to get back to whatever they had been doing before Reo’s entire life had been changed. Reo swayed a little and then fell on his ass on the floor, an ache developing in his legs.

It was the phantom pain that had called to him to play football, to chase Nagi.

To shoot. To score.

“We’re going to play professional football together. Someday, we’ll win the world cup. And then I’m going to marry your sister,” he said, dazed.

Nagi threw a glove at him.

Unfortunately, by the time he finally got to meet you, you had not yet come around to the plan.

Nagi steadfastly prevented him from joining any family phone calls he had with you. You called them proof-of-life-checks. Reo thought that was just the cutest thing in the world.

He even scored your number, once, when Nagi had fallen asleep at Reo’s apartment and you were so alarmed to see that he wasn’t in his usual cave that you called him to ask if he could track down your brother.

“How did you get my number?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter. Where is my brother?”

“He’s on the couch,” Reo flicked his eyes over to the lump of sleeping Nagi. “No, seriously, it shouldn’t be publicly available anywhere. It’s encrypted so anyone I didn’t personally add to my contact list can’t call me.”

“Ha, Reo-chan,” you said without a trace of laughter. “So good to talk to you! Goodbye now.”

Reo fell back onto the circular chaise longue and giggled maniacally, kicking his feet. You liked him so much you had tracked down his number through probably illegal methods. He had never had a crush like this before.

Reo really resented how bad of a brother Nagi was.

“You never call, you never write,” he sighed, sitting on the grass after practice, legs splayed before him. “You never go home to visit.”

“She’s not home to visit,” Nagi rolled his eyes. “She’s busy.”

“With what?” Reo cried out, but Nagi didn’t answer. Getting information out of him was like pulling teeth, and you hadn’t responded to the last five messages he sent.

From: Mikage Reo (Nagi's Friend)

To: loml 💓🌟💞🔥🌙🥰💞🫦💜💜💜

↳ let’s play 20 questions

↳ i’ll start

↳ what’s your favorite country to travel to? i’ll choose where i play when i go pro so you can come too

↳ hello?

↳ will you marry me

"Look here, Hyouma!" Reo watched as Chigiri whipped his head around, his hair trailing in the wind. Ah, that was where they had seated the family.

His parents weren't present, of course. They allowed him to pursue football, but that didn't mean they were enthusiastic about it. They weren't enthusiastic about anything. It was odd how they, with the world at their feet and the ability to do whatever they wanted, had circled back around and wanted nothing at all.

Reo squinted up at the stands and saw what he wanted.

He chanced a small wave, unsure of his place after all that had happened between him and Nagi, and suppressed an embarrassing noise when he realized that you were already looking, a fond smile on your face.

"Who's that?" Asked Otoya, who seemed caught between ogling you, Chigiri's sister, and the girls in the crowd cheering for him.

"She's too old for you," said Reo shortly.

You took them out for a celebratory dinner during their break. Reo had looked askance at Nagi when they'd met up, the ground still unsteady beneath his feet. Nagi had looked away, his lips pursed in that little x shape, and Reo had guessed that he just hadn't told you about it. How typical of him, to refuse to put in the effort of telling his family anything to make it less awkward for either of them.

Well, Reo was greedy, and he benefited from it, so he didn't mind.

He was a perfect gentleman for the entire dinner, pulling out your chair for you, serving you and Nagi before himself, asking only polite questions and not please, please, please, tell me you aren't dating anyone at university, please don't look at that Oliver Aiku guy.

He compiled the things he knows about you on the way home, leaning his head against the window of the driver's car.

You were four years older than him, studying pre-law. You were something of a prodigy, the youngest ever to land an internship at the prestigious firm you work for, and you didn't have time to date. You were Nagi's half-sister from his father's first marriage, before he cheated on your mother with his secretary, Nagi's mother, and you were more of a parent to Nagi than either of them ever were. Your favorite country to travel to was the country your mother was from, since you have dual citizenship.

You ordered duck, which he noted down as unusual, you must really like it. During long study sessions, you alternated between salty and sweet snacks to keep your electrolytes up. Like Nagi, you had a slightly flat affect, but it went away when in conversation with your brother, especially when talking about self-care (or his lack thereof). You were clearly passionate about it.

At the end of dinner, you smiled at Reo and said, "thank you for taking care of him, but make sure you take care of yourself too. Ah, my little brothers and their egos."

Something in Reo died. Nagi laughed at him so hard it almost felt like everything was alright again.

He ends up in England and so do you, a few hours away by train. You're studying law now, properly, and come by to visit Nagi once a month. The marks of your parents show clearly on both of you in odd ways. Nagi squirms under your attention, sometimes more eager to escape it than he is to hover while Reo flirts, and you frame it all as checking in on your little brother.

Really, Reo thinks, watching you get back on your train, he thinks you're lonely.

He's older now, nineteen to your twenty-three, and only slightly less brash. He knows the things that make you blush and the things that make you pull away, put off by how serious he is when he says you’re beautiful, you’re perfect, you’re his dream girl.

He squints at you, up in the stands, an umbrella propped over your shoulder and nose buried in a book while he watches. They’ve just finished a practice made all the more grueling by the mud left behind by the morning’s rain and he’s covered in it, grass and dirt all the way up his side, his lungs raw from the cold.

He never looks at you when the game's on; when he's playing, football is all that exists. The world shrinks down to the pitch, the pitch spans the earth. Occasionally, an opposing player will try to get to Nagi by talking trash about his sister and neither of them ever react to it; their ego is internal, untouchable by anyone else. Sometimes they'll try it with Reo, too, talking about his girl, his girl who they don't know is one and the same. Your face flashes in his mind and he pushes you away, diving for the ball. You don't even know yet.

You hear him say it, but you laugh about it, you look away. One day, he'll make you listen.

He takes an extra long time in the showers, waiting until the water runs cold just so the guy after him suffers. He rubs a dab from his travel tube of eye cream into his skin, bites his lips and runs chapstick over them.

When you see him, your face breaks into a smile that squeezes your eyes almost shut, your gums showing. His heart knocks painfully against his ribs.

"My brother left already," you say, voice a fond laugh. "He looked like he needed a nap."

"He slept in so late we had to drive separately," says Reo.

"Well, I need a stand-in," you say. "You game?"

He frowns, but he nods yes.

"Where will we go? You didn't dress for the weather." He chooses not to address the stand-in little brother comment. He will not be pinned down this way, fitted into your specimen display and neatly labeled as Brother #2.

You, absolutely dressed for the weather in a smart coat and lined boots, are already walking away. He chases after you, unlooping his scarf from his neck, wrapping it around you like he's leashing a cat. You laugh, startled, and don't push him away hard enough, so he adjusts it until it looks just so and brushes away your hair when he's done.

"Thank you, Reo-chan," you say, your chin almost disappearing behind the fabric. He smiles at you, sure that whatever's on his face is soppy and ugly in its earnestness, not like his media-trained charm.

You pick up takeout at some window service joint with a Michelin star tacked to the wall behind the cashier and meander back to Reo and Nagi's apartment.

It's less of an apartment than it is a floor of a building. There's a permanent mattress that lives out in the common area, where you often sleep during your visits but which Nagi is currently occupying. He's sprawled across it with his phone having slipped out of his lax grip, glowing blue next to him. You bend down and turn it off for him, patting his head lightly. He snuffles and you giggle. Reo looks at the two of you and wonders if he'll ever love someone not of your bloodline.

In order to avoid disturbing him, the two of you retreat to Reo's room. You sit on the floor, eating out of the takeout boxes, a bastardization of a young couple moving into their first apartment.

"I have a question," you say, interrupting Reo's staring.

"Yes," he says.

"My university’s law society is having a ball. After exams. I don't—my classmates—"

"Yes," he says. It's like angels are singing, cherubs floating in the air around him. Spring breaks over him, the sun coming out after a long winter.

"Thanks," you say, slouching slightly. "All my friends are bringing proper dates, so I can't go stag. Well, I could. I'm just too tired to network, you know? And a lot of them, they're. Well. You know."

It gets exhausting, sometimes, to be somewhere other people consider to belong to them and not to you. It gets exhausting to feel like they might be right for the wrong reasons.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

“I just don’t want anyone to bother me.”

“You might not have so much luck with that,” he says, winking roguishly at you. “You’ll be the prettiest girl at the party, of course, and you’re bringing the handsomest football player the world has ever seen.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask Aiku to come with me,” you tease.

He snarls and tackles you down to the floor, too slow to be violent. You melt together, leaning back from his touch, always a hair’s breadth away, him relentlessly moving forward.

When you’re finally pressed together, it feels like two stars collided. Your laugh is a crash of light over him.

“Yah,” you giggle, “I was going to say thank you for doing me a favor, but I don’t think I want to anymore.”

“Shh,” Reo hushes you. “You don’t have to say thank you.”

He rolls you over, on top of him, arranging you with your head on his chest. He holds you down until your laughter peters out into soft breaths, until each inhale deepens and each exhale lengthens, until he can tell you’re on the cusp of falling asleep. He thinks of the weariness in your voice; he thinks about digging his fingers into your sides and keeping you with him until he can be sure you get some rest. He just wants to help you rest for a little while.

You climb off of him when he can tell you’re almost slipping out of consciousness, clumsy with dreaminess. Every inch of him feels the English cold as you disappear through his bedroom doorway. He’s still lying on the floor.

The ball’s theme is “Dragon’s Hoard,” whatever that means. A number of the attendees seem to interpret it as “drape oneself in as much gold as possible.” Worse, many of the men show up in plain suits with yellow ties—Reo feels sick looking at them.

“I thought old money was supposed to be classy,” he hisses to you.

“There is no amount of money that replaces dignity,” you snort.

Your outfit is the epitome of class, in his opinion. There are accents of deep purple throughout—his color, he thinks, delusionally. You drip with mother-of-pearl from your ears, your neck, your wrists, your feet, a dragon of the East bringing living water to the world. He’d knelt and slid a ring onto your second toe, gently holding your ankle and trying hard not to spend too much time looking up at you with his mouth open.

He’s wearing it, too, his earrings, his rings, his buttons, all shimmering iridescent. There are subtly embroidered scales lapping over his shoulders, translucent from some angles and outstanding from others. His hair is slicked back at first but you make him dance so hard pieces of it are curling around his temples by the end of the night.

There’s not enough room in the coach for all the people waiting to return home, so he gathers you into his lap and gestures for another passenger to cram in.

“Hold everything. Aren’t you—” The pasty kid who ends up seated next to the two of you gasps.

“Yeah,” Reo grins. “Boom."

"No autographs," you say into Reo's neck. He can feel your mouth against his skin. "He's my bodyguard tonight."

Reo's whole body prickles with joy.

"Alright, alright," laughs the boy. "We're going to afters, me and—" He gestures at the people on the other side of him. "You and your girl want to come with?"

Reo nudges you, the corner of his knuckle into your cheek.

You slur "yeah, let's do it."

Afters are a blur. The pasty boy buys the two of you a round of shots to start off with and you make Reo finish most of them. You sit on a couch in a backroom and giggle with a bunch of strangers while he watches you. You dance more, swaying instead of bouncing like you're at a concert. He dances a little with you, hams it up to hear you laugh, wind chimes and a fresh breeze in the humid crush. He goes to the bathroom and a group of guys standing around a sink offer him a bump that he declines.

"Watching out for the missus tonight," he says. This is met with raucous approval.

"Good man," says one of them, nodding. "She's something else."

"Y'sure you can handle all that?" Another slurs. "Rookie like you, not sure you're man enough yet."

The world fractures sideways around Reo. Muttered dissent around them. Shadows bleed in.

Reo winds up and kicks out at him, just close enough that his sole almost touches the boy's pristine white dress shirt, pulling back at the last second. He slams the door behind him and grabs you around the waist when he finds you, yawning into your palm and out of sync with the beat.

"Let's go home, huh?" He murmurs in your ear. You beam up at him and start to roll your body so that you bump against him, again and again, and nod. He flexes his hands and tries to memorize everything as you start to push through the crowd of people outside.

You chat about nothing as you walk home. Reo complains about the men's fashion in this city; you exclaim over whatever artist they'd hired for the ball whose music you liked so much. Both of you agree that you're so excited for the cheesy noodles you keep a perpetual stock of.

In the last few minutes of your walk, it starts to rain a little. Neither of you have an umbrella, so you run together, him following close, trying to shield you with his body. You stumble into the lobby of your building together, the room eerily silent, a sign up saying the receptionist is sleeping in an office where they can be woken up by tapping the bell on the counter.

You look up at him, face flushed, eyes bright. There are little raindrops caught on the strands of your hair, glittering at him. Your lips are moving—his ears ring as you come closer, closer.

You tug him down and he follows blindly. He closes his eyes and feels a soft, warm pressure on his forehead. He can smell your perfume and your sweat so strongly it makes him dizzy with want.

You pull away, the sensation of your kiss pressed to his forehead lingering. You smile at him, a sadder smile this time. He holds your face, stroking at the skin under your eyes, wishing he could make it better, this awful thing you're about to say to him and how it hurts you to say. You've sobered up, he can tell. If he'd sobered up more, maybe he could have said the right thing.

"You know I'm too old for you, right?" You ask softly. He lurches back like you'd slapped him.

Everything he wants to say to you right now is awful, evil, poisonous things he'll regret, so he doesn't say anything. He waits for you to step away, scrubbing at his eyes with the palms of his hands, pressing hard so he sees starbursts of color against the encroaching blackness.

He thinks of the pasty boy in the carriage, the ring of suits in the bathroom. Hatred blooms in him for them, so young to his eyes and yet their courtship would probably be more acceptable to you. He hates them all, everyone you wouldn't write off just because they were your little brother's best friend, permanently shadowed by it. He wants to go back and really hurt them, not just scare them, even if it'll blow up his career and probably his green card.

He doesn't do that. He stumbles after you and falls asleep on your couch. He stays there until three in the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep, wishing desperately that he were anyone else as long as that was someone you would look at.

He finally gets up when you wave a bowl of ramen, cheese melted into it, a perfect soft-boiled egg sitting on top, under his nose. You give it to him with chopsticks and a brush of your hand over his hair, the scallions curled like the more effort you put into this stupid ramen the better an unspoken apology it is, and he can't help but forgive you instantly.

You're wrong. You're not too old for him. He's just too young right now, but he won't always be.

Reo waits for you another four years. For two of those you're not in the same country. Half a year into returning to Japan, Nagi mentions offhandedly that some guy at the company you provide in-house counsel for has been pursuing you and you’re considering accepting.

Ultimately, you don’t, but that’s only after Reo goes on an epic bender that culminates in a lot of incriminating tabloid photos of him shirtless on a yacht.

He sees you after that at a friends and family team event. Reo’s mother’s his representation, but she’s spent most of her time talking to the suits, probably trying to eke out some kind of advertising partnership. He really doesn’t give a fuck.

You, of course, are Nagi’s plus-one. You arch an eyebrow when you see Reo staring, your mouth curving up without your permission. He bows deeply to you from across the room—a silent sorry.

When he looks up, you’ve disappeared. He tries to breathe through the strangling squeeze of his heartstrings.

“Reo-chan,” you almost bowl him over with your arms around him, a light spring straitjacket. “I missed you.”

Reo wraps his arms around you slowly, wonderingly. He taps his fingertips against your bare skin and feels each touch reverbrate back through him. He’s never seen you let Nagi off this easily. For the first time in four years, he thinks what he wants might be within reach.

But alas, Reo is addicted to the grind. You've finally given him an inch, but he has, like, six more to go.

He starts gently by showing up to your workplace every Friday at 5 pm and forcefully separating you from your work to get dinner.

"You are kidnapping me," you complain, holding onto the edge of your desk while he tries to wheel you away in your office chair. The further he manages to pull the chair, the more exaggerated the arch of your back gets, folding yourself in half and your ankles locking around the stem of the chair.

"It's the weekend," he grits. "You're the only person still in the office in the whole fucking world."

"And I like it that way! Go away!"

"No, you need fuel," he snaps back. "How much overtime did you log this week?"

"I'm not telling you that," you huff, your hair falling into your face. "You will get me out of this building if and only if you kill me first."

"You are so," he says, voice deep with frustration. "Okay. Fine. We'll do it your way."

He's a chameleon. He'll adapt. He lets go of your chair.

"What are you doing?" Your head pops up. He's preoccupied digging his phone out of his slacks, so you keep one eye suspiciously on him and start to inch back to the desk.

"Hi," he says into the phone. "Mom? I catch you at a good time? Yeah, I'm good, thanks."

"What are you doing?" You repeat, more suspicious.

"I was thinking, I should have a little more interest in the family business now that I'm getting on in years. Yeah, haha, I know, a little late. But hey, I'm calling, aren't I?"

"Reo," you say, standing up and approaching him like a cat ready to spring. He can see your eyes narrowing as you start to put together his scheme, baring your sharp little teeth. Ah, he loves you. "Stop it. This isn't funny."

"What do you know about—" He says the name plastered across the building you're standing in right now. "Could be a good acquisition. I have it on good authority they're on the up-and-up. If you'd buy them, I'd like to take over management—"

"Holy shit, stop it," you snarl, coming in close, reaching up, up, up— "Get off that phone or I will shove it so far up your ass you're going to taste circuits—"

He shoves the phone back into his pocket and catches you around the middle, lifting you a few inches off the ground and swinging you in the direction of the door.

"Hook, line, and sinker," he says with satisfaction. "You have good reflexes, sweetheart."

"I hate you," you say, walking step by step with him out of your office. "Where did you say our reservation was?"

He doesn’t let up. He sends you flowers when he’s away for games and shows up with lunchboxes when he can.

“Did you make this?” You say with shock, poking at the jiggly, still-warm omurice.

He debates lying for a second.

“No.” The truth wins out. You grin at him. There’s rice at the corner of your mouth. He’s jealous of it, touching you, sticking to your skin.

“Have you ever even touched a stove in your life?” You want to know.

He tries to remember, but comes up blank. If no one’s there to cook for him, he doesn’t. Once he was visiting Barou and stepped into the kitchen for literally a second and got chased away like his presence could set everything on fire. Maybe it could. He doesn’t know how to work those tiny dials.

“I’ll learn,” he finally responds. It’s the best that he’s got.

You shrug. “I don’t know how to, either. We always had a housekeeper growing up, and then I didn’t have time when I was in school.”

“Maybe after I retire, I’ll learn,” he says. “It could be interesting.” After he retires, when you have kids or dogs, when you’re the breadwinner and all he has to do all day is keep himself looking pretty for you, he thinks it would be nice to learn to make you nice meals. Wagyu steaks and Peking duck, things like that. Cakes for your birthday and anniversaries, tiered and decorated in detail.

He’s not going to do the dishes, though. He wrinkles his nose at the thought. He’ll hire someone for that.

“What are you thinking about?” You’re looking at him, he realizes with a start, your chin propped in your hand. Your eyes have this sheen to them he’s never seen before, like you’re looking at something unimaginably bright. He almost checks behind him, but he can’t quite tear his eyes away.

“Dishes,” he says. You retch. His own laugh startles him, loud and strong, nothing like the polite chuckle he learned in etiquette classes as a kid. The sound is kind of ugly, but you lean a little closer to him, so he’ll try and make it as much as possible going forward.

Reo's twenty-three when Nagi texts him something that very nearly gives him a heart attack.

From: bestie 🤍🤍🤍 FOREVER

To: reo

↳ hey im getting married friday do u want to come with

From: reo

To: bestie 🤍🤍🤍 FOREVER

↳ WHAT

↳ hey. sorry WHAT

He calls Nagi twenty-nine times.

“Hey, what’s up?” His best friend asks. Reo struggles to find words to express the string of exclamation and question marks blaring red in his brain.

“Have you died and been replaced by an alien?” Is what he settles on.

“Um, no?”

“Then why,” Reo takes a deep breath. “Are you getting married. I didn’t even know you were dating anyone.”

“Oh,” Nagi pauses for a second. “Um, we met like a month ago. It didn’t feel serious enough to tell you about.”

“But now you’re getting married.”

“Yeah, it’s more serious now.”

“Are you being threatened?" Reo asks. "What is even this person's name? Are they good enough for my treasure? Do you have a prenup?"

"Dude, relax," Nagi says. "It's not a big deal. We just—we just fit well together. I don't know."

"You're just not really usually this decisive," Reo says faintly. "Or I guess active is the better word."

"Didn't it take you half a second from across the world to decide you wanted to marry my sister?"

Reo has been outmaneuvered.

"Fair enough," he says. "You have my blessing. How do you even plan a wedding in a week?"

"Oh, we're just going to the courthouse and then the bar afterwards, nothing crazy," Nagi says. "Maybe they'll have a two-for-one deal or something. Onee-san is gonna be our other witness."

"I did not come all this way to marry her two-for-one," is all Reo can think to say to that. "If I was going to, I'd have taken her to Vegas and tricked her into a drive-through chapel years ago. Did you at least get a nice ring?"

Nagi did get a nice ring. He shows it off with pride, little pieces of his future spouse's personality clearly part of the process, the price tag beyond standard, the thoughtfulness obvious. It's the final thing that convinces you both that he's not being blackmailed or brainwashed or something. Roughly twenty minutes after Nagi hangs up, Reo got a call from you, probably after you'd finished interrogating your brother just like you had when you'd been introduced to Reo.

Like two clocks tuned by the same hands, you and Reo show up at the same time the day of to force Nagi into a suit and brush his hair. To your surprise, he's already mostly done up, looking like the kind of person who does laundry on a schedule and could maybe be emotionally responsible enough to be in a long-term relationship.

You are clearly not as convinced as Reo is that this decision will turn out, but in his opinion, you've been fighting off true love for years, so what do you even know? Nagi can totally marry whoever he wants. And so should you.

Despite your skepticism, Reo finds you sidling up to him during the short civil ceremony and leaning your face into his shoulder.

"Are you crying?" He whispers.

"No," you say. "My face doesn't do that. Shut up. Can you believe our baby's all grown up?"

You shake under his touch when he puts a comforting hand on your back, holding you steady.

From his place in front of a government official who is clearly awestruck by the football royalty in the room, Nagi shoots him an indiscreet thumbs up.

"You go ahead," Reo says when you're done taking photos of the happy couple, insisting that if they don't, you want commemorative evidence of the day. "We'll catch up with you in a second."

Nagi grins. He hasn't stopped all day, really, but Reo can see it, the shine in his eyes, the twitch of his cheek.

"Thanks," you say, dabbing at your face once they'd turned the corner, leaving the two of you alone in the courtyard. There are still cherry blossoms on the trees, drifting down around you. "Oh, he looked so happy. I've never seen him so happy."

"Yeah, it's scary," Reo hums. You swat him. "Ow, hey, this is a million-dollar body."

"I can afford it," you say.

You're standing close, still. You hadn't really separated since you'd leaned into him in the courtroom and he'd kept a hand around you, grounding you. You hadn't run away from his touch.

"Our hotshot lawyer," he smiles at you. You're so close, now, your fronts touching. He can see the baby lashes stuck to your waterline, the shiny tear tracks on your skin. You're smiling, too. "Do I ever tell you I'm proud of you? I really am."

You avert your eyes, biting at your lip; it's not enough to close that pretty smile.

"You're too nice to me," you say. "The only person ever to bully me into taking care of myself. You know, everyone else just lets me manage them."

"I like doing it. I really, really like taking care of you." His voice almost cracks, the seventeen-year old who fell in love with you threatening to emerge. "I'm not afraid of a little hard work."

"You're so good, Reo-chan," you sigh, tilting your head a little. You're not looking at him anymore, an energy line cut off.

No one else has ever said something like that about him. He could laugh, but he's frowning instead, using two fingers to tip your head back so he can see you again.

"I hate it when you call me that," he says. "No, seriously. Are you going to listen to me?"

You fix your eyes on him, a kind of challenging stare. His blood goes hot under his skin. Convince me, he can hear in your voice. Make your case. Win.

"I'm not a kid anymore. I don't think you think I'm a kid anymore. I was—I used to be infatuated with you," he admits. "But I love you now. You know that. You've been letting me love you for a while, which makes me think you could—you'd love me too. I want you to love me too. It doesn't even have to be like I love you, I know I've had a lot more time and I can feel it in me like this, like this bottomless well, it's crazy. I might be crazy. But I just want you to love me back and I, uh, I always get what I want, right? It's in my fucking bloodline, for better or for worse. So I guess what I'm saying is—"

You don't let him finish before you pull him down by his tie and kiss him squarely on the mouth.

"I love you too," you whisper against his lips when you separate. "We're waiting for another month before we tell Sei, though."

"Why?" He grumbles, chasing your lips again. He's drunk, a dehydrated man offered wine.

"Because," you pause to kiss him, which turns into several minutes of silence. You're visibly reeling, trying to collect yourself when you pull away, which sends a thrum of pride through his chest like a love song. "Um. Oh, because I don't want our anniversaries to be the same."

"He literally orchestrated this," Reo says, but you're walking him back until his back is pressed against the wall between the courtyard and the sidewalk.

You’re barely through the gates when she starts squirming in your arms, legs kicking wildly against your hip. She babbles at full volume, squealing, clapping her hands together in a desperate attempt to get his attention.

“Okay, okay,” you murmur, shifting her higher. “We see him. I know.”

He’s finishing a lap when you look up.

He cuts cleanly through the last stretch of water, arms slicing forward, shoulders rolling smooth and strong beneath the surface. When he reaches the wall, he plants his palms on the edge and hauls himself up enough to hook both forearms over the edge.

Water streams down his shoulders, along the swell of his biceps, dripping from his chin in steady rivulets. The sun turns every drop of water on his skin into a shimmering prism of light.

He wipes his face with both hands, dragging them down over his eyes to clear the chlorine, and slicks his hair back.

Then he looks up.

And it’s unfair, how his whole face changes.

Recognition lights him up instantly, his mouth curving into that easy, unguarded smile you’ve seen a dozen times now—one that pulls gentle crow’s feet around those ridiculously kind eyes.

At first glance, they're just brown.

Until the sun hits.

Then a deep shade of hazel starts to blossom at the edges, that slow spill of green feathering inward. Honey-warm at the center, almost amber where the light pools. A kind of kaleidoscope you only notice if you stare for too long.

Which you don’t.

He grins wide as you approach the pool deck, squinting slightly against the glare off the water.

There’s always this split second where he looks so openly happy to see you.

Or, more accurately—to see your daughter.

You lower yourself carefully to sit at the edge, adjusting your grip because your daughter is now folding herself in half trying to reach him.

“Hey," he smiles, glancing toward the clock mounted near the lifeguard chair. "You guys are early today,”