Mysterious Midnight

But Tommy’s worst fear is being outed, and Steve isn’t sure he cares. Not now that he’s noticed Eddie’s dimpled grin, or the way he talks faster and faster and with his hands when he’s excited about something. Do you know how long it’s been since Steve’s been around someone who let themselves get properly excited about anything beyond who’s dating who or what happened on the court? Which, fine, he gets into that stuff too, but that’s not all he wants to feel engaged in.

He starts getting Eddie’s attention with mild jabs in the hallway—the verbal equivalent of pulling the guy’s pigtails. Nothing particularly cutting, but Eddie’s made his way through most of the popular guys at this point so he zeros in on it like a shark tasting blood in the water. (Maybe he’s bored. Maybe he wants a challenge—Steve likes to think of himself as a challenge. All the girls vying for his attention seem to have the same idea too, judging by how they stop returning his calls after a couple of dates.)

Eddie does his thing: drive-by flirting in the halls, taunting with just enough innuendo to titillate while still retaining plausible deniability. He’s fishing, seeing if Steve will take the bait. And Steve, feeling the thrill of the game in a way he hasn’t in a long time, takes it.

They hook up, and (because Steve knows what to look for) Eddie isn’t even that slick about setting his phone up to record it. He sucks Steve’s soul out through his dick, then looks comically shocked when Steve sits up, says “I’ve never done this before, so feel free to call out any pointers you might have,” and inexpertly but enthusiastically returns the favor.

The next time Steve taunts Eddie in the hallway, Eddie tugs him into the bathroom despite the ring of the tardy bell and lays out his usual terms: cut it out, or the video goes all over social media. But Steve interrupts his spiel to ask, “Did you watch it?”

Eddie’s cheeks start to color. “Well. I mean. To make sure it was obviously you, yeah.”

Steve hums in faux sympathy. “So sometimes you have to do this more than once for it to work? If they’re not recognizable in the video.” Eddie’s jaw drops, and Steve laughs. “Hey man, don’t worry about it. It’s pretty funny, actually. And I had a really good time. Actually, could you send it to me? Or come over again sometime, whatever you’re comfortable with. My parents really aren’t around much, as long as the front porch light is off the coast is clear.”

“… You’re bluffing,” Eddie tries, flustered. Trying for but not really achieving his usual bad boy bravado.

Steve responds by locking the bathroom door, snagging Eddie’s phone from his jacket pocket (the obligatory “I already backed up the file” goes duly ignored), and setting it up to record before putting it back in Eddie’s hand. Then he gets on his knees with a wink and a cheeky “Be sure to get my good side,” before making surprisingly quick work of Eddie’s complicated belt and going gloriously to town.

By lunchtime, Eddie plops down in his usual spot in the cafeteria still feeling shaken to his very core. After blowing him, Steve had persuaded him to unlock his phone so the dude could send himself both videos, and saved his own contact info as “Steve 🍆😜.” In the middle of second period, Steve had texted him an “Eddplant” joke. After third, it had been, “Hey, do you want to hang out sometime? Maybe a movie. Let me know what you like.”

Eddie can’t tell if the game has been turned around on him or if Steve is for real. He doesn’t know if Steve is asking about his preference in movies, associated snacks, or sex. Part of him hopes it’s sex, because Steve is a real quick study. Maybe he should start carrying condoms and lube around, just in case—no, that’s just his horny brain talking.

Or is it?

(It’s not, and Steve thinks it was a genius idea when it pays off later in the week.)

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He’s seen it before. On his mom, on his brother… hell, in the bathroom mirror a few times before Lonnie decided to take off. Would’ve been more if his entire childhood hadn’t been a master class in making himself small and easy to overlook. Eddie isn’t like him.

Will is just worried that Eddie might be a little too much like him. Brash and full of opinions and righteous conviction (like refusing to reschedule for Lucas), most of which gets a pass because Eddie likes the same nerd stuff as the Party but Will is good at pattern recognition. Same brands of cigarettes and beer, because they’re cheapest. Not that Eddie drinks around them—not much, just at backyard parties where the rest of the older crowd is drinking too, and even then nothing excessive. There were similarities but nothing truly alarming.

Not until Steve.

Will keeps telling himself that it doesn’t make something green and nasty rear up in his chest when Steve and Eddie sit them down one afternoon and explain that they’re together. He should be happy for them. He is happy for them! And happy that they’re paving the way for his own eventual introduction of his first boyfriend who he’s trying to come to terms with not being Mike. With it never being Mike. Even though Eddie can have a guy like Steve, in a place like Hawkins, when they’ve only really been friends for the moral equivalent of five minutes.

He’s totally not jealous. That has nothing to do with it.

Nothing at all to do with the fact that he makes sure that the first person he mentions the bruises to is Max, who also knows a thing or two about getting shoved around or grabbed too hard behind closed doors, and how likeable the perpetrator can continue to seem in the foreground. Or that the second person is Dustin, and that Dustin takes it and runs with it because he still feels guilty about Steve being tortured under Starcourt just because he’d intercepted that Russian code. Until the entire extended Party, Nancy and Jonathan included, are on board for an intervention. They didn’t get Robin, figuring she might be too close to see it clearly, but of course she’s there when they all go to talk to Steve.

Who isn’t cooperating at all.

“Are you guys fucking kidding me?” Steve snaps, both hands on his hips. At his side, Robin has her arms crossed with a judgmental frown, her eyes drilling into Will like he should know better. (He’s avoiding meeting that look.) “You think—Jesus Christ, I can’t even say it. I can’t believe any of you would actually think Eddie is like that. After the whole town tried to hunt him down with torches and pitchforks based on some bullshit murder accusations? He’s your fucking friend!”

“You’re our friend too, Steve,” Dustin argues, plaintive and visibly uneasy with how this is going so far. “And you’ve got—We’ve all seen the bruises. You can’t be mad at us for being worried, after all the shit you’ve been through.”

Something softens in Steve’s glare, but not by much. “Okay, so be concerned about me. Ask me if I have, I don’t know, low iron or something that makes me bruise easy. Which I don’t, but don’t… Don’t jump to my boyfriend abusing me, that’s messed up.”

Nancy steps forward to back Dustin up. “You do have a history of putting up with more than you probably should in a relationship,” she says.

“Don’t.” Steve brandishes a pointer finger at her, expression suddenly pinched. “If you want to talk about you and me, and maybe even actually apologize for some of that, just… do that. Don’t try to turn it on me like it’s some sort of trump card for why I should take this bullshit seriously.”

Will sees the word bullshit hit Nancy like a slap, and she steps back again, retreating to lean subtly back against Jonathan. He’s starting to feel antsy about how this is going.

“And the rest of you,” Steve continues, addressing the entire group. “I’m only going to say this once: Eddie doesn’t do anything to me that I don’t want him to do, and I don’t owe any of you an explanation for that. Maybe one on one, if you have questions and aren’t being judgmental assholes, but not in a group ambush like this. And you don’t want to find out what happens—what I, personally, will do if any of you go to Eddie about this shit, or if he ever catches wind of it. I’m not kidding. This goes in a goddamn vault.”

Frustrated, Will looks to Max. He knows that Billy used to grab her arm hard enough to leave marks, just like Lonnie. She was supposed to be the loudest voice in this! Instead, she looks uncharacteristically cowed. And sure, she’d also been the loudest proponent of maybe Eddie doesn’t even realize he’s going too far or maybe it’s not even Eddie, Steve still lives with his parents. After all, Max and Eddie are neighbors; she understands the stigma of living in Forest Hills better than anyone else here.

Maybe Hargrove Senior had never put hands on her mom, though. Maybe she doesn’t get that, how it can happen between people who say they love each other.

Something is rising in Will’s throat like bile, and he realizes too late that it’s words.

“Even if you think you asked for it, he still shouldn’t be hitting you!”

For the first time in all this, because Will has been hanging on the fringes of the crowd and not contributing much, Steve’s eyes land on him. It’s a heavy gaze, laced with both surprise and uncomfortably piercing scrutiny. Will isn’t really as close to Steve as his friends are—Dustin and Lucas especially, and even Mike has that long-running tension with him because the guy dated his older sister—and he’s not used to receiving the full brunt of his attention. Hadn’t realized how intense it is, or thought about how perceptive Steve can sometimes be.

And now everyone else is looking too. His skin is prickling unpleasantly all over under the microscope, sweat starting to gather at his hairline because he’s not made for the spotlight like this. It’s like—fuck, it’s like he’s something out of the Upside Down, like booger-sized Dart when they’d tried to shine a warm lamp directly at him in the AV closet. Like he’s always going to be the freak in the room trying to shrink out of the light.

And Jonathan is staring at him with recognition and guilt and something that makes Will want to cringe or maybe throw things. Because, fuck, Jonathan caught even more of Lonnie’s shit than he did! Jonathan is the reason Will first learned to start reading into bruises, the ones his big brother earned while standing in front of him like a human shield! Why is he looking at him like Will is in the wrong here?

“Okay,” Steve says, almost a sigh, even though it feels to Will like no one has spoken in approximately a million years. “Okay, just… It’s really not like that, Will. It’s… replacing bad memories with better ones. He only does what I specifically ask him to do and we talk it out before and after, and that’s all I’m gonna say here because you’re a kid and this is private, personal stuff. But also, please try to remember that he’s not… whoever you’re thinking of. He’s Eddie.”

Will crosses his arms tight across his chest and finds a point on the wall to stare at so he doesn’t have to look at anyone. He’s pretty sure Jonathan is still watching him. Feels like he’s burning up and going to be sick at the same time. Feels like Steve was being pointed, as if he’d actually dropped the words he’s not Lonnie in the room like a fucking atomic bomb—but that’s not what happened, and Will swallows down anything he might say about it because one more correction in front of everyone and he will actually implode.

He waits the rest of it out. Not that there’s much more to it—this rescue, or intervention, or mistake, whatever it is. Robin puts in her two cents, how “I know you’re all coming from a good place but trust me, that is absolutely not what’s happening here.” And fine, maybe he was wrong. But better to ask about the worst and find out it’s not than assume the best and be wrong about that, right?

When they all leave, Will is the first out the door. He hears footsteps catching up, and of course it’s Dustin because Dustin takes things and runs with them.

“Well that was awkward,” Dustin announces. “But at least it’s okay, right? Steve isn’t getting hurt, it’s all consensual… It’s unusual, but some people are into that. Ropes and handcuffs, real M&M stuff.”

“Pretty sure it’s not named after a candy,” Will relies flatly. His face still feels like it’s burning, and thinking about Steve and Eddie in the context of ropes and handcuffs… Well, it’s not helping. He’s aware he’s being kind of a dick, but he’s also aware that Dustin is only the first of many who are going to try and trap him in a conversation about this.

~

Surprisingly, everyone does end up leaving Will alone about it, even Jonathan. He’s too busy keeping his head down to really put too much thought into it until a few days later, when he realizes that maybe Steve had asked them all not to.

Because when he gets home from the arcade, the Beemer is the only car in the driveway and Steve is sitting on his front steps, clearly waiting for him.

“I brought some themed snacks,” Steve says as Will (reluctantly) approaches, and holds up two colorful bags of candy with the dorkiest grin the world has ever seen. “I got plain and peanut, wasn’t sure if you just like peanuts or both like me.”

It’s fucking M&Ms. Goddamn it Dustin.

“If I say I’m allergic to chocolate can we skip this whole thing?” he asks, knowing its rhetorical the second it comes out of his mouth. He already has his house keys out, stepping around Steve to open the front door—not that a deadbolt would stop military goons from breaking in like they had in California, but try telling his mom that.

Steve shrugs. “I’ve got gummy worms in the car. They might be a little melted together though.”

“… Chocolate is fine.”

~

An hour or so later, Steve lets himself out the front door. Will remains in his room, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to his bed, head leaned back, face still about ten degrees hotter than normal and green candy coating still on his fingers from the free peanut M&Ms.

As far as one-on-one talks went, it hadn’t been worse than the time his mom had given him the whole Birds and the Bees spiel. Steve was just the right mix of informative, funny, and surprisingly weird that made everything seem a little easier to swallow. And he’d done Will the courtesy of not talking about anything too much in terms of him and Eddie, because Will doesn’t really want to know about his friends-slash-babysitters’ sex lives—and, more importantly, not saying a word about Lonnie.

But he hadn’t beaten around the bush, either.

So now Will knows a lot more about S&M than he ever really expected to, including all the red flags that Steve says he knows to keep an eye out for. How the guy in charge, the one doling out… bruises and stuff, has the responsibility of safe wording out if he ever thinks something is off too. How the whole thing is about knowing and trusting your partner on both sides, and making sure both have a good time. How either of them can drop afterwards without aftercare, and what dropping means, and the ways they take care of each other to prevent it from happening.

It hadn’t occurred to Will that it could go both ways like that.

And the visual aid skin mag Steve had presented him with, along with a fucking receipt that showed it had only been purchased the day before to prove it was unused—Jesus Christ. But. Will flips through it now that Steve is gone and it’s not anything scary. Basically just light bondage stuff, and there’s this one picture he gets caught on where the guy tied up is being touched so… so reverently it makes something in him twist even as his throat felt suddenly tight.

Maybe Steve was onto something here, because Will kind of gets the fond look he’d had in his eye while pressing lightly on some of his own bruises during their talk.

Will is never going to admit to anyone, least of all Steve, but this is going beneath the loose floorboard under his bed. It’s not necessarily anything he’d actually want to try for himself in real life, but teenage beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to free gay porn in a small town.

Distantly, he hears the front door open and close again, and Jonathan’s voice calling, “Hey, Will? You good?”

Will sighs—Guess the reprieve is over. But he’s feeling a little better about the whole thing, ready to put the whole incident behind him and just hang out with his brother, so he gets up and heads to his bedroom door with a call of, “Yeah. Hey, you want to watch reruns or listen to the Clash or something?”

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