Everyone knows but me | Steve Harrington
Chapter two: Nothing good happens after midnight
Warnings: angst! underage drinking, one bad decision leading to a worse one,non-graphic references to Steve being hurt. pining, secret keeping, enemies-to-exes-to-something-else. slow burn.
Description: Four hundred miles away and youâre finally starting to forget him. then the phone rings at half past midnight, and itâs him, and neither of you should still be doing this. some calls make everything worse instead of better.
Steve Harrington x fem!reader
Authors note: Hi angles!! i hope you liked the first part. iâm really really trying with this story! please please please let me know if you like it (i get a little nervous to post) and what else you want to see. Love you ! If youâre interested in being on my taglist, please let me know! <3
series masterlist | previous chapter
Noah dropped you off first, since Lucy insisted, since apparently you were "too much of a mess to be left unsupervised in a moving vehicle," which, fair, considering you'd cried twice in the backseat and laughed once for no reason anyone could identify. You mumbled something like a thank you and stumbled up your own front walk, keys taking three tries to find the lock, mascara almost certainly a disaster by now, the whole night replaying itself in jagged, spinning pieces behind your eyes.
You were not prepared for the living room to be full of children.
The TV was on loud, some horror movie flickering blue light across at least five kids sprawled across the couch and floor in a tangle of sleeping bags and popcorn bowls, and it took your brain a solid three seconds, slowed considerably by everything you'd had to drink, to process that this was, in fact, Parker's house, and these were, in fact, his friends, and you had, in fact, just stumbled loudly through the front door mid-movie night.
Every single head turned toward you at once.
"Whoa," said the curly-haired one Dustin, your brain supplied slowly, Dustin, the one who talked constantly about Steve like he'd personally invented the concept of being cool sitting up straight amid the sleeping bags. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." It came out slurred at the edges, which did nothing to sell the point. You gripped the doorframe a little tighter than you meant to, and the whole room tilted gently, unhelpfully, in response.
"You don't look fine," said a girl with a bandana in her hair, blunt in the specific, fearless way only a thirteen-year-old could manage. "You look like you've been crying. Like, a lot."
"Max." Another girl elbowed her, not unkindly, though she was also staring at you with wide, open curiosity. "That's rude."
"It's not rude if it's true."
Parker had scrambled up off the floor by now, popcorn forgotten, expression shifting fast from confusion into something closer to alarm. "Y/N? What happened? Are you okay? Why do you smell like â" He stopped himself, visibly deciding not to finish that sentence in front of his friends, though the damage was already done, several kids exchanging a look that suggested they'd correctly filled in the blank anyway.
"I'm fine, Parker." You tried to sound steadier than you felt, tried to smile, which felt like an enormous, uncoordinated effort. "I just had a rough night. Go back to your movie."
"You're definitely crying," said a smaller boy with a bowl cut, gently, like he was trying to be helpful rather than difficult about it. "Your face is doing the thing."
You pressed the back of your hand against your cheek and discovered, to your mild horror, that he was right, that you had apparently been crying the entire walk from the car and hadn't fully registered it until a ten-year-old pointed it out.
"Okay," you managed. "Fine. I'm having a hard night. But it's not a big deal, and you guys should just get back to your movie, I'm gonna go to bed."
Nobody moved to get back to the movie. Five kids and your little brother all continued to stare at you with the same unblinking, unfiltered concern, and you had the distinct, humiliating sense of being examined by a jury that had already reached a verdict.
"Is it a boy thing?" the smaller kid Mike, you thought, though your head was too fuzzy to be sure asked, with the tone of someone genuinely trying to diagnose a problem rather than pry.
"It's not â " You stopped, because lying convincingly required more coordination than you currently possessed, and something about the sheer, sincere concern on all their faces made you not want to lie to them anyway. "It's complicated. It's a grown-up thing. I'll be fine tomorrow."
"That's what Steve says when he doesn't want to talk about stuff," Dustin offered, entirely unaware of what he'd just done to the room.
Your stomach dropped straight through the floor for what felt like the tenth time that night, and something bitter and unfiltered rose up before you could stop it.
"Yeah, well, Steve Harrington's kind of an expert at not talking about stuff, isn't he." It came out sharper than you meant it to, uglier, some ugly, drunk honesty slipping loose that sober-you would've swallowed. "Actually, you know what, he's an expert at a lot of things. Lying. Disappearing. Standing there looking sad instead of just saying anything real. You guys should ask him sometime how good he is at that."
The room went very quiet. Several kids exchanged glances that were somewhere between baffled and faintly scandalized, clearly having never once, in their entire experience of him, heard a single bad word said about Steve Harrington.
"Wait." Dustin's face had gone almost comically confused. "You know Steve?"
"Are you guys, like, enemies?" Max asked, sitting all the way up now, delighted at the sudden turn the evening had taken.
"Steve doesn't have enemies," Mike said, frowning. "Everyone likes Steve."
"I don't," you said, immediately, too fast, too flat, and even through the haze you could feel how strange it sounded coming out of your mouth, how much it didn't match the way your voice had cracked on his name back in that parking lot an hour ago.
"You don't like Steve?" Dustin looked almost personally wounded by the concept, like you'd insulted a family member. "That's insane. Steve's, like, the best. He drove us to the mall like eleven times this summer. He let me watch stuff at the store I definitely wasn't old enough for."
"Great. Wonderful. He's very generous with videotapes." You gripped the banister harder, the room tilting again, unhelpfully, right on cue. "I'm sure he's great at driving people places and lying about everything else."
"What did he even do?" Will asked quietly, the first thing he'd said all night, genuine confusion written plainly across his face.
"It's complicated." You were already turning for the stairs, the whole exchange suddenly feeling like more than you had the coordination to keep having. "It's a grown-up thing. Forget I said anything."
"You can't just say Steve's a liar and then walk away," Max called after you, clearly thrilled by the drama of it all. "That's not how this works."
"Max," Lucas muttered, though he didn't look much less curious than she did.
You didn't answer. You climbed the stairs instead, aware of six pairs of eyes following you, several of them now trading looks that suggested a full, whispered investigation was about to begin the second your bedroom door closed.
You didn't hear what they said once you were out of sight, but you heard the volume of their whispering pick up almost immediately, and you were fairly sure, even through the fog of everything, that your name and the word âSteveâ had both come up more than once before you managed to shut your bedroom door.
You sat down hard on the edge of your bed, head spinning, mascara ruined, a whole living room of ten-year-olds now theoretically aware that something was wrong with you, and thought, distantly, that this had to be one of the more humiliating nights of your entire life.
Somewhere below you, faintly, you heard Parker's voice, low and serious in a way that ten-year-olds usually weren't.
"Guys, seriously. Don't ask her about it tomorrow. I think it's actually kind of bad."
You woke up the next morning to a headache that felt personal, sunlight slicing straight through your curtains like it had a vendetta against you specifically, and a slow, sinking dread that arrived several seconds before the actual memories did.
The memories arrived anyway. All of them, in order, mercilessly.
You groaned into your pillow, replaying it in pieces you desperately wished you couldn't access â Danny's mouth, Steve's face across the club, the parking lot, the screaming, *I don't love you anymore*, and then, somehow worse, a living room full of ten-year-olds staring up at you while you slurred something about Steve Harrington being an expert liar. You actually sat up at that particular memory, hand flying to your mouth, mortification hitting you harder than the hangover itself.
You had said that. Out loud. To *children*. To Mike Wheeler's entire friend group, several of whom apparently loved Steve Harrington with the pure, uncomplicated devotion only twelve-year-olds were capable of, and you had stood in your own living room and called him a liar in front of all of them like a woman with absolutely no shame left to lose.
You reached for the phone before you'd even fully processed the decision, dialing Lucy's number with hands that were shaking slightly, whether from the hangover or the horror, you honestly couldn't say.
"Please tell me I didn't do half the things I think I did last night," you said, the second she picked up.
"Depends which half." Lucy's voice was rough too, clearly no better off than you were. "Which half are we talking about?"
"The part where I apparently told Parker's entire friend group that Steve's a liar. In our living room. While drunk. In front of ten-year-olds."
There was a long pause, and then a startled, disbelieving laugh. "Wait, you did what? Okay, hold on, back up, you didnât tell me this part.?
"weâll apparently i couldnât keep my mouth shut last nightâ
"Oh my God." Lucy's voice had gone bright with a mix of horror and delight, clearly torn between comforting you and reveling in the sheer scale of the disaster. "Okay, tell me everything. What did you actually say?"
"Oh my God." You pressed the heel of your hand against one eye. "Oh my God, Lucy, I am never going to be able to look any of those kids in the face again. Or their families. Or anyone in this entire town."
"It's exactly that bad. I basically ruined a ten-year-old's movie night by having an emotional breakdown about his sister's ex-boyfriend in front of him and five of his friends." Your voice was climbing now, panic and shame tangling together into something that felt, this morning, a lot like certainty. "I need to leave, Luce. I need to just go back to school. Early. Like, today, if I can manage it."
"Whoa, okay, slow down â"
"I'm serious. I have two days left and I don't think I can survive two more days of this town knowing what I did last night. Every time I see Parker's friends I'm gonna want to disappear into the floor. Every time I drive past that stupid video store I'm gonna think about screaming at Steve in a parking lot in front of his entire whatever they are, his little found-family situation, I don't even know. I can't do it. I can't stay here and keep running into the wreckage of my own bad decisions every single day."
"I already feel sick just thinking about facing my mom this morning, let alone Parker, let alone if I run into any of those kids again, or Robin, or Nancy, or â"
"Y/N." Lucy's voice cut through, firmer now, the kind of tone she only used when she genuinely needed you to actually hear her. "Running away to school two days early isn't gonna fix any of this. It's just gonna mean you left in the middle of a mess instead of cleaning any of it up."
"I don't want to clean it up. I want it to be somebody else's mess for a while."
"I get that. I really do. But you know that's not actually how it works." Her voice softened, just slightly. "Look, be embarrassed. God knows I would be too. But leaving early isn't gonna erase what happened, it's just gonna mean you ran from it instead of just living through a few more slightly humiliating days and figuring it out on your own terms."
You didn't answer right away, staring up at your ceiling, the hangover pounding steadily behind your eyes in time with the truth of what she'd just said.
"I really don't want to see any of them again," you admitted quietly.
"I know. But you might have to, at least once, before you go, if only so it's not the last thing they remember about you." Lucy exhaled, and you could practically hear her deciding to be gentle instead of blunt for once. "You don't have to decide anything today. Just drink some water, take some Tylenol, and maybe don't start packing your car before noon. Okay?"
"Okay," you said, though you weren't entirely convinced. "Okay. I'll think about it."
"Good." A pause, and then, lighter, an obvious attempt to pull you out of the spiral. "For what it's worth,That's objectively a little bit funny, in hindsight."
You groaned and hung up the phone, and lay back against your pillow, staring at the ceiling, already dreading the version of today that involved leaving your room at all.
Dustin found Steve restocking the horror aisle, a stack of returns balanced against one hip, and he'd been quiet for almost the entire walk over from the bike rack outside, which for Dustin Henderson was basically a five-alarm fire.
"Hey, can I ask you something?" he said, finally, hovering at the end of the aisle like he wasn't sure he actually wanted the answer.
"Yeah, bud, what's up?" Steve didn't look up from the shelf, sliding a tape into its slot.
"Do you know Parker's sister? Y/N?"
Steve's hands went very still. "Why do you ask?"
"She was at his house last night. Movie night." Dustin frowned, clearly still turning something over. "She came home kind of a mess, and then she said this whole thing about you. Like, out loud, in front of everybody."
"What kind of thing?" Steve's voice had gone careful, quiet, though something in his face had already started to brace for it.
"She said you're, like, an expert at not talking about stuff. And lying. And disappearing." Dustin recited it like he'd been holding the exact words in his head all day, turning them over, trying to make them fit into something that made sense. "And then Max asked if you guys were enemies, and Mike said everyone likes you, and she just said 'I don't' and went upstairs."
Steve set the tape down slowly, and didn't say anything for a long moment.
"I don't get it," Dustin went on, frustration creeping into his voice now, the kind that came from genuinely not understanding something that felt important. "You don't even seem like you know her that well. You never mentioned her. And she's just â she said it like she actually meant it, Steve. Like you did something really bad to her. And I know you, and that doesn't â that doesn't sound like you at all, and I don't get why some random girl I've never met is going around saying stuff like that."
"She's not some random girl." Steve's voice came out rougher than he meant it to, and he had to stop, clear his throat, try again. "We dated, Dustin. For two years. We broke up right before all the stuff with the mall."
Dustin's whole face rearranged itself, shock sliding fast into something more complicated. "Wait. What? You never told me that."
"I don't really tell anybody stuff." Steve managed something that wasn't quite a smile, tired and a little bitter around the edges. "Guess that tracks with what she said, actually."
"But you didn't lie to her, though. Right?" Dustin's voice had gone smaller, almost pleading, like he needed Steve to fix this fast, to make the math add up the way it was supposed to. "You wouldn't do that. I know you wouldn't."
"I did lie to her." Steve said it plainly, no defense in it at all, and watched Dustin's face fall even further. "Not about anything that matters the way she thinks it does. But I lied, over and over, for months, because I couldn't tell her the real reason I kept disappearing, and I still can't, and she doesn't know any of that, she just knows I lied and then let her walk away without explaining myself." He exhaled, dragging a hand back through his hair. "So yeah. She's not wrong, exactly. She's just missing the one piece that would actually make any of it make sense."
Dustin was quiet for a second, clearly working through it, loyalty and confusion warring visibly on his face. "That's really messed up, though. That you can't just tell her."
"I still don't think you're a liar. Not, like, a real one." Dustin said it firmly, almost defiantly, like he needed it to be true as much for himself as for Steve. "You're literally the least fake person I know. You just â you have the one thing you can't talk about, and that's not the same as being a liar. Right?"
"I don't know, man." Steve managed a small, exhausted smile, more grateful than he could easily say for the kid standing in front of him refusing to give up the argument on his behalf. "Feels pretty similar from where she's standing."
"Well, she doesn't know the whole thing. So she doesn't get to decide that yet." Dustin crossed his arms, entirely serious, twelve years old and somehow issuing the kind of blunt, absolute verdict only kids seemed capable of delivering with a straight face. "You should tell her. Not, like, the actual thing. Obviously not that. But enough that she stops thinking you're some kind of villain, because you're not, and it's kind of unfair that she gets to just go around saying that stuff about you to a room full of people who actually like you."
Steve looked at him for a long moment, something tight and grateful lodged in his throat.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I'm working on it."
"You should work faster." Dustin picked up a returned tape off the counter, apparently done with the emotional portion of the conversation, already moving back toward his usual energy. "Also, kind of unrelated, but if you guys do get back together eventually, you have to tell me everything, because this is genuinely the most interesting thing that's happened to you that I didn't already know about, and that's saying a lot, considering."
"Noted," Steve said, and almost laughed, despite everything, despite the ache still sitting heavy behind his ribs.
You decided to leave early anyway.
Lucy's advice had made sense in the moment, lying there hungover and miserable, nodding along to the idea of facing things on your own terms instead of running. But by that afternoon, after replaying Dustin's face in your head the confusion of it, the hurt, a kid who'd clearly never had a single bad thought about Steve Harrington in his life â something in you had quietly, firmly decided that your own terms were going to involve being somewhere else, as soon as physically possible.
You told your mom you'd decided to get ahead on studying . You told yourself the same thing, mostly, and didn't examine it too closely.
You were folding the last of your laundry into your suitcase when Parker appeared in your doorway, still in the same shirt from yesterday, arms crossed, looking older than ten years old had any right to look.
"You're leaving early," he said. Not a question.
"Just a few days early. I've got stuff to get set up before classes start." You didn't look up from the suitcase, focusing hard on folding a t-shirt that didn't need any more folding
"That's not why." Parker came further into the room, sitting down on the edge of your bed like he'd decided this conversation was happening whether you wanted it to or not. "You're leaving because of what you said last night. About Steve."
You sat down slowly across from him, out of things to fold, out of ways to avoid it. "Parker â"
"I want to know what happened." His voice was steadier than you expected, more serious than you were used to hearing from him. "You guys dated, right? That's what Dustin said this morning. He said Steve told him."
Something in your chest twisted at that, the knowledge that Steve had apparently had to sit there and confirm it to a twelve-year-old too. "Yeah. We did. For two years, actually. Before I left for school."
"Why didn't you ever tell me?"
"Because it ended badly, and I didn't really want to talk about it." You picked at a loose thread on the suitcase's zipper, needing something to do with your hands. "And because you and Mike are friends, and Mike's friends with Steve, and I didn't want it to be weird for you."
"It's already weird." Parker said it plainly, without any real accusation in it, just fact. "You got mad at him in front of everybody and I didn't even know why. That's weirder than if you'd just told me from the start."
You didn't have a good answer for that, so you didn't try to give one right away.
"He lied to me," you said finally, quieter. "For a long time. About where he was, what he was doing. I don't know the real reason, because he's never told me, but I know he was lying, and I know it's part of why we broke up."
"Do you think he had a good reason?"
The question landed harder than you expected, and you sat there a moment, turning it over. "I don't know. Maybe. Everyone keeps telling me it wasn't what I thought. That there's more to it. But nobody will actually tell me what the more is, so I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with that."
"Steve's not a liar, though." Parker said it with the same stubborn, absolute certainty Dustin apparently had, and you wondered, distantly, how a boy who'd known Steve for a few months had somehow arrived at more faith in him than you had after two years. "Not like â not a real one. He's actually really honest about most stuff. He told me once he wasn't good at basketball and he could've just pretended he was, but he didn't."
"That's different, Parker."
"Maybe." He shrugged, though something in his face said he didn't fully believe that. "I just don't get why you're leaving instead of trying to figure it out. If you loved him for two years, and he loved you back, isn't that kind of a big deal? Bigger than one bad night?"
You didn't have an answer for that either, and the silence stretched out long enough that Parker eventually stood, apparently done pressing, though his expression stayed troubled.
"I'm gonna miss you," he said, softer now, some of the seriousness draining out of him, leaving just a kid again. "Even if you're being kind of a coward about this."
"I'm not being a coward."
"You kind of are." He said it without malice, just honestly, the way only a little brother could get away with. "But I get it. I guess. Adults are weird about this stuff."
He left you alone with the suitcase after that, and you sat there a long time before you finished packing, his question sitting heavy and unresolved in your chest the whole time. âIsn't that kind of a big deal? Bigger than one bad night?â
You didn't have an answer. You just knew you were leaving anyway.
Steve found out you were gone almost by accident, Robin mentioning it offhand at the store two days later, something about Parker telling Mike his sister had left early for school, and it hit Steve harder than he expected, a quiet, sinking finality settling into his chest like a stone dropped into still water.
He drove past your house that morning anyway. He told himself it was on the way to somewhere else, though he knew, even as he was doing it, that it wasn't, not really.
He'd meant to just drive by. That was the plan, if it could even be called a plan â one slow pass down your street, confirmation that you were really gone, and then home, back to a life that had somehow gotten smaller and quieter in the year since you'd left it the first time. But he found himself easing off the gas as he approached, and then, without quite deciding to, pulling over half a block down, engine idling, watching your house like it might give him an answer neither of you had managed to find yet.
The driveway was empty. Your car wasn't there. He didn't know why that surprised him, since Robin had already told him you'd gone, but some stubborn, hopeful part of him had apparently needed to see it himself before it became real.
He thought about the note. The half-finished sentence, still sitting somewhere in your house, or maybe thrown away by now, or maybe kept, he had no way of knowing which, and both possibilities ached in a way he wasn't prepared for. He thought about the parking lot, the way your face had cracked open right before you said the thing that wasn't true, and the way he'd let you say it anyway instead of pushing back, because some part of him had believed, even then, that you deserved the mercy of getting away with the lie if that's what you needed.
He thought about a year ago, this exact same feeling, watching your car pull out of his own driveway while he stood frozen under a porch light, saying nothing, doing nothing, because he'd told himself at the time that not fighting for something was the same as being noble about letting it go.
It hadn't been noble. He knew that now, sitting in his car outside your empty house, hands loose on the wheel, watching a curtain move slightly in an upstairs window that turned out to just be your mother, glancing out at the street, not you. It had just been fear, dressed up as something that looked, from a distance, like restraint.
He didn't know when he'd get another chance like the one he'd had at that club, another five minutes in the same room, another shot at saying the thing he still hadn't managed to say. He didn't know if you'd even want to hear it, after everything, after the parking lot, after the lie you'd told him that he still didn't fully believe, no matter how much it had hurt in the moment.
He sat there a long time, longer than made any sense, before he finally put the car back into drive and pulled away from the curb, the house getting smaller in his rearview mirror the same way he imagined he must have, once, in yours.
He didn't say anything out loud. There was nobody there to hear it if he had.
But somewhere in the quiet of his own car, driving back toward a town that suddenly felt a little emptier than it had that morning, he thought, clearly and simply, the thing he hadn't let himself think in a year: â i should have run after the car. Both times. I should have run after the car.â
Your dorm room smelled like microwave popcorn and the specific, slightly chemical vanilla of the candle Becca refused to stop burning despite the RA's repeated warnings about it, and for the first time in what felt like weeks, you were sitting somewhere that had absolutely nothing to do with Hawkins.
"Okay, wait, back up." Tiffany was sitting cross-legged on your bed, hairbrush abandoned halfway through a braid, staring at you like you'd just casually mentioned committing a crime. "You did what in front of a room full of children?"
"I'm not proud of it." You groaned, flopping backward against your pillow. "I called my ex an expert liar in front of his little cult of adoring twelve-year-olds. One of them looked personally betrayed. It was genuinely one of the worst nights of my life."
"Okay, but like." Becca, perched at her desk with a bag of chips balanced on one knee, leaned forward, fully invested now. "Was he hot, though? The ex. Is that relevant? I feel like that's relevant."
"That is not the point of the story, Becca."
"It's a little bit the point of the story."
"He's â " You stopped yourself, some old, stubborn loyalty rising up even now, even furious as you still were. "It doesn't matter what he looks like. He lied to me for months and let me leave without a fight and then showed up at a club and watched me kiss some guy and I told him I didn't love him anymore, which was a lie, and then I ran back home five days early because I couldn't face a bunch of ten-year-olds who apparently think he's some kind of saint."
Tiffany and Becca exchanged a look that you'd seen enough times over the last two years to know exactly what it meant.
"Okay, that's a lot," Tiffany said carefully. "That's, like, several different problems happening at once."
"Do you think you're actually over him?" Becca asked, not unkindly, though the question landed with more weight than you wanted it to.
"I don't know. I don't want to be still whatever I am about him. That's the honest answer." You dragged a pillow over your face for a second, muffling your own voice into it. "I just want to not think about Steve Harrington for like five consecutive minutes, which apparently my own brain refuses to let me do."
"Okay, well." Tiffany resumed braiding, entirely matter-of-fact about the solution. "You know what fixes that."
"Please don't say what I think you're gonna say."
"A rebound," Becca said cheerfully, ignoring you completely. "A hot, uncomplicated, doesn't-know-anything-about-your-tragic-backstory rebound. Somebody who's never heard the name Steve Harrington in his entire life and never will."
"I don't want a rebound." You sat up, pulling the pillow away from your face. "I want to just not be thinking about it constantly. That's different."
"It's the same thing, actually." Tiffany tied off the braid, entirely unbothered by your protest. "You need something else to occupy the part of your brain currently dedicated full-time to Steve Harrington. A new crush is basically the only thing that works. It's science."
"It's emotional science." Becca crunched a chip for emphasis. "Look, you're at school. It's a whole new semester. Nobody here has ever met this guy, nobody here knows what happened, and there are, statistically, hundreds of men on this campus who have never once lied to you about anything, mostly because you've never spoken to them."
"It's a great bar. You'd be amazed how many people clear it just by comparison." Becca grinned, entirely pleased with herself. "So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go out this week. Somewhere loud, somewhere with actual eligible people in it, and you are going to meet somebody new. Somebody boring, even. Somebody whose biggest secret is, like, that he still calls his mom every day."
You almost laughed despite yourself, the tight, tired knot in your chest loosening slightly for the first time in days. "You guys are relentless."
"We're supportive," Tiffany corrected. "There's a difference."
"Fine." You exhaled, something in you actually, cautiously agreeing with the idea, if only because the alternative was continuing to lie in bed replaying a parking lot fight on a loop until winter break. "Fine. I need to meet someone new. Somebody who has literally nothing to do with Hawkins, Indiana, or anyone in it."
"That's the spirit." Becca held up the chip bag like a toast. "To forgetting Steve Harrington. Or at least distracting yourself from him extremely thoroughly."
"To that," you said, and clinked an imaginary glass against the bag, and told yourself, with as much conviction as you could manage, that it was going to work this time.
Parker called on a Tuesday, the dorm phone in the hallway ringing at exactly the wrong moment, right as you were halfway through an econ reading you'd been avoiding for two days, and you nearly tripped over Becca's shoes racing to catch it before whoever was on shift for phone duty gave up and hung up.
"Hey, bug." You tucked the receiver against your shoulder, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor of the hallway, ignoring the girl three doors down who was very obviously eavesdropping. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah. I mean." Parker's voice sounded smaller over the phone than it did in person, and something in your chest immediately went soft and worried. "I just wanted to call. Mom said I could use the phone for ten minutes."
"I'm glad you did. I miss you, you know."
"I miss you too." A pause, some rustling on his end, like he was shifting the phone to his other ear. "School's fine. Mrs. Halloran is still terrible. Mike says hi."
"Tell Mike I say hi back." You smiled despite yourself, despite everything, at the easy, uncomplicated normalcy of it. "How's everybody? The rest of the guys?"
"Fine, I guess." Something in his voice shifted slightly, and you sat up a little straighter, some instinct picking up on it even over a bad phone line. "Mike's been kind of weird lately, actually. Like, secretive. Him and Will keep disappearing to talk about stuff and won't tell me what it's about, even though I'm supposed to be part of the group now."
"I don't know. Just weird. Like adults are being weird too. My mom keeps saying everything's fine but she gets this face." Parker sighed, the specific, exhausted sigh of a kid who suspected he was being kept out of something important and resented it. "It's probably nothing. Probably just, like, a school thing or whatever."
You didn't love the sound of that, some old, familiar unease creeping up your spine, though you told yourself it was probably nothing too, the kind of vague middle-school drama that felt enormous at ten and meant nothing by the time you were twenty.
"And Steve?" You tried to keep your voice light, casual, and knew immediately, by the small pause on the other end, that you hadn't quite managed it.
"He's okay. I think." Parker hesitated. "Kind of sad, though. Dustin says he's been quieter than usual at the store. Robin keeps trying to get him to laugh at stuff and it's not really working as good as it used to."
Something in your chest tightened at that, an ache you weren't fully prepared for, and you hated how quickly it rose up, how little control you seemed to have over it even two states and several weeks away.
"That's not really my business anymore," you said, mostly to remind yourself.
"I didn't say it was." Parker's voice had gone careful, gentler than a ten-year-old had any real business sounding. "I just thought you'd want to know. In case you didn't want him to be sad. Even if you're still mad at him."
You didn't have a good response for that, so you let the silence sit for a second, the eavesdropping girl down the hall finally losing interest and disappearing into her room.
"How are you doing?" you asked instead, deflecting, needing to be the one asking questions again instead of receiving answers you weren't sure you wanted.
"I'm okay. I just miss having you around." Parker's voice brightened slightly, some of the heaviness lifting. "Also Mom asked if you were coming home again soon , and I told her you probably would, so you have to now. I already told everyone."
"I'll be there," you said, and meant it, even as some small, nervous part of you immediately started counting the weeks until you'd have to actually go back and face all of it â the town, the store, the party, and, somewhere in the middle of it, inevitably, him.
"Good. I gotta go, Mom's doing the hand thing at me." A pause, then, quieter, almost shy. "Love you, Y/N."
"Love you too, bug. Be good."
You hung up the phone and sat there against the hallway wall a long moment, econ reading entirely forgotten, Parker's words circling slower and slower in your head. âKind of sad, though. In case you didn't want him to be sad.â
You told yourself it didn't matter. You spent the rest of the night not quite believing it.
The frat party Becca dragged you to that Friday was loud in the specific, chaotic way college parties always were, red cups and bad lighting and a bassline that seemed to be competing directly with somebody's terrible playlist choices, and you'd had exactly enough to drink to feel pleasantly loose without tipping into anything resembling last time.
"See him?" Becca practically shouted into your ear, nodding toward a guy leaning against the kitchen counter, laughing easily at something his friend had said. "That's Dean. He's a junior, lives in the house actually, one of the frat guys. Tiffany had a class with him last semester and says he's actually normal, which for this house is basically a miracle."
You followed her gaze and had to admit, privately, that Becca hadn't undersold it. Dean was tall, broad-shouldered in a way that filled out his rumpled button-down without trying too hard, with sandy blond hair that fell messily across his forehead like he'd run a hand through it exactly once and called it styled. He had the kind of easy, sun-warmed good looks that seemed almost unfair up close, all straight white teeth and an unbothered grin, the sort of face that belonged on the cover of a J.Crew catalog rather than leaning against a kitchen counter at a frat party holding a red cup like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Okay," you admitted. "He's very good-looking."
"Told you." Becca looked entirely too pleased with herself. "Go say hi."
"I'm just saying. Geographically ideal."
Dean turned out to be easy to talk to in a way that surprised you, genuinely funny without trying too hard to prove it, asking real questions instead of just waiting for his turn to talk, and by the time you'd been leaning against that same kitchen counter for twenty minutes, laughing at some story about his terrible college roommate, you realized you'd gone that entire conversation without once thinking about Hawkins.
"So what's your deal?" he asked, tilting his head slightly, easy grin still in place. "You've got that look."
"Like you're having a genuinely good time despite yourself." He said it lightly, teasing, no real weight behind it. "Rough semester so far?"
"Rough summer, honestly." You shrugged, deciding, somewhat recklessly, that you weren't going to let this conversation drift anywhere near an explanation. "Trying to have a better one now, though."
"I can respect that." He leaned in slightly, close enough that you caught the faint smell of whatever cologne he was wearing, unfamiliar and pleasant and blessedly unconnected to any memory at all. "For what it's worth, I think it's working out so far."
You let yourself smile at that, actually smile, something loosening in your chest that had been tight for weeks. He was easy. He was uncomplicated. He didn't know a single thing about Family Video or Nancy Wheeler or a half-finished note sitting somewhere in your childhood bedroom, and right now, that felt like the most attractive thing about him.
Somewhere between another round of drinks and a conversation that had drifted, at some point, from movies to music to standing much closer together than either of you had probably intended, the party had thinned out considerably around you, and Dean's hand had found its way to your waist, easy and warm, and when he leaned in to kiss you, you let him.
It was good. Simple, uncomplicated, exactly the kind of nothing you'd been chasing all week. His hands were steady, his laugh low against your ear when you pulled back for air, and you thought, distantly, that this was exactly the kind of normal you'd promised Becca and Tiffany you'd go find.
"You wanna get out of here?" he murmured, close enough that you felt it more than heard it.
You thought about it for exactly as long as it took to decide you didn't want to think about anything else tonight.
"Yeah," you said. "Yeah, let's go."
You didn't think about Hawkins again for the rest of the night.
You didn't make it back to the dorm until well past noon the next day, hair a disaster, wearing yesterday's clothes, and Becca and Tiffany were both sprawled across Tiffany's bed the second you walked in, clearly having been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Oh my God." Tiffany sat straight up, tossing aside the magazine she'd been pretending to read. "Look who finally decided to come home."
"Don't." You dropped your bag by the door, already fighting a smile despite the exhaustion. "I need a shower and about four more hours of sleep before I can form a coherent sentence."
"Absolutely not, sit down, we need details." Becca patted the space on the bed between them with the enthusiasm of someone who had clearly been rehearsing this ambush for hours. "You left with Dean. You did not come back last night. Explain."
"We didn't sleep together." You sat down on the edge of the bed, unable to keep the small, tired smile off your face. "We did, um. Pretty much everything else, though."
Tiffany actually shrieked, muffling it into a pillow a half-second too late. "Y/N."
"It was good." You pulled your knees up, hugging them, feeling a little giddy and a little embarrassed all at once. "Like, genuinely good. He's funny, and he's easy to talk to, and I didn't think about anything else the entire night. Not once."
"See?" Becca elbowed Tiffany triumphantly. "This is exactly what I said would happen. Emotional science."
"It's not science, Becca, you just got lucky."
"I'm never wrong about these things, actually, that's the whole point."
The phone in the hallway started ringing before you could argue further, and Tiffany was closest, hopping up to grab it, already calling back over her shoulder that it was probably for you, since it usually was these days
"It's Parker," she said, holding out the receiver.
You took it, smoothing down your hair self-consciously despite the fact that your little brother obviously couldn't see you through a phone line. "Hey, bug."
"Hey! Mom said I could call again since it's Sunday." Parker's voice was bright, easy, blessedly uncomplicated. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing much. Just hanging out with Becca and Tiffany." You caught both of them watching you with matching, unsubtle grins, and turned slightly away, as if that might somehow hide the conversation from two girls sitting three feet away. "How's everything there?"
You talked for a few minutes, easy small talk about school and Mike and some new arcade game Parker was apparently obsessed with, and then, in the abrupt, unfiltered way only a ten-year-old could manage, he changed subjects entirely.
"Mom said you went out last night. Did you meet anybody?"
You glanced instinctively at Becca and Tiffany, who had both gone very quiet and very interested, clearly straining to hear the other half of the conversation. "Where'd Mom hear that?"
"I don't know, she just said it at dinner. She said something like 'I hope she's having fun.'" Parker said it with the flat, matter-of-fact delivery of a kid relaying information without understanding its weight. "So did you?"
"Maybe." You turned slightly away from your roommates' obvious eavesdropping, lowering your voice, which did absolutely nothing to stop them from listening harder. "There's a guy. Dean. We just met, though, it's not a big deal."
"He's nice. Funny, actually." You found yourself smiling again despite the audience. "You'd probably like him. He's easy to talk to."
"Is he gonna be my new brother-in-law?" Parker asked, entirely serious, the way only a kid could ask something so enormous like it was a completely reasonable follow-up question.
"Parker." You laughed, surprised, covering your face with your free hand even though nobody on the other end of the line could see it. "We met one time. Slow down."
"I'm just asking. You don't have to get weird about it."
"I'm not getting weird about it."
"You kind of are." He said it with the specific, needling satisfaction of a little brother who knew exactly what he was doing. "Is he better than Steve?"
The question landed harder than you expected, quiet and unguarded in a way only Parker seemed capable of managing, and you sat there a second too long before you answered.
"It's different, bug," you said finally, carefully. "It's not really a competition."
"Okay, okay." You could practically hear him grinning through the phone, entirely too pleased with himself for a ten-year-old. "I'm just saying, if you bring him home soon, I get to approve him first. That's the rule."
"There's a rule now. I just made it." A pause, some rustling, and then, warmer, more like himself again. "I gotta go, Mom's making the face again. Love you."
You hung up the phone and turned back around to find Becca and Tiffany both staring at you with wide, expectant eyes, clearly having heard enough of your half of the conversation to piece together most of it.
"Did your little brother seriously just ask if this guy is your future husband?" Tiffany asked, delighted.
"He's young . He doesn't have a filter." You grabbed your bag off the floor, mostly to have something to do with your hands, feeling your face heat up despite yourself. "It's not a big deal."
"I'm not blushing, I'm tired."
"Sure you are." Becca grinned, tossing a pillow at you. "Just thinking about how you're gonna explain 'Dean' to your little brother eventually, since apparently he's already planning the wedding."
"There's nothing to explain. It was one night."
"Sure it was." Tiffany grinned. "That's exactly what people say right before it becomes several nights."
"Shut up." You threw the pillow back, laughing despite yourself, despite the exhaustion, despite everything still sitting somewhere underneath all of it that you weren't quite ready to look at yet. "I'm getting in the shower before either of you says anything else humiliating."
"We'll just save it for when you get out!" Tiffany called after you, delighted, as you disappeared down the hall, still smiling in spite of yourself.
Steve's car was crowded in the way it usually was these days, Robin up front with her boots on the dash despite his repeated complaints, Parker, Dustin, and Mike crammed into the back seat arguing about something to do with a campaign none of the adults in the car could follow, on their way to some comic shop two towns over that had apparently just gotten a shipment worth driving forty minutes for.
Steve had been quiet for most of the ride, which nobody commented on, since quiet had become something of a default setting for him lately. It was Parker, mid-argument with Mike about whether a particular character could realistically survive a fall from a specific height, who mentioned it first, entirely by accident.
"She hasn't even called this week," Parker was saying, exasperated, clearly midway through a complaint that had nothing to do with you at all until it suddenly did. "Every time I try to catch her on the phone she's out with Dean. It's so annoying, I used to at least get her on Tuesdays."
Steve's grip on the wheel tightened, almost imperceptibly, though Robin caught it immediately, glancing sideways at him.
"Who's Dean?" Mike asked, entirely oblivious.
"Some guy Y/N met at school." Parker rolled his eyes, ten years old and thoroughly unimpressed by the whole situation. "She won't stop talking about him when I do get her on the phone. It's kind of gross, honestly."
"So how's Y/N doing?" Steve asked, and he was proud, in a distant sort of way, of how normal his voice came out, how carefully casual, like he was asking about the weather and not bracing for an answer that might undo him.
"She's good, I guess. Busy." Parker shrugged, unaware of the weight the question actually carried. "She's got this new boyfriend or whatever, Dean, he's apparently really into her, so she's been kind of distracted. Which, again, is annoying, because I liked getting the phone to myself on Tuesdays."
Something in Steve's chest went very cold and very quiet, and he kept his eyes carefully on the road, jaw working, saying nothing at all, because saying anything right now felt like it would come out wrong, too sharp, too much.
"Boyfriend," Robin repeated, glancing at him again, more careful this time.
"I don't know if he's officially a boyfriend boyfriend." Parker shrugged again. "But yeah, basically."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Steve's hands stayed exactly where they were on the wheel, ten and two, knuckles a shade paler than they'd been a minute ago, and he told himself, silently, furiously, that he didn't have any right to feel anything about this at all. He'd lost that right in a driveway a year ago. He'd lost it again in a parking lot outside a club. He didn't get to be angry about someone named Dean.
He was angry about someone named Dean anyway, and hated himself a little for it
"Steve doesn't seem like he cares," Dustin observed, unhelpfully, from the back seat, in the specific, oblivious way only a twelve-year-old could manage.
"I don't," Steve said, too fast, too flat, and Robin actually winced beside him.
"You kind of look like you care," Mike said.
"Okay, you're allowed to care," Robin said quietly, mostly for Steve's benefit, though it came out slightly louder than she'd intended, cutting straight into a conversation that three kids in the back seat were now paying very close attention to. "I mean, given everything, it's not exactly like you two just casually dated for two years and it means nothing."
"What? I'm just saying, it's allowed to sting a little, that's a normal â" Robin caught herself a half-second too late, some instinct kicking in right as the rest of the sentence kept coming anyway. "It's not like she just thinks Steve cheated on her with Nancy for no reason, that's a whole â"
"Robin." Steve's voice cracked out sharp, too late, the words already out in the open air of the car.
The back seat had gone completely silent, except it wasn't quite silent, because Dustin, unlike the other two, didn't look surprised at all, just deeply uncomfortable, like he'd been sitting on that particular piece of information for weeks and had been dreading the moment it finally came out in front of everybody else.
"Wait." Mike's voice was small, careful, some slow, dawning horror creeping into it. "She thinks you were disappearing to be with my sister ? During â during last year? During all of it?"
Robin's face had gone pale, the realization of what she'd just said landing about four seconds too late to stop it. "Oh no."
"That's why she was so mad." Parker's voice had gone very quiet too, some awful understanding settling over his face, young as it was. "That's what she thinks happened. That's why she left early. That's why she said all that stuff about you being a liar."
Steve didn't say anything. He kept his eyes fixed dead ahead on the road, jaw tight enough to ache, hands steady on the wheel through sheer force of will alone.
"You knew about this?" Mike turned on Dustin, betrayed. "And you didn't say anything?"
"It wasn't my thing to tell you guys!" Dustin held up both hands, defensive. "Steve told me himself, and it felt kind of private, so I just â I didn't bring it up. What was I supposed to do, announce it?"
"I know what she thinks, guys." Steve's voice came out rough, exhausted, all the careful composure from a minute ago finally cracking under the weight of it. "Believe me. I know exactly what she thinks."
You'd found the spot by accident, the summer you started dating, a stretch of grass out past the quarry where the trees opened up just enough to see the whole sky, and it had become yours without either of you ever really deciding it should be, the place you ended up whenever a night felt like it needed more room than a car or a bedroom could give it.
You were lying on your backs in the grass that night, shoulders pressed together, his jacket spread out beneath you both against the damp ground, and the stars were doing that thing they only did out here, away from the town's lights, spilling across the whole sky like something had been poured out and forgotten to be cleaned up.
"Can I tell you something kind of embarrassing?" Steve said, quiet, into the dark.
"I used to think I was gonna end up exactly like my dad. Same job, same house, same everything. Just going through the motions until I died, basically." He laughed a little, though there wasn't much humor in it. "And I was fine with that, I think, or at least I told myself I was, because I didn't really think there was another option."
"Now I don't know. Now I actually think about what I want instead of just what's expected of me, and that's â that's new, actually, that's a genuinely new thing for me, and I think it's because of you." He turned his head slightly, looking at you instead of the sky, and even in the dark you could feel the weight of it, how much he meant it. "I don't know how to explain it better than that. You just made me want more than the version of my life I'd already given up on."
"That's not embarrassing," you said softly. "That might be the least embarrassing thing you've ever told me."
"It's embarrassing because I'm bad at saying stuff like this out loud. I've been building up to it for like ten minutes." He laughed again, softer this time, and reached over to find your hand in the grass between you, lacing his fingers through yours like it was the easiest thing in the world. "I love you. I don't think I say it enough, or say it right, but I do. More than I know what to do with, honestly."
"I love you too." You turned your head to look at him, matching his gaze, something so simple and complete settling into your chest that it almost ached. "I don't think you have to say it right. I think you just have to keep saying it."
"I can do that." He brought your joined hands up, pressing a kiss to your knuckles, easy and unhurried, like there wasn't anywhere else either of you needed to be, ever, for the rest of your lives. "I can definitely do that."
You'd fallen asleep out there for a little while, tangled together under a sky full of stars neither of you were paying attention to anymore, and it hadn't occurred to either of you, not once, that there'd ever come a version of your lives where saying it plainly, out loud, in the dark, would stop being the easiest thing either of you had ever done.
Steve blinked hard, eyes fixed on the road, throat tight with the sudden, unwelcome vividness of a memory he hadn't asked for and couldn't seem to put back down. The car around him was quiet now, the kids having exhausted themselves into an uneasy silence, Robin watching him carefully from the passenger seat, and none of them had any idea he'd just spent three full seconds lying in a field two years ago instead of sitting in this car at all.
He didn't say anything about it. He just gripped the wheel a little tighter, and kept driving, and let the ache of it sit where it always sat these days, somewhere just under his ribs, quiet and constant and entirely his own to carry.
Nobody said anything else for a long stretch of road. Robin stared out the window, clearly furious with herself, and in the back seat, three kids sat in stunned, uncharacteristic silence, apparently finally starting to understand the size of the thing none of them had actually been allowed to explain.
Steve couldn't sleep that night.
He lay on top of his covers instead of under them, staring at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom, the same one he'd had since he was a kid, and every time he closed his eyes he saw some new piece of you â small, specific, unimportant things that his brain had apparently decided to keep in perfect, merciless detail. The way you used to steal his flannel shirts and never give them back, claiming they looked better on you, which they had. The specific, unhurried way you drank coffee in the mornings, always too hot, always insisting on drinking it anyway rather than waiting for it to cool. The way you laughed at your own jokes half a second before anyone else did, like you couldn't help getting there first.
He thought about the way you used to fall asleep in the passenger seat of his car on long drives, head tipped against the window, and how he used to take the turns extra slow so you wouldn't wake up. He thought about the little humming sound you made when you were concentrating on something, homework or a crossword or picking out a movie, completely unaware you were doing it. He thought about the exact face you made when you were trying not to laugh at something you weren't supposed to find funny, biting the inside of your cheek, eyes bright with the effort of holding it in.
He thought about the last time you'd said his name like you meant it, actually meant it, warm and easy and without an ounce of anger behind it, and how long ago that already felt, and how he couldn't for the life of him pinpoint the exact night that had stopped being true.
Every single one of those memories sat like a hook under his ribs, pulling tighter the longer he lay there, and by eleven he'd given up on sleep entirely, some restless, aching part of him needing to do something with all of it instead of just lying there being slowly gutted by his own memory.
By midnight, he was sitting on the edge of his bed with the phone in his lap, your dorm number written on a scrap of paper he'd gotten from Parker weeks ago and never once had the nerve to use, turning it over and over in his hands like it might rearrange itself into something less terrifying.
By twelve-thirty, he'd dialed it.
It rang three times before someone picked up, a girl's voice, unfamiliar, clearly annoyed at being woken up. "Hello?"
"Hey, sorry, is Y/N there? It's, um. It's Steve."
There was a pause, some muffled talking, footsteps, and then your voice, thick with sleep and immediately, unmistakably wary.
"Steve?" You sounded confused more than anything, at first. "It's after midnight. What's wrong? Is it Parker, is everyone okay?"
"Everyone's fine. Parker's fine." He gripped the phone tighter, already regretting this, already unable to stop. "I just â I needed to talk to you. I know it's late. I'm sorry."
"You needed to talk to me at twelve-thirty in the morning." Your voice had shifted fast, wariness curdling into something harder. "About what, exactly?"
"I don't know. Everything. I've been â" He dragged a hand down his face, the words coming out clumsier than he'd rehearsed them, hours of imagined conversation dissolving the second your actual voice was on the other end of the line. "I found out you're seeing someone. Dean."
The silence on the other end went very cold, very fast.
"Are you seriously calling me at midnight to ask about Dean?"
"I'm not asking. I just â I heard, and I couldn't sleep, and I thought maybe if I just talked to you I could â"
"Could what, Steve?" Your voice was rising now, sharp and disbelieving. "Feel better about the fact that I'm allowed to date somebody? Is that what this call is? You want me to comfort you about that?"
"No, that's not â" He stood up, pacing now, the room suddenly too small to hold whatever this was turning into. "I just need to know if it's serious. That's all. I'm not trying to start anything."
"You don't get to ask me that." Your voice cracked, fury and exhaustion tangled together, clearly not fully awake and clearly not interested in being gentle about any of it. "You do not get to call me in the middle of the night and interrogate me about who I'm seeing, not after everything, not after you let me walk out of your life without a single word to stop me, not after you showed up at a club and watched me kiss somebody else and then screamed at me in a parking lot about how much you still love me. You lost the right to ask me anything about my life."
"I know that." His voice cracked too now, raw and desperate in a way he hated. "I know I don't have the right. I just â I can't stand the idea of you moving on with somebody who actually gets to know you, who gets the real version of you, when I couldn't even â"
"When you couldn't even what?" Your voice had gone dangerously quiet now, worse than the yelling. "Finish the sentence, Steve. For once in your life, just finish one single sentence with me."
He opened his mouth. He closed it again. The words sat right there, right at the edge of everything, Vecna and the Upside Down and a year of almost dying to keep a bunch of kids safe, and he still, even now, even wrecked and sleepless and desperate, couldn't make himself say them.
"I can't," he said finally, quiet, defeated.
"Of course you can't." A short, bitter laugh cracked through the phone, nothing kind in it at all. "You know what, this is exactly why this doesn't work. This is exactly it. You call me at midnight because you can't handle the idea of me being happy with someone else, and then the second I ask you for one real thing, you go right back to 'I can't.' You don't get to have it both ways, Steve. You don't get to be jealous and mysterious at the same time."
"Isn't it?" Your voice was shaking now, and he could tell, even through the phone, that you were close to tears, and he hated himself for causing it, hated himself more for not being able to stop making it worse. "I have spent a year trying to get over you. A whole year, Steve. And I finally start to feel a little bit okay, I finally meet someone who doesn't come with an entire mystery attached, and you call me at midnight to remind me that you still get to have feelings about it, even though you won't give me a single real reason to justify any of them."
"I'm not trying to ruin anything for you."
"You're doing a great job of it anyway." Your voice broke on the last word, and you didn't try to hide it this time. "I have to be up in five hours. I have a test. I can't do this with you right now, I can't do this with you at all, actually, I don't think I have it in me anymore."
"Don't call me again like this. Please." Your voice had gone very small, very tired, all the fight drained out of it and replaced with something that sounded, worse than anger, like genuine exhaustion. "I mean it, Steve. If you can't tell me the truth, then just â leave me alone until you can. I can't keep doing this back and forth where you disappear and then show up wrecked at midnight and neither of us actually feels any better afterward."
The line went dead before he could say anything else.
Steve sat there on the edge of his bed for a long time afterward, phone still in his hand, dial tone buzzing faintly against his ear, staring at nothing, feeling, with a sick, sinking certainty, that he'd just taken whatever fragile, half-healed thing might have still existed between the two of you and torn it open all over again, worse than before, and this time, entirely alone, with nobody else to blame for it but himself.
You didn't cry right away.
You sat there in the dark hallway outside your dorm room for a long time after you hung up, phone still resting against your shoulder even though the line had gone quiet, the girl who'd answered earlier long since gone back to bed, the whole floor silent around you except for the low hum of a vending machine somewhere down the hall. You just sat there, knees pulled up, staring at nothing, feeling strangely, distantly numb, like the fight had happened to someone else and you were only just now getting the secondhand report of it.
It took almost ten full minutes before it actually hit you. You didn't decide to cry so much as you simply found yourself doing it, sudden and messy, one hand pressed hard over your mouth so you wouldn't wake anyone else on the floor, shoulders shaking silently against the wall you'd slid down without quite noticing.
You went back to bed eventually, but you didn't sleep. You lay on your back in the dark, staring up at the ceiling of your dorm room the same way, unknowingly, two hundred miles away, someone else was staring up at his, both of you wide awake at the exact same hour, replaying the exact same conversation from opposite ends of it, neither of you aware the other one was doing the very same thing.
You thought about Dean, and felt guilty for thinking about him at all in the middle of this, guilty in a way you couldn't quite name, like some part of you had cheated on something even though you owed Steve nothing anymore, hadn't owed him anything in a year. You thought about the field you used to lie in, the one you hadn't let yourself remember in months, and hated that it surfaced now, uninvited, of all times, right when you were trying so hard to be furious with him instead.
You thought about the way his voice had cracked when he said *I can't stand the idea of you moving on with somebody who actually gets to know you*, and how, underneath all your anger, some small, exhausted part of you had almost understood exactly what he meant, because you'd spent a year wondering the same thing about him â who got to know the real him now, if you never had, if you never would.
Somewhere around three in the morning, you finally stopped crying, wrung out and hollow, and lay there in the quiet dark thinking, with a kind of tired, resigned clarity, that you didn't actually know if you'd meant what you told him. *Leave me alone until you can.* It had felt true when you said it. It felt like something else entirely now, lying here in the dark, unable to sleep, unable to stop thinking about a boy who was, at that exact same moment, two hundred miles away, doing precisely the same thing.
Neither of you slept much that night. Neither of you found out, for a long time, that you hadn't been alone in it.
