Silence Magnifies Sound

“The first shelf was a learning experience...”

He pulls something from the wall at the back of the pantry, and a scatter of plaster dust immediately follows. “And the second one?”

Eddie opens his mouth.

“Don’t,” Steve says, a finger raised.

He stands up, and looks at Eddie for a moment with the puzzled expression of a man recalibrating something, and then he looks at you.

“And you willingly live with this?” He points at Eddie.

“There are positives…” you say, trying to convince yourself as much as Steve.

“Name one.”

“He’s very enthusiastic. In the kitchen.”

Steve looks back at the pantry, and the notch between his eyebrows deepens. “Yeah, no shit.”

Eddie, to his credit, recognises when he is not needed. He claps Steve on the shoulder, says “I’ll leave you to it, big boy”, and then he’s gone before Steve can respond, calling “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do” over his shoulder as the front door swings shut behind him.

Steve watches him go. Then he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

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

That’s when it starts. Or that’s when you notice it starting, which might not be the same thing.

You’re supposed to be reading. It’s what you do on Saturday mornings. You’re sitting at the kitchen table with a book open in front of you and you’ve read the same passage four times and absorbed absolutely nothing, because the pantry is directly off from the kitchen and Steve has left the door open and you have a clear sightline to everything he’s doing, which is a problem, because what he’s doing is distressingly competent. He’s got his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the veins in his forearms are doing something that should come with a warning. There’s a whole sweat-trail situation happening at the back of his neck. It’s a difficult environment to concentrate in - you could move to the living room, but where would the fun be in that?

There’s a pencil tucked behind his ear that he’s used more times than you can count (and you have been counting) - marking measurements on wood in quick, certain lines, checking them, marking again. He’d caught you watching and said “measure twice, cut once” like you’d asked, which you hadn’t, and then he’d winked, and then gone back to what he was doing.

You’ve been staring at the same page since the wink.

The sounds of it settle into the background of your morning. The drag of the tape measure. The neat knock of wood being test-fitted. The brief, focused silence before he commits to something, which you’ve started to hold out for without meaning to.

You get up to put the kettle on, because you need something to do with yourself, and when you turn around from filling it Steve is leaning in the pantry doorway watching you. Not working. Just watching. He doesn’t look away when you catch him, just holds your gaze for a second with an expression you can’t quite read, and then he pushes off the doorframe and goes back to what he was doing like nothing happened.

You stand there with the heavy kettle in your hand for a moment.

You forgot to ask if he wanted tea.

You go back to the table. You read the same line four more times.

“Can you pass me that?” He pokes his head out of the pantry and nods at the smaller of the two yellow clamps he’d left on the kitchen table.

You get up and bring it over. The pantry smells like sawdust now. The skeleton of the shelving is already taking shape - uprights in, base solid - and Steve is close enough in the doorway that you have to reach past him slightly to hand it over. He takes it, but he doesn’t move back, and for a moment you’re standing closer than you’ve stood to him before, close enough to notice that he smells like sawdust too, and something underneath it that is just him.

“Thanks,” he says, quiet, and his eyes drop to your mouth for just a second before they come back up.

Just a second. But you notice.

You go back to the table. Your heart is doing something unreasonable.

The pantry is quiet for a while after that. Steve fitting the first fixed shelf with the easy focus of someone who has entirely forgotten you exist - except that you know now that he hasn’t, not entirely, and that changes the atmosphere of the morning in a way you don’t quite have words for.

“He measured with his hand,” you tell him eventually, when he comes out of the pantry to rummage through the toolbox. You hold your pointer finger and thumb apart as wide as they can go. “Eddie. That’s how he got the shelves wrong. He said this was a standard unit.”

Steve looks at your splayed fingers and mirrors the gesture, pressing his palm flat to yours. His hand is broad across, fingers wide and squared off at the tips. His stretch goes so far past yours. You look down at the span of his hand against yours, at his thick fingers dwarfing your own, and forget what you were saying.

“He measured… with his hand,” he smirks, disbelieving.

“He seemed confident about it.”

Steve exhales through his nose, which is as close as he gets to laughing when he’s concentrating, and drops his hand. The absence of it is immediate. “Yeah,” he says. “He always does - and then people like you and me need to fix the chaos he leaves behind.”

“And we do it, because we love him.”

He nods, and brushes his hair back from his face. “Yeah. We do.”

He goes back to work. You sit back down. The morning stretches towards lunch.

There’s something different about him like this - settled in a way he isn’t always, like working with his hands gives him somewhere to put himself that the rest of the world doesn’t quite manage. You’ve noticed that. You’ve been noticing a lot of things when it comes to Steve Harrington lately, and you’re beginning to suspect the noticing isn’t entirely one-sided.

You try to refocus on your book. You read the same paragraph for the fifth time.

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

An hour later he says “okay” in a quiet, satisfied way that isn’t really directed at you, and you look up to find the cupboard standing square and solid against the back wall, the shelves level and fitted and done. Actually done. He opens the small door at the base, closes it, runs his hand along the top shelf to check for flex. There isn’t any.

He leans in the pantry doorway, arms folded, looking at his work. Satisfied.

“How long have you and Eddie lived together?” he asks, over his shoulder. Not quite casually.

“Three years,” you tell him. “Nearly.”

He nods and turns to look at you, slow, like he’s doing something with that information. “And before that?”

“College roommates.” You pause. “It’s not - we’re not. It’s never been like that with us. He’s basically my brother at this point.”

He looks at you then, just briefly, and something in his expression settles. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay, that’s good.”

“It is?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

You don’t hide your smile.

“It’ll need a day before you load it up,” he tells you. “Let the fixings settle.”

“That’s cool.”

“And don’t let Eddie put anything on it.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it. Not one thing. You’re in charge of the structural integrity of the whole thing.”

You laugh despite yourself. “Okay, I’ll make sure the weight’s distributed nice and even. You can count on me, Steve.”

He nods, the corner of his mouth drawn up into a half-smile, and starts packing up his tools. Methodical about it, everything back in its right place. The red toolbox clicks shut. He sets it by the door and straightens up, and you think, with a lurch, that this is the part where he says something easy and picks it up and leaves.

He doesn’t pick it up.

The kitchen goes quiet in a way it hasn’t been all morning - the industry of it suddenly absent, just the two of you and the smell of sawdust and the sunlight moving slowly across the floor. Steve leans back against the counter with his arms folded and looks at you, and this time there’s nothing ambiguous about it. No pretending to be doing something else. Just looking, the same way you’ve been looking at him all morning, and it turns out that being on the receiving end of it is something else entirely.

You become very aware of the chair under you. The table between you. The book you haven’t read.

“I should -” he starts.

“I just thought -” you say at the same time.

He stops. The corner of his mouth moves again. “You first.”

“I just thought…” and then you stop, because you don’t have an ending for it, because the ending is him, standing in your kitchen looking at you like that, and you can’t say that, so you just look at him and let the sentence go unfinished.

He pushes off the counter.

He crosses the kitchen slowly, not like before when there was something to fix and somewhere to be, but like he has all the time in the world now, and he stops in front of you and tilts your face up with one hand at your jaw, warm and certain, then he leans down and kisses you like he’s been the one thinking about it all morning.

It still catches you, the sureness of it. The way his mouth moves with yours like he already knows you, like he’s been kissing you for months.

When he pulls back it’s only to look at you, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw. Whatever he finds in your face seems to settle something in him, because he kisses you again, slower this time, his other hand finding your waist and pulling you up and in, and you go, and the book slides off the table somewhere behind you and neither of you notices.

You don’t notice much, for a while. Just him. The way he kisses, the way he tastes, the way his hands spread over your back, your waist, your hips.

When you finally surface, forehead tipped against his, both of you a little breathless, the kitchen looks the same but feels completely different.

“The, uh, the pantry looks good,” you say, because you have to say something, and nothing else is forthcoming. “You’re very good with your hands.”

The thing about Steve Harrington is that he has always been like this. Not the forearms specifically - though the forearms are, absolutely, a contributing factor - but the whole Steveness of him. The way he holds a door for anyone. The way he crouches down to a kid’s eye level without thinking about it. The way he’d spent three weeks last autumn quietly fixing all the odd jobs around the school, like the door in the boy’s change rooms that swung shut too fast, or the wobbly leg on the staffroom table that everyone else just bitched about; he’d shown up one Tuesday with a toolkit and had it fixed before the first bell.

The way he looks at you sometimes, across a meeting room or a crowded corridor, like he’s in the middle of saying something and waiting for you to catch up.

You’ve spent the better part of this school year trying to be extremely professional about Steve Harrington… and you’re failing, spectacularly.

There have been coffee breaks that ran long. Hours sat beside each other on the bus on a class trip, ignoring the motion-sick kids around you while he told you about the time he and his school friends spent a summer exploring the rumoured tunnels under the town. A conversation in the school yard in October that neither of you seemed to want to end, both of you standing in the drizzle until you were laughing about nothing. He’d looked at you in that particular way, and then the bell had rung and the moment dissolved and you’d gone back to class and told the kids it was a silent reading period while you stared at the far wall and tried not to imagine what his lips might feel like.

Nothing has happened. This is the correct state of affairs. You work together. You are colleagues. Professionals, even. “Don’t shit where you eat”, your sister had told you when you’d waxed lyrical about his “big, dumb eyes” over a bottle of wine one night.

You watch him demonstrate something to a small child with enormous glasses and feel your ovaries kick into hyperdrive.

By eleven o’clock, the field is packed full.

The choir is doing a sound check near the gym doors, twelve eight-year-olds in matching yellow t-shirts arguing about where to stand while their teacher makes the face of a woman reconsidering her career. The tombola wheel is spinning in cheerful, rickety circles. The car wash queue snakes around the side of the building, and from somewhere over there comes the periodic shriek of a child getting wetter than intended.

And Steve’s workshop is completely overrun.

He’s got ten kids at the tables right now, maybe eleven, all of them in various stages of constructing something. The boy with the enormous glasses is very seriously screwing two pieces of wood together with the cold intensity of a heart surgeon. Two girls have smuggled glitter from Mrs Henderson’s face painting table and are generously sprinkling it over their bright pink bug hotel. Steve is crouched down between them doing some kind of diplomatic negotiation that ends with both of them giggling with handfuls of gold pixie dust and only one destination - Mr Harrington’s hair. He’s gracious about it, at least.

He is very good with them. You’ve known that, professionally, in the vague way you know things about colleagues. But watching him like this, in the open, with actual sunlight on him, his sleeves short and sawdust on his jeans - it’s different. He explains things twice without being asked. He lets a kid do something the wrong way and then gently course-corrects when they get frustrated, never before. When a little girl drops her pieces and they scatter across the grass, he’s already down on one knee picking them up before her pained wail is fully formed.

You’re watching all of this unfold from behind a very large pavlova that someone’s grandmother donated to the cause. You’re aware of this ridiculous state of affairs, and you’re choosing not to judge yourself too harshly.

You’re also aware that you are not the only one watching.

The PTA moms found Steve’s table at approximately ten fifteen and they have not left. There are four of them currently arranged in a loose semicircle just beyond the workshop boundary, the way wildlife photographers position themselves near a watering hole - respectful distance, full attention, absolutely no intention of moving. One of them is holding a coffee cup she collected from the refreshments stand seven minutes ago and has not yet drunk from. Another one waves when Steve glances up, and he waves back with the easy friendliness of a man apparently oblivious to the affect he has on the women of Hawkins.

He glances across the field, drags a hand through his glittery hair, and then checks his hand in the sunlight, grinning. He looks up again and his eyes find yours, above the heads of the busy kids at his table and the eager cake-buyers at yours. The wave he gives you is different - smaller, just for you - and he’s already looking back at a kid before you can do anything embarrassing with your face.

Your colleague Diane appears at your elbow.

“The PTA moms found him,” she says.

“I saw.”

“Sandra Chen has been hovering since he set up the second table.”

“I saw that, too.”

Diane picks up a brownie and takes a considering bite. “You’ve been watching them watch him.”

“I have been monitoring the general area,” you say, “as part of my volunteer duties.”

Diane looks at you with the flat patience of someone who has known you for three years and knows when you’re full of shit. “Kowalski’s been at the price stickers again,” she says, and takes her brownie and leaves you to it.

The morning accelerates into a hot and sticky afternoon. You sell a frankly unreasonable amount of shortbread. The choir sings three songs, one of which is almost recognisable, and everybody claps. A dog gets into the tombola queue and has to be escorted out by two dads and someone's random wandering brother.

Steve’s table never quiets down. Kids cycle through in waves - finish a bird box, drift off glowing with accomplishment, get replaced by three more. He’s rigged up another fold-out table at the back and it’s filling up with paint-bright boxes and bug hotels in red and blue and green, drying quickly in the hot sun. A boy of about seven is showing his dad the bird box he made with the reverence of someone presenting a holy relic. Steve catches your eye over the kid’s head and grins, and you force yourself to look back at your table.

The PTA moms have regrouped and refuelled, now the white wine spritzer table is open. Sandra Chen is still in position on the left flank. She’s now been joined by a woman you don’t recognise who has positioned herself closest to the table under the guise of reading the instruction sheet Steve printed out and laminated, which - you checked - is six bullet-points long.

Around two, things thin out enough that you can leave the bake sale in Diane’s hands for a few minutes. You tell yourself you are doing a circuit of the event. Checking in. Volunteering a fresh pair of hands.

You end up at Steve’s table.

He’s got a lull between groups, wiping down a section of table the newspaper hadn’t been able to save, and he sees you coming. Something in his expression settles, like he’s been waiting.

“Hey.” He straightens up, and he’s close enough that you catch the faint smell of sawdust and fresh paint. “How’s baked goods?”

“Sold out of the red velvet before eleven. Two grandmas almost got into a physical fight over a fruit loaf. It’s chaos.” You look at the drying table, the fourteen colours of paint, the laminated instruction sheet. “How are you not exhausted?”

“Are you kidding? This is the best day I’ve had in months.” He means it. You can always tell when he means it. “Come here, look -” He turns you gently by the shoulder toward the drying table, his hand staying there a half-second longer than necessary, “- that purple one with the star on the roof? Kid who made that cried at the start because he thought he couldn’t do it. Absolutely refused to touch the screwdriver.”

“And?”

“And he did the whole thing himself and then asked if he could make another one for his aunt.” Steve shakes his head, and his voice has that softness in it that does things to your composure. “Kills me every time.”

You look at him looking at the drying table. His skin is taking on a tan from the sun, there’s sawdust on his shirt, glitter in his hair, and he’s happy in a way he doesn’t bother to moderate.

“You saved pieces back,” you say. “For adults. You mentioned earlier -” you hadn’t spoken to him earlier, you’d been watching from across the field, and you realise this a half-second after it’s out of your mouth.

Steve looks at you. His mouth does something. “Funny,” he says, “I don’t remember telling you that.”

“I heard it.” You pause, and wave toward Diane behind the tower of cakes. “From over there.”

“From over there.” He tilts his head, squinting into the sunshine, toward the bake sale table. The distance between here and there is considerable. “You’ve got good ears.”

“I’m very attentive. It’s a professional quality.”

“Sure.” He reaches under the table and produces a small stack of pre-cut wood pieces, sets them in front of you. His voice drops, the noise of the field making it easy, making it private. “I did save some back. I was hoping you’d come over.”

You keep your eyes on the wood pieces. “Oh yeah?”

“Been hoping since about nine thirty.” He picks up a screwdriver and holds it out, handle-first, the same way he’d hand you anything - naturally, like there’s nothing strange about the fact that his knuckles brush yours when you take it. “I’ve had a good view of you all morning.”

“You’ve had a good view of half the town. Sandra Chen has been standing over there since -”

“I know where Sandra Chen has been standing.” Still quiet, still easy. “That’s not what I said.”

You look up. He’s watching you with that expression - the one from the car park in October, the one across meeting rooms and corridors, the one that says he’s been in the middle of a sentence all year and he’s tired of waiting for you to catch up.

“Bird box or bug hotel?” he asks.

Your mouth is dry. “What’s the difference?”

“Bug hotel’s easier. Bird box has more steps, but the result’s better.” He rubs the back of his neck before he looks at you. “Worth the wait.”

Somewhere across the field, the choir launches into their final song. The tombola wheel rattles as it spins. Mrs Kowalski is almost certainly rearranging your price stickers again.

“Bird box,” you say.

Steve smiles, and pulls up a chair beside you so his shoulder is against yours as he talks you through the first step, his voice low and easy, like the two of you have all the time in the world and the rest of the school fundraiser can absolutely look after itself.

Across the field, you don’t notice Diane watching from the bake sale table, smiling at absolutely nothing in particular. You don’t notice Sandra Chen’s scowl when she spots your chairs, your proximity, the way Steve leans in to correct your grip on the screwdriver and doesn’t immediately lean back.

You’re looking at a piece of wood, and a pair of hazel eyes. You’re thinking about October school yards and long coffees and classroom walls you’ve stared at. You’re thinking that a bird box has more steps but the result is better.

Worth the wait, he’d said.