I would like to hear about the Steve cherry lip balm headcanon
*kisses you* thank you for giving me the opportunity to lose my mind about this
i have this headcanon that, a few months after nancy and steve break up officially, steve cleans out his car and he finds one of nancy’s lip balms in the passenger door. he brings it inside with the intention of giving it back to her, but ends up putting it down on his desk and forgetting about it.
a few nights later he finds the lip balm again. it’s just a small, unassuming pink tube on his desk. he’s a couple drinks in and he’s feeling kind of depressed and moody, still not over the breakup with nancy, so in a moment of desperation he puts it on because he’s tipsy and sad and wants to remember how her kisses tasted. (it’s not his best moment. it’s really not. it’s very depressing and a bit pathetic.)
it tastes like wax and artificial cherries. sweet and synthetic. he thinks that nancy must not have worn this all that often because it doesn’t make him think of her at all, really. he looks in the mirror at himself. the balm is tinted. his lips look red and glossy and he’s a bit surprised to realize that he likes it. he Likes It, a Lot. it looks really good, makes his mouth look all pretty. he’s like oh shit this is why girls wear makeup. i look Nice.
he wipes it off a few seconds later, embarrassed even though he’s just by himself and there’s no one to see him wearing makeup. he doesn’t throw it out though. just puts it down on the counter in his bathroom and forgets about it for the rest of the night.
the next day he has a shift at his new job—scoops—and he sees it on the counter. stares at it for a while. imagines it’s mocking him. stares at it some more. and then he picks it up and stuffs it into the pocket in the little blue shorts of his stupid sailor uniform and leaves quickly because he was already running late before he decided to spend several moments contemplating the lip balm.
he feels the weight of it in his pocket for his whole shift with his new coworker robin buckley, who’s pretty cool even though she spends much of her shift making fun of him. he notices that she wears some kind of tinted lip gloss every day and finds himself wondering what kind it is, if it’s similar to his. (too late, he remembers that it’s nancy’s, but at that point his subconscious had already cemented the fact that it’s his now.)
when he’s in the break room wasting time he’s fiddling around with it in his pocket and kinda just. impulsively puts it on because he can’t stop thinking about it. but like, it’s nothing. it’s just lip balm that tastes like cherries, who even cares? he looks at himself in a mirror again and he’s just like, yeah.. yeah. it’s really subtle. looks natural enough, like maybe he was just biting his lips a lot. it’s ok right? it’s fine. no one’s gonna know except him.
and it becomes a thing. he starts wearing it every day and it’s subtle enough that it feels like a secret, and he likes it a lot. likes that it makes him feel pretty in a way he never had before (but he doesn’t examine that too closely because he doesn’t even know how to begin thinking about it). robin definitely notices it, it’s obvious, and he’s panicking a bit but she just glances at his mouth for a second before saying “well i’m gonna go on break. if it gets busy, don’t call me. i won’t come out.” and the nerves calm down once he realizes she totally knows but doesn’t give a shit.
anyway. this is a really long-winded answer to basically say that steve accidentally discovered that he likes wearing tinted cherry lip balm and likes feeling pretty and yes he does wear it every day for the rest of his life as a matter of fact 👄
