🌸🐚

It's a Tuesday in October, and you're lying on his bed with your book open on your stomach, and Steve is at his desk doing absolutely nothing productive, spinning a pencil between his fingers and occasionally throwing paper balls at you when he gets bored, which is often. 

There's a tape playing on his stereo, something slow and warm that he'd made a face about when you put it on, but hasn't actually complained about since. The afternoon light is doing that thing again, that low October angle that makes the whole room feel like gold, like something preserved, and you are — happy.

You are so specifically, painfully happy.

There it is, you think. There's the problem.

Because happiness like this has weight. It has a shape. It takes up room in your chest in a way that makes it very obvious how much space it would leave if it left.

"You're doing the thing again," Steve says.

You look up from your textbook. "What thing?"

"The thing where you get really quiet, and your face does..." He gestures vaguely at his own face, a sort of sweeping motion that implies interiority, complexity, and general emotional weather. "That."

"My face doesn't do anything."

"Your face does everything." He swivels his chair to face you fully, dropping the pencil, elbows on his knees, and you hate it — the way he just looks at you. Like you're something worth looking at. Like you're the most interesting thing in the room, which is absurd, because you're lying on his bed doing homework, and yet. "What are you thinking about?"

That I love you, you don't say. That I love you, and I'm terrified of it. That you are so good, Steve Harrington, so unexpectedly, uncomplicatedly good, and I don't know what I did to get here, but I'm already waiting for the part where it stops. I'm lying in your room in the October light, and I'm already mourning this, and I know that's insane, and I can't seem to stop.

"Wizards," you say.

He holds your gaze for a second, like he's deciding something. Then he throws another paper ball at you.

"Liar," he says cheerfully, and turns back to his desk.

Your chest does something involuntary. You look back at your book and read the same sentence six times.

Here is what nobody tells you about falling in love with someone good:

The good ones. The ones who actually show up. The ones who call when they say they will, and remember what you said three weeks ago about your mom's birthday, and ask about it without being prompted.

The ones who hold your hand while they're driving without making a big deal about it, like it's just what hands are for, like where else would they be. The ones who show up at your door with takeout on a bad day, without you having to say it was a bad day, because they've been paying attention, they've been keeping track of you.

With those ones, you can't protect yourself. There's no armour to deploy. You've already handed over the whole thing before you knew you were doing it, and by the time you understand the scale of the transaction, it's too late, the exchange has already happened, and there you are, standing empty-handed, having given everything you have to someone you have absolutely no guarantee of keeping.

Steve Harrington is a good one. That's the problem. That's the entire, stupid problem, standing six feet tall with ridiculous hair and a heart so open it's almost embarrassing to witness. He doesn't seem to know he's supposed to be more guarded than this. Nobody told him. Or maybe they told him, and it didn't take.

You've seen him sit on the floor of his own living room for two hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of thirteen-year-olds who were absolutely delighted to have him, deeply confused about everything that was happening, asking questions like wait, so can I be a wizard? and what if I roll a one, is that bad? with such earnest willingness to be there, to learn the thing they cared about, just because Dustin asked him to, and he doesn't know how to say no to people he loves.

He loves people so loudly. So shamelessly. Like it doesn't cost him anything, or like the cost doesn't matter.

You want to live inside that forever, and you are already grieving the moment you might have to leave.

—

November. His car, your driveway, 11:47 PM.

You've been sitting here for twenty minutes because neither of you has started the process of saying goodbye yet. It's a thing that happens with you two. You'll be in the driveway, and you'll both know it's time to go in, and then someone will say something, or ask something, or just sort of drift into another conversation, and the time keeps moving without you. Tonight, the inside of the car is warm from the drive home, and neither of you has made any move toward the door.

The radio is off. The car is contained, separate from everything, like being in a snow globe. Outside is your street, your neighbour's porch light, the November dark. Inside is this, just this, the two of you in the small warm dark of his car.

"Hey," Steve says softly. Just that. Hey.

"Hey," you say back.

He reaches over the centre console and pushes a piece of hair out of your face, and his fingers trail along your jaw for a moment after, and you feel it everywhere. Down your spine, through your ribs, settling somewhere low and warm and permanent-feeling, which is the thing you're supposed to not think too hard about.

"You're okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say, because you are. That's what you can't explain, even to yourself. You are so specifically okay. You’re sitting in a car in your driveway, twenty minutes past when you said you'd be inside, and you are so precisely, completely okay that it almost hurts. "I'm just —" You stop.

"Just what?"

You look at his face in the dark. The shadows under his eyes, the particular mess of his hair at this hour, the way he's watching you like you're something he's been waiting for, that he finally has and doesn't intend to look away from. And the feeling comes up again, that dual thing, joy and dread wound together so tightly you can't find the seam between them, like two threads braided so many times they've become a single rope.

"I just really like this," you say, which is not the full thing but is at least true.

His mouth curves. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He leans across and kisses you, slow and unhurried, and you let yourself have it. You let yourself be entirely present in it for once instead of standing to the side, cataloguing, archiving, already mourning. Just for a second. Just the warmth of him, the press of his mouth, the sound he makes low in his throat when you move closer, the quality of the quiet around you.

When he pulls back, you can feel him smile against your lips.

You gather your bag, your jacket, your composure. You open the car door and the cold rushes in.

"Hey," he says again, before you've fully unfolded yourself out of the seat.

You look back.

"I'm not going anywhere." His voice is easy, quiet, like he's saying something obvious, like he's reminding you of something you already knew. But his eyes are doing the steady, slightly serious thing they do when he means something all the way down.

Your heart does something complicated.

"Okay," you say.

You say it as if you believe him. You say it like the part of you that doesn't believe him, the part that lies awake at three in the morning with your hands pressed flat against your sternum like you're holding yourself together, waiting for the moment the math stops working in your favour — like that part doesn't exist.

Some nights, almost.

You shut the car door, go inside, and you don't look back, because if you look back, you'll see him watching you walk to the door, which he always does; he always waits until you're inside, and if you see that, you'll be done for tonight.

You go upstairs. You sit on your bed. You press both hands flat to your chest and breathe.

He's not going anywhere, you think.

And then: yet.

—

Your best friend notices before anyone else.

Robin has known you since fourth grade, and she has, over the years, developed a very specific talent for identifying when you're about to do something emotionally complicated, and making you talk about it over mediocre diner coffee before it gets worse.

"You're in love with him," she says, across a formica table in the first week of November, like she's telling you something obvious.

"I know," you say.

"Like, really in love with him. Not the fun kind."

You look up. "Is there a fun kind?"

"There's a kind where you're happy about it," she says. "You don't look happy about it. You look like someone gave you a really great gift and you're already worried about losing it."

You’re quiet for a moment.

"He's really good," you say, finally, which doesn't quite answer the question but which she seems to understand anyway.

"Yeah," she says. "I know." She stirs her coffee. "Has he done anything? To make you think —"

"No," you say immediately. "No, he's — no. He's the most there person I've ever dated. He calls. He shows up. He remembers things. He's —" You stop. "He's so good, Robin. That's the problem. He's so good that when it ends, I'm not going to be able to explain why. There's not going to be a reason. He's just going to eventually realise there are easier people to love and he's going to leave. It's going to be completely reasonable of him, and I'm going to be devastated."

Robin looks at you for a long moment.

"What if he doesn't?" she says.

You open your mouth and close it.

"What if you're sitting here pre-suffering for something that never happens?" she continues. "What if Steve Harrington is just actually in love with you, and that's just the thing that's true. You're wasting time being scared of it instead of being in it."

You look at your coffee.

"That would be worse," you say. "If I let myself believe that and then I was wrong."

Robin sighs. The sigh of someone who has been friends with you for many years, who loves you and finds you exhausting.

"You're going to have to decide at some point," she says, "whether the fear of losing it is worth the cost of not fully having it."

You don't answer her. You pay for your coffee, you drive home, and you call Steve on a whim. He picks up on the second ring and just says hey, I was just thinking about you, easy as breathing, and the thing Robin said sits in your chest like an unread letter.

—

December comes in cold and certain.

You've developed routines with him the way you develop calluses — gradually, without planning, through repeated contact. Friday nights are almost always his place or yours. Sunday mornings have become a thing, slow and domestic, whoever wakes up first makes coffee and the other one shuffles in and steals it, and it turns into a thing before either of you named it. 

He texts you when something makes him think of you, which is apparently fairly often, The early slightly-formal texts, then the ease, then the inside jokes that require no context, then eventually just hey and come over, and I'm outside with no preamble because none is needed.

One Friday in December, you drive to his place in the snow, he opens the door before you've knocked because he heard your car in the driveway, and this small thing — this tiny, unremarkable thing — undoes you completely for approximately thirty seconds while you're standing on his porch.

He heard your car. He knew the sound of your engine, and he came to the door.

"You okay?" he says, reading your face.

"Yeah," you say, which is true and also wildly insufficient.

He steps aside to let you in. You go in, and he takes your coat and the evening folds around you like something you've had for a long time.

Later, when you're sitting on the floor of his living room with takeout containers between you and a movie that neither of you is really watching, you think: I am going to remember this forever.

You think: I am going to remember every single thing about this.

—

You don't tell him. Not in a way that has words.

But maybe you tell him in the way you reach for him first in movie theatres, before you're even seated, just automatically, your hand finding his. In the way you let yourself lean all the way into him when he has his arm around you instead of holding some small, cautious part of yourself back. 

In the way you've started saying yeah, next week and I'll come over Friday and we should do that sometime, making casual plans in the future tense without flinching. Letting yourself just exist in time with him, forward-facing, like someone who believes in the future.

In the way you press your face into his shoulder sometimes, in quiet moments, for just a second longer than you need to. Like you're checking that he's solid. Like you're confirming he's there.

One morning in mid-December, he catches you watching him pour coffee, and he looks up and his face does something soft, some unguarded thing, and he says:

"What?"

"Nothing," you say. "You're just —" You shake your head. "Nothing."

He sets down the coffee pot. He walks over, unhurried, and he sets down his mug. He tilts your chin up with two fingers and looks at you for a long moment, this searching, steady look, like he's reading something written in a language he's been learning.

"I know," he says quietly.

You blink. "Know what?"

"Whatever it is." He brushes his thumb along your jaw, once, the way he does. "I know."

You don't know what that means exactly. You're not sure either of you is ready to say it out loud yet. But something in you unclenches. Something that has been held at low, constant tension since September releases, just slightly, just a little.

Your heart, stupid and loyal, and already entirely gone on him, just opens up like a hand.

—

There's a night in January when it almost comes apart.

Not because anything happens. Not because he does anything wrong or you do anything wrong. Just because you're tired and the fear gets loud, and sometimes that's enough.

You've been at his place for dinner, and the evening has been fine, good even, but then his phone rings. He moves into the other room to take it, and you hear him laughing at something, the laugh he uses with people outside of this, people from his other life, and for just a moment, you have this sudden, stupid sense of all the parts of him you don't know. All the rooms of his you haven't been in. All the people who knew him before you and might know him better and could, at any moment, matter more.

He comes back, and you’re quiet. He notices immediately, because he always notices.

"What happened?" he asks.

"Nothing," you say.

He sits down next to you. His shoulder against yours, waiting.

"I don't know," you say, eventually. "Sometimes I just —" You press your fingers to your collarbone. "I get scared. Of this."

"Of me?"

"No. Of how much I —" You stop. "Of how much this matters to me."

He’s quiet for a moment. Outside, the January wind, thin and insistent.

"That's a bad thing?"

"It's a vulnerable thing," you say. "When something matters this much, you can get really hurt."

He turns toward you. He has that face he gets sometimes, the serious one underneath the surface, the one that he doesn't show everyone. "Yeah," he says. "You can." He holds your gaze. "So can I."

The admission of it — that this is also something that could cost him, that the vulnerability isn’t one-directional, that you aren’t the only one standing exposed in this.

"I didn't think about that," you say, quietly.

"I know," He half smiles. "I think you forget sometimes that this is —" He gestures between you. "That it goes both ways. You act like you're the only one who could get hurt here."

You look at him.

"I could get hurt too," he says, simply. "If you left. If this ended. I'd be —" He makes a small sound, not quite a laugh. "I'd be a mess, honestly. Just so you know."

"Steve," you say.

"I'm just saying. You're not alone in this. Whatever you think is happening, you're not the only one with skin in the game." He reaches over and takes your hand. Turns it over. Holds it in both of his. "Okay?"

You breathe.

"Okay," you say.

—

January cold. His bedroom, a Saturday afternoon, the particular grey light of a January that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to snow.

You're lying on your stomach on his bed, and he's lying on his back next to you, arm behind his head, and you've both been reading — or supposedly reading — for an hour and it's been mostly quiet except for the occasional turn of a page or the sounds of the house settling.

This is something you've learned about being with him: he's good at quiet. He doesn't fill silences just to fill them. He can be in the same room with you, just existing, both of you parallel and unbothered, and it feels not like absence but like presence. Like a different kind of company.

You're watching him from the corner of your eye. He's not looking at you. His eyes are on his book, and his face is relaxed, and he has no idea you're watching him. It’s the real version, the unobserved version, the Steve who exists when he's not performing anything.

You love him so much.

You love him. You are in love with Steve Harrington. You have probably been in love with Steve Harrington for a while now, and you've been calling it other things — really like, care about, have feelings for — as though the smaller words could contain it, as though naming it correctly would make it too real to survive.

It is too real to survive. You’re going to have to survive it anyway.

He turns a page. His profile in the January light. The particular way he bites the inside of his cheek when he's reading something dense.

"Steve," you say.

He looks over.

"Hi," you say.

He looks at you like you've said something that made sense, smiling slowly. "Hi," he says.

You look at each other for a moment.

You don't say I love you. You're not there yet, the words aren't ready, they need more air before they can be spoken. But you let yourself look at him the way you feel it, just for a second, without the protective overlay of self-consciousness. Just your face, your actual face, the way it looks when it's doing everything.

He goes a little still. He looks at you with something careful and warm.

Then he reaches over and tucks your hair behind your ear, a gesture that means nothing and everything, and goes back to his book.

—

February. Snow. His car again, but this time going somewhere, nowhere in particular, just driving because he wanted to show you how the town looks in the first real snow of the year. You've lived here your whole life, but you look anyway.

Because it's different with him. That's the embarrassing truth of it. Hawkins looks different with him in it. Things look different when you're in love, when you're in this suspended terrified hopeful state, when the ordinary world has been overlaid with something that makes it glow at the edges.

He has one hand on the wheel. The other is holding yours across the console. His thumb moves occasionally, absently, like punctuation he doesn't know he's adding. Outside, the snow is coming down steady and soft. The streetlights are making haloes in it and everything is very still.

The town is white and quiet, and Hawkins looks almost like somewhere you'd choose to be.

"What are you thinking?" he asks. He always asks.

This time you don't lie. "That I'm happy," you say.

He squeezes your hand.

"That I'm a little scared of it," you add, and your voice is smaller than you want it to be but it gets out. It makes it into the air between you.

He's quiet for a moment. The wipers move slow. The snow comes down.

"Because it might go away?" he says.

You nod once, looking out at the white. He squeezes your hand again, tighter this time, his fingers laced through yours.

"It won't," he says.

"You don't know that."

"No," he agrees, and you love him for not arguing with the truth of that, for not pretending certainty he doesn't have. "But I know I'm not going to be the reason it does."

You turn and look at him. His jaw. The line of his profile. The small, serious set of his mouth. The snow in the headlights. The sound of his thumb moving against the back of your hand.

"Steve —"

"I mean it," he says, and he says it so simply, so quietly, without any flair or performance, the way you'd state a known fact. Like the sky is blue, or it's cold out, or I'm not going to leave you. Just a thing that's true that he's telling you.

The feeling breaks over you like a wave. The kind that lifts you instead of knocking you down. The kind you can float in.

You hold his hand, just for this mile, just for the length of this road, for the white quiet of this February night with him, believe him.

—

Spring comes. The ice thaws and the days get longer and Hawkins shakes itself out into something almost pretty, the way it does for about six weeks in April and May before the summer makes it flat and still again.

You're sitting on the hood of his car in an empty parking lot at nine pm in late April, which is something you've started doing — just finding empty places and sitting in them together. It costs nothing. It requires no plan. It's just the two of you and whatever sky happens to be available.

Tonight the sky is doing something lavender and soft and there are the first real stars of the year visible through it, or maybe just the first time you've been still enough to notice. Your shoulder is against his shoulder. You have his jacket on because you said you weren't cold and were wrong, and he gave it to you without comment. Your feet are dangling off the hood, his are too, and you're looking at the same sky from the same angle, and it's so —

It's so simple. That's the word. It's so simple and so full.

"Can I ask you something?" he says.

"Yeah."

"Are you happy?" He says it straightforwardly, turning slightly to look at you. "Like. Not in a complicated way. Just — are you?"

You think about it. You actually think about it.. You think about the last six months. The kitchen light, the Sundays, the lamp left on, the snow, his hand, and the way he said I mean it in the dark.

"Yeah," you say. "I really am."

"Good," he says, simply. Like that's what he needed to know. Like the answer matters to him practically, usefully, the way weather matters — because he's planning around it. Because he's building something and the conditions are important.

You look at the sky.

"Are you?" you ask.

He doesn't answer right away. He looks up at the stars for a moment, considering.

"Yeah," he says. "More than I expected to be, honestly." A beat. "I wasn't — I mean, things were kind of." He makes a vague gesture. "Before. Not bad. But kind of empty. Like I was just going through — anyway." He stops. Starts again. "You make things feel worth paying attention to. If that makes sense."

It makes sense. It makes so much sense it takes you a second to breathe around it.

"Yeah," you say. "I know what you mean."

He puts his arm around you and you lean into it, all the way in, the way you've learned to do, and the night is warm for the first time in months.

The fear is there. It's always there, the small stone, the distant clouds.

But the field is so full of light.

—

Late April. The diner on Route 12. The one where it all started, more or less.

You're in the same booth, across from each other, and the pie is still actually insane. At some point in the last six months this diner became a place that belongs to you. To this, to the two of you.

He's telling you something, some story about Dustin and a radio, and an incident that had apparently involved a minor property dispute, and his hands are moving while he talks the way they do when he's animated. He's laughing already because he knows where the story is going and so does the laugh, and you're watching him.

You’re watching him, and the love in your chest is so specific, so particular. It's not just the abstract warm feeling of loving someone. It's him, this exact configuration, this precise person.

The way his eyes crinkle. The way he reaches the punchline of his own story and then laughs at himself before you do. The way he looks at you when he's done, looking for your reaction, wanting to share the funny thing with you specifically.

You make things feel worth paying attention to.

You think about what he said. You think about all of it.

You think: I am going to love this person for a very long time.

And then — softer, quieter, underneath: maybe that's okay.

Maybe you don't have to carry the grief of the ending while you're still in the middle. Maybe the fear doesn't have to be the loudest voice in the room. Maybe you can hold the fragility of it — you can know that things end, you can know that love doesn't guarantee permanence — and still let yourself have it completely. Not in spite of the fear but alongside it. Both things true at once.

The field and the clouds. Joy and the knowledge of impermanence. Love and the terror of it, inseparable, which is maybe just the definition of love.

"Hey," Steve says. "Where'd you go?"

You smile at him. "Nowhere," you say. "I'm right here."

Something in his face softens. "Good," he says.

He reaches across the table and takes your hand, his thumb moving across your knuckles, and he goes back to his story, and you listen. The diner is warm, and you’re right here.

You are right here.

That night you lie in bed and press your hand against your sternum, and underneath it your heart beats with that familiar double rhythm. Joy. Fear. Joy. Fear. The one that’s been your whole relationship with loving him.

You breathe. You let it be true.

You have a habit of memorising things you're afraid to lose.

You still do it. You probably always will — that's just the shape of you, the way you're built, the shape of a heart that loves with its whole fist and knows it. You still catalogue. You still archive. You still watch the clouds.

But you've started doing something else too.

You've started letting yourself be inside the moment while you're memorising it. Not outside, looking in, preserving it from a protective distance. Actually inside. Warm hands and all, right in the middle of it, letting it matter the full amount it matters, letting yourself be as happy as you actually are without the mental asterisk, without the quiet hedge against loss.

He notices. Of course he notices.

"You seem different lately," he says one evening, not in a bad way, just an observation, his head tilted slightly, that look he gets.

"Different how?"

"More,” He thinks. "Here. Present or whatever." He shrugs, a little self-conscious. "I don't know. I like it."

You look at him. This boy. This specific, ridiculous, generous, good boy who heard your car in the driveway, and left the lamp on low, and held your hands, and said I'd be a mess, honestly like it was nothing, like it was just the truth and the truth was fine.

"I'm working on it," you say.

He grins. "Yeah?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say.

He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear and his hand lingers for just a moment at your jaw and you let yourself feel it all the way down, all the way through, the full warmth of it without flinching, without the hedge, without the yet.

You loved mornings wrapped in Steve's warm embrace, sun rays spilling through the blinds and settling over the sheets.

It was one of the times that you felt safest. The soft contact regulated you in a way that nothing else could. And Steve? He loved it as equally as you did.

He always made sure you both slept with as few clothes on as possible; it wasn't necessarily sexual, he just craved the feeling of skin to skin. He felt a physical closeness like this that you couldn't get when the barrier of pyjamas was in the way.

Even though you were both very used to staying at each other's houses, it still only happened when parents were away. In Steve's case this was quite often but for you, not so much.

This meant that every time Steve stayed at yours he made sure to soak up every sacred moment, like he was memorising each corner of your room, the way your bed felt beneath him, the smell of your deodorant mixed with scented candles, he could go on and on.

He loved it.

His biggest fear was that he was going to loose it.

He'd woken up before you like he normally always did; it didn't bother him at all as he enjoyed being able to just watch you sleep for a moment.

You were laid with your back pressed against his chest, a stray curl resting over your face and your legs still entangled with Steve's.

Over your hip, Steve's whole arm held you to him protectively almost as if you were going to disappear in your sleep. His arm rose and fell slightly while you slept calmly under his hold as his other hand slipped under your waist to pull you closer.

Subconsciously realising that Steve was awake, you began to stir until you eventually fluttered open your eyes.

Before your eyes could even adjust to the light, Steve was placing open mouth kisses over your neck and shoulder. Instinctively, you leaned your head back opening up your neck to the boy behind you as your hands found his.

"Good morning baby girl, sleep good?"

"mm" you weren't quite awake when he spoke to you. Turning around to face him you buried your face into his chest and griped onto him.

You pushed your face even further into him, taking in every single sense around you. The way he felt, how he held you, the raspy sound of his voice.

"not quite awake yet?" He spoke quietly with a slight laugh.

"no" you grumbled, threatening to give back into sleep.

You felt Steve's hands creep up your back and finally reach your hair, fingers raking through the curls of the strands.

Instinctively, you let your head lean back slightly into his hand, the feeling of sleep coming back quickly.

"what time is it?" you whisper.

"uhh just gone 10"

"shit" you try to pull away slightly.

"what" His voice was still raspy as he spoke into your hair and tightened his hold on you.

"my mom will probably be home really soon and I've got to be at work at 12"

The night of November 12th, 1983, or maybe it was the early hours of November 13th, your friend Will Byers had finally been found after spending a week trapped in a dark, alternate dimension you and your friends had dubbed ‘The Upside Down’.

You were 13 now, the oldest of the party (beating Lucas by a whole 4 months), and Steve was 17.

After you had spent the night chased by government agents, and evil scientists and literal monsters, and after you had watched your new friend Eleven – El – die.

You and your friends had been cramped into the hospital waiting room, hoping to see Will when he woke up. Lucas and Dustin had been passed out, leaning on each other, and your head was on Dustin’s shoulder as you slept too.

Steve Harrington was also in the waiting room, sitting between a snoring Ted Wheeler and the door. His face was bloody and bruised as he stared at a blank spot on the floor ahead of him.

At this point in time, you didn’t know Steve. You knew of him, that he was a douchebag high schooler, that people called him ‘King Steve’, and that he was dating your friend Mike’s older sister, Nancy.

That night is when you think you met Steve Harrington for the first time.

You didn’t see him very often after that, maybe a few times at the Wheeler household when he was hanging out with Nancy and you were there to play D&D in the basement with your friends, sometimes you’d both be seated at the dinner table, but that was about it.

You didn’t really care about Steve then, he was just some guy – an asshole – who was dating Nancy, and nothing else.

That is, until the beginning of November, 1984. Just days after Halloween, after meeting Max Mayfield for the first time, and after Will’s episode on the field at the school.

You’ve always been closer with Dustin and Lucas than you have been to Mike and Will. In fact, out of all of them, you always considered Dustin to be your best friend.

That might be why you answered his code red that morning, while Lucas went out to try and recruit Max, the new girl, into your party. You were all for Max joining your party, you thought she was cool, and it would’ve been nice to have another girl around.

You ended up helping Dustin scrub blood out of the shag carpet in his bedroom, and helped him bury his now-dead cat after Dart, the slug-like creature Dustin had found in his trash, had turned out to be a baby Demogorgon.

Nobody else was answering the call, so you and Dustin headed to the Wheeler house to try and find Mike, or maybe even Nancy, but neither of them were home.

And when the two of you turned away from the front door to head back to your bikes, Dustin muttering obscenities under his breath, you watched a familiar BMW pull up outside the house.

Enter Steve Harrington. Again.

A bouquet of roses in one hand, running the other through his perfectly styled hair, now walking across the Wheelers’ front lawn and towards the door.

Was it fate? No, just convenient timing, but the next night your perception of Steve Harrington would entirely change for the rest of your life.

You had watched him walk down the steps to Dustin’s cellar, nail bat gripped in his hands, and your first thought was that you hadn’t realized how brave Steve Harrington actually was.

And the next day you had followed him down a set of old rail road tracks, dropping chunks of raw meat onto the ground and listening to him giving Dustin horrible advice on girls. At one point, he had even turned back and asked for your opinion, only for you to totally disagree with what he was saying, but he brushed you off like it was nothing.

Soon, once Lucas and Max had joined you in the junkyard, the five of you set up an old bus as your base of operations, and after that you were hiding inside.

Lucas and Max were up on the roof, keeping watch, Dustin was pacing angrily; he was mad about Lucas telling Max everything and letting her tag along, and you were sitting on one of the old bus seats with your arms crossed to your chest, watching Steve flick his lighter open and closed.

He was cool, you could admit that now. Sure, he still seemed like a douchebag, but after spending literally all day with him, you had come to find Steve wasn’t as bad as you had thought.

And he was kind of… cute. He had nice eyes, and a nice nose, and the moles littering his face were just the cherry on top. And not to mention his ridiculous, but somehow attractive hair that you had recently learned he styled with Farrah Fawcett’s hairspray. Plus, he was charming.

He looked up at you, catching you staring, and gave you a smile. Your eyes darted down immediately, face heating up quickly out of embarrassment of being caught.

“You good over there, kid?” He asked, calling out across the bus. You just nodded in response, avoiding his eyes.

That nickname would stick around much longer than you’d have liked.

And once Dart and the other Demo-dogs had started to arrive, and they weren’t taking the bait, Steve tossed his lighter to Dustin, telling him to “get ready,” and you watched him go outside with that nail bat, using himself as bait.

“He’s insane.” Max had stated, and you had silently agreed.

“He’s awesome.” Dustin had said with an awestruck expression, and for some reason you agreed with that too.

Dustin had clearly begun to admire Steve as a kind of role model, while in that moment, as you watched a number of Demodogs surround him swing at the monsters after you and your friends, you were beginning to admire Steve in a different way.

When he had run back to the bus, several Demo-dogs were right on his tail, and you had all screamed at him to run faster until he was eventually launching himself into the bus.

He pushed you all to the back of the bus, away from the monsters clawing at the door, and you were the one to make it to the ladder at the back of the bus, and the moment you looked up at the hole and saw a Demogorgon looking down at you, you screamed loudly.

“Out of the way! Out of the way!” Steve had yelled and Max yanked you back with her own shriek of fear, having seen the monster for the first time. Steve forced his way in front of you all, pushed you behind him, and raised the bat threateningly, ready to swing at the Demogorgon again. “You want some?! Come get this!”

And in that moment, right there in that rusty old bus, you fell in love with Steve Harrington.

He had jumped in front of you with nothing but that nail-studded baseball bat to protect you all, he had pushed you behind him like it was nothing, like it was easy.

For the rest of that night you were practically glued to his side, not close enough for him to notice, but lingering close enough that he was always nearby. Whatever room he was in, you weren’t far behind him.

From your walk to the lab, where you met up with Nancy and Jonathan, and soon after Chief Hopper, Joyce, Mike and Will, all the way to the Byers’ house, where you discovered that Will was possessed by the shadow monster he had seen and was somehow connected to the monsters, like a hive mind.

You and your friends made the connection between the shadow monster and the Mind Flayer, which Dustin then explained to the rest of the group, and soon after you, Dustin, Lucas, Max, Steve and Nancy waited inside while the others tried talking to Will in the newly disguised shed.

You sat on the couch, watching Steve as he practiced swinging his bat in the middle of the living room. You tried not to stare, really, but your newfound crush was hard to ignore. But then, awkwardly, you glanced over to Nancy.

Right, she was Steve’s girlfriend. Or… ex-girlfriend now? You weren’t sure, but all you knew was that you immediately felt guilty and you cast your eyes down to stare at your shoes instead.

When the Byers’s phone rang not once, but twice, and Nancy ripped it from the wall and threw it across the room, everything got hectic immediately.

The others came rushing back inside from the shed, weapons were distributed, and as Steve raised his nail bat, he pushed you behind him again so you were standing beside Dustin.

When the dead Demo-dog came flying through the window, shattering the glass, you all jumped back, and when El walked through the front door, relief flooded through your body immediately.

Her hair that had once been shaved was now slicked back, she was wearing dark clothes, converse and cuffed jeans, and had dark eye makeup on her face.

And when Hopper took a yelling Mike down the hallway to Will’s room after it came out that the Chief had known where she was for the entire last year and hadn’t said a thing to anyone.

But then she walked over to you, Dustin and Lucas, hugging the boys first and even touching Dustin’s teeth, which had only just grown in, before she walked over to hug you next.

“I’ve missed you so much.” You told her and she hugged you tighter.

“I missed you too.” She said before pulling back and smiling. 

Max stepped forward to introduce herself, giving a polite smile and holding out her hand, but instead of greeting her back, El brushed her off and walked away, towards Joyce.

Max turned to look at you, hurt evident on her features, and you watched El walk away.

“Did I do something wrong?” Max whispered to you and you frowned.

“I don’t… No, I don’t think so.” You told her and pat her shoulder.

Then soon after Hopper and El left to close the gate, and Will was taken by the Byers’ and Nancy to try and separate him from the hive mind, which left you and the rest of your friends alone with Steve once more, which was fine until Billy showed up.

Billy Hargrove was Max’s older step-brother, and he was a total piece of shit. Steve had gone outside to try and get him to leave, and Billy had just shoved him to the ground before bursting through the door, but instead of going for Max, he went for Lucas.

You and your friends were all shouting at Billy to stop as he slammed Lucas against the wall, threatening him, telling Lucas he was “So dead.”

And that’s when Steve stepped in and punched Billy, and for a moment things were looking up. Until they weren’t and Steve ended up getting his face pummeled in by Billy, who Max knocked out a moment later with a needle of whatever Hopper had used to knock Will out earlier.

“Shit, shit, shit, what do we do?” Dustin exclaimed, looking down at the two unconscious 18-year-old boys lying in the middle of Joyce Byers’s living room.

“We have to get to the tunnels,” Mike decided immediately. “To help El.”

“What about Steve?” You spoke up, gesturing down to him and his swollen face.

“What about Steve?” Mike repeated, giving you an unbothered look.

“Well, we can’t just leave him here, Mike, look at him.” You pointed out, and the five of you stared down at his bloody face, bruises already blooming on his skin beneath the red liquid.

“She’s right.” Dustin backed you up immediately. “Besides, he just saved Lucas, we can’t just leave him here for Billy to probably murder when he wakes up. Or what if he chokes on his own blood or some shit?”

Mike groaned loudly, rolling his eyes and looking down at his older sister’s ex? boyfriend. “Fine, whatever, we can bring him.”

“Yeah, but how are we even going to get there? It’s not exactly like we can just walk to the farm.” Lucas asked and Max spun on her heels quickly, walking over to Billy and digging through the pockets of his jeans before pulling out his car keys.

“I’ll drive.” Max said, holding the keys up and dangling them from her fingers.

“What? No!” Mike scoffed. “You can’t drive!”

“I’ve driven in a parking lot before, and I can guarantee that’s more than any of you.” She pointed around at the rest of you. “Besides, Steve clearly can’t drive because he’s practically dead.”

Dustin took off running down the hallway.

“Dude, where the hell are you going?” Lucas yelled after him.

“I’m getting medical supplies!” Dustin had shouted back.

You and Dustin were stuck cleaning up Steve’s face to the best of your abilities while the others scrambled around the house, collecting items they said you needed to go into the tunnels and light the ‘hub’ on fire.

Mike made a map based on the drawings taped to the walls, you all put pairs of gloves and masks in the trunk of Billy’s Camaro before you and Dustin hauled Steve into the backseat.

The car was extremely cramped, Max taking the driver’s seat, much to Mike’s chagrin, and Lucas took the passenger seat beside her to navigate with a map of Hawkins.

You, Dustin and Mike squashed into the backseat, and Steve was pulled between you and Dustin, though he was mostly lying on your laps due to the lack of space. At the time you had been extremely thankful that the car was dark, because your face was burning just due to the minimal contact.

After that, the night faded into a blur of chaos. Steve woke up, screaming frantically about Max driving, sounding so terrified that you were surprised he didn’t jump out of his skin, while Mike snapped at her from the backseat. Dustin was doing his best to comfort Steve while Lucas shouted directions at Max over the noise, screaming at how sharply she turned the corner into the farm.

You were frozen in your seat, stiff as a board, because in his panic Steve had grabbed a hold of your arm and now your heart was beating a mile a minute.

Then came the tunnels, dark, slimy, filled with spores from the Upside Down, and monsters from the very same place. Once you had made it to the hub with little-to-no trouble and doused it in gasoline, Steve tossed in his lighter and lit the place up.

You all raced back to the exit while Demo-dogs chased you all down the tunnels. Steve had lifted Max, Lucas and Mike up and out of the hole before the monsters came bounding around the corner, heading right towards you.

Steve’s arms wrapped around you and Dustin instinctively, and you had squeezed your eyes shut out of fear for your life.

The Demo-dogs just ran right by the three of you, and once they were gone, you all let out relieved breaths.

“You okay, Henderson?” Steve asked, patting Dustin on the shoulder and he nodded. Then he looked at you. “You good?”

Steve hoisted Dustin up first, and Mike and Lucas pulled him up and out of the hole. Then Steve turned to face you. 

“Alright, your turn, kid.” He had said, and all you could do was nod before Steve was grabbing your hips to help lift you out of the hole, and butterflies had swarmed in your stomach.

You felt ridiculous. All this for some stupid crush on Steve Harrington? You had to be out of your mind.

Surely it must’ve just been because of the situation over the last few days, and once everything went back to normal, you’d see Steve less and this crush would fade, right?

Wrong.

Suddenly, Steve was everywhere. Since his breakup with Nancy (which you had confirmed a couple weeks later when Will mentioned something about her and Jonathan definitely being together) Steve clearly had a lot of time on his hands, because now he was always hanging out with Dustin.

And because Dustin was your best friend, that meant you saw Steve a lot more than you would’ve liked. And that crush didn’t fade, not even a tiny bit.

By the time December of 1984 rolled around, Hawkins Middle School’s annual winter dance, the Snow Ball, was here.

You had been excited for the dance for weeks, it was an excuse to go out and dress up with your friends for a night, and maybe you hoped a boy would ask you to dance.

You had seen Lucas and Max grow closer, and Mike and El seemed to have something going on, and you wanted something like that too. And, besides, a boy your age asking you to dance might’ve helped you get rid of this stupid crush on him.

But it turned out that the boys at the dance weren’t the people you should’ve been worried about, because not even five minutes after you had arrived, feeling good about yourself and excited to see your friends, Stacey Albright cornered you.

–

Steve watched Dustin walk into the gym with an unfamiliar sense of pride; the smile that sneaks its way onto his face shows as much. He watched Dustin talking with Mr. Clarke, like a proud big brother, before his eyes betrayed him, his gaze slipping past Dustin and landing on Nancy.

Nancy, his now ex-girlfriend, was inside the gym, volunteering at the middle school dance because that’s the kind of person she was.

Steve’s eyes softened, but the smile he had had already disappeared from his face. He only stared for a moment, just a couple of seconds, before he forced himself to start the car and drive away so he could spend the next couple of hours alone before he had to come back and pick Dustin up.

But Steve only drove a few feet away before he stopped again, because as he turned to drive around the side of the gym, he spotted you.

You were sitting on the curb in your dress, knees brought up to your chest, and from where Steve was it looked like you were crying. Steve’s brows scrunched at the sight, why aren’t you inside with the others?

Steve parked not too far away before exiting his car, brushing his hands on the front of his red sweater, before he approached you.

Your eyes were glued to the ground in front of you, your shoulders shaking as your body was wracked with sobs, your chin buried in your arms that sat atop your knees. The sight made Steve frown.

“Hey, kid.” Steve spoke up and you jumped, your head snapping up so quickly Steve thought you were going to get whiplash. “Sorry– didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing out here?”

You shrug half-heartedly, looking away from Steve and down at the ground, sniffling as you brought a hand up to your face, rubbing your eyes.

“I’m fine.” You told him and Steve let out a snort.

“Yeah, I’m not buying it.” He dropped down onto the curb to sit beside you, and your eyes went wide as you watched him do so. “What’s going on?”

“It’s dumb.” You muttered, still avoiding his eyes.

“It can’t be that dumb if it’s got you out here crying instead of being inside and having fun with your friends.” Steve pointed out and you sighed, still not looking at him. “Come on, kid, talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“Just… some girls.” You mumble, and Steve’s frown etched itself deeper into his face. “They were saying stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

You didn’t reply, instead you crossed your arms across your chest and curled further into yourself.

“Sometimes I just wish I was normal.” You said, and Steve paused.

“You are normal.” Steve said and you scoffed.

“No, I’m not.” You stated. “I’m a weird nerd and I’m ugly, and my dress looks ugly and no boys are gonna dance with me, I shouldn’t have even come to this stupid dance.”

For a moment, Steve didn’t know what to say. He knew how to talk to the boys, because he used to be a 13-year-old boy, but you? That was some new territory for him. But he found the words soon enough.

“Don’t listen to those other girls, they’re just jealous.” Steve stated. You immediately opened your mouth to protest, but Steve cut you off. “You’re way cooler than those other girls. You’ve fought interdimensional monsters.”

“You did most of the fighting.” You mumbled, but Steve waved you off.

“That’s besides the point.” He said. “If those other girls are being mean to you, they’re just lame.”

“This dress is lame.” You muttered back, flicking at your skirt.

“No, it’s not. You look pretty.” Steve complimented and you finally looked over at him.

“You really think so?” Your voice was quiet, but your eyes were wide and locked onto Steve as your tear-stained cheeks flushed.

“Very pretty.” He told you with a nod. “Too pretty to be sitting out here and crying while all of your friends are inside and probably wondering where you are.”

“But what if nobody wants to dance with me?” You asked Steve, tears still brimming in the corners of your eyes. “That’s what Stacey said would happen.”

“Well Stacey sounds like a bitch.” Steve stated bluntly, causing a giggle to escape your lips. “And if no boys want to dance with you, it’s because middle school boys are dumb.”

“I can’t wait to go to high school.” You said, and Steve chuckled.

“Yeah, well, high school boys are pretty dumb, too.” He said with an exhale, gesturing to himself. “But trust me, kid, one day you’re gonna find some guy who loves you for all those things you don’t like about yourself, and those girls are probably never gonna find something like that.”

“What makes you so sure?” You asked Steve, more curious than anything, but still soaking in every word.

Steve just shrugs. “Because you deserve it.”

You stared at him for a moment. You had stopped crying by now, and Steve took that as a small victory as you gave him a small smile.

“Thanks, Steve.” You sighed and Steve stood up, offering you his hand.

“Come on, let’s get you inside to your friends.” Steve said and you took his hand and let him lift you to your feet. You brushed off your skirt, frowning as you wiped your cheeks, and you nodded.

But you didn’t even make it around the corner before you froze at the sound of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time flooding out from the gym.

You spun around to face Steve again.

“I can’t do it. Nobody’s gonna dance with me.” You stated. “I don’t even know how to dance.”

“It’s easy.” Steve shrugged, then he offered you his hand again. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Steve, you don’t have to.” You told him, eyes full of panic, but he brushed it off.

“I need practice before prom anyway, if anything you’re doing me a favor.” He said, making you chuckle. “Here, put your hands on my shoulders.”

That night Steve Harrington became the first boy you had ever danced with, in the dark Hawkins Middle School parking lot in the middle of a cold December night.

That night you also knew you were completely screwed, and no boy your age would ever stand a chance, because you were absolutely head-over-heels obsessed with Steve Harrington.

–

The new year came quickly after that, and with 1985 came a brand new mall in Hawkins called Starcourt Mall, and after you and your friends officially finished middle school you were all spending almost every day of the summer there.

Well, all except Dustin, who went off to summer camp in the beginning of June. But the rest of you were spending your days outside riding your bikes or going swimming in the day before heading to the mall in the evenings.

And your favorite part of each trip to Starcourt, by far, was when you’d visit the little ice cream shop, Scoops Ahoy. Sometimes it was just for a snack, and sometimes it was to sneak into the movie theater for free.

The reason didn’t matter to you, because you were just happy to see Steve. He had gotten a job at Scoops Ahoy for the summer, which meant every time you went there, he was standing behind the counter in a cheesy sailor’s costume that he somehow still looked good in, hat and all. You were sure your face had flushed with heat the first time you had noticed his chest hair peeking out from beneath the shirt of his uniform.

There’s only one thing you didn’t like about seeing Steve at Scoops Ahoy, and that’s when he flirted with almost every girl his age who crossed the counter. He didn’t score a single date, not in that uniform, but it still hurt.

It made you wish that you were just a few years older. It made you think, if I was his age maybe he’d actually return your feelings.

And the thing was, Steve didn’t have a clue.

He greeted you casually, smiling at you or rolling his eyes like he did with all of your friends. A part of you was upset, but another part of you knew it was for the better. 

Steve had just turned 19 that June, and you were turning 15 in September. He had graduated high school, and you were only just about to start when the summer was over.

Realistically, you knew it wouldn’t work, and you knew it would be just weird if Steve actually liked you back at that point, but it still felt like a curse.

–

The night before Dustin came home from Camp Knowhere, you and your friends wanted to go see Day of the Dead, which meant you had to sneak in. And sneaking in meant seeing Steve.

It’s not that you purposefully dressed up just because you’d be seeing Steve for what was probably one minute at most, but you might’ve been dressed just a little bit nicer than usual for a trip to the movies with your friends.

Of course, you, Lucas, Max and Will all ended up waiting outside the mall for Mike to arrive from his usual daily visit to El at Hopper’s cabin, which meant your friends had plenty of time to analyse your outfit–specifically Max.

“Why are you dressed up?” She asked you suddenly, cutting off Lucas and Will’s complaining about Mike’s tardiness, and you scoffed.

“I’m not, these are my regular clothes.” You weren’t exactly lying, but you weren’t telling the whole truth either.

Max’s eyes narrowed at you, but Lucas shrugged from beside her. “I think she’s dressed normally.”

“Thank you.” You said to Lucas, but Max just raised an eyebrow.

“Right.” She nodded slowly, and a moment later Mike arrived.

“You’re late.” Lucas had stated with crossed arms as Mike jumped off off his bike.

“Sorry!” Mike replied, but he didn’t seem to mean it.

“Again.” Lucas emphasised.

“We’re gonna miss the opening.” Will added.

“Yeah, if you guys keep whining about it.” Mike said as he put his bike in the bike rack. “Let’s go!”

“‘If you guys keep whining about it. Nyeh-nyeh-nyeh.’” Lucas imitated Mike and you had snickered.

Then as you walked through the mall, Lucas complained about and mocked Mike for spending so much time with El and not the rest of you. It made you and Will laugh.

As you and your friends pushed your way down the escalator and towards the food court, bumping into a bunch of people as you went, your stomach began to flip with excitement.

You all made it to Scoops Ahoy and Steve was nowhere to be seen, instead his co-worker Robin was behind the counter. You thought Robin seemed cool, from what you had seen she was funny, sometimes a little blunt, but you liked her. You just hoped Steve didn’t.

Mike smacked his hand down on the bell on the counter several times, despite the fact that Robin was right there. She sighed and called out, “Hey, dingus, your children are here!”

And then the window on the back wall slid open and there was Steve in his sailor uniform with a scowl on his face as he looked over your group.

“Again? Seriously?” He asked, but instead Mike just rang the bell once more. He groaned, but ushered you all over.

He held the door to the back room open for you all, Mike and Will entering first, then Lucas and Max, and you were pulling up the rear. You smiled up at him as you passed him.

“Hi, Steve.” You greeted quietly and he sighed, but put on a smile.

“Hey, kid.” He said, letting the back door swing shut before he headed to the front of the group to open the door to the delivery tunnel out the back. He peered out through the peephole to make sure nobody was around before ushering you all out the door and into the hallway. “Come on. Come on.”

While your friends all pushed in and walked ahead, you gave Steve an appreciative smile. He didn’t pay any mind, instead just looked pretty stressed out as he called out after you all.

“I swear, if anyone finds out about this–” He would say the same thing almost every time, because he was worried about losing his job, but he knew your friends wouldn’t give up until he let them through.

“We’re dead!” You all chorused and you waved to Steve before following your friends down the hallway.

Steve closed the door with a heavy sigh and walked through the Scoops Ahoy back room before he made it behind the counter again, only to find his co-worker Robin already staring at him with an amused smile.

“Oh, what now?” He groaned and she chuckled.

“That little girl has a crush on you.” Robin stated and Steve stopped in his tracks, his blue Adidas sneakers squeaking against the tiled floor.

“What? Who, Max?” He asked, confused. “I’m pretty sure she’s actually with Lucas again right now, so you’re definitely wrong.”

“Is Max the redhead?” Robin asked and when Steve nodded she sighed. “Well, I’m not talking about her, I’m talking about the other girl.”

Steve said your name, and now looked even more puzzled, his brows drawing inwards as he looked at Robin. “No, she doesn’t.”

“Uh, yes, she totally does, dingus.” Robin chuckled, shaking her head. “God, you really are oblivious.”

“Um, no, those kids all see me as, like, I don’t know… A babysitter, older brother type, you know? I’m their friend.” Steve explained, like Robin was maybe just missing something. She was completely unaware of the trauma bond that had formed between the group over the last two falls. “She doesn’t have a crush on me, okay? She probably just thinks I’m cool.”

But, of course, Steve was wrong and Robin was absolutely right, because you did have a crush on Steve, which is what Max had been making fun of you for quietly as you walked through the delivery tunnels.

“You totally have a crush on Steve!” She had whisper-shouted to you at the back of the group with a giggle and your cheeks flushed with warmth.

“No, I don’t.” You lied. “Shut up.”

“That’s why you got all dressed up!” She realized and you shot her a glare.

“Shut up, Max, before the others hear you.” You hissed and she snickered.

“I knew it.”

When you had successfully made it into the theatre, you had split off to the few empty seats in the room. Max and Lucas ended up in the row in front of you, Mike and Will

The movie had been fine, except for the fact the power had cut out completely only a few minutes in. But it wasn’t just in the cinema, it wasn’t even just Starcourt Mall, it was the entire town of Hawkins.

When the power came back and the movie continued to play, the entire theater cheered before falling back to a regular silence and the rest of the night went on just fine. Completely normal, unlike the rest of the week would turn out to be.

–

The next day you and your friends surprise Dustin at his house once he returns from camp, and Lucas ended up with hairspray in his eyes.

Finding out that Dustin had somehow scored a girlfriend he deemed ‘hotter than Phoebe Cates’ in his three-week-long science camp was a shock to not only you, but the rest of your friends too.

But that wasn’t as much of a shock as what you and Dustin heard on his super radio, which he had named Cerebro in a true X-Men fan fashion.

You had all spent the entire afternoon lugging Dustin’s radio equipment up the tallest hill in Hawkins, one your friends called Weathertop, because he wanted to introduce you all to his girlfriend, Suzie.

But as the day turned into night and Suzie was nowhere to be heard, your friends had slipped away one-by-one. First Mike and El, who had ditched you before even making it up the hill, then Lucas and Max who left once nightfall had hit. Will stayed the longest, but once it started to get too late he left too, suggesting you all play Dungeons and Dragons the next day.

You stuck around, mostly because you had noticed the way Dustin had seemed to deflate as each of your friends left, and you wanted to know if his girlfriend was real or not.

“Guess it’s just you and me, huh?” Dustin had said and you just nodded at him in the dark as he repeated the prase, “Suzie, do you copy?”

By the end of the night you still hadn’t heard from Suzie, but you and Dustin had somehow intercepted what sounded like a secret Russian communication. Which led you to Scoops Ahoy the next day.

Dustin, of course, had wanted to see Steve and complain about how everyone else had ditched him the night before, but he also wanted to recruit him because overnight he had somehow gotten the idea that if you were to translate the Russian phrases he had recorded off the radio, you’d all become ‘American Heroes’.

The thing is, though, Dustin wanted to tell Steve all of this alone, which meant while they were talking in a booth in the back corner, you were leaning against the front corner, shooting them glances.

Robin was behind the counter, serving customers and wiping down benches, while also watching you. And after calling out to Dustin, making fun of Steve, she turned to you.

“So…” She said your name and you looked up. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” You replied and she nodded.

“Cool. So, uh, how long have you had a crush on Harrington over there?” She asked and your cheeks immediately flushed with warmth. Your fingers pinched at the chain of the necklace hanging from your neck, fiddling with the charm.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You lied. 13-year-olds aren’t the best at lying, and Robin very clearly saw right through you. “He’s, you know, old. And dumb. And hairy.”

Robin snickered and you looked down at your shoes. “Right.”

“I would never like him, okay?” You defended weakly.

“Like who?” Steve’s voice came from behind you and you froze, eyes going wide.

“Nobody.” You muttered and he raised his eyebrows. Dustin’s eyes locked onto yours and he stared you down like he was trying to read your mind. “Seriously, nobody.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, kid.” Steve teased and Robin glanced at you with amusement evident on her features. Then he nodded for you to follow him and Dustin to the backroom of Scoops Ahoy.

That’s where you spent the rest of the day, translating Russian phrases that seemed to be utter nonsense. Not a single word seemed to correlate with one another, and yet you had ended up translating a few sentences anyway.

Then, as you left Scoops Ahoy that night, you had all debated whether or not ‘The week is long, the silver cat feeds when blue meets yellow in the west,’ was a secret code of some kind.

And then Steve worked out that the music in the background of the recording, something the rest of you had chosen to ignore, was in fact coming from a mechanical horse from inside of Starcourt Mall.

Then Robin left on her bike, while Steve waited in his car, watching to make sure you and Dustin were alright riding your bikes home.

When you were gone, riding your bikes side by side, Dustin spoke up. He offered for you to stay the night at his. He knew you didn’t want to go home, not to your parents who fight every night. You took him up on the offer.

The next day, you and Robin sat around at Scoops Ahoy trying to crack the entire code you had finished translating while Steve and Dustin searched the mall for any signs of ‘secret Russians’.

You sat cross legged on a countertop in the back room, the straw of a milkshake between your lips while Robin mumbled the same words over and over, staring down at a notepad.

Robin cracked the code that same day, and that night was the night you found the secret room in the back of the mall, guarded by what your group had now confirmed to be ‘Evil Russians’.

But, of course, finding the room wasn’t enough and then you needed to find a way in, and after Robin bought blueprints to the mall and roped Erica Sinclair into the mix, you made it into the secret room the next night.

Upon opening a box that was labelled for the mall’s Chinese restaurant, you all found something that absolutely wasn’t Chinese food. Once Steve had pulled out a glass cylinder of some kind of mysterious, green liquid, the secret room had began to move.

That was when you found out the room was an elevator.

The next couple of days were a blur. You were all stuck in that elevator overnight, you had to spend the night listening to Steve and Robin talking the entire time while your chest burned with jealousy.

But the rest of your time in that dark, underground base was worse. So much worse.

You had spent almost all day walking down a painfully long hallway, arguing about the design of the base, who was and wasn’t a nerd, and whatever the hell that mysterious, green and acidic liquid was. There was even one small moment where you, Dustin and Steve had all shared looks and debated quietly whether or not the Russians knew about the Upside Down.

Then you made it to the main part of the bunker which was crawling with soldiers and scientists. You made it up to the comms room and watched Steve fight and successfully knock out one of the Russian soldiers.

While Dustin celebrated and Steve smiled proudly, pushing some of his floppy hair away from his face, you had struggled to tear your eyes away from him. That was, until Robin found something at the top of a set of stairs.

It was a giant machine, and that machine was opening a gate. A gate to the Upside Down.

You couldn’t even explain anything to Robin or Erica because a moment later the five of you were sprinting down hallways and running around corners while Russian soldiers chased you until Steve and Robin had yelled for the three of you to leave them behind and escape into the vents.

You, of course, had been extremely hesitant. You didn’t want to leave them, and neither did Dustin, but they were busy trying to hold a door shut and get the rest of you out of there to follow you.

Erica went in first, then you had forced yourself to follow her before Dustin joined you in the vents and you crawled away having to listen to the sound of yelling in Russian behind you, because Steve and Robin had been caught.

Your time in the vents might’ve been worse than the elevator or the hallway, because now you were terrified. You had no idea if Steve and Robin were okay, or even alive. You had no idea where you were or how to get out of the bunker. 

While Dustin explained everything to Erica, about when Will went missing and the Upside Down, and the two had an entire long conversation about My Little Pony, you were silent, only chiming in a few times to add to Dustin’s story. Erica had believed it all, except for the fact that Lucas was there, which was apparently hard for her to believe.

Once you had made it out of the vents and found Steve and Robin, they weren’t in the best condition at all.

You had gasped upon running into the room to find his face beaten black and blue, blood coated his face and his uniform and his eye was swollen shut. Robin looked better, shaken but unharmed for the most part.

Dustin had taken out the doctor in the room and the three of you had hurried to untie the older teens. The only issue was that Steve and Robin weren’t acting right.

They were giggling, a little hyperactive, whispering to one another, laughing hysterically at things that weren’t even funny, and just acting nothing like themselves.

You were the one to come to the conclusion that they were drugged once you were all back in the elevator, this time heading up. You had just watched Steve tumble to the ground after pretending he was surfing on some kind of delivery cart.

Dustin had checked and found his pupils were dilated and his eyes were a bright red. Though neither of them would give any of you a straight answer.

After getting out of the elevator, you had made it maybe ten feet away from the doors before two Russian guards were running towards you.

“Shit!” You and Dustin had yelled and shared a look before ushering Steve and Robin towards a door by your side.

“Why are we running?” Steve questioned and you had grabbed onto his arm to pull him into the delivery tunnels you would use to sneak into the cinema, and despite everything going on your stomach had fluttered at the contact.

Hiding in the cinema was easy. There was a late night showing of Back to the Future playing and you had forced Steve and Robin down into front row seats. You, Dustin and Erica had found more seats, but a moment later you and Dustin had headed up to the projection room with his walkie to try and get into contact with any of the others.

Luckily, you had managed to get into contact with Mike.

Unluckily, you had barely been able to tell him anything before the audio cut out and Dustin’s walkie ran out of battery.

He turned to face you with a desperate expression.

“Do you have yours?” He asked and you shook your head before pausing. “What about more batteries?”

“Wait–” You had realized and your face lit up as you met Dustin’s eyes. “I think my walkie is still in the backroom at Scoops.”

“Does it have battery?” He questioned you.

“I mean, it should do. It hasn’t been used in like a day.” You pointed out and Dustin shrugged. “Do you think we’d be able to get down to Scoops without getting caught?”

“Do you know the way through the tunnels?” He asked and you nodded.

“You have no idea how many movies Steve has sneaked us into, dude. Yeah, I know the way.” You stated before you both jumped up and hurried back down to the front row to find Erica.

The only issue was that now Steve and Robin weren’t in their seats.

After some searching, you had found them in the women’s bathroom, sitting on the dirty floor of the same stall, facing each other and laughing.

While Dustin scolded the pair for running off, you were trying your best to push down that disgusting feeling of jealously that swirled in your stomach.

The rest of the night was a mix of running from both Russian soldiers and a giant flesh-like version of the Mind Flayer, arguing with the rest of the group once you had all reconvened and shared what you had each discovered. 

There was blood, you had to hold El’s hand tight while Jonathan had sliced her leg open looking for something that had been moving inside it. There had been singing, when Dustin had somehow come into contact with his girlfriend Suzie and you and Erica just had to sit on the grass beside him and watch. There had been fire, after the others had used fireworks to attack the Mind Flayer they had unintentionally set the entire mall on fire.

And there had been tears, because when they were down in that Russian bunker to close the gate that had been opened, Hopper had died. And Max’s step-brother Billy had been killed by the Mind Flayer right in front of her.

But, for the most part, everyone was okay. Some bloodier than others, some suffering a little more trauma than before, but okay.

Once he had gotten his keys back, some American soldiers had recovered them from the Russian base, Steve had driven you, Dustin and Robin back to his place.

The Harrington house was large, and empty. Steve had made some excuse saying it was to make sure the drugs wouldn’t kill him and Robin in their sleep, saying something else about how he had accidentally given the Russians Dustin’s full name, but you had a feeling he just didn’t want to be alone, not after everything that had happened.

The four of you had crashed in his living room, Steve covering the sofas and large wooden floor in a collection of pillows and blankets before you all practically passed out, sleeping in until late the next afternoon.

–

El and the Byers’ moved three months later, not long after you all started high school. Saying goodbye to your friends before they moved to California wasn’t easy for any of you, especially not for Mike, but you all pushed through.

High school was different. You, Dustin, Lucas and Mike had a rough start, but soon you joined a D&D club called the Hellfire Club, led by a senior named Eddie Munson.

Eddie was great, despite being older than most seniors due to being held back for several years. He was cool, he was funny, he had a band and he loved D&D.

Steve, unlike the rest of you, didn’t like Eddie very much. He would make vague comments here and there whenever Dustin mentioned him in passing, or when Mike talked about Hellfire, or when Lucas told him a story while the two practiced basketball.

High school was very different from middle school. While, at first, you and your friends had fallen into your usual places at the bottom of the food chain, that didn’t last long for some of you.

Lucas had made it onto the basketball team, though he had been riding the bench all year, which had already given him a bit of a boost when it came to terms of friends. 

Mike and Dustin didn’t seem to care about popularity, rather embracing the fact that you were all nerds and geeks thanks to Eddie’s ‘guidance’.

Max still sat with you guys sometimes, hung out occasionally, but she had started to isolate herself from everyone. She had been struggling mentally, mostly due to her step-brother’s death, something she only ever told the school therapist and, well, you.

You weren’t quite sure what had happened to you in high school, or what had happened to your peers, because the bullying from other girls had diminished, and now they actually talked to you in the hallways, or sat with you in class, or paired up with you for projects.

It was different, but it was nice.

Though, sure, there were still times where they’d judge your friends, or some of your interests, like D&D, but you’d much prefer they make fun of the fantasy game you played with your friends than make fun of you.

Your first year of high school started off fine, great even, up until Spring break.

That’s when shit really hit the fan.

The last day of school before break was the last day of the Hellfire Club’s D&D campaign against the cult of Vecna, but it had coincided with Lucas’s basketball game. You had wanted to go and watch, but Eddie was already pissed enough that Lucas would be missing Hellfire, and you didn’t want to get on his bad side.

So you instead recruited Erica to be his substitute for the night, though you felt bad for missing your friend’s game, especially when you found out he not only actually had a chance to play, but had scored the team’s winning shot.

But the break itself was worse.

Mike had gone to California to visit El and Will, while you, Dustin and Max spent the first day of your break finding out that a Hawkins High student, Chrissy Cunningham, was found murdered at the trailer park Max lived in – specifically in Eddie’s trailer.

But Eddie himself was nowhere to be found, Max had seen him fleeing the scene in fear the night before, speeding out of the trailer park faster than she had ever seen him drive before.

So, of course, you, Dustin and Max had ended up in Family Video, where Steve and Robin had been working since about October, since the Byers’ had left town. 

Your group debated on whether or not Eddie was capable of murder, Steve being the only person to really think he was, while proceeding to use the three phones inside the video store to call Eddie’s friends in an attempt to track him down.

You were helping your friends, of course you were, but you couldn’t help but sneak longing stares over at Steve as he ‘attended to the customers’, and flirted with any girl his age that walked through those glass doors.

But you pushed down those feelings of jealousy and disappointment you had grown familiar with and did your best to focus on the task at hand. 

Still your eyes would betray you and flick towards Steve every so often, taking him in. The way his green vest stretched over his shoulders, the chest hair sticking out from the open top buttons of his polo shirt.

You’d watch him drag his hands through his hair in some kind of pathetic attempt to impress a girl who turned out to have a boyfriend and mourned the fact that you’d never be able to have him.

Eventually your friends managed to track Eddie down to the house of a drug dealer named ‘Reefer Rick’, and once you found him there, wide-eyed, shaking and terrified, Eddie told you all about what had happened with Chrissy.

How she seemed to be in a trance, how she floated into the air with her eyes rolled into the back of her head. How each of her limbs snapped and broke violently before her eyes popped from her skull and her body crumpled to the ground right in front of Eddie.

You, Dustin and Eddie then noticed the similarities between Chrissy’s trance and being under a spell or a curse. Specifically, Vecna’s curse. The same dark wizard you had just finished fighting in your Hellfire campaign.

You and your friends spent the next days doing your best to keep Eddie hidden from the police, bringing him food deliveries when you could, while also doing whatever research you could to find out what, or who, Vecna was, and why he was going after Hawkins High students.

After the second murder, a boy from the school paper named Fred, Nancy Wheeler joined your small group and you had to pretend you weren’t jealous whenever Steve looked her way, his eyes softening. When he practically jumped at the opportunity to go with her to follow a potential lead, only to end up pissed off when Robin went with her and he was stuck ‘babysitting’ you, Dustin and Max.

But then you found out Vecna was going after Max next, and suddenly everything was scarier. When you watched her float into the air just moments after Lucas had slipped her headphones over her ears, you thought she was going to die.

You had grabbed onto Steve’s arm out of fear, staring up at your friend as you all screamed her name, begging for her to come back down to the ground and out of that trance she was stuck in.

And she did, Max fell to the ground with the rest of you and Lucas cradled her shaking body in his arms, holding her close to his chest as she struggled to catch her breath.

After Nancy and Robin found out that Victor Creel’s family might’ve also been killed by Vecna, and Max had seen an old, broken house when she was in Vecna’s mind, your group went to the old abandoned Creel home to search for clues.

After Max found an old grandfather clock identical to the one she had seen in her visions, and Steve had suggested that Vecna could’ve been a clockmaker, you all split off into groups to explore. Robin and Nancy went together, Max and Lucas, which left you with Dustin and Steve.

Steve didn’t seem too thrilled, letting out a loud sigh and complaining about always being grouped with Dustin.

It made you frown, disappointment flooding your body. First you had been watching him make eyes and flirt with Nancy for the last couple of days, and now he was acting like being grouped with you and Dustin was a chore.

You were quiet as the two boys argued, Dustin quoting Sherlock Holmes and Steve not understanding a word before Dustin wandered off, and you followed behind.

Nobody really found anything in the house, but at one point while crossing the upstairs hallway you caught a glimpse of Steve and Nancy standing a little too close together while she smiled up at him. That was enough to dampen your mood for the rest of the night.

You knew it shouldn’t have mattered, there were more pressing issues going on at the time – like the fact Max had almost died and Eddie was being framed for murder – but you just couldn’t shake the jealous feeling away.

That night, after your flashlights had all blown up, you spent the night staring at the ceiling and replaying the way Steve had looked at Nancy over and over again.

It had just made you feel ridiculous. You needed to move on, find someone your own age, someone who could actually return your feelings and give you that love you craved so much. So you decided that you would, that tonight was the last night you would care about Steve Harrington and after that he would go back to being nothing more than a friend.

And then you saw him the next day, wearing that yellow sweater with a wide smile on his face, offering you Pringles in the back of Nancy’s station wagon, and you tried so hard to ignore the way your stomach fluttered when his big, brown puppy dog eyes met yours.

The fact that Vecna had killed another teenager – a boy from the basketball team named Patrick – the night before helped keep you distracted, but when you and your friends were walking through the woods in search of Eddie, following Steve and Dustin as they argued while leading you all to ‘Skull Rock’, you were left alone with your thoughts.

Of course, it wasn’t that long before Steve had found Skull Rock and began rubbing it in Dustin’s face that he was right and your best friend was wrong and you had found Eddie.

While Eddie ate the food you had all brought for him and he recounted the previous night’s events, including when Patrick was lifted into the air in the middle of Lover’s Lake and had each of his limbs snapped one by one, Dustin paced back and forth while staring down at his compass.

That was, until he yelled out a very loud, “Boom!” That echoed through the woods before he pointed at Steve. “Bada boom.”

Steve, naturally, was confused, as were the rest of you, before Dustin began spouting off about how Skull Rock was North once more, which made Steve roll his eyes before he started to argue back.

Then Dustin told you all that Skull Rock in fact was North, and his compass had been leading him in the wrong direction, which then made him point towards you and Lucas, making you recall a piece of information you had learned back when you were 13 and had just learned about El and the lab for the first time.

“Do you guys remember what can affect a compass?” Dustin had asked, and it was like a lightbulb had gone off in your head.

“An electromagnetic field.” You and Lucas both answered, like the memory of that information had just resurfaced for the first time in years.

While the others in the group were confused, you were starting to understand what Dustin was getting at. There was likely a gate somewhere nearby, much like when your compasses had deflected towards the lab back in 1983.

The rest of the afternoon was spent following Dustin and his compass through the woods as the sun set and darkness fell over Hawkins, and eventually his compass had started going totally beserk and he started running.

Eddie managed to grab him by the shoulder and stop Dustin from falling right into Lover’s Lake, which was where the compass had led him, which meant the gate was likely somewhere… inside of it.

The older teens all ended up on a rowboat with Dustin’s compass, leaving you, Dustin, Lucas and Max on the shore, watching them with a pair of binoculars.

“Wait, wait, wait. They’re stopping.” Lucas said suddenly, holding the binoculars to his eyes while hitting Dustin in the chest. “What are they stopping for?”

Dustin scrambled for his walkie. “Guys, what’s going on? Come on, guys, talk to me, what’s going on?”

You and Max had been standing off to the side, a little further back, whispering to each other, but your attention had been stolen once the boys had started to speak.

“Uh, Dustin, your compass has gone from wonky to wonky with a capital, ‘ahh!’” Robin’s voice crackled through and you had sighed, disappointed that you were all sidelined and forced to stay on the shore.

A few more silent moments passed before Lucas let out a disgusted groan.

“Ugh. When’d Steve get so hairy?” He asked and Max’s head snapped towards you with a wide smirk on her face, making your cheeks heat up as you whispered for her to stop.

“Right? I keep telling him he needs to tame that jungle, but he claims the ladies dig it.” Dustin explained and the boys each made a face before you stepped forward and reached for the binoculars around Lucas’s neck.

“Pass me those.” You said and he shot you a confused look before you took them right from his hands and peered through them yourself, getting a look at a very shirtless Steve Harrington in all his glory.

Lucas and Dustin shared confused looks for a moment before Dustin made a sound that was half a scoff, half a surprised yelp before asking, “Dude! What the hell?”

You just gave a shrug and watched as Steve dove into the lake, disappearing beneath the cold, dark water, and you handed the binoculars back to Lucas.

However, you and your friends didn’t get to see the outcome of the dive, because only a few moments after Steve dove in, you and your friends were lying on the ground and hiding behind a log because the cops had arrived.

Robin’s voice crackled through on Dustin’s walkie, saying Steve found the gate, but none of you paid any mind as he switched the walkie off and you stayed hidden for a moment more. And in order to keep the cops away from Eddie, Max jumped up and yelled for the cops to follow her.

Of course, you all got caught, and an hour later the four of you were cramped onto the couch in the Wheelers’ living room, surrounded by cops and your parents.

You had shrunk into the sofa at the sight of both your mother and father in the same room, but this time their anger was directed at you and not each other.

After some questioning, where you all lied in response to almost every question, you explained everything that had been going on to Erica, and she was the one who noticed the blinking light in the dining room, morse code that Dustin translated spelling out S.O.S..

Communicating with Steve, Nancy, Robin and Eddie in the Upside Down using Holly Wheeler’s lite-brite seemed crazy, but what was crazier was sneaking out of Nancy Wheeler’s bedroom window and running away from the cops, Erica popping the tires of the police cruiser before the now five of you rode your bikes across town to Eddie’s trailer.

There was a gate on the ceiling, and Dustin used a broom to break open the red, fleshy gateway to reveal the Upside Down on the other side. A moment later, Steve appeared above you, standing in the same place you were, looking up – or down – at the rest of you. Nancy, Robin and Eddie followed suit and you all waved happily, chuckling at the absurdity of the situation, before you were dragging Eddie’s mattress out of his bedroom to use as a landing pad to help the others through the gate and back to your world.

Except that proved difficult when after Robin and Eddie had crossed over, Nancy ended up in a trance much like Max and the rest of you searched Eddie’s trailer for any music that could help her while Steve stayed with her in the Upside Down, cupping her face and shouting for you all to hurry.

But Nancy got out of the trance on her own, and once she explained to you all what had happened, what she had seen, what Vecna – or Henry Creel, Number One – had shown her, to say you were terrified would be an understatement.

The end of the world. Hawkins on fire, everyone dying. Four gates opening up and spreading across Hawkins, splitting the Earth open.

Hearing that was enough to stop you from thinking about how Steve was sitting just a couple of feet away from you, completely shirtless except for Eddie’s denim vest he had started wearing at some point in the Upside Down.

So your group started coming up with a plan, Vecna wanted to kill four people, so Max would offer herself up as bait. Then, you’d strike.

Naturally, Eddie suggested getting weapons and gear from an army surplus store known as ‘The War Zone’, but it was too far for you to bike there. So Eddie hotwired his neighbors’ motor home and had Steve drive the damn thing there.

Halfway there, you had been sitting at a table in the back with Dustin, but your eyes kept drifting over to Steve driving the RV, and Nancy in the passenger seat talking to him with a soft smile. And Steve would turn and look at her with an expression you could only describe as pure longing, maybe even love.

And he told her a story about his dream for the future, about driving around in a Winnebago with five or six kids of his own, and then he looked at Nancy again. Suddenly you wanted to sink into the floor and never come back.

At the War Zone, you had to stay in the RV with Eddie, Dustin and Lucas as members of the Hellfire Club who were currently being hunted like the Salem Witch Trials, and obviously one of you had been framed for several murders in town. All of Hawkins believed you to be devil worshippers of some kind.

After your friends bought half of the store and then had a brief run in with Jason, Chrissy’s boyfriend, and the other members of the basketball team who were currently hunting you all down – especially Eddie – Steve, now dressed in a leather jacket and a camo shirt, pulled the RV off onto a field where you all began preparing your weapons.

You sat beside Max and Nancy on some old milk crates as Nancy sawed off the end of her new shotgun. Max asked her if it was legal for her to do so, and Nancy replied with something about it being a felony. You were distracted, yet again, by your overwhelming crush on Steve.

He was sitting with Robin in front of the Winnebago, filling bottles with kerosene to make their own flaming molotovs. And you kept glancing his way, then practically staring.

Then, at one point, he looked up and glanced your way. Your eyes darted away immediately and you turned your body to face Max, unaware that Steve hadn’t even noticed you staring because he had been looking at Nancy.

Max chuckled at you and immediately began with the teasing again, some comment about you drooling or making ‘heart eyes’ at Steve. You shushed her, but it was too late because Nancy, Steve’s ex-girlfriend who he had been flirting with over the last several days straight, had heard her.

Your face flushed with warmth and you looked down at your shoes on the grass, then shot Max a harsh glare when you thought Nancy wasn’t looking. But, of course, she still was, and even huffed out a little laugh.

“It’s okay,” She told you, her lip quirking up slightly as she said your name, and your attention was all hers a moment later. “I mean, I was the same once upon a time. Had a big crush on Steve, obviously you knew that because we…”

“Nancy.” You groaned, covering your face with your hands out of embarrassment, and Max had immediately started saying something about you being ‘in love with Steve for like two years’. 

You should’ve been used to her teasing by now, it was stupid and you knew it. It was just some dumb teenage crush. But you had slowly began curling into yourself, your arms wrapping around your body as your thoughts and insecurities took over.

You weren’t sure if it was about Steve, or just about craving that kind of attention. Craving love and a relationship, much like you had seen and heard from your friends.

Max and Lucas, Mike and El, Dustin and his long distance girlfriend Suzie, hell, even seeing Nancy with Jonathan. It felt like you were missing out on something that everyone else was allowed to have.

Your friends were all growing up and getting these experiences you could only dream of, like having a first kiss, or dancing with a boy who actually liked you and wasn’t just trying to comfort you when he found you crying on the curb outside the Middle School gymnasium.

So you lived vicariously through teen romcoms and stories from other girls in school, fantasizing about the moment a boy would actually show that kind of interest towards you. To want you, to love you.

And Steve… Steve was older. He was cool, he was good looking, he was funny, he had that charm you had seen him use to ask girls out on dates at Family Video while you were browsing for the closest thing you’d ever get to a relationship, aka. Star Wars, where you’d watch Han and Leia and sigh to yourself, or some cheesy movie where the guy pines after a girl for years and then finally wins her heart.

But Steve was also the first boy who had ever said that you looked pretty, and he was the first boy who had ever danced with you. And he was the first boy you had ever had a crush on that had lasted longer than a couple weeks.

All of it together was just enough to make you crave it so badly. Crave that experience of a relationship and that feeling of love.

And of course the only boy you had ever really liked had absolutely no chance of liking you back. Not in a million years.

“Can we just drop it please?” You asked and while Max nodded, Nancy gave you a sympathetic look that made you want to crawl into a hole and die.

So that night you were dropped off at the Creel House with Max, Lucas and Erica, and after stepping off of the dead silent Winnebago, you turned back and looked at Steve, eyes full of fear. He was watching you all as you left, and when he saw you looking back, he nodded at you, telling you to go on.

You did. You followed your friends into the creaky, old, crumbling house as the sun set, unaware of just how badly the night would end.

It started off okay, walking around the house only in socks, using lanterns as light and communicating using notepads to avoid making any noise that could potentially alert Vecna to your positions, and soon you and Erica had been hurrying outside as phase 2 initiated, to signal to the others in the Upside Down when you were going into phase 3. 

That’s when shit went downhill, because then Jason and his jock friends showed up. One of the basketballers, Andy, chased you and Erica away from the playground before he tackled you to the ground and pinned your arms behind your back.

You had been struggling against his grip until Erica managed to push him off of you and kicked him right in the balls, and Andy curled into himself, his hands grabbing at his crotch as he groaned in pain.

Then you and Erica had sprinted back into the Creel House, where Jason had headed when Andy went after you. The attic door had been locked once you reached it, but the two of you had managed to break it open and make it up to where Lucas and Max had been.

“Lucas!” Erica called out her brother’s name and you froze at the top of the stairs because Lucas was sobbing on the ground with Max pulled into his lap. Her limbs were snapped, twisted abnormally out of place and sticking out in directions that they shouldn’t, and her eyes were glazed over in a pure white, blood dripping down her cheeks.

Lucas had spun around immediately to face you both, screaming out, “We need a doctor! Call an ambulance! Hurry! Call an ambulance!”

And when Erica had rushed back downstairs, likely to find a neighbor or the closest possible phone, but you were completely stuck in place, staring at the girl you had grown up with, one of your best friends, as she sobbed in her boyfriend’s arms telling him that she was scared and that she wasn’t ready to die.

You were crying, your body shaking uncontrollably as you stumbled over to them, trembling as you dropped to your knees and practically begged her not to slip away.

“Erica, help!” Lucas shouted out, his voice so full of pain that you couldn’t breathe as you sobbed, gripping Max’s hand in yours as you pleaded with her to stay. But it didn’t work. Max died in his arms.

And then the Earth split open, a gate forming and growing. Lucas pulled Max away and you both scrambled to the side, watching as the gate ripped Jason in two and continued to spread further away from the Creel House and through Hawkins.

Then, after over a minute had passed, Max’s heart had started beating again, just enough that she was still alive. But Eddie wasn’t so lucky, he had died in the Upside Down, sacrificing himself to save Dustin.

Three days later, Max was in a coma in Hawkins Memorial Hospital, Mike, Will, El and Jonathan all arrived in Hawkins again, and you were helping Dustin, Robin and Steve volunteering in the post ‘earthquake’ aid and suddenly not having a boyfriend, or your crush not liking you back, didn’t feel like as a big of a deal as it had before.

And, somehow, life managed to return to normal after that. Well, something close to normal.

Hawkins was now under a government mandated quarantine, where the military crawled around every inch of the town, keeping you blocked off from the rest of the world. 

You and your friends were starting your junior year in high school, except for El, who was hiding from the military, and Max was still in a coma and had been for the entire 18 months that had passed.

The crawls were new. Every couple of weeks Hopper would sneak into the Upside Down with the military through the massive gate in the middle of Hawkins, right at the library, and would search for Vecna while Dustin and Steve tracked him from your side and Mike and Lucas kept watch from the nearby church.

But after 18 entire long months, you found nothing. Not even the slightest hint that Vecna was anywhere near, and after over 30 crawls it was like the entire Upside Down had been searched from top to bottom and absolutely nothing was found.

Not until what would be later known as your last crawl, the one where Dustin didn’t show up and you were thrown into the Squawk van with Steve and had to practically beg for Jonathan to come along for ‘help’ when really you didn’t want to be left alone with Steve.

Your crush hadn’t faded, despite the fact that you didn’t see him as often as you used to. Not when Dustin was acting differently and seemed to be avoiding him half of the time. But you listened to the WSQK radio broadcasts every day, mostly for Robin’s DJ-ing and to listen out for any hidden codes about crawls, but also because you knew Steve was the one behind the station’s many sound effects in the background of the broadcasts.

You were now 17 years old, almost an adult, and you hadn’t gotten over the crush on the guy who was basically your best friend’s older brother that had formed back when you were 14. You still had absolutely no experience in anything even slightly romantic, and it was killing you.

But the crawl in the Squawk van had been even more awkward with Jonathan around, because then they argued about Nancy, of course they had, while you sat in the back of the van awkwardly while thinking about Hopper’s signal, which you had lost when the van broke down.

At one point, Steve had spun around to face you, gesturing to Jonathan and asking why you had brought him along because, “Byers is a total buzzkill’. Jonathan had rolled his eyes and called Steve a name, and Steve had mumbled a bland insult back, and it almost felt like you were at home, listening to your parents doing anything but getting a divorce.

Just seconds after Steve had managed to get the van running again, finally, Dustin showed up. His face was completely busted and he had blood leaking from his nose and down his chin.

That just resulted in another argument, this time between Steve and Dustin, while you searched for Hopper’s signal again, only to come up with nothing, other than a strange noise Dustin had brushed off as nothing important because it wasn’t Hopper.

That same night, Holly Wheeler had been taken from her own home by a Demogorgon and her parents had been attacked and had almost died. El had followed the monster into the Upside Down to try and catch up to them and save Holly.

Sometime early the next morning, long after the sun had risen, you had arrived back at the Squawk, where Will then explained that he had a connection to the hive mind again, and to Vecna, and he knew that Vecna was going after another kid from Holly’s class next, a boy named Derek Turnbow.

Mike and Nancy shared the information they had learned at the hospital, that Vecna had stalked Holly long before she was taken, but had appeared as Henry and pretended to be her friend, not someone to be afraid of.

So then you were all coming up with a plan to try and save Derek, and this plan involved drugging and kidnapping the kid and his entire family.

Lucas and Mike recruited Erica, because her best friend Tina was Derek’s older sister, meanwhile you were on the McCorkle farm watching Dustin destroy Steve’s car by affixing the telemetry tracker to the top of the Beamer and crushing Steve’s heart.

You couldn’t help feel bad for him and the way he frowned for the rest of the afternoon, wincing every time he caught a glimpse of the car.

That night, the plan went well. The Turnbow family were all successfully knocked out by the pie Erica made using benzos that Robin and Will stole from the hospital, and while Joyce, Robin, Will and Erica took the family away to the farm, the rest of you set up traps around the house in preparation.

Watching Steve use a chainsaw to cut open a giant hole in the living room floor might’ve been the highlight for you, well, until you had helped him set up a trap outside Derek’s bedroom door using some wood planks, nails and a trip wire. Once the trap had been set, Steve had given you a high five that had genuinely sent a jolt of electricity through your body and a smile etched itself onto your face.

When the Demogorgon arrived in Derek’s room, only to find a dummy in his bed instead, it was your and Lucas’s job to pelt the thing with water balloons filled with acetone so it was guaranteed to catch a flame once Jonathan threw a flare at it.

Once the Demogorgon flipped using a small gate it had made in the living room, Nancy and Jonathan rushed outside to join Steve and Dustin in the Beamer as they chased the Demogorgon, hoping it would lead them to Holly.

Later, when you, Mike and Lucas made it to the farm on your bikes, telling the others about how you saw soldiers loading Debbie Miller and a bunch of other kids Holly’s age onto a bus, Dustin, Steve, Nancy and Jonathan were nowhere to be found because Steve drove his car through a gate and right into the Upside Down.

Will told you all about what he had learned in the hive mind, how many kids Vecna wanted to take, and now the military had all of those kids in one place in an attempt to protect them. But you and your friends knew the only way to really protect them was to get them out of Hawkins and out of Vecna’s reach, which meant it was time to make a new plan.

This time, Robin made it, basing her entire plan on the film The Great Escape. But there were a few key pieces of information you needed. How would you know where the washroom was to know where to dig up from the tunnels below Hawkins? How would you know which kids were even being targeted by Vecna?

Mike’s solution was to send Derek Turnbow, the kid you had managed to save, into the MAC-Z and into the barracks with the other kids.

And the plan had almost worked, until a burst pipe led to you all getting caught before you had gotten all of the kids out and into the tunnels. Robin and Lucas took half the kids to Murray, but the rest of you were captured by the military. 

Of course there was arguing, a fight started to break out after one soldier hit Derek on the back of the head, both you and Mike immediately jumping in to defend him, but everything stopped when Will fell to the ground.

Joyce rushed over immediately while you and Mike stayed with the kids, who were absolutely terrified. Will could sense the hive mind. Demogorgons were coming for the kids. 

They burst through the plates and immediately began attacking the soldiers, who were shooting at them left and right. Gunshots filled the air, echoing through what should’ve been a quiet night, and flames burst around the military base.

You hadn’t really realized how much you had grown up over the last few years until you and Mike were leading the group of kids around the base, protecting them from the monsters, shielding them the same way Steve, Nancy and Jonathan used to do with you and your friends.

But it was all for nothing, because the Demogorgons took the kids in the end. Vecna himself had come through the gate in the MAC-Z and when a blast of flames sent you, Mike and the kids flying back, you were knocked out.

When you came to, Mike was pulling you to your feet, only for you both to flinch back when a Demogorgon jumped towards you.

You had raised your arms to cover your face in a weak attempt at a shield, but no impact was made. The Demogorgon had frozen midair, and how? Will had his arm outstretched towards it, keeping it frozen in the air, using his own powers to stop the Demogorgon.

You were absolutely bewildered, your mouth falling open in surprise, having to blink a few times just to confirm you weren’t still unconscious and that this was actually happening. Mike, on the other hand, was staring at Will in absolute awe. 

Will lifted the Demogorgon into the air and snapped its limbs one by one before snapping its neck, similar to the way Vecna had killed Chrissy and the other teens, and had almost killed Max the year before. When its body crumpled to the ground, Will fell to his knees and wiped the trickle of blood that had formed under his nose.

Beside you, Mike had started to smile. The look on his face wasn’t something you quite knew how to describe at the time, but looking back later, you knew that was a look of love.

Back at the Squawk, the group had to come up with yet another plan to be able to find the others in the Upside Down and come up with a plan, because Lucas was sure Vecna’s plan to end the world was going to take place on November 6th, and that was just a day away.

Both Lucas and Erica came up with two separate plans, Erica’s involved creating a new telemetry tracker and finding Mr. Clarke and getting him to help, while Lucas wanted to Frankenstein one of the dead Demogorgons to link Will back to the hive mind.

You ended up going with Erica and Murray to find and recruit Mr. Clarke to help you, and it didn’t take much once you told him Dustin was in trouble and you needed his help. 

The four of you spent all night recreating the telemetry tracker until you tracked Dustin’s location to Hawkins Lab, though, in the Upside Down. Of course, Mr. Clarke didn’t know that and assumed he had left or something similar.

The others had arrived not long after, and when you saw El, you moved forward to hug her, glad that she was home safe and no longer in the Upside Down, even if Dustin and the others were still stuck.

“Mr. Clarke, thanks for the assist.” Mike spoke, walking forward to shake your former teacher’s hand as you stood by his side again.

“Don’t thank me yet.” Mr. Clarke had replied. “We successfully trilaterated Dustin’s position here, to precisely where I stand now.”

“But by the time we arrived, he was MIA.” Erica continued.

“Well, he wouldn’t be precisely here. He’d be under.” Robin pointed out, crossing her arms, and you nodded along.

Mr. Clarke tilted his head in confusion as he looked at Robin. “Sorry?”

Mike’s head then snapped towards you. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Told me what?” Mr. Clarke asked you.

“It… slipped my mind?” You excused, speaking to Mike, but your attention was stolen a moment later. “Oh, my god.”

“Holy shit.” Erica spoke from beside you as her gaze also landed on Max, who was being wheeled towards you all in a wheelchair, but she was very much alive and no longer in her coma.

“Holy shit.” Max echoed and your face lit up as you let out a surprised chuckle.

“Max!” You hurried over and she grinned as you crouched down to hug her, but the moment was cut short by Murray yelling that he got Dustin’s signal on his walkie and you all rushed down to his level.

After a brief conversation about Holly was shared between Mike and Dustin over the walkies, El ripped up one of the plates covering the rifts in the ground and you all, except for Lucas and Max, went into the Upside Down.

You were all calling out the names of your missing friends while you were trying to take in the fact that you were in the Upside Down for the very first time before you heard Dustin calling out your name, and then Mike’s. You both rushed towards him as he barrelled over.

“Jesus, it’s good to see you guys.” He sighed in relief, throwing his arms around you both and hugging you tight.

As you hugged him though, your eyes drifted to Steve as he approached behind him, standing off to the side from Nancy and Jonathan. It took a moment for you to notice how miserable they looked, and another moment for you to realize that Holly wasn’t with them like you had thought.

Turns out Vecna had pulled her into the literal sky and she had disappeared into the clouds. And you and your friends needed to save her before Vecna likely ended the world on that very same night.

So you all went back to the Squawk to share new information and come up with the final plan to defeat Vecna.

Dustin stood in front of you all with a black marker in hand, drawing on the glass windows of the recording booth as he explained something he had learned in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab.

“We’ve always the Upside Down was another dimension opened by Brenner, but it turns out it’s actually a bridge.” Dustin added two long lines to his diagram, representing the bridge. “More specifically, an interdimensional bridge that rips through space-time. It is wildly unstable, but held together by exotic matter, which we found dead center right above the lab. In theoretical physics, they call this type of bridge a–”

“Wormhole.” Both Erica and Mr. Clarke finished in sync, and Dustin pointed at them. You shared a glance with Max, who was sitting beside you in her wheelchair.

“And this wormhole connects Hawkins to here, another world that I’ve coined the Abyss.” Dustin explained.

“Any particular reason?” Robin asked and Mr. Clarke leaned forward in his seat.

“A realm of pure chaos and evil.” He spoke and Robin looked towards him.

“I’m sorry?”

“D&D.” You, Mr. Clarke, Erica, Mike, Will, Lucas and Dustin all answered at once.

“Jesus Christ.” Hopper groaned.

Dustin went on to explain how he believed the Abyss was the true home to the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer and all of the monsters, and that Henry Creel had been sent there by Eleven years ago, before Dr. Brenner had her find him and created the bridge between the two worlds.

That had explained a lot over the last few years, like why every single crawl had come up empty, because Vecna hadn’t been in the Upside Down, he had been in the Abyss.

Will came up to the conclusion that the reason he was taking kids like Holly into the Abyss was because the minds of children were weaker and easier to mold, like he had done with Will himself, and he was going to use them to amplify his abilities and move worlds. To draw the Abyss and Hawkins closer and merge them together.

Will jumped forward to draw something on Dustin’s diagram and you shifted your body away from Max, who had just been talking, to then face him. In doing so, your arm brushed against Steve’s leg, and you muttered a quiet apology but didn’t look up at him where he was sitting on the back of the couch you were seated on.

Then you were working out a plan to get up to the Abyss to try and stop Vecna before he could draw the worlds together.

After Hopper’s first suggestion of a helicopter, which then resulted in the rest of you telling him that it wouldn’t work, and a rather crude comment about Steve made by Robin that made your eyes go wide, Steve himself was the one to come up with the plan.

He had jumped up from his place on the couch beside you and you had watched him as he walked a few steps away, then stopped, his brain clearly moving faster than his mouth could before shouting that you wouldn’t need a magic bean to make a beanstalk and climb up to the Abyss like some fairytale.

His idea was to use the Squawk radio tower in the Upside Down as a way into the rifts, letting Vecna draw your worlds together just enough that you could all make it inside before El would stop him from drawing them closer.

It was genius, and while the others added a few more small details to help, Dustin was the one who finalized it, suggesting for you all to leave a bomb at the exotic matter that would detonate when you left the Upside Down and destroy the bridge for good.

Then everyone was gearing up, dressing in old combat gear, gathering weapons, and Mike built the detonator for the bomb using a record player and a minifigurine. 

You sat with Lucas on a table in the basement as he adjusted his giant slingshot, a great improvement from his old Wrist Rocket he used against the Demogorgon when you were younger.

You were filling more water balloons for him with the flammable liquid inside the unlabelled canister you had found in the Squawk basement, but every so often you’d glance over to Steve in that same leather jacket he had worn the first time, the material stretching along his shoulders, and a backwards cap on his head, a small tuft of hair sticking out from the front, as he walked away from the cabinet in the corner that usually held the weapons, specifically the guns.

He held a small handgun until Nancy approached him, questioning whether or not he had used a gun before. Of course, he hadn’t, and you forced yourself to look away, only to find Lucas smirking at you.

“What?” You asked.

“You’re, like, in love with Steve.” He whispered with an amused laugh and you shushed him.

“Shut up, no I’m not.” You scoffed, then glanced towards Steve again, watching him follow Dustin through the basement before you met Lucas’s eyes again and saw he was still smirking. “Shut up.”

Getting into the Upside Down was the easiest part of the plan. Murray’s huge Bradley’s Big Buy truck was large enough to hold all of you as it charged into the MAC-Z right through the front gate, and Hopper took down any soldiers shooting at you from the inside, having sneaked in through the tunnels like he would before a crawl.

Nancy and her rifle climbed up the ladder in the middle of the truck and stuck out the hole at the top, where a Demogorgon had ripped the metal open, only to rain fire on any other soldiers around trying to stop you.

Once Hopper was inside the truck and the truck had successfully made it through the MAC-Z gate, the ride got a little bumpier.

“Jesus Christ.” Steve wobbled on his feet a little from beside you.

“Everybody alright? Everybody okay? You alright?” He asked Steve, who nodded, before looking around and asking the others. “Everybody alright?”

Steve looked down at you, where you looked a little shaken as you blinked a few times, and his face scrunched into one of concern.

“You sure you’re okay, kid?” He asked and you looked up, eyes going wide when you realized he was talking to you, as if it were something out of the ordinary.

You nodded before forcing yourself to speak. “Yeah. Thanks, Steve.”

Then he had reached over and patted your shoulder for just a moment before leaning back against the wall. He smiled at you, and you returned the gesture, though you had a feeling you were blushing before you looked to your other side and reached for El’s hand.

Once you reached the lab, Hopper, El, Murray, and El’s ‘sister’ Kali all left the truck, and Steve moved to the front to drive the rest of the way to the Squawk.

You hated the climb up the ladder on the tower, you weren’t the biggest fan of heights, and once you had made it up to the top, you, Lucas and Dustin all stood together and stared out at the Upside Down Hawkins skyline.

“It’s pretty damn spectacular.” Dustin had commented, bumping your shoulder with his.

“Yeah,” You agreed breathlessly, staring out at the dark, yet amazing parallel to your hometown. “It is.”

“It’s almost too bad we have to blow it all up.” Lucas added and you had glanced his way.

“Is it though?”

It wasn’t long after that when you could hear, and see, the Abyss as it descended towards you all, and the plan seemed to be going okay until Lucas noticed that the top of the tower wasn’t lining up with the rifts, which only meant bad news.

El wasn’t able to stop the Abyss fast enough and the planet above you came into contact with the needle, snapping it off.

You all jumped out of the way as it fell, gripping onto the edges and each other. The needle broke off one end of the tower’s railing, and it took Steve with it.

Both you and Dustin shouted his name, watching as he dangled from the edge of the tower, only gripping on with one hand. If he slipped, he would fall and die. 

And then he did slip, and he fell. But not far enough, because Jonathan caught him. He grabbed onto Steve’s hand and pulled him back up onto the tower, saving his life.

The moment he was back on the platform, Dustin charged forward and pulled Steve into a hug. You had almost wanted to follow him, but instead hugged Robin, who was sobbing in relief that she hadn’t just watched her best friend fall to his death.

The Abyss was strange, it was almost like a desert. A vast, empty desert. It seemed too empty, and too quiet, but eventually you found where Vecna was keeping the kids, inside of a ginormous spider-like monster. The Mind Flayer in a much larger, physical body.

And while El fought Vecna inside of the thing, you and your friends attacked the monster from the outside, shooting it, stabbing it, lighting it on fire, until it eventually collapsed to the ground.

Nancy was the first to rush inside in search of Holly, and the rest of you joined her a moment later, Mike rushing forward to reunite with his sisters. The rest of you helped the other 11 kids from where they were up in the spires on the wall. They were all confused, and dirty, covered in some kind of slimy residue as Mind Flayer particles expelled themselves from their mouths.

As you helped a young girl brush herself off, telling her you would help get her home, you could hear gurgling coming from somewhere nearby. You turned to see Vecna, though impaled on a sharp spike of some kind, was still alive.

Joyce dealt with him, decapitating him with her axe. The moment you watched his head tumble to the ground, rolling for a moment before coming to a stop, it felt like a weight was lifted from your shoulders immediately.

Soon you were all heading back home, having climbed back down the radio tower and all cramped into the back of the bus. Steve and Robin were in the front, and you were squashed between Dustin and El as you all talked, almost celebrating the fact that you had won.

Everything descended into chaos when you returned through the gate. The tires of the truck were flattened by spikes and everyone was hauled from the vehicle by soldiers in a flurry of chaos.

You were pressed against the side of the truck, El to your left and Mike to your right, as soldiers surrounded you all. There was yelling, arguing as soldiers patted you all down and searched you all.

Dr. Kay approached El, who glared in response, wincing at the loud radio feedback sound coming from the speakers around the base.

But then the bomb went off inside the Upside Down, and everyone watched the wind whipping around inside as the buildings collapsed and then… it was gone. The gate disappeared, leaving nothing but the crumbling destruction of the library.

After that, you and your friends were all brought in for hours of questioning by the military and Dr. Kay, asking about Henry, El, Kali, the Upside Down, the Demogorgons, why you had taken the kids, why you had gone into the Upside Down. They asked you about everything from the moment Will went missing and you found El in the woods to that point in time where you were being interrogated.

And, eventually, you were all let go and expected to go on with your lives like normal. With the Upside Down gone and Henry dead, El had lost her powers again and now the military had no reason to be after her, not after everything had gone down and she had stopped Vecna.

While it did take a long time, eventually things did get back to normal, as much as they could’ve at least.

–

The morning of your high school graduation you woke up with more energy, and more anxiety, than you had had in a long time.

You went through your morning routine like normal, waking up to a silent house because neither of your parents liked being around each other, or you, before getting dressed.

You had nothing to do all day before graduation, no boyfriend to celebrate with, no family around who wanted to take photos of you. You had the day to yourself.

So you turned on the radio and sat down on the couch with a book, listening as Robin Buckley presented the Squawk’s morning broadcast for the first time since Jimmy ‘Fast Hands’ Lee had returned to Hawkins and she had gone off to college.

At least that was something you could look forward to – college. You couldn’t wait to get out of Hawkins, to do more with your life. You were going to study to become a teacher, something you had wanted to do probably since middle school when you and your friends had all idolized Mr. Clarke.

A burp sound effect playing at the wrong time caused you to look up at the radio for a moment, brows furrowed before a whip cracking sound effect played and Robin’s voice came in.

“There we go. Sorry about that. My partner in crime ditched me.” Robin explained and your face fell for a moment. “But, well, as far as excuses go, he had a pretty good one.”

She was, of course, talking about Steve, who now coached the middle school baseball team. He was the only one of the older teens that hadn’t left Hawkins to go to college when the quarantine had been lifted.

At the mention of Steve, your stomach had flipped uncomfortably. 18 months had passed, and while your crush hadn’t faded, something had happened that now just made you feel guilty for liking him.

Steve had a girlfriend now, a woman named Kristen who he had been dating for a couple of months by this time, and it killed a part of you every time you thought about it.

But that was another reason why you were excited to get out of Hawkins, you would leave Steve behind, maybe meet a guy at college and finally move on from your dumb crush and have a relationship of your own.

That afternoon after you made it to the graduation, everything felt too real. You stood with your friends, dressed in your orange caps and gowns as guests all took their seats, and then the music played, queuing you all to take your seats so the ceremony could begin.

As you walked to your seats, lined up alphabetically like you had rehearsed, you looked around the bleachers to see who you could recognize.

There was Jonathan filming the event off to the side, Joyce, Hopper and El, the Wheelers (including Nancy), Lucas’s parents, Dustin’s mom, Mr. Clarke and Murray, Robin, and Steve.

He was dressed in a suit with a pair of sunglasses on, but as you all walked out, his head turned away from Robin to watch you all. You raised a hand and gave a small return, and he grinned, both him and Robin waving back and you smiled, looking down at your shoes before taking your seat.

Dustin’s valedictorian speech started off normal, he mentioned how he had wanted a normal childhood, but that didn’t really happen, due to obvious reasons. He went on to mention D&D, talking about bad chaos and good chaos. He mentioned making friends with people who were never supposed to be his friends, and how he had seen the same happen to others. He talked about how he was now a better person because of his friends.

But then, towards the end of his speech, something shifted. He called Principal Higgins a square, took off his robe and ripped open his shirt to reveal a t-shirt reading ‘Hellfire Lives’. You cheered loudly for your friend, and so did the others as he went on to say, “Screw the school. Screw the system. Screw conformity. Screw everything and everyone trying to hold you back and tear us apart, because this, this is our year!”

And as you all cheered for him, Dustin snatched his diploma from Principal Higgins and flipped the old man off, just like Eddie had said he would your freshman year.

After the ceremony, you and your friends ran through the sea of orange robes to find him.

“Dustin!” You all called out upon spotting him and the four of you hugged him tight.

“You’re a madman. You’re an absolute madman.” Mike said first as Dustin shook his shoulders with an excited laugh.

“Higgins totally shit his pants.” Lucas added with a laugh.

“Yeah, what’s he gonna do, expel me?” Dustin asked.

“You’re crazy.” Lucas told him, but before the conversation could continue, a voice cut in.

“Hey.”

You turned to see Stacey Albright, the same girl who had once teased you at the Snow Ball, approaching you, Dustin, Lucas, Mike and Will.

“Hey, Stacey.” Dustin greeted her with a grin and an attempt at speaking casually, but your smile fell just a little.

“I just wanted to say what you did up there was pretty badass.” She complimented Dustin, and for a moment you thought she wasn’t going to be serious. But, then again, everyone had matured since middle school.

“Oh. Thanks. I was kind of just going for like a bit of like a Belushi thing. But if he was like in a Hughes film.” Dustin scratched his eye and you shared a glance with Will, who was standing to your left. “But I don’t know. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. No, totally.” She told him and there was a bit of an awkward pause where she went to turn around and walk away.

“Why did I say that?” Dustin whispered to you and you shrugged, but then Stacey had turned back.

“Hey, so I’m having a party later tonight. You guys should come.” She told you all, then made direct eye contact with you and smiled. Not in a teasing way, but more genuine. You did your best to smile back before she walked away.

“Did that just happen?” Dustin asked Will the moment she left, and the boy chuckled in response.

“Should we go?” Will asked, looking around the group, his eyes lingering on Mike.

“Is that rhetorical?” Lucas asked back, because the answer was obvious.

“No. Screw that. I got a better idea.” Mike stated.

His better idea had been a D&D campaign, and so the seven of you – You, Dustin, Lucas, Mike, Will, El and Max – all cramped around the table in Mike’s basement to play D&D until dinner, laughing and reminiscing about the last six years of your lives and the chaos you had all survived.

But after dinner?

“We still have time to go to Stacey’s party after this.” Lucas had said first, checking his watch by the Wheeler family’s front door.

“Oh, my god, please.” Dustin clamped his hands together and gave Mike his best puppy dog eyes. “Come on, dude, let’s go.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “Seriously?”

“Come on, Mike, don’t be a party pooper.” Max had teased, making El giggle from where she stood by Dustin’s side.

El and Dustin had gotten closer over the last year or so, after she and Mike had finally broken up for good. She had, obviously, been very behind on school, and was currently a grade behind you all, having to take summer school to catch up, but Dustin had been tutoring her and helping her with any subjects she had been struggling with, and now sometimes she hung out with Dustin more than you did.

Another recent development had been with Will and Mike. About a year ago, Will told you, Dustin, Lucas, Max and El that he was gay. He said he had only told his mom, his brother, Mike and Robin before that. Now, Mike hadn’t told you anything, but sometimes you caught the two of them sending each other glances across the room like they were the only two people around.

Will turned to face Mike. “Yeah, Mike, come on. It’ll be fun.”

Then Mike sighed, dropping his head back with a groan before throwing his arms up in the air in front of himself. “Fine.”

You had all walked to the party at Stacey’s house, and once you arrived she, as well as many others, were happy to see you all there.

It was like years of bullying and cliques and labels in school didn’t matter anymore, and that felt weird. It looked like the entire senior class was there.

Kids were high-fiving Dustin as they passed him, complimenting him on his speech loudly, raising their voices to be heard over the thumping bass of the music practically vibrating the house.

You and your friends decided to just let go and have fun; talking to people you usually wouldn’t, drinking alcohol, drinking a lot of alcohol. At one point you and Dustin had started teasing Lucas and Max as they made out in the corner of the room, only for Lucas to let go of Max and start chasing Dustin through the house, leaving you, Max and El bursting into a fit of laughter in the corner.

But the later into the night you got, the more drunk you had all become, and eventually you were all collapsed onto a couch together, El giggling as she played with Dustin’s curls while Max rested her head on your shoulder, her legs thrown across Lucas’s lap. Mike and Will were sitting just a little too close for it to not mean anything by your other side.

Then someone mentioned being tired, someone else started to get sad about the fact you would all be going away to separate colleges soon, and then you were all debating who to call to pick you up.

Will called Jonathan first, who said he could come pick up his brother and sister and one other person, which ended up being Mike.

You, Dustin, Lucas and Max had to find a different ride home, so Dustin went to make a call.

–

Steve had gotten home a couple of hours earlier after making plans to meet up with his friends in Robin’s weird uncle’s house in Philadelphia once a month, and he had been stretched out on the sofa, his arm around Kristen, his girlfriend, as the two of them watched a movie together.

When his phone rang, he furrowed his brows in confusion before getting up and crossing the room to pick it up, assuming that maybe Robin had left something behind in his truck earlier.

Instead he found Dustin on the other end, his words slurred slightly as he asked for Steve to come pick him up.

“Are you drunk, Henderson?” Steve asked, crossing one arm around his torso as he leaned back against the kitchen counter. Kristen had poked her head out of the living room to see what was going on, and he waved her off.

“Pfft, not even. Just, like, a little.” Dustin replied, though his words said otherwise.

“Alright, bud.” Steve chuckled, shaking his head. “Where are you?”

“What’s the address?” He could hear Dustin ask someone else on the other end before he recited Stacey’s address. “Oh, and can you pick up the others too?”

Of course, Steve couldn’t fit four teenagers into his truck, which meant he had to borrow Kristen’s car to go pick you all up, and when he arrived at the address he found the four of you seated on the curb, the party still going on in the house behind you.

Dustin was already half passed out, leaning against Lucas, but he grinned when Steve approached.

“Steve!” He cheered before nudging you and tugging on Lucas’s arm. “Guys, Steve’s here!”

“Steve!” The rest of you chorused the cheer, your face lighting up immediately, and Steve laughed before offering Dustin a hand to lift him up.

While Dustin, Lucas and Max all piled into the backseat, you were left with the passenger seat. And while your friends passed out almost immediately, all leaning against each other as they snored softly in the backseat, you were wide awake.

Something by Queen played on the radio, faint but still clear enough for you to understand every word Freddie Mercury sang as Steve tapped along to the beat on the steering wheel.

“Thanks for picking us up, Steve.” You spoke, half mumbling, as you shifted in your seat, no longer staring out the window and now facing him.

Steve shrugged. “No problem. You know I’d do anything for you guys.”

You hummed before looking around the car. “This isn’t your truck.”

“Nope.” Steve agreed, taking a look around himself. “It’s, uh, my girlfriend’s car.”

“Right.” You had replied, then sunk back into your seat, your eyes fluttering shut a moment later. Steve exhaled out his nose lightly in a gentle laugh.

He glanced over at you, then to your other friends in the rearview mirror before you spoke again.

“I love you, Steve.” You stated, still half-asleep, but your voice was clearer than it had been before.

He smiled, flicking on his blinker as he turned a corner on the dark, empty streets of Hawkins. “I love you too, kid.”

“No.” You had sighed, and Steve glanced your way again, watching how each street lamp illuminated your face for a few seconds as he passed them. “I mean, I love you like… like how you love Kristen.”

He stopped completely, the car slowing slightly, and he frowned as he looked your way again, one eyebrow raised. You what?

“You love her, right?” You asked and Steve coughed awkwardly.

“Well, yeah.”

“Good. She’s nice.” You mumbled. “You deserve that.”

Steve didn’t know how to reply. He had never felt so awkward in his life as he glanced your way.

“You don’t love me.” He told you, like he could decide that. Like saying that erased any feelings you might’ve had for him.

“Yes, I do.” You sighed again, turning to face the window again. “But, it’s fine. I get it. And I’m glad you’re happy, and once I go to college I’m gonna find a boy and he’s gonna love me and I’m gonna forget all about you, so it’s fine.”

And then you went silent for the rest of the car ride. When Steve pulled up outside of Dustin’s house, you shot him a kind smile, thanked him, and left the car like nothing had happened, waking Dustin up before the two of you headed off to the front door with nothing more than a goodbye.

And Steve sat there for a moment, watching the two of you make it into the house before he just stopped, thinking over the interaction he just had with you, extremely confused, because you were in love with him? Since when had you loved him?

The next time he saw you was a week later at one of his baseball games when you and your friends had all shown up to watch.

You were acting like nothing had happened, teasing him with Max like normal, laughing with your friends, acting like you hadn’t drunkenly confessed your love to him a week earlier.

Naturally, Steve assumed you were too drunk to remember the interaction. Hell, he assumed the entire interaction had only happened because you were drunk, because Steve didn’t think you loved him.

But you did love him, and you didn’t forget about the interaction.

Neither did Steve.

–

a/n: holy shit this was wayyyy longer than i had anticipated uhhh no wonder it took me literal months to write omfg. anyway the rest of the series is set in 1993, and the next chapters will be shorter i swear. um, i hope you liked this and the few changes i made lol. i’m excited for this series!!

summer was coming to an end sooner than you’d like. you just might even say it was the best summer of your life. there was endless movie nights, random adventures with the kids (who weren’t technically kids anymore, more like soon-to-be seniors in high school), self-care nights with max, and soft moments with him.

steve harrington. the boy you’d been in love with since you were a kid.

he practically lived at your house at all times due to how close him and your brother, jake, were. steve was at every family party, dinner, outing, all of it. he’d become such a normal part of your life that you couldn’t tell when you began to look at him differently. or maybe you’d always had this crush on him since the moment you met.

he was sweet and gentle and caring in a way that you didn’t know existed. your parents weren’t exactly the best image of love growing up. their fights got nasty and they often went long periods of time without talking. you knew from a very young age that that wasn’t what you wanted.

and with steve, he never allowed the smallest of disagreement to escalate into anything more. the moment he made a joke that hit you in a way it wasn’t supposed to, he was grabbing your hands and apologizing with that genuine glint in his eyes that made you melt. the second there was even the slightest tone to his voice, he was taking a beat to reset before apologizing.

you may call yourself delusional, but you could swear he’s only like that with you. the kids argue all the time. almost every other minute is spent arguing. whether that be over a movie, what snacks they want, who farted— it was always something. and yet steve would sit there and watch. sometimes he’d even join in with the teasing.

seeing the differences in how he treated you versus the rest of the world made it impossibly hard not to fall even more.

like the time when dustin had fallen off of his bike because his chain had snapped. steve hadn’t even bothered to help because he couldn’t stop laughing for a solid ten minutes, holding his stomach that was starting to actually ache. but the time you’d fallen off of your bike after attempting a trick a few years ago? he was calmly helping you up and into your house, sitting you down on the lid of the toilet as he cleaned up the blood and bandaged you up. he whispered sweet words the entire time so you wouldn’t panic at how bad the scrapes looked.

or the time when lucas ate mike’s leftovers that he’d been saving for this specific movie night. it was practically a war in the kitchen and all steve could say was shut up and watch the goddamn movie. but when jake ate your leftovers that you’d been excited to get home and eat? steve was back in his beamer to get you more.

it was the little things that made you fall down, down, down the rabbit hole of steve harrington.

the thing you always dreaded most was going back to school. sure, you loved it. like, really loved it. your roommates, allie and jackie, were the best people you could’ve ever imagined living with. they were fun and crazy and so full of life. they made forgetting about hawkins feel easy.

but the one thing you still could never forget was steve. even when you were at the bars, borderline plastered with men standing and sitting all around you, your mind was back to steve. none of them were as pretty as him or as sweet to you as he was. you sat and talked to one guy for hours and couldn’t help but compare the two the entire time.

then when you’d occasionally go home for the weekend or for break, you’d see him at your house like he always was and your mind would start wandering. it made you wonder what it’d be like to come home with him waiting for you. not jake, you.

it was a very dangerous game to play. and this summer, was teetering extremely close to the edge.

you were currently in your room, packing up all of your stuff again to go back to your dorm on campus in a few days, when you heard a knock. steve moved to stand in your doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. his hair was a little messy like he’d been messing with it recently and he was in worn sweats with a simple crewneck. and still, you thought he was so stunning. “need any help?”

you stood from your crouched position and placed your hands on your hips while analyzing your room. most of it was packed, now just the smaller more personal things. “uh, i think i’m just about done. thanks though,” you said with a smile. “keep me company while i finish?”

the corner of his lip twitched upwards as he nodded and moved to sit on your bed against the headboard, making himself comfortable like he always did. “of course. jake went out to get groceries. he said the fridge was looking sad.”

you let out a soft laugh and continued stuffing things into bins. “hm. i wonder why that is,” you teased. the two boys were like vacuums. if you didn’t hide your food in a secure location, it was one hundred percent going to be gone in the morning.

“wasn’t me this time,” steve said defensively, holding his hands up. he smiled to himself as he recalled the memory. “he practically inhaled everything last night when we got in.”

the lid to the storage bin clicked as you pushed it down into place. “yeah, sounds just like him. those everything sandwiches cannot be good.”

he huffed out a laugh and stared at his hands that were fumbling with the blanket. “yeah, they’re gross,” steve mumbled. you could see a wave of something unfamiliar wash over his face quickly before returning back to neutral. “you ready to head back to school?”

a long sigh left your lips as you stopped to look at him. it took a second to think of an answer. “i don’t know. i guess? i love it there but… i also just hate having to leave this place. as much as it sucks sometimes.”

his eyes held an intensity that should’ve terrified you. instead, it only had you more intrigued. “that’s good though, right? that you have something so meaningful here that it makes it hard to say goodbye.”

you snorted at that. “jeez, steve. when’d you get so poetic?” you moved to lay on your side beside him once your feet started aching, tucking a big lump of blanket under your head so you could look up at him easier.

he shrugged playfully and placed your legs over his lap, his warm hand resting on the bare skin of your calf. “guess i’ve picked up on a few things being a teacher and all.”

the subconscious movement of his hand running along the length of hour lower leg made it much harder to focus. you cleared your throat. “what about you? excited to get back to teaching?”

his posture relaxed slightly, like the topic of conversation made him go softer than he already was. “yeah, i am,” he replied with a smile he couldn’t fight off. his gaze was still fixed on his hands. “jus’ hope the team can have a better season this year. they deserve a big win.” steve finally looked to you, chuckling as the big grin across your face. “what?”

you shook your head. “nothing. i just like hearing about your job. the way you talk about them is really sweet.”

a soft blush coated his cheeks as his gaze broke away towards your calf again. a wave of sadness washed over his features. “i’m gonna miss you,” he said just barely above a whisper.

the corners of your lips pulled downwards into a frown. “you know, you can always come visit me like you and jake used to do freshman year,” you replied, analyzing the way he looked so focused on his hands rubbing your skin. “you haven’t even gotten to see my new place yet. the couch unfolds.”

the way you said it with such excitement should’ve made him smile or crack a joke about your enthusiasm for a couch. instead, his face fell. he mimics your frown. he wants to visit your again more than anything else. but sitting here, surrounded by boxes and bags full of your items, he can only envision your bright future ahead of you. one where you graduate and move far away to become someone great who can make real change. the realization hits him hard.

this was your senior year. its the time where you should be enjoying the last bit of college left. going to parties, experimenting, experiencing everything the world has to offer. and most importantly, meeting more people. not feeling like you’re trapped in the boring little hawkins that never did anything to deserve someone like you. “yeah. maybe we’ll have to do that,” he whispered, no real intention of following through with it.

not because he didn’t want to— no, of course he did. but college was your space and he quickly realized that after the first few times he visited. he didn’t want to scare off anyone who might become your entire future. was it a little silly? maybe. but to him, he thought it was the right thing to do.

your brows furrowed as you watched him. you sat up a little more, unintentionally scooting a little closer to him. his hand was now resting on the outside of your thigh with his thumb moving soothingly along your skin. “what’s wrong? you look upset,” you asked softly, searching his eyes for anything.

he finally lifted his gaze to look at you, void of anything but sadness. and still, he tries to force a smile onto his face. “nothing. i’m good,” he said quietly. his other hand that was still in the blankets was flexing out and bunching the fabric between his fingers repeatedly like he wanted to reach out and cup your face. “just sad to see you go so soon.”

you let out a soft laugh. “steve, we had all summer. i’d say this one was one for the books,” you joked playfully. the joke didn’t land. if anything, it made him even more sad.

“it was pretty fun, huh?” he muttered, his gaze flickering from your eyes to your lips. never in your life had you seen steve look so heartbroken.

the only sound to break the tense silence was your box fan in the corner of your room. the air began to thicken with the weight of unspoken words and confessions that had been building for the last three months. and subconsciously, you lean in just half an inch. your close enough to feel the soft puffs of air from him.

his eyes were fixed on your lips. how pretty and soft they looked. how badly he wanted to kiss you right now. he could feel his heart thumping loudly in his chest as his fingers on your thigh dug into the skin slightly. his palms were beginning to grow hot and clammy as he took in your scent.

your faced were only centimeters away. and you really thought it might actually happen. that he might finally kiss you like you’d been waiting years for.

then he pulled away like he’d been electrocuted.

his eyes became glassy as he looked at you, his lips parting like he was trying to find the words to describe the internal dilemma in his head. “i’m sorry,” he whispered so quietly you almost missed it. “i can’t.”

you visibly deflated, your heart breaking in your chest. “what?” you questioned quietly. he could hear the sadness in your voice as you stared at him with big pleading eyes. getting punched in the face was definitely much easier than this conversation. “what are you talking about?”

he gulped nervously and retracted his hands from your skin like the contact burned him. “i can’t do this,” he replied softly, looking completely defeated.

your hands trembled with the fabric of the blanket as your eyes began to sting. “is it because of jake?” you asked. part of you wished it was. that’d be much easier to find a solution to than anything else. “is it because he’s your best friend? we’re not kids anymore, steve. he doesn’t get to dictate who we like.” he watched a flash of realization wash over your face as your bottom lip wobbled. “or do you… do you just not like me?”

his hands moved quickly to cradle your cheeks when you moved your head to look down. his thumb gently swiped at a tear rolling down your rosy skin. “no! no, i think you’re perfect. trust me, that’s— that’s not it at all,” he said quickly, not even skipping a beat. “it’s not that, or your brother. i promise.”

your sniffled sadly and looked into his brown glassy eyes. “then what is it?” you whispered brokenly, voice cracking more than you would’ve liked.

he moved to hold your hands in his instead like he needed something to ground him too. “it’s about you,” steve stated. “i mean… this is your senior year of college, y’know? this is your final year of fun before you have to go out into the real world. you should be going out to parties and— and meeting new people and trying everything life has to offer you. you have this amazing future ahead of you and i’m just… the guy who coaches baseball in a hopeless place like hawkins.”

there was a moment of silence before he held you a little tighter. “if i kiss you or— or tell you how i feel, you’ll go back to campus carrying all of this. and as much as it hurts me to not be able to do those things, i don’t wanna hold you back from living your life. i don’t wanna be the reason why you skip out on going to a party or feel guilty for having some fun because you feel tied down to me.”

your face fell as you stared at him. there was not a hint of dishonesty in his voice or on him at all. he looked completely torn and wrecked and above all, guilty. “steve. you can’t actually think that,” you began with a gentleness he didn’t think he’d deserved right now. you returned the firm hold on his hands and pulled him a little closer. “look at me. do you really think you’re a burden?”

he didn’t answer. the slight shrug if his shoulders and the slow slide of a tear running down his cheek was enough of an answer for you. “i’ve already lived three great years of the college life. i’ve gone to the parties, i’ve met all the people there is to meet, i’ve done it all. and somehow, the entire time, all i could think about was you,” you admitted, putting your whole heart on the line now. “all i could do was wish i was sitting right here, talking to you. you’re not holding me back from anything, steve. and i really don’t want you to think that, because out of everyone else in the world, you’re still the one i wanna be with.”

you could feel and see steve tense up at the confession. there was no going back now. a summer of lingering touches and gazes, flirting so subtle that everyone else missed it, and late night conversations had led you both straight to this moment.

and steve was fucking terrified.

“i’m sorry,” he whispered so quietly you thought you’d imagined it. he sniffled brokenly and wiped at his eyes, pulling away from you. “i can’t do it.”

just like that, he was gone. he was shuffling off of your bed and slipping downstairs through the front door before jake could come in and ask what happened.

you’d cried the entire night. you barely even slept because of it. the embarrassment of laying all of your feelings out on the line and leaving the ball in his court, just for him to walk away like none of it meant anything to him. it killed you more than you liked to admit.

it’d been three days without seeing him and today was the day you’d be leaving.

jake was currently doing a once over of your car to ensure it would run smoothly all the way to university while robin gave you a big, bone crushing hug. “don’t forget about me while you’re gone,” she mumbled against your shoulder. “and pleaseee bring some of allie’s pie home for thanksgiving.”

you could help but laugh as you pulled away, wiping your tears as you did so. no matter how many times you’d done this previously, it still felt just as hard every time. especially when you were missing a certain someone.

the kids (teenagers actually) all ambushed you into a big group hug, each muttering their goodbyes all at the same time. when you finally got to your parents, you heard the loud engine of some expensive car. your eyes lit up as you looked to the end of the block.

it was just some new red sports car.

jake watched your shoulders drop as your hopes of seeing him one last time shattered. that was what hurt the most. the realization that whatever had been brewing between the tow of you was actually over.

your brother pulled you into a hug, an uncharacteristically sweet one, and muttered a very soft i’m sorry. you weren’t actually sure if he knew what he was apologizing for or if steve had told him what happened, but it was enough to make you cry a little harder.

steve’s leg bounced anxiously as glanced at some of the pictures he’d found in his drawer while searching for his wallet that you all had taken over the summer at nearby photo booths. one in particular had caught his eye. he leaned his elbows on his knees as he stared at it and frowned.

you two were sitting down side by side in the booth, his arms around your waist while yours were around his neck. you were smiling big while his lips were pressed to your cheek. it was meant to be a silly photo, but with the timer counting down unnaturally fast, the two of you picked a random pose. it was actually embarrassing how much he looked at this photo.

something inside of him clicked instantly. he jogged down the steps, almost missing a few, and ran out to his key, quickly shifting it into drive before speeding off towards your house. he didn’t care about the speed limit or the fact that he didn’t have his seatbelt on. he just cared about making it in time to see you. and as he rounded the corner of your street, his heard sank.

your car was gone.

and still, he pulled up to the curb and got out in record breaking time. his hair was a mess, his clothes were completely wrinkled, and his eyes were bloodshot. yet part of him was still optimistic. he needed to see you. he needed to say a real goodbye. but when the front door opened to reveal jake with the slightest frown on his lips, steve knew he was too late.

your brother stepped out onto the front porch as he approached, a cup of coffee in his hand. he looked at his best friend’s disheveled state with the quiet panic behind his eyes, and sighed.

he didn’t yell at steve or ask where he was. he just gave him a comforting pat on his back and a sad smile across his lips. “she just left, man,” jake said softly, voice full of sympathy. he turned to head back inside, leaving the door open for him to follow.

steve stood there, with his heart in his stomach, staring at the road you’d just driven down minutes ago.

🌊⋆｡𖦹 °.🐚⋆❀˖°🫧

almost a year later, and you were finally done. all that was left for you now was graduation in a week.

this particular school year had felt like it dragged on much longer. perhaps it was the fact that you didn’t go home at all like you typically did. or maybe it was because for half of the first semester, you couldn’t stop thinking about the dreadful interaction that happened between you and steve just before you left.

allie and jackie were good at making you forget about all the bad things in your life. you spent countless nights laughing with them while sharing a bottle of wine, staying out until the early hours of the morning at the bars, doing anything and everything possible. it felt better than you’d ever admit.

but now you were in your car, trunk and backseat (and your passenger seat too actually) completely filled with bags and boxes. they were stacked so high you could barely see out of your back window. the drive home was familiar in a way that made your stomach churn with excitement. you had really missed your brother and your friends.

even though you’d be on the road for a while, you didn’t even bother stopping for food or to rest. the adrenaline of getting home was enough to keep you full and ready to go for the entirety of the ride.

a big, wide smile spread across your lips as you pulled into your driveway. you were practically out of the car before you could even fully put it into park and shut it off. you headed up onto the porch and opened up the front door, only to hear the deafening silence of the house.

your brows furrowed as you called out to your parents and jake but got no response. there was a small white note on the dining table that caught your attention. it read ‘see you soon to celebrate. love, jake’.

if anything, you were even more confused now. then there was a loud knock at your door. you cautiously walked toward it and looked through the peep hole to see two familiar faces.

as soon as the door swung open, robin was squealing excitedly and practically tackling you into a hug. vickie was standing beside the two of you, laughing loudly at the interaction.

“oh my god, dude. it feels like it’s actually been forever,” robin muttered into your shoulder before finally pulling away to allow her girlfriend to hug you too. “i hope you know how devastated i was to know you weren’t coming home with pie.”

vickie snorted as she pulled away from you. “she cried when you two got off the phone. like real tears.”

robin glared at her, though there was no real malice in it. “you weren’t supposed to tell her about that,” she whispered incredibly loud without even realizing it. she then turned her attention back to you and ushered you inside the house, following behind you. “ok, hurry up and go change. we’re going on a little walk.”

your face scrunched up in confusion. you were already in comfortable clothes. “what do you mean? why can’t i just go like this?”

she smacked her lips and gestured to her and vickie’s outfits. they both had on much nice outfits than you did. “no, dingus. not that kind of walk,” she teased with a chuckle. “just trust me. put on something cute so we can get going.”

the realization quickly became apparent. “is this about jake’s note?” you asked, a knowing smirk on your face. “how did you guys even know when i’d be getting home?”

robin shrugged. her expression was telling a completely different story. “women’s intuition.”

“we stood at the end of the block for half an hour waiting,” vickie corrected, doing her best to hold back a laugh.

you snorted at that. “you guys are ridiculous,” you remarked playfully as you turned to head up the stairs and into your bedroom. most of your clothes were still packed up in your car. fortunately enough for you, you found a nice pair of jeans and a flattering shirt that could be considered dressy for whatever occasion.

the second you reached the bottom step, the girls were grabbing each of your arms and basically dragging you outside and down you street.

and before you knew it, you were at the bar.

nerves flooded your stomach as they pulled you inside. you’d never been here before but it was safe to say that the place was packed. not to the point weee you couldn’t move, but definitely to a point where you were squeezing through to get past.

“there’s my favorite grad!” you heard from in front of you as your brother— evidently already tispy —shimmied through the crowd to pull you into a suffocatingly tight hug. “congrats, kid. proud of you.”

you pulled away from him and placed your hands on his shoulder to steady him. “thanks, jake,” you smiled. “how much have you had to drink already?”

he gave you that smirk that meant he was up to no good. “not nearly enough,” he replied with a playful wink. one of his friends from work, damien, approached from behind him with four shots in his hands. he quickly passes two to jake, kept one for himself, and handed to last to robin. “to the grad!”

the group cheers’d to you and downed the shot, your brother shaking his head at the disgusting burn. you could hear robin coughing behind you while vickie chuckled and handed her some water. you weren’t entirely sure what alcohol they’d given you, but it was probably in the top ten worst drinks you’d ever had.

as you made your way to the table behind jake, you ran into multiple of his friends. they each congratulated you with a hug and offered to buy another round, which you’d politely decline each time since you were trying to hold off on getting too hammered.

once you finally got to the table by the wall where your party was seated, you froze. your heart had dropped to the depths of your stomach and almost stopped beating right then and there. because there he was.

steve harrington.

sitting at the table that was meant to be celebrating you tonight.

almost as if he could sense the pair of eyes on him, he turned his head and his gaze caught yours. a slow smile spread across his lips as he stood from his seat to greet you. he set the beer he was nursing onto the table and took long strides over to you. “hey,” he beamed. he had this calm, warm confidence that radiated from him as he approached and pulled you into a gentle hug. “congratulations.”

you wrapped your arms around his torso and let out the shaky breath you’d been holding in. “thank you,” you mumbled against his chest.

the two of you stayed like that for a few seconds longer than you should’ve, his chest against the top of your head like you guys molded perfectly together. when he finally reluctantly pulled away, you didn’t miss the way his eyes trailed down your frame. “want a drink?”

you shook your head with a tight-lipped smile. “no, i’m okay for now. thank you though,” you replied gratefully. but he was already grabbing ahold of your hand. “steve, seriously—“

he flashed you a toothy grin and began taking a few steps backwards. “oh, come on. we’re supposed to be celebrating,” he teased playfully. “one drink. that’s all i ask.”

you didn’t have time to protest. he was using the hold on your hand to pull you along with him as he used his own body to clear a path for you, effectively preventing anyone from bumping into you or spilling their drinks on you.

he pulled out of of the high chairs for you and waited for you to be seated before taking a seat in the one beside you. “anything you like in particular?” he asked, one elbow propped up on the table with his chin resting in his palm. his other hand was flat on his thigh.

the attention made your cheeks flush a soft red. “i usually just go for shots whenever i go out with my roommates,” you said honestly, slightly embarrassed that you didn’t have a big palate like the others did. “i’m not the biggest fan of the taste so i’d rather just get it down quick.”

he didn’t judge. of course he didn’t. steve would never. he nodded along as narrowed his eyes at you slightly as he thought. “okay. how ‘bout something sweet then?” he suggested, the hand on your thigh moving to trace shapes over your knee as he stared at it.

your gaze followed his to watch his pointer finger press small circles into your jeans. “what if i hate it?” you asked.

he let out a huff akin to a laugh and lazily grinned. something about the way he looked was doing things to you. “you won’t. just trust me. it’s good,” he said confidently. “and if you do hate it, i’ll get you something else.”

you mimicked him and propped your elbow up with your chin in your palm. “i’ll pay you back.”

his eyes found yours again, brows furrowed slightly as his head tilted the slightest bit. he almost looked offended. “what are you talking about?” he replied, his voice light hearted and playful. “when have i ever asked you to ‘pay me back’?”

you shrugged. “that just means i have a big debt to pay back.” you couldn’t help but begin to feel small under his intense gaze. “which i intend to start paying back.”

steve waved it off like that was the most ridiculous thing you’d ever said. “don’t worry about it. i wouldn’t have done any of those things if i didn’t want to.”

the bartended finally made his way over to the two of you, his eyes mainly focused on you. “what can i get for a beautiful woman like you tonight?” he asked, winking as he leaned on the counter with his palms flat on the surface below the bar.

you pursed your lips into a thin line and looked to steve, unsure of what he had planned.

he noticed the slight tense in your posture instantly. he placed the hand on your thigh over the back of your chair instead, pulling your chair the slightest bit closer with his knee slotting between yours. his eyes never left yours. “can i get a beer,” he began, searching your face one last time like he was really contemplating what you’d like. “and one tequila sunrise please?”

the man nodded like he’d taken the hint and went to prepare the drinks. you glanced at him, then back to the boy in front of you. “tequila sunrise?” you questioned curiously.

the corner of his lip quirked up as he gave you a curt nod. “you’ll like it,” he assured. “thought about a sex on the beach but you don’t like peaches.”

your heart swelled at the fact that he’d remembered something so small. within a few short seconds, your drinks were placed in front of you two. the gorgeous gradient was enough to make you love it already. “thank you,” you replied gratefully when he slowly slid it over to you, careful not to spill. you gave it a small swirl and took a sip. “wow. oh my god. it’s really good.”

steve had this proud smile on his face as he took a swig of his beer. “what can i say,” he replied with a playful cockiness as he shrugged.

you lightly shoved at his shoulder and took another sip. your eyes widened as you remembered something. “robin told you me you got your own place,” you said, genuinely excited for him.

he nodded and took another sip. “mhm. just bought an apartment a few blocks down from here,” he stated, doing his best to stay humble. you could see just how proud of himself he was. “just somewhere temporary for now. jake and i found a couples places a few towns over. thought it’d be fun to get out of here and settle down somewhere nicer.”

you smiled. that sounded nice. “oh boy. that neighborhood is really gonna hate to see the two of you coming,” you teased softly, earning a laugh from him.

“yeah, they definitely will,” he smiled to himself. “the houses are nice. a lot cheaper too. and they’re next door to one another.”

you nodded along and glanced down at your knee that was brushing up against his. “that sounds like the dream.”

he hummed in agreement. “you’ll have to come visit. see the place for yourself and tell me what you think.”

you could feel your face grow hot almost immediately. “i’d love to,” you said, voice shaking a little to much to sound sure. the alcohol was definitely starting to hit you a little bit by now. if it weren’t for the help of it, you surely wouldn’t have asked the next question that left your mouth. “so, my roommate allie has some extra graduation tickets. she didn’t want them going to waste, soo she gave them to me. and i was wondering, if maybe you wanted to go?”

there was a pause of silence as you sipped your drink and he stared at you with a look in his eyes that you couldn’t quite place. “you obviously don’t have to or anything. i just— i don’t know. i figured i’d ask,” you nervously rambles. “robin and jake are carpooling and you know how much they can argue over stupid things. not that that’s the only reason i want you to go but—“

“i’ll be there,” he said gently to stop you from freaking yourself out. he was looking at you with a softness you’d never seen before.

you took a deep breath. “really?”

he nodded and smiled. “of course i will. wouldn’t wanna miss it for the world,” steve replied. “i’m a little offended that you asked me last but i’ll—“

you lightly slapped his arm that was around the back of your chair and glared at him, though there was no real bite behind it. it made him chuckle. “you know that’s not how i meant it. you’ve always had an invite. you’re just the hardest to contact.”

“i know,” he whispered softly, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “i really missed you.”

your heart did a little flip in your chest as you looked down at your drink that was just about empty. “i really missed you too, steve.”

he wanted to say sorry for how things left off between the two of you. he really did. but that would only open up old wounds that he was sure would ruin your night. and you didn’t deserve that. so the second you looked down, he got you a refill and swapped your glass for the full one. “c’mon. let’s get back to the table before jake kills me for stealing you for too long. think i just nance and jonathan come in too,” he stated as he stood up, offering you a hand as you hopped off of the high chair.

you took the outstretched hand and allowed him to lead you through the crowd back to the table where your brother and his friends were dishing out more shots. “just in time,” jake hollered excitedly. he’d always had this dream of getting fucked up with you once you were of age.

everyone held their glasses up in a cheers before throwing back the shot and setting the empty cups down onto the tray. steve took yours from you and placed it down with the rest while nancy came over to greet you excitedly.

as the two of you briefly caught up, steve was pulling out the chair with his jacket on it for you to take a seat whenever you were ready. nancy took a seat beside you with jonathan on her side, and robin and vickie across from you. steve was standing next to you between your chair and the wall, his beer in one hand and the other on the back of your chair to keep people from bumping into you as he argued with robin over something silly.

the rest of the night went by in a blur. you had shots practically getting shoved down your throat every few minutes, steve watching over you with a quiet protectiveness, robin and nancy pulling you around the bar to dance, and jake demanding you drink even more.

it was around two am now and majority of the group was beyond drunk. fortunately for you all, steve and damien lived in the same apartment complex nearby. the worst part was that it was still a twenty minute walk.

jake had effectively gotten you absolutely plastered. not to the point where you couldn’t stand or enough to make you puke everywhere, but enough to make steve worry about how you were gonna make it. you were practically beginning to fall asleep leaning against him in your chair.

so he had scooped you up carefully, your arms around his neck and your legs around his waist, while his hands held underneath your thighs as respectfully as he could. he was great at handling his alcohol. so it was no surprise that he was fully functioning better than anyone else was.

jonathan was carefully monitoring nancy as she walked, not quite beside her but also not behind her. just close enough to catch her if she fell at any given moment.

vickie was going through it beside steve. she was fully supporting robin’s weight against her with the help of jake, who was not sober enough to be helping. he was spluttering nonsense and cracking jokes the entire walk home that had the rest of their friends laughing obnoxiously loud.

once you all finally made it, half of the group split to damien’s apartment, while your brother, robin, nancy, vickie, and jonathan stayed with the two of you.

steve mumbled something to jake about the key in his back pocket, which he quickly reached for and unlocked the door. he pushed it open so steve could enter first and make his way towards his bedroom while the others prepared the pullout couch and the floor.

he could feel the slow thump of your heartbeat against his chest as he kicked the door shut and gently sat you down at the edge of his bed. you flopped back immediately, dramatically sighing. it made him chuckle. “you okay?”

you nodded lazily, even though he couldn’t see it, before humming. “mhm. jus’ tired.”

he sank down to his knees and carefully untied your shoes then gently slid them off of your feet. he placed them neatly by his door and moved to his closet. “i know. ‘m gonna find you some clothes ‘nd then we can get ready for bed, ‘kay?”

the only answer you could offer was a barely there hum of acknowledgment as you rolled onto your side to get comfortable. he quickly gathered up some sweatpants and a hoodie he didn’t wear very often and made his way back over to you. “c’mon. how ‘bout you get changed really quick?”

you groaned in protest but took his hand as he helped you up and led you to the bathroom connected to his room. he gestured for you to enter while holding out the clothes. “jus’ lemme know when you’re done,” he said, shutting the door behind you.

with a little but of stumbling around and a few close-calls to falling, you were finally changed. his clothing was extremely comfortable and oversized. you opened up the door. “all done.”

his eyes scanned over your figure, in his clothes, in his apartment. he thought he might actually be dreaming. he stepped inside and moved around you, his hands gentle on your waist as he did so to get to the other side and pull out a spare pink toothbrush. your brows furrowed as you looked at it. “why do you jus’ have this laying around?” you slurred tiredly.

he chuckled to himself and wet down yours and his before squeezing out a big bead of toothpaste on each. “this is the usual crash spot since i live so close to the bars. gotta keep a few extra just incase. and one so happened to be pink.”

you let out a sleepy sigh and began brushing your teeth, staring at yourself in the mirror. you couldn’t help but look over at him every now and then. something about this felt so domestic. the way he was taking care of you. the way you had on his clothes. the way you were literally doing your nighttime routine with him. this was basically all you’d ever wanted.

once the two of you were all finished up, he grabbed out his face wash and a headband, gently sliding it over your forehead to pull your hair back. your brows furrowed slightly at how prepared he was, until he did the same for himself to keep his hair out of the way too. makes sense.

he turned the sunk back on and pumped some of the liquid into your hand before extending on of his own to do the same. “wait, stevje,” you interrupted. “can you watch my back please?”

now it was his turn to look confused as he stared at you through the mirror. “what?”

“can you jus’ like— can you watch my back for me? whenever i wash my face, i get scared that someone’s gonna, like, kill me or something while my eyes are closed,” you explained, a bright blush coating your cheeks from the alcohol and the embarrassment. “‘cause then i can’t defend myself.”

he swallowed down the laugh bubbling in his throat to not embarrass you even further. “yeah. of course. i’ll watch your back,” he said with a warm smile. and he did. he let you wash your face completely and pat it down dry before even thinking about washing his own. and once the two of you were all done, you moved back to his room. “you take the bed. i’ll sleep on the floor.”

you stared at him like he was crazy. “steve, what? no. it’s your place, you can—“

he was already placing a spare blanket on the ground with some extra pillows. “no, seriously. it’s okay. i’ll take the floor.”

this wasn’t a fight you were giving up. “that’s not fair. i will—“

he cut you off with a small smile. “hey, it’s okay. i don’t mind. i wouldn’t have offered it if i did,” he replied softly. “you had a long night. you should really take the bed.”

you huffed out a breath if defeat when he sat down on the ground. “why don’t you jus’ sleep up here with me?” your heart was hammering in your chest. never would you have said something like this if you were sober. “it doesn’t have to be weird.”

there was a beat of silence as he thought. he nodded slowly even though you couldn’t see him. “yeah, okay,” he said hesitantly. “sure.”

he crawled up onto the bed on the opposite side of you, making himself comfortable under the covers.

it took all of ten minutes before you both were knocked out, and wrapped up in one another.

Hey guys! This little page is going to serve as the installment list for the Steve Harrington fic I am in the midst of writing!

The story loosely follows the show starting in Season 2 around Halloween! Expect canon typical warnings such as violence, swearing, angst, gore, and spice. I've stuffed this little story with fluff and angst and jealousy and all emotions in between! You also get to see me nerd out about D&D in this story quite a bit! I've loved writing mini Hellfire sessions for this, and it's been such a great time exploring how characters interact in this world!

I hope you all enjoy!

Chapter 1 - The Hellfire Club

Chapter 2 - Halloween Havoc

Chapter 3 - The Disappearance of Mews Henderson

Chapter 4 - Tension Rising

Chapter 5 - The Truth Comes Out

Chapter 6 - The Christmas Truce

Chapter 7 - Valentine's Day Surprise

Chapter 8 - Hard Feelings

Chapter 9 - The Confession

Chapter 10 - The Fourth of July Blues

Chapter 11 - Welcome to the Party

Chapter 12 - The Final Session

Chapter 13 - [Redacted]

Chapter 14 - [Redacted]

Chapter 15 - The Heart of the Matter

Chapter 16 - The Truth About Eddie Munson

Chapter 17 - The Sweetest Taboo

Chapter 18 - Back to School

Chapter 19 - The Missed Crawl

Chapter 20 - Learning to be Brave

Chapter 21 - [redacted]

Chapter 22 - The Fairytale

Chapter 23 - [redacted]

Chapter 24 - End of Beginning

You'd been dating Joe for almost a year now.

This Saturday was your first anniversary.

For the past month, you'd been secretly working on a scrapbook for him. Every evening after closing, when you’re alone you'd sit at your kitchen table surrounded by polaroids, ticket stubs, pressed flowers, colored papers and pens, glitter and glue, and little handwritten notes. Some pages made you laugh. Some made you cry. One page was dedicated entirely to Ponkan. 

You were ridiculously proud of it. The scrapbook currently sat hidden beneath your bed, where Joe would never think to look. At least, hopefully, because if he found it before Saturday, you'd actually have to move countries.

Unfortunately, life had other plans. 

Wednesday afternoon found you sitting inside a small office with the building's former owner and the new landlord. The meeting had started normally enough then everything went wrong. The new owner stood from his chair, buttoning his expensive suit jacket.

"As of next month," he said smoothly, "rent will be adjusted to reflect the current market value."

Your stomach dropped. He slid a document across the table. You stared at the number and stared harder so surely that couldn't be right. "Excuse me," you said quietly.

The landlord smiled, which wasn't really a smile. "Yes?"

"There has to be a mistake."

"There isn't."

You looked down again. The rent had nearly doubled, you felt sick. "I can't afford this."

The landlord simply shrugged. "Business is business, darling."

You hated him immediately. You spent nearly thirty minutes trying to negotiate. You explained that the café was a small independent business. You explained that your staff depended on these jobs. You explained that you'd never missed a payment.

None of it mattered.

By the time you left the meeting, your hands were shaking.

The walk back to the café felt longer than usual. Outside, the familiar storefront greeted you. The bell chimed softly when you stepped inside. Immediately your staff looked up—they'd clearly been waiting. One of your baristas stood first.

"Well?" You tried to smile but failed.

Everyone's faces immediately fell. "Oh no."

You set your bag down slowly. The café suddenly felt too quiet. The smell of coffee and vanilla lingered in the air. A customer laughed somewhere near the window.

You swallowed. "The building was sold." Nobody spoke. "And the new landlord is raising the rent."

"How much?" your co-baker asked. You told them and they went silent.

"What?" your barista practically shouted.

"That's insane."

"No, seriously, that can't be legal." One of the bakers was already pulling out her phone. "I'm looking it up."

"Maybe there are protections."

"There have to be protections."

You wished you had their optimism because you'd already tried. You stared at the pastry display. At the chalkboard menu. At the table, Joe always claimed. At the little corner where the old man from 6D liked to sit every Tuesday afternoon.

Your throat tightened. "I don't know what we're going to do." The words came out smaller than intended. Nobody spoke because everyone understood what you weren't saying. If you couldn't pay the rent—there wouldn't be a café anymore.

Your eyes immediately burned. You looked away before anyone noticed. "I think..." Your voice wavered. You cleared your throat. "I think we should close early today." The room stayed quiet. "You'll all receive your paychecks next week." You forced a smile. "and bonuses."

"Boss—"

"And if it comes to it," you continued softly, "I'll make sure all of you have good references." The youngest employee looked devastated.

One of them actually started crying. That almost broke you because suddenly this wasn't just your dream, it was theirs, too. You looked around the café one last time.

The place you'd built from nothing. The place your grandmother would've loved. The place where people celebrated birthdays, first dates, and engagements. The place where Joe is sitting peacefully and enjoying his slice of cake. And for the first time since moving to New York, you wondered if you were about to lose it.

Thursday evening arrives with rain threatening outside the city skyline.

Joe has just gotten back from a run of shows across five different states. His body aches from airports and cramped vans and terrible gas station coffee, but none of that matters because he's finally home.

Only today, the hallway is too quiet, which made him frown immediately. That's when he spots the old man from 6D standing outside your apartment holding a tray of food. The old man looks equally annoyed and worried.

"Hey," Joe says, setting his duffel bag down. "What's happening?"

The old man sighs heavily. "She missed chess yesterday."  You never miss Wednesday chess, EVER. 

The old man adjusts his grip on the tray. "I saw her crying in the elevator yesterday morning. Asked if she was alright." His mouth tightens. "She said she was fine." Joe and the old man exchange a look, nobody believes that. "I knocked a few times after." The old man glances toward your door. "Nothing." A pause. "I don't think she's eaten."

Something cold settles in Joe's chest. "I got it," he says quietly.

The old man nods and hands him the tray. "Good,” softer, "she looks heartbroken."

That sentence follows Joe all the way inside. The apartment doesn't feel like yours. The curtains are closed. The kitchen light is off. A coffee mug sits abandoned on the counter.

Ponkan immediately appears, meowing loudly at Joe's feet as if filing a formal complaint. "Yeah," Joe murmurs. "I know." Even the cat sounds worried.

Joe sets the tray down and heads toward your bedroom. The door is closed, he knocks gently. "Hey, honey."

Nothing.

His heart sinks and he tries again. "Sweetheart, it's me."

A soft rustling comes from inside.Finally the door opens. Joe almost forgets how to breathe. Your eyes are swollen. Your hair is tangled. You're wearing one of his old hoodies not because it's cute. Because you clearly grabbed the first thing you could find.

The sight alone nearly breaks his heart. "Sweetheart," His hands immediately find your face. "...hey."

The second he touches you, your eyes fill with tears again. You look away. Joe gently guides your face back toward him. "What happened?"

For a moment you don't answer. Then your lip trembles. "I have something to tell you."

A few minutes later you're curled up on the couch. Joe sits close enough beside you. The apartment feels impossibly quiet. You stare down at your fingers.

Twisting them together, untwisting them. "I'm closing the café."

The words barely come out above a whisper. Joe blinks surely he heard wrong. "What?!"

You swallow hard. "The building got sold." Your voice cracks. "The new owner doubled the rent." Joe's expression changes immediately. Confusion to disbelief to anger.  You laugh bitterly "I can't afford it."

Joe stares at you, those words don't belong in the same sentence as your café. "No."  word leaves him before he can stop it. Joe shakes his head. "No, you can’t do that." His voice breaks slightly. "Sweetheart, that's your dream."

Fresh tears spill down your cheeks. "I know." The two words absolutely destroy him because you sound exhausted. "I worked so hard for it." Your voice shakes. "I never missed rent." Joe squeezes your hand. You keep talking words spilling out now. "I came in early." A tear slips down your cheek. "I stayed late. I even worked holidays." Joe's chest aches. "And now some man in a suit gets to decide none of it matters?" The tears finally come. "It isn't fair."

Joe immediately pulls you into his arms you collapse against him instantly. "I know I know." His hand slides into your hair.

You cry harder. "It isn't fair."

"No." Joe presses a kiss against your forehead. "It isn't." Your fingers clutch the back of his shirt. 

The way they do when you're really hurting and Joe closes his eyes because all he can think is: Not you, anyone but you. Not the girl who spent her entire life making other people happy. Not the girl who built something beautiful from scratch. Not the girl who took a chance on New York and made it work.

He holds you tighter and while you cry against his chest, Joe quietly decides something. He doesn't know how yet but he's going to fix this whatever it takes.

Saturday arrives a little gentler than the rest of the week. The ache is still there. The grief of potentially losing your café hasn't magically disappeared overnight but it hurts less when Joe is around.

Over the last two days, he's practically made it his personal mission to make you smile. He brings you coffee in bed. Leaves sticky notes on your bathroom mirror. Shows up with flowers for absolutely no reason. Lets you steal his hoodies without complaint. And every time he catches you staring off into space, thinking about the café, he simply pulls you closer.

Today is important day—your first anniversary. One whole year of loving Joe. One whole year of finding home in another person.

You carefully slide the scrapbook into your tote bag. The corners are worn from how many times you've reopened it to add things. Photos. Movie tickets. Receipts. Pressed flowers. Tiny memories. An entire year pressed between pages. You smile to yourself.

"Happy anniversary, beautiful." Joe looking ready to go. 

Your smile widens. "Happy anniversary."

Then clears his throat dramatically. "Can we stop by the café?"

"Why?"

A pause. "I think I left my beanie there." what a terrible lie

The second you turn the corner, something feels wrong or right. You can't tell because your café is glowing. Warm golden light spills through the front windows.

You stop walking and he gently takes your hand. "No." You look at him.

His smile softens. "Come on."

You already feel tears threatening. "What did you do?" Joe only squeezes your hand then unlocks the door.

The moment you step inside, your breath catches. Fairy lights hang across the ceiling. Candles flicker softly on the tables. Fresh flowers sit everywhere. In the center of the room sits a single table, set for two. The way you'd always imagined anniversaries looked in movies. Except this feels better.

His voice is quiet. The same voice he used when he first told you he loved you. Joe hands you a bouquet of your favorite flowers. Then lifts your hand and presses a kiss against your knuckles. Your heart physically hurts.

"One whole year." Joe smiles. "The best year of my life."

Dinner is easy and comfortable, the way it always is with him. You laugh, eat, and tell stories.  For the first time all week, you almost forget about the building. almost.

Then your gaze drifts around the café and your smile softens. "I really am going to miss this place." Joe's fork pauses yet you don't notice. You continue quietly. "I know it's just a building." Your eyes wander across the room. "But it feels like..." Your voice cracks slightly. "so me, a huge part of myself."

Joe's heart breaks all over again because that's exactly why he did this. Not because it's a building because it's part of you.

A few minutes later Joe clears his throat. "I have your gift." Your eyes immediately widen.

"What?"

"You already did all this."

"I know."

"That's enough."

"I disagree." He reaches beneath the table. Pulls out a wrapped rectangle. Places it carefully in front of you. "Open it."

You unwrap it slowly and the world stops because sitting in your hands is the property title with YOUR NAME ON IT. Your café. Your building, all yours. Joe slides a key with a mushroom and cottage house pendant. 

"No way." Joe smiles, that reaction is exactly what he expected. You look back at him and at the paper.  "JOSEPH DAVID."

"That's my name." Joe starts laughing.

You look genuinely seconds away from passing out. "Oh baby,." Your voice shakes. "You didn't." Tears fill your eyes instantly.

"I did."

"You can't just buy buildings."

"Apparently, I can." He laughs and you don't. you're actively crying now.

Joe reaches across the table. "I couldn't watch you lose it." Your lip trembles. Joe squeezes your hand. "I know how hard you worked for this place." His voice softens. "I know what it means to you."

Joe stands just in time to catch you. You practically launch yourself out of your chair. Wrapping your arms around him. Holding him so tightly he laughs softly into your hair. "I love you." The words come out muffled against his chest. "I love you so much."

Joe hugs you tighter like he's afraid you'll disappear. "I love you too." then quieter. "So much it scares me sometimes."

You returned to your seat and carefully pulled the scrapbook from your tote bag. Suddenly, after receiving an entire building from your boyfriend, the gift felt embarrassingly small.

"I know it's not much," you said, rubbing the back of your neck. 

Joe immediately sat up straighter. "Oh, honey." His voice softened instantly. The moment he took it from your hands, he handled it with ridiculous care, like it was something fragile and precious.

Written across the cover in gold marker were five simple words: One Year of Loving You.

Joe stared at it for a second before looking up at you. You suddenly became very interested in your wine glass.

A smile slowly appeared on his face when he opened it. The first page immediately made him laugh. "Are you serious?"

You groaned.

Joe held up the photo. It was the first time he'd ever fallen asleep in your apartment. Curled sideways across your bed, mouth slightly open, hair sticking out everywhere.

"You took a picture of me sleeping?"

"You looked cute."

"I looked dead."

"I SAID you looked cute."

Joe shook his head, still smiling. The next page made him go quiet. Pressed between the pages were dried flowers from the very first bouquet he'd ever bought you. Beside them was a small handwritten note.

You were nervous buying flowers. I know you checked three different bouquets before choosing this one.

Joe blinked. "You preserved it?"

You looked confused. "Of course I did."

His chest immediately hurt because you remembered things he hadn't even realized mattered.

Slowly, he kept turning pages. Polaroids from lazy Sundays. Pictures from your first baking lesson together. Candid shots at Comic Con were both of you geeking so much at Star Wars. The disaster cupcake day, where he somehow managed to get frosting on the ceiling. Photos of guitar lessons. Photos of Ponkan sleeping on his chest. Photos of him sleeping literally everywhere.

"Why am I unconscious in half of these?"

"Because you're adorable."

There was a page dedicated entirely to Japan. A picture of him feeding deer. A train ticket taped into the corner. Tiny notes written beside every photo.

You and this Capybara passed as brothers.  You bought three matcha desserts in one day. We got lost and blamed Google Maps.

"I did not blame Google Maps."

"You absolutely did."

Joe looked back down.

Christmas.

The photo of you holding the Lenox Spice Village like you'd just won the lottery. The photo of him grinning over the Pokémon cards you'd hunted down with apples on the background for him.

I've never seen anyone so excited over cardboard.

Joe snorted. "It was a historic moment."

"It was cardboard."

"It was Pokémon."

You rolled your eyes.

Then Joe turned another page and another and another. Each one filled with memories. Movie tickets. Coffee and restaurant receipts. Little doodles. Pressed flowers. Tiny notes. Photos. A whole year. Your whole year.

By the time he reached the final page, he was suspiciously quiet. You shifted nervously. "Joe?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked back through several pages again. Slower this time as if he didn't want it to end. You reached across the table. His eyes finally lifted and your heart instantly melted because they were glossy. "Baby..."

Joe laughed softly and rubbed his face. "You made me cry on our anniversary."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did."

"Guess we’re even

You laughed as he pointed accusingly at you then his expression softened again. "Honey, do you know what this means to me?"

You shook your head, Joe looked down at the scrapbook. At the year you had carefully preserved with glue, photographs, stickers, handwriting, and love.

"A building can be bought." Joe gently touched one of the photographs. "This can't." His voice came out quieter. "You spent hours making this."

"Days," you corrected.

Joe looked at you. "Days?"

You immediately regretted admitting that. Joe's entire face crumpled. "Oh, sweetheart."

You laughed. "Don't do that, please."

"I'm not crying."

"You are."

"I'm appreciating."

"You are literally crying."

Joe ignored you completely. Then he stood, walked around the table, crouched beside your chair, and wrapped both arms around your waist. You immediately smiled. His forehead rested against your shoulder.

"I don't think anybody has ever loved me this carefully before." The words hit harder than any expensive gift ever could.

Slowly, your arms wrapped around him. Joe squeezed you tighter, you could not even breathe. "Joe."

"Hm?"

"I can't breathe."

"I love you."

"That's not what I said."

"I know."

He kissed your shoulder. Then your cheek. Then your forehead. Then your nose. Then your lips. "I love you," he repeated with another kiss. "I love you." Another kiss.  "I love you."

"Joseph."

"I love you."

You started laughing. Joe grinned against your mouth. Between the property deed on the table, and the scrapbook, both of you realized something very simple. Neither of you had won because, after one year together, you had both gotten exactly what you wanted.

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emoji anon/s #🍪anon

the girl next door (is not a grandma) masterlist

edit: ow fuck thank you for 700 followers, i'm beyond grateful 😭💗

"no im not a cat person”

"YOU HATE KITTENS?!"

"no- no! i don't hate kittens"

Joe, Maya, Natalia and Charlie were sat on the floor of a bare studio, ready for their kitten interview

"how could you hate kittens"

"i just- i've never had a cat so?"

maya could not belive the words previously uttered from joes mouth.

and neither could you when you'd first met him.

you were a cat person through and through, joe was not.

you'd asked on multiple occasions about adopting a kitten between the two of you. used the argument that it would keep you company when he leaves on tour.

didn't work.

when you heard he was doing an interview surrounded by tons of little kittens two things popped up in your mind.

1. jealous as fuck, And 2. what if it got him to change his mind.

like in an exposure therapy kinda way. him being surrounded by the cuteness of little baby kitties might bring him to his senses and finally let you get a cat together.

"this cat is like... eating me?!"

a kitten, the literal size of joes hand, was dangling off his arm, mouthing and biting the skin there.

"she likes you" maya laughed.

joe looked down at the little fluffy animal crawling over him, not really listening to the interview anymore.

once the interview was over, and the cats were being herded back, Joe took out his phone to bring up your number

you were at home alone, a couple hours away from where joe was filming when you picked up the facetime.

"hey baby, how's the shoot"

"better than i thought actually"

"oh yeaaah?"

"yeah okay.. oh look"

he panned the camera down to the last kitten in the studio, the one that had practically claimed him.

"AWHH" you squealed into the microphone.

you held the phone close to your face to see the little kitten as best as possible.

"she's sweet ain't she, she reminds me of you"

"of me?"

"yeah- adorable, and wouldn't stop biting my arm"

you laughed and blushed at his comment.

"she likes you"

"mhm she- oh"

one of the crew had swooped up the tiny kitty taking her back to her little friends.

"sorry honey she's been taken away"

"aw it's okay, when you coming home i miss you"

"literally now, this was the last thing"

"good, can't wait to see you"

when joe got home that night you hounded him about the interview.

and eventually he slipped up- just like you'd planned.

"i think i would get a cat you know"

and that's how you ended up with roxi, a little brown and white kitty you adopted from a family friend.

joe got everything for her. a tiny pink collar, pink bed, scratching frame, matching water and food bowl set with a little pink mat.

everything.

the night you brought her home you felt like a part of your life had actually been missing this whole time.

joe set the cat bed up on the floor at the bottom of your bed next to a water bowl.

roxi however, decided that your bed looked much comfier, specifically- joes chest.

"hey that's my pillow!" you crawled into bed next to joe who was mesmerised by the little ball of fluff that had settled on his chest.

"sorry princess, looks like you got some competition"

"mm i think i do"

you laid down, resting your head against his shoulder as his arm came up to pull you into his side.

you reached out to roxi, stroking her head softly.

"she's so cute”

"yeah she is"

"she likes you a lot"

"cats always do- i don't get it"

"it's cuz you're a calm person"

"calm?"

"you got that kinda energy about you"

he looked down at you with a slight frown, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"i'm serious"

"okay baby"

he leaned down to press a lingering kiss to you forehead.

"are you happy we got her?" you whispered.

"well so far.. yeah"

"so far?"

"well it's only been like 8 hours"

"it's been the best 8 hours"

"yeah it has"

roxi rolled onto her back in her sleep, stretching out her tiny body across joe.

"awwwwwh" you both squealed in unison.

"okay honestly.." joe started. "i think i'm in love with her"

your chest tightened, almost painfully as you looked at your boyfriend laying in bed with your baby kitten.

Individually, none of it should be enough to hold his attention.

The problem is that once he notices you the first time, he can't seem to stop.

Every time he looks up, somehow you're there again.

Not because you're demanding attention. Not because you're trying to become the centre of the room. If anything, what catches his attention is how effortless you seem. There are people at parties who perform confidence and people who perform coolness, and Joe has spent enough years in entertainment to recognise both on sight. You don't appear to be performing anything.

You simply exist as though you belong wherever you've decided to stand.

People seem to gravitate towards you naturally. Conversations form around you without effort. Complete strangers look comfortable in your company within minutes. Every time Joe catches sight of you, you're talking to somebody different, and every single person seems to be laughing.

Which becomes a problem.

Because somewhere between the second glance and the fifth, Joe realises he's no longer accidentally noticing you.

He's looking for you.

The discovery is deeply annoying.

Joe Keery is a grown man. A reasonably sensible grown man. He should not be standing in the corner of a party scanning a crowd for somebody he's never spoken to before. He should not be wondering whether your voice sounds the way he imagines it does. He should not be finding himself irrationally curious about what kind of person inspires that many people to orbit around them.

And yet.

Every time he tells himself to stop looking, something drags his attention back.

A laugh, a movement, the sight of you pushing your hair back from your face while listening to somebody speak.

It's ridiculous. Embarrassing, honestly. The sort of thing he'd mock one of his friends for doing.

Then you catch him, properly, from the opposite side of the room.

For one awful, suspended second, neither of you looks away. Joe feels it immediately. That strange, electric jolt of being caught in the act.

Your eyebrow lifts slightly. Not offended or confused. Amused, rather. Like you've just discovered something entertaining. Like you've caught a dog standing on a dining table and are waiting to see whether it's going to jump down on its own or need assistance.

The corner of your mouth twitches.

Joe immediately looks elsewhere.

Far too late.

Because the damage is already done.

Now he knows what your smile looks like when it's directed at him.

And unfortunately, that's significantly worse.

The first conversation lasts forty-three minutes.

Joe knows this because he checks the time afterwards and nearly chokes when he realises how long it's been.

Not during.

During, he forgets time exists.

Somehow the two of you end up standing beside each other near the drinks table, and within minutes it feels as though somebody accidentally skipped over the awkward introductory stage entirely. There is no stilted small talk. No fumbling attempts to establish common ground. No polite conversation limping awkwardly from one topic to the next. One minute you're exchanging names, and the next you're halfway through a discussion about something completely ridiculous as though you've known each other for years.

Joe finds himself relaxing before he's even consciously aware he's doing it.

Which would be dangerous enough on its own.

Unfortunately, you are funny.

Genuinely funny.

Not in the rehearsed, attention-seeking way that some people at parties try to be, constantly waiting for laughter before delivering the next line. You're funny in the far more dangerous way, where humour seems to arrive naturally, effortlessly, often catching him off guard when he isn't expecting it. The sort of funny that makes somebody laugh halfway through taking a drink and nearly regret it.

That would already be a problem.

The fact that you're also clever only makes it worse.

And confident.

And somehow entirely unimpressed by him.

Which turns out to be catastrophic.

Most people either know who Joe is or know enough to pretend they don't. There's usually a moment, however brief, where he can see somebody placing him. Connecting him to something they've watched. Something they've heard. Some version of him that exists outside the room.

You don't seem remotely interested in any of that.

When he mentions a project he's worked on, you nod politely, ask one perfectly normal question, and then immediately become distracted by something else entirely. Within thirty seconds, the conversation has moved on, and Joe finds himself weirdly disappointed by how little weight his answer seemed to carry.

He should probably find that refreshing.

Instead, he finds it wildly attractive.

Everything about you becomes weirdly attractive after that.

The way you talk with your hands when you're excited about something, as though the words alone aren't enough to contain whatever thought is trying to escape. The way you interrupt yourself halfway through stories because you've suddenly remembered a detail you consider significantly more important than the point you were originally making. The way your entire face changes when you're passionate about something, your eyes lighting up so dramatically that Joe finds himself getting distracted from the actual conversation.

At one point, you become so animated telling a story that you nearly knock your own drink out of your hand.

You save it at the last second.

Joe laughs.

You continue talking.

Joe keeps watching.

And somewhere around that moment, he realises he's stopped paying attention to what you're saying.

Not because he's bored.

Because he's become distracted by you.

The discovery is deeply irritating.

There are beautiful people everywhere. Interesting people everywhere. Funny people everywhere.

The problem is that very few people are all three at once.

You are.

And now Joe has to deal with that.

At one point, you say something so unexpectedly funny that he actually doubles over laughing. Proper laughing. The kind that sneaks up on you and leaves your face aching afterwards.

When he finally looks back up, you're watching him. Far too pleased with yourself. The smile on your face is infuriating.

"You are genuinely annoying."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"It absolutely was."

Joe shakes his head, and you grin wider.

And for one brief, awful moment, he becomes aware of how close you're standing.

Close enough that he can catch the scent of your perfume whenever you move. Close enough that every time you lean towards him to say something over the music, his attention immediately abandons whatever thought he was having beforehand. Close enough that when you laugh, he can feel himself wanting to be responsible for it again.

That realisation lands somewhere low in his stomach and remains there.

The conversation continues.

People drift past.

Hours seem to collapse into minutes.

And by the time somebody interrupts to ask how long you've been together, Joe's already in significantly more trouble than he'd like to admit.

By eleven o'clock, people have started noticing.

Not the flirting.

The chemistry.

There's a difference.

The flirting comes later.

The chemistry is immediate.

Every time somebody interrupts one of your conversations, you somehow end up finding each other again afterwards.

Every time Joe gets dragged somewhere else, he catches himself looking around the room until he spots you.

At one point somebody asks how long you've been together.

Neither of you are.

The assumption lingers awkwardly in the air for several seconds.

You don't correct it immediately.

Neither does Joe.

Which somehow makes it worse.

The balcony is quieter than the rest of the party.

Not silent. Never silent. The distant hum of traffic drifts up from the streets below, mixing with the muffled bass vibrating through the glass doors behind you, but compared to the crowded warmth inside, it feels almost peaceful. Cool air brushes against overheated skin. The city stretches endlessly beyond the railing in a sea of lights, windows glowing gold against the darkness, and for the first time all evening Joe finds himself able to think clearly.

At least, that lasts for about thirty seconds.

The two of you have ended up leaning against the balcony rail together, drinks forgotten somewhere in the conversation, talking about absolutely nothing and somehow everything at once. The ease of it is becoming a problem. Every topic seems to lead naturally into another. Every story somehow turns into a joke. Every joke somehow turns into the two of you standing slightly closer than you were a few minutes earlier.

Joe can't remember the last time meeting somebody felt this effortless.

Which is probably why he asks the question. Mindlessly. Carelessly. The sort of question people ask a hundred times without thinking.

"So when did you graduate?"

You answer immediately.

Joe nods. Then Joe does some maths. Then immediately wishes he hadn't. For a second, his expression goes completely blank. The number lands. His brain attempts to process it. Fails. Attempts again.

And directly opposite him, your entire face changes.

"Oh no." The words leave you with the unmistakable tone of somebody who has just watched a disaster unfolding in real time.

Joe points at you immediately. "What do you mean, oh no?"

The smile spreading across your face is deeply unhelpful. In fact, the smile suggests you're enjoying this.

"Joe."

"No."

A laugh escapes you. Not a polite laugh. Not an awkward one. A genuine one. The kind that's been ruining his life all evening.

"Joe."

His stomach drops. Slowly. Horribly.

"How old are you?"

You're already grinning when you answer.

"Twenty-three."

Silence. Complete silence.

The city continues existing around you. Cars continue moving. Music continues playing somewhere behind the glass.

Joe's soul quietly leaves his body.

"Twenty-three?"

"Yep."

His eyes narrow. "Twenty-three."

You nod. "Still twenty-three."

"Jesus Christ."

The worst part is that you don't look remotely concerned. If anything, you look delighted. Like you've just been handed front-row seats to the world's most predictable breakdown.

Joe drops his head briefly, rubbing a hand across his face as he attempts to reorganise his entire evening.

Because suddenly the last four hours are replaying themselves inside his head in excruciating detail. The flirting, the laughing, the fact he'd spent half the evening wondering what kissing you would be like, the fact he'd spent the other half trying not to wonder what kissing you would be like.

Meanwhile, you're standing opposite him looking infuriatingly amused.

"You're being weird about this already."

Joe lets out a disbelieving laugh. "Already?"

"Joe."

"I'm thirty-four."

"So?"

The answer arrives so quickly that it almost derails him further.

"So?"

You shrug. Actually shrug. As though you've informed him of the weather. As though he isn't currently having a mild existential crisis.

Joe stares. You stare back, completely unbothered.

The cool air catches a strand of your hair and sends it across your face. Without thinking, you tuck it behind your ear, and Joe immediately finds himself distracted by the movement in exactly the same way he's been distracted by every movement you've made all evening.

Which is deeply inconvenient.

Because the attraction hasn't gone anywhere. If anything, it's becoming worse.

You're still standing too close. Still looking at him with that infuriating mixture of amusement and confidence. Still somehow managing to make him feel like the most interesting person in the room whilst simultaneously refusing to let him take himself too seriously.

The chemistry is still there. The problem is that now Joe is aware of how much chemistry is still there. Which feels considerably more dangerous.

"Why are you smiling?"

You bite back another laugh.

"I'm just enjoying watching you try to explain why this is apparently a catastrophe."

"It is a catastrophe."

"It really isn't."

"It kinda is."

"Joe."

Something in your voice shifts slightly. Not enough for anybody else to notice. Enough for him. The teasing softens around the edges.

You step a little closer. Not enough to force the moment. Just enough that the distance between you suddenly feels different. Smaller. More noticeable.

And for one awful second, Joe becomes aware of everything at once.

The warmth of your shoulder beside his. The city lights reflected in your eyes. The fact that neither of you has looked away. The fact that despite the conversation, despite the maths, despite his increasingly dramatic internal spiral, he still wants to keep standing exactly where he is. Exactly this close. Looking at you exactly like this.

Your smile softens, just slightly. And somehow that's infinitely more dangerous than the laughter had been.

"Oh," you say quietly.

Joe frowns. "What?"

You tilt your head, the corner of your mouth lifting.

"That's the problem."

"What is?"

Your eyes flick briefly to his mouth before returning to his. The movement lasts less than a second. It still nearly kills him.

"You liked me before you knew."

And unfortunately for Joe, that's exactly it.

Because nothing has changed.

The number did.

You didn't.

The city hums quietly around you.

Somewhere below, traffic moves through the streets in ribbons of white and red light, whilst music continues to pulse faintly through the glass doors behind you. The breeze has picked up slightly, carrying the cool edge of approaching midnight with it, and for a moment neither of you says anything.

Joe just looks at you. Really looks at you.

Not at the number that has spent the last ten minutes sending his brain into increasingly dramatic spirals. Not at the imaginary problem he's somehow managed to construct out of thin air. Just at you.

The woman who made him laugh until his face hurt. The woman he'd spent half the evening looking for in every room he walked into. The woman he'd been finding increasingly ridiculous excuses to stand beside for the better part of the evening.

The number changed. You didn't.

"Joe."

The sound of your voice pulls him out of his thoughts immediately.

"What?"

Your expression softens slightly. Not teasing this time. Not entirely.

"Do you think I'm a child?"

The question hits him like a bucket of cold water.

"What? No."

"Do you think I'm incapable of making decisions?"

"No."

The answer comes even faster.

You study him for a second.

Then, "Then what exactly is the issue?"

Joe opens his mouth. Closes it again.

Because that's the problem. There isn't one. Not really.

There are concerns. Thoughts. Questions. A brief existential crisis taking place somewhere in the back of his mind.

But there isn't actually an issue.

Not when he's standing here looking at you. Not when every instinct he has keeps drawing him back towards you. Not when you've been the most interesting part of his evening since the moment he arrived.

You take a small step closer. Not enough to force the moment. Not enough to corner him. Just enough that the space between you suddenly feels different. Smaller. More noticeable.

Joe becomes aware of everything all at once. The warmth radiating from your skin despite the cool night air. The way you're looking at him now, patient and amused and entirely aware of the effect you're having.

His attention drops briefly to your mouth before he can stop it.

The movement lasts less than a second, but you still catch it. Of course you do.

Something in your smile changes. The teasing fades. What replaces it is infinitely more dangerous.

"Hi."

Joe lets out a helpless laugh. "Hi."

Neither of you moves. Neither of you looks away.

The tension that's been building all evening settles between you, no longer hidden beneath jokes and conversation and accidental touches. It's simply there now, undeniable and impossible to ignore.

His hand finds your waist almost absent-mindedly.

The breath you take catches slightly.

That doesn't help. Nothing helps.

"You still being weird about this?" you ask quietly.

Joe smiles despite himself. "A little."

"That's unfortunate."

"Why?"

Your gaze flicks briefly to his mouth before returning to his eyes. The gesture is tiny and devastating.

"Because I was kinda hoping you'd kiss me."

For one suspended second, neither of you moves.

Then Joe laughs softly, the sound full of disbelief and relief and something dangerously close to affection.

And then he kisses you.

The entire evening seems to collapse into that single moment. The city disappears. The party disappears. The noise inside his head disappears.

One hand settles more firmly at your waist as yours finds the back of his neck, and the kiss deepens naturally, neither hurried nor hesitant, as though both of you have spent hours arriving at exactly this point.

The first kiss isn't rushed. If anything, it's almost cautious, as though neither of you quite trusts that this is actually happening. Joe's hand tightens slightly against your waist, drawing you a fraction closer, and something about the movement makes your breath catch. The sound seems to affect him just as much as it affects you, because the next kiss arrives almost immediately afterwards, deeper this time, carrying all the tension that's been building between you for hours.

You can feel him smiling briefly against your mouth.

Not because anything is funny.

Because he's relieved.

Because after spending the better part of the evening wanting this and trying not to want this in equal measure, he finally doesn't have to pretend anymore.

Your hand slides into his hair almost absent-mindedly, fingers brushing through the soft curls at the back of his neck, and Joe lets out a quiet breath that disappears between you. The reaction sends an entirely unfair rush of warmth through your chest. He steps closer without seeming to realise he's doing it, the distance between your bodies disappearing until there's barely any space left at all.

The cool night air has long since stopped feeling cold.

Everything feels warm.

Your skin, your face, the hand resting against your waist, the look in Joe's eyes every time the two of you pull apart for half a second only to immediately drift together again.

It's impossible to tell who kisses who next.

At some point the distinction becomes meaningless.

The conversation is gone. The teasing is gone. The careful distance is gone. There is only the undeniable feeling of finally giving in to something you've both been circling around all evening.

When you finally pull apart, it's only far enough to look at each other.

Neither of you says anything immediately.

You don't seem particularly interested in creating distance.

Joe doesn't seem capable of it.

Your foreheads drift together.

The corner of your mouth lifts.

"You know," you murmur, "for somebody who was having a crisis five minutes ago, you seem remarkably recovered."

Joe groans and you laugh, the sound is warm and bright and entirely too satisfying.

"I hate you."

"No you don't."

"No." His smile appears before he can stop it. "No, I really don't."

The grin that spreads across your face in response is so pleased with itself that he almost starts another argument purely on principle.

Unfortunately, that would require wanting to stop standing exactly where he is.

And that seems increasingly unlikely.

For a moment, neither of you moves.

The city glows beneath you. Music pulses faintly through the glass behind you. Somewhere inside, the party continues completely unaware that the two of you have apparently disappeared into your own private universe.

Joe's hand is still resting against your waist. Your fingers are still tangled loosely in the hair at the back of his neck. Neither of you seems particularly interested in fixing that.

His gaze drops briefly to your mouth. Then back to your eyes.

The look on his face is enough to send warmth rushing straight through your chest.

Because the panic is gone now. The overthinking is gone. What's left is considerably more dangerous.

You study him for a second, a slow smile beginning to creep across your face.

Joe immediately looks suspicious. "What?"

Your smile widens. Nothing reassuring has ever followed that smile.

You lean forward just enough for your lips to brush briefly against his cheek. Then his jaw. Then, finally, his ear. When you speak, your voice is quiet enough that nobody else could possibly hear it.

"Your place or mine?"

The silence that follows is genuinely spectacular.

Joe just stares at you, completely blank, like his brain has temporarily stopped functioning.

Then he laughs. Once. Short and disbelieving. Drops his forehead against your shoulder. And mutters, "Oh, you are trouble."

Your laugh echoes out across the balcony.

The answer, judging by the arm tightening around your waist immediately afterwards, is pretty obvious.

He was talking about knees.

And backs.

And the mysterious ache that had settled permanently between his shoulder blades sometime around the age of twenty-six and apparently intended to stay there forever.

Children operated under the assumption that adults existed in a constant state of physical readiness. They expected demonstrations. Repetitions. Enthusiasm. They expected you to crouch behind home plate for twenty minutes and then stand back up again like your joints weren't negotiating terms and conditions. By the end of practice, Steve was pretty sure half his skeleton hated him.

The late April sticky humid heat that settled over the baseball field wasn't helping. The air hung thick over the grass, turning his t-shirt damp beneath his coaching jersey and baking the metal bleachers until they practically shimmered.

Across the diamond, three of the kids were arguing over a butterfly. Not a metaphorical butterfly…an actual butterfly.

A small yellow one that had apparently landed on a baseball during a drill and somehow become the subject of an increasingly heated debate.

"It touched the ball."

"It doesn't count."

"It absolutely counts."

"It was a butterfly."

"It was still on the field."

Steve stood with his hands on his hips and stared at them for a moment. Then toward the sky before looking back at the children.

Nobody had warned him that coaching required this much conflict resolution. Not the actual baseball stuff. The baseball stuff was easy. Teaching a ten-year-old how to square up to a pitch? Easy. Explaining why they shouldn't swing at a ball that bounced twice before reaching home plate? Easy.

Convincing three fourth graders that insects could not, in fact, interfere with gameplay? Apparently much harder.

Somewhere behind him another kid yelled, "Coach Steve!"

He turned. "What?"

The child held up a glove. "My glove smells weird."

Steve blinked.

The kid blinked back.

For reasons that remained completely unclear, this seemed like information he was expected to do something with.

By the time he finally escaped the field nearly twenty minutes later, the sun had already started its slow descent toward the horizon. Everything had taken on that golden late-summer glow that made the chain link fences look softer than they actually were. The parking lot shimmered with trapped heat. Cicadas buzzed from somewhere beyond the tree line and the smell of cut grass lingered in the evening air while parents gathered equipment, folded chairs, and attempted to herd children toward minivans.

Steve tossed his equipment bag into the passenger seat and climbed into the car with a groan. His entire body protested. His shoulders ached. His lower back ached. One knee made a noise he'd decided to stop investigating.

Ordinarily, Steve liked this part of the day. He enjoyed the quiet ride with the music low, tapping his fingers to the drums of whatever song was playing. He appreciated the decompression. The beautiful twenty-minute stretch between obligations where nobody needed anything from him.

Lately, though, his thoughts had developed an annoying tendency to wander. Specifically toward the fact that he was turning thirty.

Not even particularly soon, and yet somehow the number had attached itself to everything. Thirty wasn't even here yet and somehow it already felt like it was lurking around corners waiting to jump out and attack him. The thought had become annoyingly persistent over the last few months. Just frequent enough to be irritating.

The number itself shouldn't have mattered. Objectively, Steve knew that. People turned thirty every day.

People turned forty.

Fifty.

Sixty.

Life continued.

The thing was, Steve wasn't unhappy. That was what made it difficult to explain. People talked about milestone birthdays like they arrived with a crisis attached. A sports car, a tattoo, some desperate attempt to reclaim youth. Steve didn't want any of that…his problem was simpler.

At sixteen, he'd assumed thirty-year-old Steve would have figured more things out. Not everything - mostly the important things. He didn't even expect to be wildly successful. Just...settled. When he pictured adulthood back then, it always looked remarkably ordinary: a house and family. Kids running through a backyard, somebody else's shoes by the front door and the smell of dinner cooking when he got home from work.

Nothing dramatic or even extraordinary. Just a life that felt full.

Instead, he was driving home alone with a bag of baseball equipment rattling around in the passenger seat, a discussion board assignment waiting for him on a laptop he'd been avoiding for three days and a weekend full of shifts at the bar ahead. Which sounded significantly less impressive whenever he was forced to say any of that out loud.

He spent his mornings in class or completing observation hours for a teaching certification program, his afternoons coaching baseball, his evenings four nights a week bartending to help pay for the classes required to eventually stop bartending. It wasn't a bad life. Objectively, it was a pretty good life, but lately it felt like everybody else had moved forward while he'd somehow gotten stuck at a red light. Depending on the day he happened to see somebody from high school posting engagement photos, pregnancy announcements, or family Christmas cards featuring matching sweaters and suspiciously happy golden retrievers and he had to actively fight an eye roll.

The apartment greeted him with silence when he finally unlocked the door. It wasn't even a peaceful silence. It was the empty kind of silence that immediately reminded you that nobody else lived there.

Steve dropped his keys into the bowl by the door and kicked off his shoes. The place was clean enough. He was organized, liked to keep things somewhat tidy but mostly his place felt lived-in. A coffee mug sat abandoned beside the couch from the night before. A pile of coursework occupied one end of the dining table. Laundry he'd folded two days ago still waited patiently to be put away. Somewhat organized.

For a moment he simply stood there.

Then his phone buzzed.

Robin.

Of course.

Steve didn't even have to open the message to know it was going to be about the cat.

Three weeks had passed since the cat report. The fact that there was still a cat report remained deeply upsetting, but unfortunately, Robin hadn't moved on. If anything, she'd become more invested. The original psychic analysis had somehow led to follow-up consultations. Which led to recommendations. Which led to offerings. Which led to what Robin had described last week as "active relationship repair."

With a cat.

A cat she did not own.

A cat who, as far as Steve could tell, remained entirely unaware that any conflict existed.

The text preview appeared across the screen.

💬 THE WITCH SAYS WE'RE MAKING PROGRESS.

Steve stared at it, then set the phone face down.

It buzzed again almost immediately.

💬 THE TUNA WAS A BREAKTHROUGH.

Another buzz.

💬 YOU AREN'T APPRECIATING THE GRAVITY OF THIS SITUATION.

Steve laughed despite himself. Because this was his life. His best friend was conducting diplomatic negotiations with an apartment cat and somehow she remained the most functional person he knew.

The phone buzzed again.

💬 SHE RECOMMENDED A CORD CUTTING.

💬 DO YOU THINK CATS CAN PARTICIPATE IN CORD CUTTINGS?

Steve closed his eyes. For a brief moment he considered throwing the phone across the room.

Instead he typed:

🗨️ Please leave the cat alone.

The typing bubble appeared instantly.

💬 YOU SOUND JEALOUS.

The apartment fell quiet again. Outside, daylight continued slipping toward evening. Inside, his laptop waited patiently on the coffee table alongside his coursework. So did the discussion post he'd been avoiding. A responsible adult would have opened the class portal. A responsible adult would have completed the assignment.

Instead, almost without thinking, Steve opened a browser and three clicks later, he was staring at the listing again. The same black background. The same gold lettering. The same handful of sample portraits.

For a long moment, he simply looked. Not for a second because he believed it. That would be ridiculous. Not because he was considering it. That would be worse. And yet the page remained open. Weeks later, still there like a splinter he couldn't stop pressing on just to see if it still hurt.

He should have closed it. He knew that.

There was no logical reason to keep staring at a listing he had already decided was bullshit. Several times, actually. Repeatedly. With conviction. Steve Harrington did not believe in soulmates being pulled from the ether by a woman with an Etsy storefront and a suspiciously professional logo. He did not believe in psychics. He did not believe in destiny. He barely believed in the weather app on his phone, and that at least had satellites.

Still, his thumb moved before the rest of him could intervene.

He scrolled.

The reviews were the worst part. Not because they were convincing, exactly, but because they were sincere in a way that made him uncomfortable. People had written paragraphs. Long ones. Messy ones. The kind of reviews people only wrote when they were either extremely committed to the bit or genuinely shaken by something. Some attached photos of the portraits beside real people they claimed to have met later, and Steve hated those most of all because even when the resemblance was questionable, even when he could clearly see where somebody was forcing the comparison, there were enough similarities to make his stomach do something stupid.

He hated that too.

The stomach thing. The quiet little twist of possibility.

Steve shifted on the couch, the fabric sticking faintly to the back of his shirt. His hair was damp from a shower and curling slightly at the ends, and the apartment around him had settled into early evening dimness. The laptop screen lit his face while the rest of the room went soft and blue around the edges.

He clicked through the sample portraits again. A man with tired eyes and a crooked smile. A woman with short curls and a nose ring. Another woman laughing, head tilted slightly, the artist somehow catching the suggestion of movement in a still image.

That was the thing that bothered him. They looked like people. Real people, instead of made up fantasy people. Not perfect people or even the kind of people drawn to sell a dream to lonely idiots at midnight. They looked ordinary enough to be real, and that made the whole thing worse because Steve could dismiss a fantasy. He had gotten pretty good at that. But ordinary was dangerous. Ordinary was exactly what he wanted.

Steve closed the laptop.

Then opened it again almost immediately because apparently he had no self-respect.

The bar always smelled vaguely like citrus and regret by nine o'clock on a Saturday. Steve wasn't entirely sure where one scent ended and the other began anymore.

By now he knew the rhythm of the place as well as he knew the rhythm of baseball practice. The early crowd arrived for dinner and a couple drinks. The middle crowd arrived because they didn't want to cook. The late crowd arrived because they didn't want to go home yet. Every shift felt slightly different but somehow exactly the same.

The glasses clinked. The television above the bar played a game nobody was really watching. Somebody fed dollar bills into the jukebox near the back and immediately got into an argument about song choices.

Normal. Predictable. Comfortably familiar. Steve liked that about bartending, even if he had no intention of doing it forever. The bar never asked him where he saw himself in five years. The bar didn't care about certification exams, his middle school spring placement or the lesson plan he’ll never actually use that's worth 20% of his class grade. The bar didn't care that he'd spent most of the week quietly spiraling about a birthday that was still months away.

The bar just needed him to pour drinks. That, at least, he could do.

He was wiping down a section of counter when the front door opened and Robin appeared. Steve didn't even look up immediately. He didn't have to. After fifteen years of friendship he'd evolved to possess the ability to identify Robin's mood based entirely on the way she entered a room. Tonight's entrance involved a dramatic sigh, an aggressively dropped purse, and enough theatrical disappointment to suggest she'd either experienced a minor inconvenience or survived a maritime disaster.

Steve continued wiping down the counter. "How bad was it?"

Robin slid onto her usual stool. Not a stool. Her stool. At this point half the staff probably thought she worked there. "It wasn't bad."

Steve hummed. The sound carried exactly as much belief as intended.

Robin narrowed her eyes. "It wasn't."

"Mm."

"It wasn't."

"Mm."

She looked personally offended, which was impressive considering she'd only been in the building for thirty seconds.

Around them the crowd surged and shifted. A group near the windows burst into laughter. Somebody called for another round. The kitchen doors swung open and released a wave of fried food and garlic into the air.

Robin watched him work for a moment before finally giving up. "It was fine."

"There it is."

"It was."

"Robin."

"It was."

Steve laughed. He wasn't trying to be a dick. He believed her

..it was just that “fine” was Robin's least favorite outcome. A terrible date became a story. A fantastic date became something with potential. Fine just became...nothing.

Robin picked at the cocktail napkin in front of her. "I think we've officially reached the point where every lesbian in a fifty-mile radius has dated every other lesbian."

Steve set a glass on the shelf behind him. "I feel like you've said that before."

"I have."

"Several times."

"Because it keeps being true."

He smiled despite himself. Robin had spent years assuring him that dating women would be easier. Then she'd spent the following years discovering that small-town dating was terrible regardless of gender. Tonight's grievance seemed to involve a woman she'd apparently matched with on two separate apps, forgotten about, rematched with later, and then discovered shared three mutual exes and one extremely specific opinion about oat milk.

Steve stopped paying attention somewhere around the second ex-girlfriend. Not because he didn't care. Robin told stories the same way she experienced life - every detail arrived at full speed, all the winding tangents demanded equal consideration. By the time she reached the oat milk portion of the narrative, she was gesturing so enthusiastically that the ice in her drink sloshed against the glass.

"You know what the real problem is?" she asked.

Steve immediately answered. "No."

"The dating pool isn't even a pool anymore."

There was a beat of silence. Robin leaned forward. "It's a puddle."

Steve snorted. "A puddle?"

"A haunted puddle."

"There it is."

"What?"

"The thing you've been working toward for six minutes."

Robin pointed at him. "You're just mad because I'm right."

Steve wasn't. At least not about that. Truthfully, he found most of Robin's dating stories comforting. He didn't relish in them because they were disasters…because they weren't. Robin dated. Robin tried. Robin got disappointed. Robin got back up and tried again.

There was something admirable about that. Something brave. Lately, Steve wasn't sure he possessed that particular skill anymore.

Robin took another sip of her drink, then, with the alarming efficiency of a bloodhound catching a scent, her attention shifted. "Oh."

Steve immediately recognized the tone. "What."

"The cat."

Of course.

The cat had become a permanent resident in their friendship. Not physically. Spiritually. Every conversation eventually arrived there.

Robin brightened instantly, "You'll be happy to know we're making progress."

Steve closed his eyes. Somewhere deep inside himself, he found the strength to keep polishing glasses. "I will not."

"We are."

"You aren't."

"We are."

"The cat doesn't know you're having a relationship."

Robin gasped. An actual gasp. Across the bar, a customer looked over. Steve immediately pointed at Robin. "See? This is what I'm dealing with."

The customer wisely chose not to get involved.

Robin lowered her voice. "The witch thinks we've moved into a healing phase."

Steve nearly dropped the glass in his hand. "A healing phase."

"Yes."

"You and the cat."

"Yes."

"The cat."

"Steve."

"The cat."

Robin rolled her eyes so hard he thought she might actually injure herself. And despite everything, despite the exhaustion and the bartending and the classes and the fact that his best friend was apparently spending real money on feline spiritual mediation, Steve found himself laughing, and the sound came easier than it had all week.

Because of that genuine laughter, Steve hadn't seen Tommy and Carol walk through the door at first. Saturday nights had a way of blurring together when the bar got busy. Faces came and went. Orders stacked up. Credit cards accumulated beside the register in uneven piles.

It wasn't until Robin's attention drifted somewhere over his shoulder that he noticed. "Well that's annoying."

Steve glanced up. Tommy was holding the door open while Carol stepped inside ahead of him. Neither of them had changed all that much and that was probably the most annoying part. Tommy's hair was a little shorter now. Carol wore it longer than she had in high school. There were a few extra years around their eyes. A little more confidence, a little less effort. The strange thing was how natural they looked together. They weren't particularly passionate, but they were clearly comfortable. Like they'd spent years reaching for each other without thinking about it.

Carol said something Steve couldn't hear and Tommy laughed immediately. Not the loud laugh he used to weaponize in high school. A quieter one. Familiar. Automatic.

Robin made a face. Steve didn't know whether she was reacting to Tommy and Carol or simply continuing her thoughts about the cat. Honestly, with Robin, it could have gone either way.

"Remember when those two broke up every six weeks?" she asked. Steve barked out a laugh. Because he did…everybody did. Half of Hawkins did. There had been entire months where the status of Tommy and Carol's relationship seemed more heavily monitored than local weather patterns.

"Remember when Carol threw his varsity jacket at his head?"

"Remember when Tommy dated Beth Franklin for like nine days?"

"Remember when Carol keyed his car?"

Robin looked delighted. "God, they were terrible."

"They were."

They watched Tommy guide Carol toward a table near the windows. The hostess already knew them. Of course she did. The hostess smiled. Tommy smiled. Carol smiled. Everybody seemed irritatingly happy.

Robin took a sip of her drink. "You know they have three kids now?"

Steve frowned. "Three?"

"Three."

"How did that happen?"

Robin laughed. "The normal way, Steve."

"I know how kids happen."

"Do you?"

"Robin."

"I'm just saying. You looked genuinely surprised."

The truth was that he was. Not about the kids. About time. Because somehow Tommy Hagan still occupied a permanent space in Steve's brain as an eighteen-year-old asshole leaning against a locker, not as somebody's husband. Definitely not as somebody's father. Not as a man who probably spent portions of his weekend arguing about play dates and pediatrician appointments.

Yet there he was. Living proof. Time moved whether people paid attention or not.

Steve turned away and reached for a stack of glasses. The cool weight of them grounded him. One after another, he lined them up along the bar before reaching for a towel. Around him the noise continued uninterrupted. Ice rattled into metal shakers. Somebody cheered at the television. A server squeezed past carrying a tray overloaded with appetizers.

Normal.

Ordinary.

For some reason that made it worse. Because Tommy and Carol weren't extraordinary. They weren't some impossible fairy tale. They weren't special. They were just...people. People who had somehow built the exact sort of life Steve used to assume would eventually happen to him too. The realization settled somewhere uncomfortable in his chest. It felt a little like jealousy, but it wasn't that. At least not exactly. Something quieter than that. It was the feeling you get when you miss a turn and suddenly find yourself wondering how long you've been driving in the wrong direction.

Robin had been watching him. She noticed things other people missed with Steve. Tiny shifts in tone. The difference between irritated Steve and defensive Steve. The specific way he cleaned glasses when he was avoiding a conversation.

"You're doing it again."

Steve didn't look up. "Doing what?"

"The thing."

Not this shit again.

"What thing?"

"The existential thing."

Steve rolled his eyes.

Robin ignored him. "You're thinking about your birthday again.".

That got his attention, because unfortunately she was right. Unfortunately she knew it, and there was no one on earth who enjoyed being right more than Robin Buckley. Steve reached for another pint glass. "I'm literally at work."

"That's not a denial."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

Robin smiled into her drink, the expression immediately made him nervous, because it wasn't quite mean or cunning like she can so often be…it was knowing.

There were very few people left in the world who remembered every version of Steve Harrington. The stupid teenager. The version that thought popularity meant something. The version that thought Nancy Wheeler was the beginning and end of his life. The version who spent months driving everyone insane over a girl. The version who swore he was over it. The version who absolutely wasn't.

Robin had known all of the versions of Steve Harrington, which meant she was uniquely qualified to be annoying. "You know," she said casually, "I told you this already. You just haven't listened, you asshole. Your problem is that you're romantic."

Steve groaned immediately. "There it is."

"What?"

"The thing you always do."

Robin laughed. "No, seriously."

"I don't want to hear this."

"You absolutely don't."

"Then stop."

"I'm helping."

"You never are."

She ignored him, as usual.

The crowd around them continued shifting and moving. A birthday group had taken over two tables near the back. Somebody fed more money into the jukebox. The kitchen doors swung open and released another wave of garlic and fryer oil into the room. The whole place felt warm, loud and alive, and somehow Steve found himself wishing the conversation would die.

Robin rested her chin on her hand. "You always wanted that stuff."

"What stuff?"

"The stuff."

"Robin."

"The family stuff."

Steve looked away. Immediately. Which was apparently answer enough, because when he glanced back she wasn't smiling anymore.

"You did."

It wasn't a question. Steve focused on restocking bottles behind the bar. He lined them up. Adjusted labels that didn't need adjustment. Did literally anything besides answer. Robin let the silence stretch for a few seconds, then she sighed. "See? That's exactly what I'm talking about."

"What?"

"You act like wanting things is embarrassing."

The words landed harder than he wanted them to, mostly because they felt uncomfortably true. Across the room, Tommy reached across the table and stole a fry from Carol's plate. She slapped his hand away without even looking up from whatever she was saying. Tommy grinned. Carol rolled her eyes. The exchange lasted maybe three seconds. Three completely ordinary seconds, and Steve couldn't stop looking at it.

Robin followed his gaze. Then, because God clearly hated him, she said the worst possible thing. "You know..."

"No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to."

"I was."

Steve pointed a bottle opener at her. "Don't."

Robin's grin returned slowly. Dangerously. "Speaking of wanting things..."

Steve closed his eyes. "Robin."

"I'm just saying."

"Don't."

"That soulmate portrait is still available."

His eyes snapped open instinctively and far bigger than they should have been. Robin saw it. For one horrible second neither of them said anything and then her eyebrows lifted just slightly.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Steve immediately looked away, which was a mistake. The kind of mistake that only made a guilty person look more guilty. Robin sat up straighter. "Oh my God."

"No."

"Oh my God."

"No."

"You looked."

"I did not."

"You looked."

"I didn't."

"You absolutely looked."

Steve hated how hot his face suddenly felt. He hated Robin. He hated Tommy and Carol. He hated Etsy. Most of all, he hated the fact that Robin had somehow managed to hit the exact nerve he'd spent weeks pretending didn't exist. "I was proving it was a scam."

Robin burst out laughing. The sound echoed across the bar. Customers looked over again. Steve considered quitting his job and moving to another state.

"You researched it."

"I did not."

"You absolutely researched it."

"It came up."

"How?"

Steve opened his mouth…except nothing came out. Robin's smile widened. "Oh my God."

"Stop saying that."

"You've been looking at the listing."

"I have not."

"Steven."

Robin only used his full name when she already had the answer. The worst part was that she didn't push any further. She didn't need to, so instead she picked up her drink, took a long sip, and looked entirely too pleased with herself. Like she'd just solved a puzzle. Like Sherlock Holmes who discovered groundbreaking evidence. She'd filed the information away for future use, which was, frankly, much more terrifying than the prospect of her continuing roasting him now.

By the time Robin finally headed home an hour later, Steve had convinced himself the conversation was over. Unfortunately, as he locked up after closing and stepped out into the cool night air, he found himself thinking about it again.

About Tommy and Carol.

About turning thirty.

About wanting things.

And about a stupid Etsy listing he absolutely should have forgotten weeks ago.

The drive should have cleared his head. Instead it had somehow made things worse. Robin's voice had followed him all the way home. You act like wanting things is embarrassing.

He hated when she did that. Not the talking part. She always did that. It was the being right part that pissed him off.

The apartment greeted him the same way it always did. Quiet. Predictable. The overhead light in the kitchen cast a warm yellow glow across the countertops while the rest of the place disappeared into soft shadows. His keys landed in the bowl by the door. His wallet followed a second later.

For a while he wandered, because he didn't have anything to do. He opened the refrigerator. Stared into it. Closed it. Opened it again ten minutes later as though a completely different selection of food might have materialized during the interim. Eventually he settled for leftover lo mein and stood at the kitchen counter eating it straight from the carton while the microwave clock blinked 2:41 in green digital numbers.

The apartment remained stubbornly silent. No television. No music. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional rattle of ice from the freezer. The kind of silence that felt fine right up until it didn't.

Steve leaned against the counter and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. His shoulders still ached from practice.His feet hurt. His coursework was waiting on the dining room table..again. Tomorrow he'd need to finish a reflection paper about classroom management strategies. Next week he had observation hours. The week after that was another assessment.

None of it was hard. Just endless. One thing after another. Another step toward a life that still somehow felt perpetually five years away.

His eyes drifted toward the dark living room and the couch. Toward absolutely nothing. And, completely uninvited, he found himself thinking about Tommy.

Not high school Tommy.

Tonight's Tommy. The version who reached across a table without looking and stole a fry from his wife's plate. The version who probably knew exactly what Carol would order before she said it. The version who would go home tonight and step over toys in the hallway and complain about soccer schedules and probably fall asleep halfway through a movie.

Ordinary.

God, it had looked ordinary.

Steve dropped the empty carton into the trash.

That was the problem. He wasn't jealous of some extraordinary life. He was jealous of something painfully normal.

The realization followed him while he brushed his teeth. It followed him while he locked the front door. It followed him while he changed into an old t-shirt and sweatpants.

By 3:30 in the morning he was lying in bed staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazily overhead, still awake. Still thinking. Still replaying the conversation. The family stuff. You always wanted that stuff. The embarrassing part wasn't that Robin had said it. The embarrassing part was how quickly he'd looked away.

Because she wasn't wrong. She'd never been wrong. Not about that.

At sixteen he had imagined a future that felt so obvious he never questioned whether it would happen. At twenty-two he assumed there was still plenty of time. At twenty-six he figured life was just taking a slightly different route. Now he was almost thirty and sleeping diagonally across a queen-sized bed because there was nobody else occupying the other half.

Steve rolled over and reached for his phone.

Bad idea. He knew it immediately.

The screen lit the room blue. A text from Robin. Nothing new.

Just a picture she'd apparently sent forty minutes earlier.

The cat.

The fucking cat curled in a flowerpot.

💬 HE ACCEPTED MY OFFERING.

Steve laughed despite himself. Then sighed. Then opened the browser. Because apparently tonight every bad decision was arriving in pairs.

The Etsy page loaded instantly. Of course it did. The universe clearly had a sense of humor.

For a long moment he just looked at it. The portraits. The reviews. The ridiculous description promising insight into future connections and soulmate energies and whatever other nonsense the woman was selling.

Bullshit.

Absolute bullshit.

Steve knew that. But then his eyes caught on a review he'd never noticed before. A man. Middle-aged. Profile picture included.

His review wasn't dramatic nor was it particularly emotional. Didn't mention destiny or use any of the romantic flowery language the young women praising and gushing over the witches results did.

It simply said: "Bought this because my daughter thought it would be funny. The portrait looked nothing like anyone I knew. Met my wife eleven months later. We're celebrating our first anniversary next month." That was it.

No sales pitch. Curiously missing exclamation points. Just an ordinary life.

Steve stared at the words longer than he should have…somewhere deep inside his chest, something shifted. Was it belief? No, not really. Maybe something smaller and more subtle. Something more dangerous.

Curiosity. The possibility of possibility.

The thought arrived quietly. What if the portrait wasn't real? Fine. It probably wasn't. But what if it was fun? What if it gave him something to laugh about? What if Robin never had to know? What if eighty-three dollars was just eighty-three dollars?

The order button sat at the bottom of the page.

Patient.

Unmoving.

Waiting.

Steve stared at it like they were in a standoff. Then reached for the wallet on his nightstand.

Halfway through entering his card number, he started laughing. The sound bounced around the empty room. "Jesus Christ," he muttered to nobody. “This is robbery.”

The confirmation email arrived before he could change his mind. And for the first time all night, his brain finally went quiet.

The portrait arrived eleven days later.

Steve only knew that because he'd accidentally memorized the shipping timeline. Not on purpose. Obviously. Just incidentally. In the same way someone might incidentally check a tracking number every morning while drinking coffee. Or incidentally reopen Etsy every few hours. Or incidentally know that the package had arrived in Indianapolis at 3:17 a.m. before crossing state lines.

Completely normal behavior.

The point was, he wasn't expecting it to arrive until later today. Which meant he wasn't expecting the notification that appeared halfway through a Saturday morning study session at the coffee shop.

For no reason in particular, Robin was there. Steve had made the mistake of mentioning he needed to finish coursework. Robin had interpreted that as an invitation. Now she occupied the chair across from him, her laptop open but largely ignored while she talked her way through what had apparently become a truly astonishing amount of personal drama for someone whose primary relationship currently involved a cat.

The coffee shop buzzed with quiet conversation around them. Milk steamed somewhere behind the counter. A playlist of acoustic covers drifted through the speakers overhead. Outside, people wandered past the windows carrying shopping bags and iced drinks while late-summer sunlight spilled across the sidewalk.

Steve was trying to finish a reflection paper.

Trying being the important word.

Across from him, Robin was explaining why her latest date had failed. Again. "...and then she said she wasn't really into movies."

Steve looked up from his laptop. "Movies."

"Movies."

"Any movies?"

"Apparently."

"That's not real."

"THANK YOU."

A woman at the next table glanced over. Robin lowered her voice approximately half an inch. "I asked what her favorite movie was."

Steve already knew this wasn't going anywhere good. "What'd she say?"

Robin looked personally offended by the memory. "'I don't really watch movies.'"

Steve sat back in his chair. "See, that's a red flag."

"Right?"

"A huge red flag."

"Thank you."

"What does she do when she's sick?"

"I DON'T KNOW."

"What about airplanes?"

"EXACTLY." Robin slapped the table.

Two students looked up. Steve laughed despite himself and for a moment she looked pleased…then suspicious. Then pleased again. Which usually meant she'd remembered something.

"The cat sat next to me Thursday."

Steve groaned.

"I'm serious."

"You always are."

"No, like...sat next to me."

"Robin."

"It chose me."

"It wanted food."

"It did not."

"It absolutely wanted food."

Robin narrowed her eyes. "The witch disagrees."

"The witch is benefiting financially from your delusion."

"The witch says we're entering a period of mutual trust."

Steve opened his mouth. Closed it, opened it again rhen stopped. Because honestly? There wasn't a single response available that would improve the situation.

Robin smiled triumphantly. Then Steve's phone buzzed. The sound was small. Insignificant…but somehow his stomach dropped immediately.

Robin noticed. Of course she did. "What was that?"

"Nothing."

"You looked weird."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did."

Steve pulled the phone from his pocket and there it was. The order has been delivered. His stomach dropped again and across the table, Robin's eyes narrowed like she was watching a nature documentary and had just spotted movement in the bushes.

"No." Steve immediately locked the screen.

"Steve."

"No."

"STEVE."

"It isn't anything."

"Oh my God."

Several nearby customers glanced over a second time. Robin lowered her voice into an awfully loud version of a whisper. "You did it."

"I didn't."

"You did."

"I didn't."

"You bought the soulmate portrait."

Steve stared at her. Robin stared back. The silence lasted exactly three seconds before she screamed a strangled, triumphant noise that caused three separate people to look up from their laptops. "I KNEW IT."

Steve dropped his forehead onto the table. "I hate you."

"I knew it."

"I genuinely hate you."

"I told you."

"You told me lots of things."

"I specifically told you this."

Robin looked delighted. Absolutely radiant. The kind of delighted that should have been illegal. Steve wanted to leave. Unfortunately, he'd made a critical mistake, because now Robin knew the portrait existed and there wasn't a force on earth powerful enough to stop what happened next.

"Open it."

"No."

"Open it."

"No."

"Open it."

"Robin. I don't have it yet anyway. It's at my apartment…in the mailbox."

"Let's go open it.” she deadpans.

Steve closed his eyes. Across the coffee shop, milk hissed from an espresso machine, aomeone laughed near the counter, outside, traffic drifted lazily past the windows. Meanwhile Robin Buckley vibrated with barely contained excitement - just like a child on Christmas morning. Or a shark smelling blood. Possibly both. And Steve suddenly realized there was absolutely no chance he was making it out of this nightmare without opening the package in front of her.

By the time they left the coffee shop, Steve was already regretting every decision that had led him to this moment.

Outside, late afternoon sunlight spilled across the sidewalk. The air still carried that lingering September warmth that managed to survive even as summer started loosening its grip. Cars rolled lazily through downtown. People wandered in and out of storefronts carrying iced coffees and shopping bags. It should have felt like an ordinary Saturday.

Instead, Steve felt vaguely like he was being escorted to his own execution.

Robin was unbearable.

Not loudly unbearable. Worse.

Quietly unbearable. She kept smiling to herself. Every few minutes Steve would glance over and catch the corner of her mouth twitching upward again like she'd remembered something funny. The entire drive back to his apartment became an exercise in endurance.

Robin talked about her date. Then the cat. Then the date again. Then a podcast she'd listened to. Then the cat again. Somehow every road led back to the cat. Steve wasn't sure whether he should be impressed or concerned.

The portrait sat between them the entire time. Not in the physical sense…yet. Mentally. An invisible third passenger occupying all available space.

Neither of them mentioned it directly after leaving the coffee shop, but its presence lingered anyway. Steve could feel it every time Robin looked at him. Every time she smiled. Every time she failed to make a comment she was very clearly thinking. The anticipation itself was starting to get annoying, because now that the package actually existed, curiosity had begun elbowing its way past skepticism.

For weeks the portrait had been theoretical. An abstract bad decision. A joke.

Now it was sitting on his porch. Real. Waiting.

The closer they got to his apartment, the less funny it felt, which was fucking ridiculous. It was a drawing - nothing more than a stranger's face on a piece of paper - except every time Steve tried telling himself that, he found himself thinking about the reviews again. The ordinary people. The photographs. The stories. The possibility. That stupid, dangerous little word.

By the time he parked, his stomach had developed an irritating habit of tightening every few minutes. The apartment complex looked exactly the same as it always had. The same brick buildings. The same uneven sidewalks. The same flower beds that somebody's grandmother clearly cared about far more than the management company did.

Nothing about the place suggested it was currently housing a crisis, yet Steve found himself slowing as they climbed the stairs. The package was visible immediately. A plain rigid mailer leaning against his door. Small. Unremarkable. Entirely too powerful for an object made mostly of cardboard.

Robin spotted it at the same time. Neither of them said anything…for once.

Steve stared at it. The package stared back. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. A lawn mower droned from another building. Wind rattled leaves through a nearby tree. The world continued as normal, which somehow felt rude.

Robin folded her arms, still silent, which was exactly how Steve knew she was enjoying herself. Any other person would have filled the moment. Robin understood suspense.

The asshole.

He bent down and picked up the envelope. It weighed almost nothing. A few sheets of paper..That's all. Nothing magical. Nothing important. Just paper.

The lock clicked as he opened the door. The familiar scent of his apartment greeted him immediately. Coffee. Laundry detergent. The faint citrus cleaner he'd used on the kitchen counters that morning.

Home.

Safe.

Predictable..

The envelope remained tucked beneath his arm while Robin made herself comfortable with the confidence of somebody who hadn't been invited but fully intended to stay anyway. She dropped onto the couch and kicked off her shoes haphazardly. One fell to the left of the couch. The other somehow landed on the other side of the coffee table. She reached for the remote and then looked at him expectantly.

The package suddenly felt heavier. Steve set it on the kitchen counter and walked away, opening the refrigerator instead. Closed it again. Walked back. Robin watched the entire performance with such visible delight that he could practically hear her thoughts. The man who mocked psychic cat readings for a month was currently pacing around his own kitchen because he was afraid of opening an envelope.

The reason he was stalling had nothing to do with believing it. It had everything to do with wanting it to matter. Not magic. Hope. Hope was infinitely more embarrassing.

For a long moment he stood there looking down at the envelope, rhen finally, before he could talk himself out of it again, he slid a finger beneath the seal and tore it open.

The tear along the edge of the envelope sounded absurdly loud. Steve immediately hated that. It was cardboard. Paper. A purchase he'd made at nearly three o'clock in the morning while suffering from a temporary lapse in judgment and an unfortunate conversation with Robin Buckley. It shouldn't feel important..

Across the room, Robin had somehow gone completely silent. Which was honestly more unnerving than the commentary would have been. She sat cross-legged on the couch watching him with the focused attention of somebody waiting for a scientific experiment to either succeed spectacularly or explode.

Steve slid the contents from the envelope. Several sheets of paper emerged first. A typed letter. Some kind of explanation. A certificate-looking thing that immediately made him suspicious. Then the portrait.

The paper caught slightly against the edge of the mailer before slipping free. For a second he only saw pieces of it.

The lines of hair.

A shoulder..

The edge of a smile.

And then the entire image settled into his hands..

The apartment disappeared. Not literally, of course. The refrigerator still hummed, a car still passed outside, Robin was unfortunately still sitting ten feet away perched on the couch like a preening bird, but for one strange moment all of it faded into the background.

Steve stared. The first thing he noticed was that the woman in the portrait wasn't extraordinary. She wasn't impossibly beautiful. She wasn't drawn like some fantasy version of a person. There were no dramatic features. No movie-star perfection. No attempt to manufacture attractiveness through symmetry and wish fulfillment.

She looked real.

The artist had somehow captured the small imperfections that made people look like themselves, like the slight asymmetry of her smile and softness around her eyes. The way a few loose strands of hair seemed determined to escape whatever had attempted to contain them. She looked familiar because she looked like somebody he could have seen before. Someone standing in line at a grocery store. Someone laughing across a restaurant. Someone dropping a kid off at school.

The same dangerous word returned immediately. Ordinary.

God.

He'd paid eighty dollars for a pencil drawing of ordinary.

His thumb brushed the edge of the paper. The artist had drawn her smiling like she'd been caught in the middle of something. For reasons Steve couldn't explain, that detail lodged itself somewhere beneath his ribs.

The room remained quiet. Eventually Robin stood. Slowly, without theatrics and without commentary. Without making his life difficult. She crossed the room and stopped beside him. Steve handed her the portrait without looking away from it first and Robin studied it.

A second passed.

Then another.

Then another.

The silence stretched long enough that Steve finally glanced up. For the first time since he'd known her, Robin Buckley looked genuinely thrown.

Robin would never be speechless, so it wasn't that …But close.

"Huh."

Steve frowned. "Huh?".

Robin looked between him and the portrait..The expression on her face was impossible to read. "That's...not what I expected."

Something tightened in Steve's chest.."What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

Somehow that answer felt more unsettling than any reaction she could have given. Robin looked at the portrait one more time before handing it back..Then she squinted at him as a slow smile spread across her face.

Steve immediately groaned. There she was. Whatever moment of sincerity had existed was officially over.

"Oh no."

"Oh yes."

"Robin."

"Steve."

"Don't."

Robin pointed directly at the portrait, then directly at him. "You are absolutely going to fall in love with a woman you've never met.” Steve grabbed the nearest throw pillow and launched it at her head.

Robin stayed for another forty-five minutes purely because she was enjoying herself.

Steve had known that woman long enough to recognize the signs. The occasional glance toward the portrait. The smug little smile she kept unsuccessfully trying to hide behind her coffee cup. The fact that every conversation somehow found its way back to the drawing sitting on the kitchen counter.

She was trying to be subtle. Unfortunately, subtle had never been one of Robin's strengths.

By the third time Steve caught her looking at it, he pointed across the room without even turning around. "Stop that."

Robin didn't bother pretending ignorance. "Stop what?"

"The staring."

"I'm not staring."

"Robin."

"I'm observing."

Steve rolled his eyes. "The difference being?"

"Intent."

"There is no difference."

"There absolutely is." The smile in her voice was immediate.

Steve hated that smile. It was the same smile she'd worn when she correctly predicted he'd fail chemistry. The same smile she'd worn when she correctly predicted he'd call Becky back even after she stood him up last month. It's the smile she's wearing because she correctly predicted he'd buy a soulmate portrait after spending a month mocking soulmate portraits.

A deeply irritating smile.

Robin followed his gaze toward the kitchen counter again. "You know..."

"No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to."

"I was."

Steve groaned.

Robin laughed. The sound bounced easily around the apartment in the most normal, comfortable way. The kind of laugh that had lived in the background of most of his life.

Eventually she gathered her things and headed toward the door, still grinning like she'd just witnessed something tremendously entertaining but at the threshold she paused, turned and looked directly at him. Then looked at the portrait. "Oh, you're screwed."

"Goodnight, Robin."

"I mean it."

"Goodnight, Robin."

She pointed dramatically - first at the portrait, then at him, then back at the portrait again with a raised eyebrow and a smile, then slipped out the door before he could throw anything at her.

The apartment settled back into that silence almost immediately. But it was infinitely more quiet now because of the strange vacuum that appeared whenever Robin left a room. One moment everything felt loud and crowded and alive while the next he was back to only the soft hum of appliances and the occasional sound of traffic filtering through the windows.

Steve stood in the kitchen for a second before looking toward the counter..The portrait was still there and for reasons he couldn't explain, he crossed the room and picked it up again.

The paper felt heavier now. The initial shock had faded enough that he could actually look at it. Really look.

He carried the portrait into the living room and dropped onto the couch. The accompanying paperwork slid free.

A typed explanation.

Several paragraphs about intuitive impressions and energetic connections and other things that sounded vaguely ridiculous. Steve started reading anyway, mostly to prove how ridiculous it was. Halfway through the second page he realized he'd stopped making fun of it and that annoyed him even more. The woman who'd created the portrait described warmth. Patience. Humor. Somebody who collected people rather than things. Somebody deeply devoted to family. Somebody who carried responsibility easily but worried more than she let others see.

Generic.

Obviously generic. Broad enough to apply to half the population and yet his eyes drifted back toward the drawing.

The smile.

There was something about the smile. Not the shape of it. The fact that it looked comfortable. Like she knew exactly who she was and like she belonged somewhere. Like she had purpose.

Steve immediately looked away because the entire thing was starting to feel a little too personal. "Jesus Christ."

The words disappeared into the empty apartment. No response came back. Just that stupid fucking refrigerator humming in the next room. Steve set the portrait down on the coffee table and stood.

Enough. He needed sleep. Needed to finish coursework tomorrow. Needed to stop behaving like a lunatic.

The drawing stayed where it was while he brushed his teeth. It stayed there while he locked the front door. It stayed there while he turned off lights one room at a time.

Eventually only the lamp beside the couch remained with the portrait leaned against its base, illuminated in warm amber light. Waiting.

Steve paused halfway down the hallway, then kept walking. Made it three more steps. Stopped. Closed his eyes. Turned around. "Ridiculous."

A minute later he found himself back in the living room for just one more look. That was all. One more.

The portrait hadn't changed, the woman still smiled, the room remained quiet. Steve stood there longer than he intended before finally switching off the lamp and heading toward bed, and despite leaving it behind, image followed him anyway.

The first thing Robin asked three weeks later was whether he'd named her yet.

Steve nearly dropped a pint glass. The glass slipped against his fingers just enough to send a splash of beer across the bar top before he caught it. Years of bartending prevented a full disaster, but not quickly enough to stop Robin from noticing.

"What?" The question came out sharper than intended.

Across the bar, somebody cheered at a football game playing on the television overhead. A server squeezed between tables carrying a tray full of burgers. Ice rattled into a metal shaker somewhere behind him. Saturday night churned around them in its usual predictable rhythm.

Robin sat on her stool looking entirely too pleased with herself. "You heard me."

Steve grabbed a towel and wiped down the counter. "No, I didn't."

"You absolutely did."

"I absolutely didn't."

Robin took a sip of her drink.

The smile never left her face.

It had become significantly more dangerous over the last few weeks because they'd learned nothing new. The portrait remained exactly as mysterious as the day it arrived

No names.

No location.

No clues.

No helpful psychic breadcrumbs from the Etsy witch. Despite Robin’s incessant begging, Steve refused to pump any more money into that scam for follow up questions or hokey “spells.” 

Nothing.

Which should have been reassuring. Instead it was somehow making everything worse.

Robin rested her chin in her hand. "The woman."

"There is no woman."

"The portrait woman."

Steve reached for another glass. "There is no portrait woman."

"Interesting."

"There isn't."

Robin nodded thoughtfully in the kind of way people nodded when they were about to become unbearable. "Then why'd you move her?"

Steve froze for a second. A tiny second - but it was enough. Robin's smile widened.

Asshole.

Three weeks ago the portrait had been sitting on the coffee table. Now it lived on a bookshelf near the television. Steve hadn't intentionally relocated it, at least not consciously. The coffee table had been temporary! The bookshelf simply made more sense.

A better location. More practical.

Less likely to get bent. Less likely to collect coffee rings. Less likely to—

"Ohhhhhh.”

Steve immediately groaned. "What now?"

"You've thought about this."

"I haven't."

"You absolutely have."

Robin looked delighted. Genuinely delighted llke she'd just spotted an endangered species in the wild. "You have reasons."

"I don't."

"You have categories."

Steve pointed at her with the bottle opener. "Don't."

Robin laughed and the sound disappeared into the noise of the bar. For a moment Steve considered defending himself, then immediately abandoned the idea because the problem wasn't that Robin was wrong. The problem was that she was alarmingly right.

The portrait had moved. Twice, actually. Three times if he counted the week it spent leaning against the lamp. 

Not because he was obsessed. Because...

Because..

Steve frowned. The thought trailed off before it reached a conclusion.  Because what? Because it looked nice there? Because he paid eighty dollars for it? Because he kept looking at it every time he walked through the room? None of those answers felt particularly safe. Or sane for that matter. 

Across the bar, Robin was watching him think, which was never good. The dangerous thing about Robin wasn't that she talked, it was that occasionally she stopped, and when Robin Buckley stopped talking, it usually meant she'd figured something out.

Steve immediately disliked the expression spreading across her face. "No."

"You always do this to me. I haven't said anything."

"You're about to."

"I am."

"Robin."

She ignored him, as usual. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her phone.

Steve felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of dread. "What are you doing?"

Robin's thumbs moved rapidly across the screen. Nothing good ever followed that. A second later his own phone buzzed in his pocket. 

Then again.

Then again.

Steve stared at her. Robin stared right back. Smiling. "Check your messages."

"No. I'm working."

"Steven."

"I hate that tone."

"You should check your messages."

Against his better judgment, Steve pulled out his phone. Three new texts. All from Robin.

The first was a screenshot. The second was another screenshot. The third was a zoomed-in crop of the portrait woman's face.

Beneath it, Robin had typed:

💬 FOUND HER YET, DETECTIVE?

Steve closed his eyes. Across the room, somebody ordered another round while the football game continued. Meanwhile, Robin Buckley had somehow turned his private humiliation into a recurring bit. And the worst part? The absolute worst part? A tiny, traitorous corner of his brain immediately wondered if she'd noticed something in the portrait that he hadn't.

Steve stared at the texts.

The cropped image looked somehow worse on his phone screen. More incriminating. Like evidence presented during a trial. 

He hated that she had a copy. More importantly, he hated that he had absolutely no memory of sending it to her. "How did you even get this?"

Robin blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. The way one might look at a person who had just suffered a head injury. "You sent it to me."

Steve frowned. "No, I didn't."

"You absolutely did."

"I absolutely did not."

Robin was already reaching for her phone. A few seconds later she spun the screen around. There it was.

A text chain.

His text chain.

Three nights earlier. At 12:47 in the morning. A cropped photograph of the portrait.

Steve felt his stomach drop. "Oh."

Robin's grin became feral. "Oh?"

"I forgot about that."

"You forgot about that?"

Robin sat up straighter. Interested. Dangerously interested. "You forgot you sent me a close-up photograph of your future wife's face?"

"It wasn't a close-up."

"It was only her face."

“Wh - wait….She's not my future wife, Robin!”

Steve closed his eyes. The memory returned all at once. Three nights ago. It started with a beer (maybe two) and a debate about whether the artist had changed something around the eyes. He'd zoomed in, taken a screenshot and sent it, then immediately become distracted by something else. At the time it had seemed completely reasonable. Now it sounded insane.

Robin watched realization spread across his face.

"Oh my God."

"Stop saying that."

"You've crossed over."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you've become me."

Steve barked out a laugh. "No."

"Steve."

"No."

"Steve."

The problem was that Robin wasn't even joking anymore, she looked genuinely delighted - like she'd finally found proof of a long-standing theory. For a moment she simply watched him before she took a slow sip of her drink. "You've got tabs open, don't you?"

Steve kept polishing the same glass. The glass had been clean for several minutes. Neither of them acknowledged this. "What tabs?"

Robin's eyes narrowed. The same way they narrowed whenever the cat did something suspicious."

Steve focused very hard on the bar. On the glasses. On literally anything except the conversation.

"Oh my God."

"Robin."

"You have tabs."

"I do not."

"You have investigative tabs."

Steve immediately hated the phrase. Investigative tabs sounded criminal. Or obsessive - maybe both - which was unfair. He wasn't investigating…not really. He'd just…looked.

A little.

Here and there.

Sometimes.

Occasionally.

Robin was staring at him now with the expression of a person slowly assembling a puzzle. The problem wasn't that she lacked information, instead it was that she had enough. "You've reverse image searched it."

"No."

"You've zoomed in."

Steve didn't answer.

Robin gasped."You've zoomed in."

"It was right there."

"OH MY GOD."

"Will you stop-"

"You've zoomed in."

A customer at the opposite end of the bar looked over and back to the big screen again quickly. He was a regular, so Robin's squawking was nothing new.

"What are we looking for?"

"We?"

"We."

"There is no we."

Robin ignored him. Again. Like always. "What. Are we looking for?"

Steve sighed.

Long and defeated.

The embarrassing part wasn't that he'd looked, the embarrassing part was that he'd had theories. Terrible theories. Theories that made perfect sense at one in the morning and absolutely no sense in daylight.

Maybe the necklace meant something.

Maybe the background meant something.

Maybe the artist had picked up on a location.

Maybe—

"Steve."

He looked up to see Robin staring at him wide-eyed and for the first time all evening, she wasn't laughing. "You don't actually care if it's real…"

Steve frowned. "What?"

Robin set her drink down. "...but you want her to be."

The words landed somewhere deep and for a second neither of them said anything.

"Welcome to the haunted puddle, dingus."

The thing nobody tells you about obsessions is that they rarely announce themselves when they arrive. Nobody wakes up one morning and says, "Today seems like a great day to become emotionally invested in a complete stranger."

If they do, they're probably Robin.

For Steve, it happened slowly enough that he didn't notice it at first. The portrait simply became another object in the apartment. It sat on the bookshelf while he paid bills. It watched him from across the room while he half-finished lesson plans and discussion posts. It existed in the same casual way as the lamp in the corner or the stack of baseball equipment by the door. Just another thing occupying space.

Except it wasn't.

The first sign should have been the fact that he kept moving it.

Not consciously. Not because he was thinking about it. If anyone had asked, Steve would've said he was reorganizing. Cleaning. Straightening up. The same excuse he'd used every other time he'd found himself carrying the frame from one room to another without entirely understanding why. One week it sat on the bookshelf in the living room. The next it appeared on the desk beside his laptop. A few days later it somehow migrated to the dresser in his bedroom where it remained for nearly a month before Robin noticed and made his life significantly worse.

Which, in fairness, was how Robin expressed affection.

"Interesting."

Steve had been folding laundry when she said it. Just one word tossed casually into the room while she wandered through his apartment looking for something to drink.

Whenever Robin said interesting, it was never interesting.

Steve didn't even look up. "What."

"Nothing."

The immediate answer guaranteed it was absolutely something.

A minute later she reappeared in the bedroom doorway holding a bottle of water and wearing the expression of somebody who had just stumbled across state secrets.

"What."

Robin took a drink, then nodded toward the dresser toward the portrait. Toward the frame Steve had purchased three weeks earlier after spending an embarrassing amount of time standing in the aisle pretending to compare options.

The realization hit him all at once. "Oh, fuck off."

"Your wife moved."

"She's not my wife."

"Mmhm."

"Robin."

"Interesting that she's in the bedroom now."

Steve considered throwing a t-shirt at her. Instead he resumed folding laundry with significantly more aggression than the task required. The truly infuriating part was that he didn't actually have an explanation.

Not a good one.

At some point the portrait had stopped feeling like decoration and started feeling familiar. The same way a photograph became familiar. The same way a favorite coffee mug became familiar. He didn't think about it every second of every day. Most of the time he forgot it was there. Until he didn't. 

Until he'd come home from a long shift at the bar and catch sight of it while kicking off his shoes. Until he'd spend three hours writing a lesson plan and glance up from his laptop. Or when he'd be brushing his teeth before bed and find himself staring at the reflection of the frame in the bathroom mirror.

Little things.

Tiny things.

The sort of things that would've been completely harmless if his brain had possessed even a shred of self-preservation. But lucky for Steve, it didn't. Because somewhere along the line Steve had stopped wondering whether the woman existed and started wondering what she was like.

It was the necklace that bothered him.

Not because it was unusual. If anything, the opposite was true. It was so aggressively ordinary that Steve couldn't understand why his eyes kept drifting back to it.

The artist had only suggested it rather than fully rendering it. A few careful pencil strokes. A thin chain disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt. A small pendant resting at the base of her throat. Nothing distinctive enough to identify. Nothing useful. Certainly nothing worth spending ten minutes staring at while a half-finished lesson plan sat open, Learning Objectives abandoned on his laptop screen.

The cursor blinked patiently inside a section about differentiated instruction while Steve leaned back in his chair and squinted at the frame sitting beside the monitor. The only light in the apartment came from the desk lamp and the blue glow of his computer screen, casting long shadows across stacks of papers and baseball schedules he'd promised himself he'd organize eventually.

He should have been working. Instead he found himself wondering whether the necklace meant something. Not in a clue way. In a person way.

People wore things for reasons. Maybe it had been a gift, or she'd bought it herself on a trip. Maybe she'd worn it every day for ten years without thinking about it. She reached for it automatically each morning the same way Steve reached for his watch. Or it held some sentimental value. Maybe it didn't mean anything at all. Maybe it was costume jewelry she'd picked up at a craft fair for twelve dollars and forgotten about immediately afterward.

The problem wasn't that he had questions. The problem was that every question generated another.

By the time Steve finally looked back at the computer, he'd somehow wandered so far down the mental path that the woman in the portrait had acquired opinions about coffee.

He actually stopped and laughed at himself. A sharp, disbelieving bark of a laugh that startled him in the silence of the apartment. "Jesus Christ."

This was insane. He didn't know whether she drank coffee. For all he knew she hated coffee. Maybe she was one of those tea people. The thought bothered him more than it should have. Not because tea was bad. Robin drank tea. Plenty of normal people drank tea. It was just that he'd already decided she was a coffee person. Somewhere along the line he'd made the decision without consulting reality, and reality, unfortunately, had never actually been invited to participate in any of this.

The background became another problem entirely. One Saturday morning Steve found himself sitting on the couch with the portrait balanced on his knees while a baseball game played unwatched on television.

Outside, rain slid lazily down the windows. The entire apartment smelled like coffee and the cinnamon rolls he'd bought from the bakery down the street. He'd intended to spend the morning catching up on coursework. Instead he was staring at trees - or what might have been trees.

The artist had suggested some kind of blurred landscape behind her. A few soft lines. Shapes rather than details. Enough to imply a place without actually creating one.

Steve tilted the frame as if a different viewing angle might suddenly reveal hidden information.

His imagination was going haywire again. His first thought was that it was a park. Maybe a backyard. Could be absolutely nothing because the artist could have invented the whole thing and that distinct possibility should have ended the conversation he was currently having with himself. Instead it somehow started another one.

Because if it was a backyard, that implied a house. And if it implied a house, then his brain immediately began constructing an entire life around it.

A dog appeared first..Not a specific dog. Just...a dog.

Then a garden.

Then a child.

Steve lowered the portrait into his lap and stared at the ceiling. At some point during the previous fifteen minutes he had apparently invented a family and the realization was horrifying. More horrifying was the fact that Robin would absolutely love this.

The portrait wasn't the thing he'd become attached to. It was the possibility of the life attached to it, just like Robin said it was, and that realization followed him around for weeks afterward like a song stuck in his head.

The investigation lasted long enough to become embarrassing.

Not immediately embarrassing. Steve had crossed that threshold weeks earlier. This was a different kind of embarrassment. The sort that only arrived after enough time had passed for perspective to settle in. In retrospect, the timeline was probably where things had gone wrong.

He still maintained it wasn't actually a timeline. It had started as notes. Observations. A couple of thoughts scribbled in the margins of a notebook while he sat through an online lecture that should have been significantly shorter than it was. Then it became a list. Then several lists. Then categories.

The categories were admittedly harder to defend.

Robin discovered them on a rainy Tuesday afternoon while he was making grilled cheese. One minute she'd been looking for a phone charger. The next she'd gone suspiciously quiet. By the time he returned to the living room, she'd somehow spread three legal pads across his coffee table and was laughing hard enough that tears were running down her face. The worst part was that she couldn't even speak. Every time she tried, another laugh escaped instead.

Steve stood there holding a spatula while she pointed helplessly at a page labeled POSSIBLE PROFESSIONS.

"Robin."

More laughter.

"Robin."

She wheezed.

"You made a cat report."

"It is not a cat report."

"It has categories."

"It has organization."

"It has color coding."

That one was harder to argue.

Robin laughed for nearly twenty straight minutes. Then she took pictures. Then she threatened to frame one. Then she spent the next four weeks  referring to every mention of the portrait as an update to The Investigation.

Eventually Steve gave up. Life simply reclaimed its territory. Student teaching became all-consuming. Baseball season rolled into tournaments. The bar lost another employee and suddenly everyone was picking up extra shifts. Entire weeks disappeared before Steve realized they were gone.

The searches stopped. The theories stopped and the late-night rabbit holes stopped.

The portrait remained, mostly because getting rid of it felt ridiculous. He paid eight-fucking-three dollars for it, after all…But continuing to care about it felt even more ridiculous. So it stayed where it eventually landed, tucked among a collection of ordinary things that gradually crowded around it. A photograph from college. A baseball signed by one of his first teams. A couple books he kept meaning to read. Mail he should probably throw away. Dust gathered and time passed.

Robin still brought it up occasionally because she was fundamentally incapable of leaving anything alone.

The Etsy witch became one of those stories. One of those things friends referenced years later while everybody groaned.

Soulmates weren't real, any of those portraits that “worked” were a coincidence. The woman was a stranger. The witch was running a scam. Case closed. Or at least that was what Steve told people. And eventually, after saying it enough times, he almost believed it.

Thirty arrived sometime after that.

No fireworks or revelations or any of the things movies promised. Just a Wednesday.

A long day. A good day, actually. The kind of day filled with enough people that Steve barely had room to think. His students had surprised him with donuts that morning. One of the kids from his fall ball team handed him a handmade birthday card featuring a stick figure with suspiciously gray hair. Tommy and Carol stopped by the bar later that night with their youngest asleep in a stroller and their oldest arguing about math homework. Robin had appeared carrying a birthday pin the size of a dinner plate and somehow convinced half the staff to sing.

It was nice. Genuinely, nice.

Which somehow made the quiet afterward feel louder. By the time Steve got home, the apartment building had settled into that strange middle ground between night and morning. The parking lot sat mostly empty beneath the amber glow of the streetlights. Crickets hummed somewhere beyond the buildings. The air carried that first hint of autumn coolness that arrived long before the leaves changed.

His keys hit the bowl by the door and his shoes landed somewhere behind him. The apartment greeted him with familiar silence. The kind that belonged to one person.

Steve wandered through the dark living room offloading the remnants of the day. A card here. A gift bag there. Somebody had given him a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER. Robin had somehow signed the bottom of it.

Of course she had.

Shaking his head, he crossed toward the bookshelf. One of the envelopes slipped from his grip and disappeared behind a stack of books. "Perfect."

The muttered complaint echoed softly through the room. Steve crouched down and reached behind the shelf and his fingers brushed cardboard.

Paper.

Dust.

Then wood.

The frame shifted, only slightly. The movement exposed a familiar corner. Dark hair. The curve of a smile. And suddenly there she was again. Not hidden or forgotten. Waiting exactly where he'd left her.

For a long moment Steve simply stared.

Months. It had been months since he'd really looked. Steve remained kneeling beside the bookshelf. Thirty. The number drifted through his head again.

Thirty years old.

Student teacher.

Bartender.

Baseball coach.

Good friend.

Good son to a shit dad.

Reasonably functioning adult.

A life that looked perfectly fine from the outside. A life that actually was fine. 

He thought about what “fine” actually meant. In Robin-speak fine is a death sentence because fine means…nothing. 

In no time the anger came sharp. Sudden. Directed nowhere. Everywhere. At the portrait. At the stupid witch. At himself. At the fact that he'd wanted it to be true badly enough to build timelines and theories and entire fictional biographies around a stupid fucking pencil drawing he didn't want in the first place.

He was angry at the fact that Tommy went home with Carol..At the fact that Robin would eventually find somebody because Robin always threw herself toward life with both hands. He was most angry at the fact that he was standing in an empty apartment well past midnight staring at a woman who didn't fucking exist.

"You aren't even real." The words left before he realized he'd spoken. The frame offered no response. Only that smile.

God. That smile.

Steve hated that smile.

Hated the ease of it -  the familiarity. Hated how quickly irritation gave way to something else entirely. Something warmer. Something lower. Something he'd spent months successfully ignoring.

Because the truth was that he hadn't forgotten her, he'd just gotten better at looking away. And standing there in the half-dark of his apartment, freshly thirty, a little tired, a little lonely and a little angry at the shape his life hadn't taken yet, Steve found himself looking again. 

For a few moments longer, Steve allowed himself to feel that anger because it felt easier than everything else..Anger was clean. Simple. Anger didn't ask questions. Anger didn't force him to admit that he'd spent months hoping for something he knew better than to expect.

The frame remained balanced in his hands while he sat back against the couch. The apartment was quiet enough that he could hear the faint ticking of the clock in the kitchen. Outside, a car passed beneath the window, its headlights briefly painting moving shadows across the wall before disappearing again.

The artist had captured something annoyingly human about her. Not beauty, although she was beautiful in a way that felt effortless. Not perfection. Steve had dated enough people to know perfection wasn't real. It was the feeling that if she walked into a room, he'd recognize her immediately. The feeling that she'd laugh at the right moments. The feeling that she existed just outside his reach. His thumb brushed absentmindedly against the edge of the frame.

The anger softened as he did. Just lost some of its sharpness and in its place came something quieter filled the void it created - a longing he'd spent most of the year pretending wasn't there. He found himself studying details he'd long since memorized. The curve of her smile. The way loose strands of hair had been sketched around her face. The warmth in her expression.

Warmth. The sense that she would look at somebody and actually see them. The sense that she would know things and that coming home wouldn't feel quite so empty if she were there when he did.

Steve leaned back into the couch cushions and closed his eyes. The portrait had stopped being a stranger months ago, and when he opened his eyes again, his gaze found hers almost immediately. The room seemed smaller suddenly. The loneliness that had been sitting heavily on his shoulders all evening shifted into something warmer. A pull he recognized immediately and wished he didn't.

Because now he was no longer angry at the portrait. Now he was remembering that she was beautiful and that was significantly more complicated.

Steve should have put the portrait back on the shelf.

The thought occurred to him more than once over the next several minutes. Every time it surfaced, he ignored it. The frame remained balanced against his knee while he sat on the couch with his tie loosened, sleeves pushed up, and the remnants of a perfectly good birthday scattered around the apartment like fragments of a person.

And maybe that wasn't fair. The evening had been good. Really good, actually. People had remembered. People had shown up. There wasn't a single logical reason for him to be sitting here feeling this restless.

And yet the feeling remained. Not sadness exactly, or even loneliness, it was something harder to pin down than that. His eyes drifted back to the portrait before he could stop them. The artist had somehow managed to capture an expression that felt unfinished, as though she'd been interrupted in the middle of laughing. The longer he looked at it, the more he found himself trying to fill in the missing pieces. What had been funny? Who had she been looking at? What happened immediately afterward?

Questions he'd asked himself a hundred times before, but he'd stopped asking weeks ago. Questions that apparently hadn't gone anywhere. He hadn't forgotten about her. He'd just gotten busy. There was a difference. The searches had stopped. The theories had stopped. The embarrassing late-night internet deep dives had stopped. But every now and then he'd still glance at the frame while walking through the apartment. Every now and then he'd catch himself wondering. Every now and then he'd hear a laugh somewhere and think, irrationally, that it sounded like the one she'd probably have.

Stupid. It was stupid because he knew nothing except the things he'd invented. The things he'd decided. The things he'd quietly assigned to her over months of staring at the same drawing. Like that she spent Saturday mornings reading on a porch somewhere. Maybe she couldn't sit still long enough to finish a chapter. He thought that she was probably stubborn, but he was sure she would've taken one look at Robin Buckley and immediately understood why Steve was constantly exhausted.

The corner of his mouth twitched despite himself.

The portrait. The woman - the one Robin teasingly would just call “the wife” just...turned into someone. Someone to tell about the baseball card from the kid on his team. Someone to roll their eyes at Robin's birthday texts. Someone to come home to after nights like this when the apartment felt a little too quiet and the future felt a little too uncertain.

He spied the whiskey on the bar cart in the corner. The whiskey wasn't even good whiskey. It was the bottle he'd been slowly working through for the better part of a year. The one reserved for nights when he wanted a drink but didn't feel like thinking about what he was drinking. The label was peeling at one corner. There couldn't have been more than three fingers left in it. Still, it felt appropriate.

Thirty deserved whiskey. Or maybe surviving thirty deserved whiskey.

The apartment remained dark except for the lamp beside the couch and the faint glow filtering through the blinds from the parking lot outside. The kitchen light stayed off as he crossed barefoot across the cool tile, sleeves already rolled halfway up his forearms from work. The top three buttons of his shirt had given up somewhere around hour six of the evening.

He grabbed the bottle, a glass and poured.

Then added a little more whiskey than he'd originally intended. The amber liquid caught the low light as it settled into the bottom of the glass. For a moment he simply stood there staring at it before he carried the drink back toward the living room.

The portrait was still sitting where he'd left it halfway between being displayed and being discarded.

He sank back into the couch and stretched one arm across the cushions. The springs shifted beneath his weight. Ice clicked softly against the side of the glass. Somewhere outside, a car door slammed and then silence settled over the building once more. For a long moment he didn't look directly at the portrait. His gaze wandered around it instead.

And suddenly it felt impossible to remember why he'd spent months pretending it didn't matter. It's not like he'd started believing in soulmates again - or that he ever did in the first place. If anything, he believed in them less.

The Etsy witch was still a scam. Robin was still insane. The timeline had still been the most embarrassing thing he'd ever produced outside of high school. None of that had changed. The only thing that had changed was him.

Steve took another sip of whiskey and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The portrait sat close enough now that he could see the faint texture of the paper beneath the drawing.

Months ago he'd been looking for clues. Tonight he found himself thinking about entirely different things. Not where she lived. Not what her name was. Not whether the artist had somehow hidden some microscopic breadcrumb he'd missed. In this moment the hypothetical “she” became …you. 

So he found himself wondering what you smelled like. Whether you talked with your hands. Whether you painted your nails and what color they were right now. How that hand might look wrapped around his - no absolutely not..

The thoughts arrived dangerously easily as though they'd been waiting for an opportunity. Steve shook his head and laughed softly into his glass.

"God, you're not even real."

He sipped the whiskey as a distraction while his other hand seemed to find a mind of its own. It slid across the soft middle of his stomach, fingers gliding under the waistband of his jeans, thumb working just so to pop the button loose. He bit his lip as he slipped his whole hand into his briefs, gently grazing his own cock with his fingers and his eyes flutter open to lock with the ones in the portrait 

He blushes. Blushes at the touch of his own fucking hand, but he's too far down this path to stop now. 

He throws back the rest of the whiskey in the glass and slams it down on the coffee table before he starts stroking himself. He imagined you’d start off light and gentle, so he tries to be light and gentle himself. He thinks about how you seem confident - like you might take charge and pull him free from the confines of his clothes so you can see what you do to him while you work, so he pulls himself free. He imagines you're…experienced, and know just when you need more to work with, so he leans forward and spits on his own length, pretending for a second it's your saliva making his dick wet.

It's pathetic how fast he starts whimpering. Jaw slack and lips raw from chewing on them through the building pleasure. He gasps, breath stuttering as he exhales, followed by a low growl as he keeps working himself through it. 

He’s imagining things again - like how your hair would smell and how soft it would feel as he ran his fingers through it, tugging at the roots as you moved your lips up and down his length. And speaking of those lips... Did your lips leave sticky cherry chapstick around it as they drag up and down him? Or did you wear lipstick? Leaving a crimson ring around the base of his thick shaft as you take him. 

Oh my God he was going to lose it right here, right now over a photograph drawn by a bullshit witch. 

He fists the couch cushion, hand speeding up, grip tightening on each upstroke. “O-oh Jesus fucking Christ that's it. That's it baby….d-don’t stop -” 

He's begging no one but the graphite lines on the paper staring back at him when he opens his eyes one last time and looks at the drawing. And that's what does him in.

He spills all over his hand, onto his stomach, matting the hair of his happy trail down along the subtle softness that emerges from his otherwise thin frame. He strokes himself softly a few more times, working himself through it before he flops back on the couch boneless and satisfied. Picking up the portrait frame he lifts it and takes it in one last time. 

For several seconds, Steve couldn't do anything except stare. The portrait stared back. The apartment remained exactly the same. The world continued with absolutely no respect for the life-altering humiliation that had just occurred in his living room. 

His chest still rose and fell a little harder than normal. His skin felt too warm. His entire body had that strange loose heaviness that arrived afterward, when every muscle suddenly remembered it had been working. For a moment he considered dying. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Maybe dissolving into the upholstery? That seemed reasonable. Anything felt preferable to acknowledging what had just happened.

Because now that the haze had started clearing, now that his brain was slowly rejoining the conversation, the facts of the situation were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The woman wasn't real. The witch was probably running her business from a spare bedroom somewhere. And Steve Harrington had spent his thirtieth birthday emotionally unraveling and coming harder than he has on any one night stand in months…all over a pencil sketch.

That memory needed to go directly into a vault and stay there forever.

He adjusted the frame back on the shelf - set it upright again and looked at it. "You're a problem."

The smile remained infuriatingly unchanged. Steve sighed. Because somehow, against all logic, the drawing had won. Not the soulmate thing or even the stupid scam witch thing.

The woman thing.

The possibility thing.

And as he finally pushed himself off the couch and headed toward bed, he found himself carrying the same thought that had haunted him for months. Not who are you. Not even where are you.

Just...I really wish you existed.

Another thing about turning thirty, Steve discovered, was that your body immediately began punishing you for decisions that would've barely registered at twenty-two.

The headache had settled behind his eyes before he'd even gotten out of bed. It wasn't a debilitating headache, but it was an irritating one. The sort that sat directly between his eyebrows and refused to leave. Add in four hours of sleep, lingering whiskey, and the emotional equivalent of being hit by a truck the night before, and Steve was functioning at approximately sixty percent capacity.

Maybe fifty.

Forty if Robin kept talking.

Unfortunately, Robin was absolutely determined to keep talking. "I still don't understand why you're so grumpy."

Steve squinted at the baseball field. The sun seemed significantly brighter than necessary. "Because it's nine in the morning."

"It's nine-thirty."

"Exactly."

Robin looked entirely too refreshed for somebody who had also been at the bar the night before. She sat sprawled across the bleachers beside him with a giant iced coffee and sunglasses pushed into her hair scrolling through her Instagram feed liking and saving things at rapid pace.

"I didn't even think you drank that much."

Steve's stomach performed an alarming little flip. "Can we not?"

"You had what? Three drinks after tour shift?"

"Robin."

"Four?"

"Robin."

The grin spread slowly across her face. "I knew it."

"You know nothing."

"Oh, I know something."

Steve groaned. The sound emerged from somewhere deep within his soul. Robin brightened immediately.

"What."

"That."

The field slowly filled around them. Parents unfolded camping chairs. Kids chased one another through the grass. Equipment bags hit the ground with dull thuds. Somewhere a cooler lid slammed shut.

Normal.

Ordinary.

Exactly what Steve needed - normal baseball practice. No soulmates. No Etsy witches. Absolutely no whiskey. No conversations. Just baseball.

Robin continued watching him, which was unfortunate. Because Robin had spent fifteen years developing an almost supernatural ability to identify when Steve was hiding something.

"You seem weird."

"I'm tired."

"You seem guilty."

"I'm tired."

"You seem suspiciously tired."

Steve turned slowly. "Have you considered leaving me alone?"

"No."

"Interesting."

"I care about you."

"You are actively making my life worse."

Robin laughed far too loudly. A few moms who have an awfully full face of makeup for Saturday morning little league look over in her direction and glare.

The sound followed Steve all the way onto the field as he walked away waving his arm at her in dismissal and practice started. Mercifully.

Children, unlike Robin, could usually be redirected. Mostly. 

At one point Steve spent seven minutes mediating a disagreement about whether sunflower seeds counted as lunch. At another, somebody informed him a squirrel had been watching them for twenty minutes.

By comparison, baseball felt easy.

The familiar rhythm gradually pulled him out of his own head. Ground balls. Batting practice. Fielding drills. The steady repetition of instruction and correction. It helped.

And then there was Luke. The kid had joined the team a few weeks earlier and immediately became the sort of player coaches noticed. A lefty. Fast. Ridiculously natural swing. The kind of talent that couldn't really be taught. Steve had spent most of practice watching him launch line drives into the outfield while trying not to look too excited about it.

By the end of the session, he'd already decided he wanted to talk to Luke's parents. Private lessons maybe. Definitely Travel Ball eventually. The kid had potential.

The thought returned as practice wound down and parents began filtering back toward the field. Kids collected water bottles and their equipment slowly disappeared, replaced by empty water bottles and gum wrappers. The usual chaos.

Steve spotted Luke stuffing a glove into his bag and called him over. "Hey, buddy."

Luke jogged over immediately. "What's up Coach?"

Steve nodded toward the parking lot. "I need to talk to your mom for a minute before you leave. Is she here?"

Luke froze, only briefly. Then a strange little smile appeared. "Oh."

Steve frowned. "Oh?"

Luke shrugged. "Yeah."

The kid adjusted his backpack. Then said, "She'll know who you are."

Steve blinked. "Well...yeah."

"I'm serious." The smile widened. "She'll recognize you."

The statement made absolutely no sense. He hasn't met any adult that belongs to Luke yet, but before he could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean, Luke was already heading toward the parking lot.

"Come on."

Steve followed, distracted and still mildly hungover. Still wondering what the kid had meant.

The parking lot shimmered beneath the afternoon sun. Rows of cars stretched across the asphalt. Parents loaded equipment and called goodbyes through open windows. Luke walked with complete confidence straight toward a dark SUV parked near the far end of the lot, then he stopped, turned and waved. "Mom!"

The driver's door opened. Steve looked up and every thought in his head disappeared. Gone. Completely. Poof! As though somebody had reached into his brain and unplugged it. Because standing beside the SUV was a woman he'd never met. A woman he'd never seen. A woman who absolutely, unquestionably should have been a stranger.

Instead, Steve recognized you instantly.

Not from life. Not from Hawkins. Not from anywhere real.

From graphite.

From paper.

From months of wondering.

From a frame sitting on a bookshelf in his apartment.

For one impossible second the entire world seemed to tilt sideways. The parking lot vanished and he felt honestly a little queasy. Even Robin's voice somewhere behind him vanished. All that remained was you, and the horrifying realization that the Etsy witch might have been right.

Steve thinks that he forgot how to breathe. The reaction was immediate. Physical. Brutal. Like missing a step in the dark. For one impossible minute his brain refused to process what his eyes were seeing. It simply stalled out somewhere between recognition and denial.

No.

Absolutely not. People looked like other people all the time. Faces were faces. Features repeated. Haircuts existed. The human population was large. Rational explanations existed. His brain offered all of these arguments in rapid succession, unfortunately, none of them survived first contact. The woman standing beside the SUV wasn't identical to the portrait. This was worse.

Real always was.

The artist had gotten the shape of your face right. The smile. The eyes, but reality added all the things graphite couldn't. Movement. Expression. Life. The way a loose strand of hair caught in the breeze as you stepped around the open car door. The distracted look of someone halfway through three separate thoughts at once. The phone balanced against your shoulder and up against your ear. The coffee cup in one hand.

Busy. That was the first thing Steve thought.

Forget that you were beautiful. This girl is busy. Like somebody with too much to do and not enough hours to do it.

Luke waved dramatically. "Hey Mom! Coach wants to talk to you about first base I think!"

You looked up, still distracted and not quite paying attention. Still reaching into the backseat for something before your eyes landed on Steve. There was the smallest pause imaginable. A hitch in movement so subtle Steve might have missed it if he wasn't already staring. The hand reaching into the car froze and your distracted expression disappeared and for the first time since he'd seen you, you looked directly at him …the same way he was looking at you - as if you'd seen a ghost. That look on your face wasn't even confusion. Confusion Steve could explain. Recognition was much harder.

Neither of them moved. Around them, the parking lot continued normally. Parents loaded equipment. Engines started. Kids shouted goodbyes across the asphalt. Meanwhile Steve felt like he'd been hit in the head with a baseball bat full of nails.

Luke looked between them with a shit eating grin only 10 year old boys can muster.  The little butthead actually smiled. "Oh good." Steve blinked. Luke adjusted his backpack. "I told her you were my coach."

The words barely registered. Because the woman was still staring with the unmistakable look of someone trying very hard to reconcile two pieces of information that absolutely should not fit together. For the first time in months, Steve Harrington had absolutely nothing to say and that was the thing that finally convinced him it was real.

----

Chapter 2 - Trick Or Treat, Freak:

The night of the Halloween party. Drinks are had, fights are initiated and Dustin Henderson discovers a new friend.

Chapter 3 - The Pollywog:

You ride the shock waves of the party, enemies are made, Steve Harrington gets under your skin and cracks start to form in the lies your brother has been telling.

Chapter 4 - Will The Wise:

Steve tries to right his wrongs. A crime scene pulls you in. A meal with Max leaves you with more questions than answers.

Chapter 5 - Dig Dug:

A missing cat leads to an important conversation with Robin, and you come home to the second shock of the day: Your brother and Steve Harrington, gearing up for war.

Chapter 6 - The Spy:

Dustin hates the distance he's put between the two of you. He doesn't realise what damning consequences it has until it's too late.

Chapter 7 - The Lost Sister: Coming soon!

After a year of lies, you finally get the answers you've been looking for, but as threats close in and Steve becomes your strongest ally, you're sure of only one thing: life will never be the same again.