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Skipping town is probably the best worst thing he’s ever done.
It’s the simple answer, the easy out that saves him from the embarrassment of coming to terms with how it really feels to watch the worst best thing that’s ever happened to him lying unconscious in a hospital bed.
Because it’s one thing to ignore the ache in his chest every time they’re around each other, but it’s another to feel like he’s being split open and pulled apart.
Jonathan’s going to die and the last thing he ever did was ruin it all.
–
There’s something to be said about loveless relationships that still work. The kind of relationships where the most intimacy that they each experience is getting their hair washed at the salon every few months.
It’s what his parents have always had: that cold, contactless sort of routine. The whole song and dance of appearing perfectly happy from the outside when the life they lead in private plays to a very different tune.
That’s all he’s ever had to go off of: seeing the way they sit in pristine silence around the dinner table, the clinking of silverware against fine china as the only grating melody to an otherwise monotonous ballad. It’s all he’s ever known and so it’s easy to mimic that with Nancy, to feel like it makes sense that she swats away his wandering hands. That their study sessions in the library are done in a quiet so loud that he sometimes wonders if she can hear his thoughts.
And of course he knew when things were going sour between them. It didn’t come as a surprise when they broke up even though it did surprise him to hear her say she had never loved him the way he had loved her. Because his parents still said they loved each other even if it wasn’t true.
–
He discovers later that it’s harder to say it when you actually mean it.
That it’s harder to say it when it’ll hurt worse if the other person doesn’t feel the same way.
That it’s scarier when they do.
–
He knows leaving town when he did was the weakest thing he’s ever done. It was the easiest way out. A simple solution that wasn’t fair to either of them. He knows that, he knows.
Because he doesn’t know how to let himself want something that he doesn’t think he deserves; doesn’t know how to tell himself no, either. It’s why he reacted the way he did–why he always presses forward and pulls away simultaneously. Hurts himself and hurts others in the process.
It didn’t stop hurting when Jonathan was in the hospital, unconscious but safe. Not yet angry or disgusted with him. So it’s easier to make the choice for him, to make him angry either way, because it would hurt worse if he had the choice and pulled away.
Steve tries to tell himself it hurts less like this, even though it never stops hurting, really.
The one thing that he knows for certain, the thing he realizes the first and last time he sees Jonathan in that hospital bed, is that no matter the outcome, he loses him either way.
Six months later, because it still hurts, because it’s still the thing he thinks about every day, Steve mails a letter. It’s not very long, just a few short sentences. He’s never been good at putting his feelings into words and he’s never liked putting words down on a page. So it’s easier to just apologize.
I’m sorry. I was scared and didn’t want to see someone I–
He scratches the words out, tries again.
I didn’t want to see you die.
–
Robin gives him a long, curious look the fourth time in as many weeks when he casually mentions that he’s hanging out with Byers again. Like she knows.
Like she knows that it’s more than just beers on the hood of Jonathan’s rotting Ford Pinto at the quarry to stave off the height of the damp summer heat. More than Steve pointing out fake constellations for Jonathan to give fake names after smoking a joint with their feet hanging over the edge of his pool. More than six packs of beers split, gas money exchanged, sideways glances during movies, the last slice of pizza cut in half.
She looks at him like she knows, her lips puckering together and she goes back to tallying off inventory on her clipboard. He exhales, realizing he’d held his breath the whole time she’d been taking inventory of him instead.
“I’ve got this book I think you’d like,” she says suddenly.
He frowns because she knows he’s never been the type to voluntarily pick up a book. But she brings it to him a few days later and he flips open the first page on a slow shift at the video store. Each line, each moment of longing, only brings to mind one person…
–
Mail from anyone in Hawkins is few and far between. It’s not like he expects Jonathan to send him a reply to his first letter. Days go by, weeks, months. A year. At some point he convinces himself it was as one-sided as he’d expected it to be, even if there were a few moments where he thought, maybe.
Mostly he hears from Robin or his parents. Occasionally he’ll get a thick envelope from Dustin, a rambling six or seven pages, front and back, catching him up on everything all at once. And it’s a year passed that he gets one with a single line, an offhand comment, that breaks him open again, the wound fresh and raw like it was the day he left.
Jonathan and Nancy are engaged–
The words have him flat out for a week, curled up under a blanket on his shitty couch in his shitty apartment, staring at the television between bouts of restless sleep.
He had moved his whole life to an entirely different city, an entirely different state. But the moment his whole life catches up with him, he’s wiped out, caught tumbling and gasping for air in the undertow.
He had crammed all of his things in the back of the BMW, shoved random objects into every inch of space. And sometimes it’s the same with his chest, every feeling shoved up against each other, making it hard to breathe, everything wanting to escape at once.
He’d spread out, made a home out of the box of an apartment he’d found in Chicago. A third floor walkup in an old red brick house in the middle of Andersonville with the Swedish bakery on the corner and the ‘roommates’ in the basement apartment that he caught kissing in the front entry one late night.
There was a coffee shop he preferred and he’d even measured the awkward space in the corner of his living room for a bookshelf.
Steve had moved on from Hawkins, or so he told himself. He thought of it rarely, if at all. But that didn’t stop him from imagining Jonathan’s opinions on his coffee with too much sugar, of how bare the bookshelf was in the living room. There’s no reason for his mind to return to Hawkins most days, but everyday something returns the memory of Jonathan to him.
He doesn’t even really remember what the book on his bookshelf is about, the names of the characters are gone, the details fuzzy. It’s been months, but whenever his eyes catch the spine on his shelf it reminds him of how it made him feel.
It never stops hurting. And it’s never going to stop until he dredges it all up and burns it all down. Reminds himself that love isn’t like the movies.
After a week of wallowing he picks the book up again, starting from the first page. It feels the same way it did the first time, which catches him completely off guard.
He didn’t think it could hurt any worse than it already did, but he was wrong.
The only thing that makes sense–the only thing he can think to do–is write his address on the last page. With it, he sends a letter, long and rambling but not saying anything at all. Half truths and thoughts on promises he’d never made to which he still doesn’t put a name.
He puts everything in a package and sends it before he can convince himself not to. Before he can read over what he’d written and throw it all in the trash.
This is what I wanted, he thinks. I didn’t know how to say it then and I still don’t know how to say it now.
–
Jonathan doesn’t look happy, he thinks, and part of him wonders if it’s his fault; if his presence in town is enough to make Jonathan look so dour. It’s stupid, though, because he’s sure Jonathan hardly thinks of him at all.
He flies into town for his mother’s birthday in late summer. It’s like nothing about Hawkins has changed at all other than the flash of gold and yellow on Jonathan’s finger. Steve tries not to look at him, but it’s hard not to when a warmth floods his chest every time he does, filling the hole he’d meticulously carved out just for him.
The weekend trip he had planned turns into two weeks when he asks where his father is and his mother sighs heavily like she’s been dreading the question. He pushes his flight out and they spend time sorting through most of his things in the house, donating and throwing away the belongings he doesn’t need and getting his childhood home ready for the sale that will happen once the divorce is finalized.
Nothing lasts, he learns, not even forced, loveless relationships.
The leaves on the trees fall with the changing of the season and the last of the stolen glances in Jonathan’s direction doesn’t feel like it’ll be enough to fill that hole in his chest permanently as he says goodbye to the only thing still tying them together.
–
“I can’t do this anymore, man,” Steve sobs quietly, out of breath as he watches Jonathan’s pain-dazed face. He uses the brick wall of the alley to hold them both on their feet.
It’s dizzying: the shower of glass from around the corner flinging through the air over them and raining across the rooftops. The old strip center on Main Street ablaze a block away. Fallen phone lines shooting up sparks as they rest across puddles of water. The unfamiliar smells and the chaotic noise of the world crumbling around them and all he can focus on is Jonathan.
They both cling desperately to each other, to consciousness. He tries to wipe away the blood on Jonathan’s lips, his thumb dragging slick across them, smearing the slash of red more than cleaning it. It’s more blood than he’s ever seen in his young life and he’s seen a lot more blood than most people his age.
“You should come with me,” he says desperately, trying to give them a reason to keep going. Something for Jonathan to live for, especially: a boy that was desperate to escape small town life and the otherworldly darkness that consumed it.
Steve ruins things, he knows this. He ruins things by not saying it out loud, by saying it without words. Over and over again. Too loud and too quiet. Yelling it until his chest hurts, until it aches and aches and aches. The real truth about it is he’ll ruin this too. That or he will ruin himself if he loses Jonathan and never gets the answers to the questions that eat away at him from the inside out.
His ears are ringing and Jonathan’s staring at him, panicked and scared and the only thing Steve can think to do is kiss him, to say it without words, over and over, until it aches and aches and aches.
And later, when he’s watching Jonathan’s chest rise and fall from the safety of the hospital bed, he wonders if his mind had played tricks on him or if Jonathan, for a brief moment, had kissed him back.
–
Steve remembered–
Like taking knuckles to the chin. Like reliving the same worst day of his life.
That’s the thing about life: the hits just keep on coming.
After his parents divorce he thought a lot about settling and choosing yourself second. About the promises you break and the lies you tell yourself to help you sleep at night. About second chances, earned and lost.
Sometimes he’ll write those thoughts down. Sometimes it’s for Jonathan and sometimes he sends it. More often than not, as the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, the letters start to pile up in the drawer of his bedside table, unstamped and unsent.
He pretends to move on. To put the same distance from the idea between his head and his heart as he had put between himself and Hawkins.
It’s lonely.
It’s lonely until it’s not.
A letter received, a hopeful note:
Here I am. Here I am tired of wanting. Are you still here, too?
And it’s easy to write back:
Of course. I never left…even when I did.
And when Jonathan sits across from him, far away from Hawkins, far away from the claustrophobia of that small town, it’s like no time has passed at all.