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The first time Nancy meets Kristin – “Crystal,” Crystal herself corrects, smiling at her from the spot tucked under Steve’s arm while standing in the open doorway of Steve’s house he’s been renting the last four months – it’s a few days after their rooftop reunion and she’d been coaxed into a dinner slash hangout, mostly by Robin, who’d been a little drunk and had whispered in her ear, come see the show.
Nancy didn’t know it, then, but she gets it now.
The “show” is Steve, all grown-up. He wears his hair different than the last time they all saw each other months ago. To be fair, so does she—shorter, easier, less effort for her to spend on appearances when she’s once again in a male-dominated job, too many of those males egotistical enough to think they can say whatever they want and she’s supposed to find it charming—but she’s been playing with lengths and styles for a while now.
Steve? It’s like he’s settled, like he wakes up and barely spends time in front of the mirror. She’s still warming up to it.
Crystal isn’t what Nancy expected. If she’s being brutally honest, she didn’t really picture her at all. Because it wasn’t her business to, and because she never liked that she couldn’t tell if the ache that came from thinking about Steve having a girlfriend was because Steve had himself all happily figured out while she was still struggling to find herself, or if there was, you know, more to it.
When she did let herself go there, she thought—blonde. Preppy. Ex-cheerleader, maybe. She’s seen Steve flirt with girls exactly like that, she knows his type.
But Crystal is tall and slender. She’s got mousy brown hair she wears past her shoulder. No frizz. Glasses. She’s a teacher (they met in the cafeteria, Nancy learns, info given to her with an affectionate glance between them that sours her appetite.) She’s wearing sensible loafers, has got a couple of pieces of jewelry on that Nancy can’t help but wonder—gifts from Steve?
It’s a lot, but at least Robin's there, too, to serve as a buffer.
“So,” Robin says to her from across the table, mouth full of food. Steve’s to the left of Nancy, Crystal to her right, which means she’s been a perfectly placed spectator for so much of their staring. And they stare, a lot. They’ve got inside jokes, mostly about their jobs, other teachers. “Nance,” she hears Robin cut through her thoughts, loudly, and it must not be the first time her name’s been said because everyone’s looking over at her.
Awkwardly, she picks up her fork and ignores the way Steve’s eyes drill into the side of her head. Her voice is peppy, hollow as she chirps, “Yep?”
“I was just saying. With the lovebirds here,” and Nancy tries not to wince through that, “serving as an ever-present reminder of romance… no boys? Really? You’re telling me that George Michael-esque haircut of yours—not an insult,” she’s fast to insert, “I love it! It’s not setting the pressroom a’blaze? I figure the male-to-female ratio alone…”
For as heavily as she could feel Steve stare just a second ago, now he’s chipping away at the vegetables on his plate, eyes cast downward.
When Nancy balks at answering, Crystal bails her out with a kindly asked, “What do you do?”
“I work for the Herald.” She feels that instant impulse to diminish it (sounds like more of a big deal than it is,) overly aware of how she’s barely earned the implied title. “Uh, I don’t really have a degree or anything—”
“Just years of experience, that junior reporter internship, you were singlehandedly keeping The Post going,” Steve lists.
It hits at something sensitive inside of her, his encouragement of her, but it doesn’t make her feel good. The opposite, really.
“They’ve got me doing grunt-work. Copy, edit.” She gives an ‘it is what it is’ shrug, fork piercing a green bean. With the mood nose-diving and Nancy feeling herself the cause of it, she blows out a breath, puts on a voice. “And what about you? I mean, I caught the gist of it, but you’re—”
“Ninth grade, Language Arts.”
“Gettin’ ‘em right before they turn into little shits,” Steve smirks across the table.
“They’re sweet.”
“They’re monsters.”
“You sound like Barnes—”
“Sound like—?” Steve makes a mock-wounded noise. “I sound like—?”
“Maybe—” Nancy cuts in, a little too forcefully. When it grabs everyone’s attention—Steve, startled; Robin, amused—she says more evenly, “I don’t know, maybe you’ll teach my sister. Wild to think about, but. She’ll be in high school soon. She still feels like such a little kid…”
“Tell me about it, half the knuckleheads I coach are teeny-tiny, still got baby teeth to get whacked in the face by a ball and lose all over the field—happens, trust me, it’s traumatic and it sucks for everyone. The other half…”
“Monsters?” Nancy fills in, with a teasing lilt.
When Steve meets her eyes, he’s got that fondness in them she’s only seen aimed elsewhere all night.
She hates herself for it, but it makes her heart kick around, has her smiling genuinely for the first time in a while.
++
By the time she heads out, she’s eager to go.
She’s Robin’s ride, though, and Robin veers off to the bathroom while everyone heads for the door.
Steve sighs at her quickly retreating back. “Seriously, Buckley?”
“I’ve got a small bladder, this isn’t news!” is the last thing they hear before the door shuts.
The silence that permeates is immediately uncomfortable.
Nancy endures it for a few minutes, risking a glance up at Steve, who’s rocking back on his heels, staring at the ground. Crystal’s eyes are already on Nancy when she glances over.
There’s something scrutinizing in them that makes Nancy want out, now.
“Well.” It’s abrupt, embarrassing. “I think I’m gonna—” she points her thumb behind her, “wait outside. Let Robin know?” she asks Steve.
He must catch the pleading in her eyes because he doesn’t question it. Just says, “Sure, Nancy. Thanks for coming.”
The ‘Nancy’ hits especially hard, speaks of the distance that’s grown between them.
“Thanks for having me. And,” to Crystal, “nice to finally meet you.”
“Sure, same to you.” She moves close to Steve, wrapping her arm around his back. Steve does the same right after. “I feel like I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Yeah, well. Robin, she talks.” It’s a half-serious apology.
“Not from her.”
The oh realization slams into Nancy as she’s got her hand already on the knob. Steve won’t catch her eyes after, and Nancy ends up slipping out the front door without a more friendly goodbye or some kinda optically traded explanation. She bails, in all honesty, halfway down the dark front path before she remembers she has to wait for Robin.
But still, now that she’s outside, she can feel how suffocating it was starting to get inside.
She’s had her share of complicated emotions, post-everything. She almost hooked up with Jonathan one night before leaving for Emerson, something she’s so glad never happened because being friends with him now is a reminder of just how much they'd outgrown their relationship in the end, and that backslide would’ve been regrettable. And they probably wouldn’t have been able to keep a friendship going on the other side of it, and she loves his friendship.
Steve’s dated other girls. She’s heard about them, Robin can’t ever keep her mouth shut about it all the times they get each other on the phone.
As much as she keeps dodging the question, there have been guys. A few of them, actually. Dates that halfway through she always starts to feel like she’s going through the motions, like she’s forcing normalcy on herself.
There was who she only remembers as Bar Guy who she got frisky with in an alleyway before, again, her brain kicked on and asked ‘what the hell are you doing?’
There’s a guy at the Herald—Noel—who asked her out for drinks last week. She told him no and doesn’t even really know why. He’s cute, he looks nothing like Jonathan or Steve. He makes her smile and he always comes by her desk with coffee he pours for her in the morning. He even knows how she likes it. But there’s no spark, no flutter, no excitement.
The only time she ever feels that anymore, it’s when she thinks of—
“Hey,” Steve says, coming outside. He shuts the door behind him carefully, stepping toward her. “Thought you could, y’know, use the company while Robin does her thing. Jesus, it’s cold out here.” He’s rubbing his arms as he stops beside her.
She hadn’t even noticed.
When she looks up at him, she can’t help but let her appreciation show. “Thank you.” He smiles back so sincerely she can barely stand it. It compels her to add, “And, sorry. That was…” She tries to find the right words and only comes up with, “probably not as nice as you thought it’d go?”
“I don’t know. Had my best friend over. My other best friend.” He knocks Nancy’s arm with his elbow. “Felt pretty nice to me.”
While she’s processing that—of all the ways she’s thought of Steve before, ‘best friend’ hasn’t ever crossed her mind. But she likes the fit of it, the weight of it, finds it to be true—Steve takes a couple of steps around her, to the half-wall that separates the gravel driveway from the lawn. He sits down and stares up at her expectantly.
When she sits beside him, a respectable distance apart, she feels the cold for the first time.
Nancy blurts, “She’s nice. Crystal. I get why you like her.” With Steve staring at her, she can’t help but keep rambling. “She’s pretty. Seems really smart. You guys, yeah. You’re good together. Sweet,” she adds, her voice doing that fake-cheery thing Steve can usually see right through. “I’m glad I got to see it for myself, finally stop wondering—” Her eyes cut to him at the slip.
He, of course, catches it.
He surprises her, though, by not making her talk about what she could possibly mean. He tells her, “I guess I feel… like things are finally going my way for once. I like my job. I’m actually pretty good at it, believe it or not. Got all the little nuggets a guy could want. Some I don’t,” he jokes, smiling when she smiles. “And, yeah. Pretty cool girlfriend. We have fun.”
The word ‘fun’ comes down on her shoulders like it’s strong enough to grab hold and push her down.
“But, Nance. She’s not you,” he admits softly.
It takes her too long to process that, too lulled in by how heavily his eyes have landed on hers, how much yearning is in that gaze.
And then the front door opens and Robin comes out, painfully unaware she’s interrupting. “You waited! That’s so nice, I thought I’d have to bribe Steve to Miss Daisy me home and he gets real cranky about that.”
Moment over, Steve stands up, already moving past Nancy.
“Yeah, because you hog the radio and won’t shut up about your Jodie Foster thing.”
“And when I marry her, you won’t get invited to the wedding.”
Steve looks at Nancy with see what I mean? eyes. To Robin, “I’m not having this conversation again. Get off my yard.”
Nancy’s up and on her feet as soon as Steve starts heading back up the path. She calls out, “Steve,” to stop him. Pretty urgently, if the wide-eyed shock she gets from Robin is any indication. When Steve stops and gives her his attention, she lets him know, “I’m in town a couple more days. Maybe we can… hang out again?”
From the way Steve’s eyes flick over to Robin—and Robin’s eyes pass back-and-forth between them like it’s a tennis match—she knows she’s being super obvious, knows she’s got some nerve.
But Steve, with his face full of guarded surprise, finally clears his throat and says, “I’d like that. Rooftop, tomorrow?”
“Meet around five?”
“Make it six. I got a practice that ends around then.”
They do get stuck in a stare-off, let it be noted. Nancy’s fighting back a smile but feels it’s a losing battle. Steve is searching her eyes.
It gets interrupted when Robin says, “Oh-kay?”
Abruptly, Steve turns and bails with a, “Jesus christ, Robin,” thrown over his shoulder before heading inside without another word.
Robin watches in bewilderment. “Can you believe that?”
Except, flustered with shame now creeping up—he’s got a girlfriend, he’s content, what is she doing—she, too, takes a hasty turn for the car.
“What’d I do?!” Robin stays back and wonders.
++
Steve is right. Robin hogs the radio.
She’s fiddling with it, blowing through stations with enough detached restlessness, Nancy finds herself clenching the steering wheel.
Of course, that could also be the self-reproach.
She’s stupid, stupid, making a move on a guy who’s girlfriend she just met. His very nice, perfectly normal girlfriend.
But, actually. Maybe it’s not a move. Maybe it just feels like that because of their whole complicated past. Maybe it’s just two friends, catching up without an audience for once.
Like she’s reading her mind, Robin gets bored and turns down the static. “So. Anything you, I don’t know, want to talk about?”
“Not if it’s Jodie Foster,” she tries to distract with a joke. Her fingers are tapping nervously on the steering wheel.
“I’m not gonna reward that with a response. I’m talkin’ the weirdness I stepped into back there. Like a… sex fog.”
Nancy nearly drives them off the road.
“There wasn’t,” she sputters, horrified at the possibility while being privately thrilled—and then horrified all over again, only at herself for being such a terrible person.
“Hey, said in a judgment-free tone,” Robin raises her palms in the air to defend. “I’m not saying you asked, but if you did ask, then I’d probably tell you—he’s not as happy as he seems,” she confesses softly.
Nancy’s heart crawls inside her throat. She’s gotta swallow it down to speak. “What?”
Robin’s kind enough to not roll her eyes. “Our dear mutual friend. He kinda slipped into this mask after you guys left. Jonathan. You,” she says more pointedly. She starts flicking one of the graduation tassels hanging from Nancy’s rearview mirror. Nancy can’t even find it in her to stop her, too transfixed. “I think he felt all this pressure to—get a job, grow up. Hence the half-dozen eligible bachelorettes he's paraded through his bedroom door. In,” she quickly assures, “a non-chauvinistic way.”
“Judgment-free,” Nancy parrots back tonelessly, mind still spinning.
“He keeps thinking he’ll meet ‘the one,'” Robin finger-quotes with a voice. “Again, you didn’t ask, but I think? Well, I think he’s already met the one, they just haven’t had a fair shot at making it work. But, hey. The world’s been saved for like a whole entire year now. Maybe they’ve got time to figure it out.”
++
Steve shows up the next day with a cooler in hand, ten to six.
Despite the new “NO TRESPASSING” signs plastered all over the radio station, their chairs are right where they left them atop the roof.
“Hey,” Steve greets her with a big grin, making his way over.
They don’t really have claimed seats, but. They do tend to sit in the same spot every time. She’s in her predictable chair, but this time, Steve sinks into the one beside her where Jonathan normally sits, dropping the cooler by their feet. “Refreshments.”
“Smart,” she gives back, returning his smile.
From the looks of it, he’s come straight from the field; he’s got his ‘Coach Steve’ jacket on, has some truly unflattering hat hair. Which, for Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington is such a change from the norm. She finds it all the more charming.
“How were the nuggets?” she asks with enough of a lilt, his eyes narrow before growing wide, and he looks down at himself.
“Shit,” he realizes and starts tugging it off. “I wanted to look—not like this,” he catches himself, flinging the jacket to what’s typically been Robin’s chair. Nancy catches a whiff of cologne as it whips past. Running his hands through his hair after, and bringing some life—and height—back to it, he tells her without looking at her, “Derek’s a powerhouse behind the plate, if you can believe it. We got a game next week—Fairfield Tigers, these kids are like chuggin' milk or something ‘cause they’re freakishly huge—I keep rallyin’ the troops, ya know, ‘we got this, don’t worry, drink more milk’—but, yeah, we’re totally screwed.”
“That sounds…” She leans forward, elbows resting on her knees, so she can be more shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “Like it’s gonna suck for everyone. But, hey. Last minute fumble, maybe?”
She doesn’t know why he’s suddenly smiling so fondly at her until she realizes they probably don’t fumble things in baseball.
“Shut up,” she preemptively stops him from calling her out.
“No, I like it. Game goes south, we switch over to football. Awesome play, totally confuse everyone. You know, we could use your brains on the team…” he tells her more intently, with meaning. She hears the ‘if you were around’ for the depressing reality that it is.
Not wanting to dwell on it—or the fact that she heads back to Boston in three days, to her empty apartment she can just barely afford, where she knows she’s coming back to trash she forgot to take out—she breathes out and nods down at the cooler.
“What’d you bring?”
It takes him a second to look away from her, to play along, but then—it’s like Robin said—the mask slips on. “Oh, you know. Couple adults hanging out? I got—’ He flips open the lid and starts pulling out, “Hi-C: Orange Lavaburst and Ecto Cooler, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” he repeats. “Tab, some water. Soda. Practice leftovers,” he explains, looking over at her while he waits.
Nancy never knew what Steve’s ‘six little nuggets’ dream could look like. That it’s just this—Coach Steve carrying around juice boxes—it’s embarrassingly endearing.
She picks, “Ecto Cooler,” and he looks pleased by it.
“Ya gotta,” he agrees, pulling out two, one for each of them before slapping the lid closed.
After the first sip, he lets out an exaggerated noise of satisfaction that she can’t help but shake her head about, ducking her head to hide her smile.
He says, “You can’t get away with it anymore,” with the can held to his mouth before he takes another, less theatric sip.
“With—?”
“The hair. Doesn’t cover that smile you’re always so cute when you think you’re hiding it.”
It’s so flirty, she almost reacts on instinct. Is almost taken back to junior year when he was so charmingly cocky, happy to call her out because he knew she’d slap at him, pretending to be offended when really her crush was as obvious then as it apparently is now.
“Looks good, by the way,” he adds, eyebrows rising.
The compliment washes over her strangely. First, like a lie. The haircut was what men do when they hit fifty and think their lives are suddenly over. It was like a midlife crisis, except she got it cut thinking she’d feel new after, fresh, unrecognizable from her old self. But she looks in the mirror and still finds the same ol’ Nancy looking back, lost as ever.
She also feels the truth in it. He means it, he isn’t just saying it like some kinda line she’s supposed to be flattered by.
“Same to you,” she throws back with the same honesty.
He huffs, running a hand down the back of his head where it’s grown the longest. “Really? Because I hate. Makes me look like one of the dads in the bleachers, pushing middle age.”
Mask, she thinks again.
“I mean, no one’s going to see it and call you ‘the Hair’...” she breaks the news to him with, teasing to lessen the sting.
He pretends to be gutted, wincing like she wounded him.
“But. It’s not bad.”
“Not bad,” he repeats like a death sentence. “Well, Crystal likes it, so.” Right. His girlfriend. The reminder makes her feel like shit for about, oh, a hundred reasons, most too complicated to think about. But it’s hard to ignore that jealousy is one that lingers the longest. “Of course, she also likes New Kids on the Block,” he confides with a face that expresses deep horror. “She keeps telling me I should style my hair like one of ‘em. Hence—” He sweeps his hand over his head.
She’s aghast, the mood lightened a little. “Steve.”
“Obviously I said no. Hell no. But, the hat,” he explains, sad little dip in his voice, hand doing a ‘so this is the best you’re gonna get’ gesture of defeat. “Perma-dad hair.”
“I know half a dozen girls who would be devastated.” When his eyes find hers, big with betrayal, she adds, “And a half dozen more who’d throw themselves at your feet for just a date. Or so I hear,” and she gives him her own look.
He shakes his head. “Goddamn Robin.”
“Hey, it’s hot gossip. It’s part of my journalistic integrity to dig for it.”
“Squeezing your source?”
“She gives it up so easy,” she confirms.
“She does talk a lot. Like a lot.” There’s a beat, and then, “I, uh, never really hear any of that gossip come my way…” and he trails off pointedly.
“Are you asking?” When he gives her a slight nod back, she scoots forward to put her barely touched drink on the ground. It’s easy to come clean. “There’s no one.”
He scoffs. “Seriously? Because,” he gestures at her, then does it again more emphatically, and when she gets it, her face burns hot. “Lots of blind guys in Boston or something?”
“There have been…” she struggles before saying, “some…”
He points. “A-ha! I knew it.”
“Not—like that,” she makes sure to insist.
Steve takes a sip, like he’s fortifying himself, and then sets his can next to hers. When he looks over again, he’s much more serious about it, almost nervous. “One of them ever happen to be Byers?”
Though her heart does skip, as it seems it might always do at the thought of what she once had with Jonathan, it’s easy to repress. She misses the safety net but she doesn’t miss everything else that came with it.
“No,” she tells him. His expression says he doesn’t believe it, and she insists, “No. I mean, we almost, one time, before I left—but, no. And it would’ve just been meaningless sex, not anything real.”
He looks like he’s processing this. If she expected surprise at their near relapse, she doesn’t get it. Maybe he thinks her and him are destined to gravitate in and out of each other’s lives, always coming back to each other, never over the other.
It’s a depressing thought she hates might be hanging around inside his head somewhere. She wonders if last night was a small percentage of what Steve must’ve felt, all that time she wasted pretending her relationship with Jonathan wasn’t over.
After a prolonged beat, Steve leans back, the aluminum chair creaking as he goes. It feels like he’s putting space between them on purpose. “Hey, meaningless sex? Not overrated.”
It’s a brush-off she doesn’t want to relent to. She can’t help herself from looking over her shoulder and going, “Yeah? And wouldn’t you know?” It sounds meaner than she means for it to. She can tell by the ways his eyes fill with hurt that it lands. “Steve,” she starts to try and take it back, but he rocks forward and gets up, pacing a couple feet away.
“What are we doing here, Nancy?” he asks, throwing his arms out wide.
She’s not stupid. She knows what he means. Knows it by the way he says Nancy and not Nance..
But she says, “We’re talking. We’re catching up—”
“Don’t,” he tells her, swinging back her way. “Don’t bullshit me.”
She stands up, feeling things unraveling, desperate to hold on. “I’m not.”
“So you, what, you want to hang out, just the two of us? All of a sudden? After being all weird last night—”
“I wasn’t—” He doesn’t let her lie, cuts it off with a stare. The truth of it strikes at something inside her, something ugly and embarrassing, that makes her lash out, “Oh, and it was perfectly normal for you? Yeah, sorry that I was a little unsettled sitting at the table with, who is it, girlfriend number—what are we on now? Nine? Ten?”
He steps forward, looking hurt and offended. “And you’re so perfect, I guess. Left Hawkins, left your friends—”
“I didn’t—”
“Some of us don’t get that, Nance. You wanna know what I figured out that year—the military, the quarantine, all of us trapped here? You already knew I’d never make it out. Even with the gates gone. You knew this was all I was ever good for, that’s why you never—” He swallows the rest of his words and looks away, pinching the bridge of his nose with a quiet, emotional curse.
She hates that he thinks that of her. That she would ever be so shallow, think so little of him, think any of that would even matter.
“Actually,” she says, voice tight, “what I spent a lot of that year thinking was, ‘I hope no one else dies.’ Wasn’t really time for thinking what could come after.” She takes a step toward him. “I had a boyfriend.”
“And I have a girlfriend,” he throws back, only seeming to realize the weight of it when she reacts, the sting of it visible across her face. And then, all the fight gets knocked out of him and he deflates, muttering, “Maybe,” as he turns away again.
It’s embarrassing how immediately she latches onto that.
“What?” At his reluctance to elaborate, she closes the gap between them. They’re close to the edge of the roof where there’s a perfect sunset view. “Steve.”
“C’mon. Like I don’t get stupidly obvious around you.”
She says again, “What?”
He sighs. “I… may have maybe talked about a certain ex of mine who did a number on my noggin. Crystal, she put two and two together the second I came back inside last night. Clocked me pretty fast.” He laughs at himself, self-deprecating. “Left."
Nancy, to her credit, feels her heart pounding in her chest and is trying not to act rashly about it.
This is what she’s been missing with other guys. That thump that beats so fast, it almost makes her sick. The kind of wanting that aches. The thought of what are you waiting for? the loudest in her head.
She used to look at Steve and envy his certainty. The dream he told her about never scared her because she was in it, it terrified her because she didn’t know how to find her way to it.
She thought she’d figure it all out, figure herself out, once she got to Emerson, but even on the drive there, Hawkins getting further and further behind her, it didn’t feel like the restart she wanted it to be.
It felt like an easy escape.
Even now, released of it, she still wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes wondering what comes next.
She’s never going to get the answers if she doesn’t make any moves.
“Something else I thought about that year?” Her voice trembles as she tells him. “Steve makes me laugh. His sound effects are really lame—they were,” she insists when he opens his mouth, “but, I love them. They brighten my morning. He’s smart,” she continues, and she has to cut off his protests again. “He leads, he comes up with brilliant ideas. He looks hot in a leather jacket.”
He tries to underplay the impact her words are having on him, saying, “Well, of course,” like his attractiveness is a given.
“Steve, you’ve always known what you wanted and that’s… so real and so scary to me.”
“Does this look like I know what I want? I got the job at the school because the town did some bullshit ‘let’s thank him for saving our lives with a pity fake-degree' and even then the best I got was Sex Ed.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He looks deep into her eyes—she lets him, lets him find what he’s searching for—and then his own blow open wide.
“You mean—? My feelings, you’re—?”
“Scared less and less,” she admits.
He tilts his head. “And that means—?”
“I guess… I’m figuring out I don’t need it all figured out.”
She watches as hope slowly spreads across his face, as his eyes light up with it. Practically vibrating with the urge to act, she doesn’t overthink it, just launches herself at him for a hug he immediately reciprocates, something that's a long time overdue.
Eyes closed, she feels the sway from the force of it until he straightens them out. She burrows against his chest, has his face in her hair, arms wrapped tight around each other, fingers fisted in fabric.
Under the cologne, she can smell the baseball field, and she breathes it all in, missing him.
He’s as reluctant to let go as she is. When they do, still standing so close, his eyes drop to her mouth.
“What do we do about it?” He’s still just staring at her mouth. To be fair, she’s also looking at his, which makes him have to ask, “Nance?”
++
This is what they do:
The day before Nancy leaves for Boston, Steve shows up with a camper hitched to the back of his pickup truck.
Nancy, in the driveway of her childhood home, stands flushed head to toe, a whole lot smitten and a whole lot horny. Proactive Steve, as it turns out, is a turn-on.
He looks nervous about it, unsure, telling her, “Not exactly the luxury-home-on-wheels I was imagining, but I used half of what I’d saved up, figured the rest would go toward—you okay?” he asks out of concern when she finds herself getting emotional.
Because he’s got that look like he thinks she’s starting to regret things, she quickly controls herself, doesn’t want any reason for his doubt to creep in.
“Well? Do I get a tour?”
Once inside, Steve starts fretting about some stains on the couch, the size of the bed, the way the overhead light kinda coughs weakly on when the flick is switched—but all she sees is freedom and adventure, possibility as endless as they want to make it.
She quiets his worries with a kiss that startles him into silence, his eyes still open when her mouth lands on his. He catches on quick, though, going from dazed to groping at her to pull her closer.
She’s got just enough sense to grapple behind her, find the door knob, hope to god it latches when she pulls it shut as he’s tugging her toward the back.
The back of his knees hitting the edge of the mattress makes him break away, pausing to rest his forehead against hers and ask, “You sure?” with this hitch in his voice.
He’s not just talking about sex.
“About the only thing I’m sure of,” she breathes out with meaning.
She gets a wonderful few seconds to watch him pull back and be floored by it before he lifts her by the waist, spinning them around less suavely than he was going for because the space is so small—but she’s smiling as he saves them from toppling over, one hand braced against the wall—before he slides her onto the bed more carefully, only letting go when her head is on the pillow.
He stands there and looks down at her, cheeks a little pink from embarrassment, and she sees in his eyes, so openly, all the same things she’s seen the last couple of years and has only ever run away from.
How could this ever have scared her?
Slowly, he joins her, a knee braced on the outside of her leg, the other between her thighs. It’s there that he stops to take his shirt off, silently checking again beforehand that she’s sure.
She grabs his shirt by the sleeves and helps him out of it, in response. It gets flung to the floor somewhere, leaving him with some errant curly tufts on top of his head. He’s been wearing his hair closer to how she—he—likes it again.
He lowers himself above her, until his weight’s pressing her into the mattress. It creaks and groans and definitely has a musty smell, but she slides her palms around the back of his head, clenches the longer strands, and guides him back to her, mouths meeting with obvious heat.
He starts pulling at the bottom of her shirt—she lifts just enough for him to peel it off, and then they’re right back to kissing, even as she fumbles for his zipper, as he reaches for hers. Pants and then underwear get shucked off pretty quickly, and she’s gotta stop and actually take a moment when she feels him hard against her.
It’s been a long time since they’ve had each other like this. And by the end, it wasn’t exactly romantic or happy.
He brushes her bangs out of her face, smiling down at her. “Blows my mind how beautiful you are,” he murmurs dazedly, mesmerized by what he finds looking back at him.
She’d feel self-conscious, but his dick has rubbed a wet smear high up her thigh, his attraction to her not exactly going unnoticed here.
“Then do something about it,” she tells him with enough command, he does exactly that.
++
Showing Steve around Boston is its own dream.
He felt out of place at first, she could tell, uncomfortable with the idea he was messing up the routine she falls back into, one she didn’t even realize she missed until it’s hers again.
But it doesn’t take long for him to become part of it.
Wake up, fool around a little. Take a shower together. He grabs coffee while she scours the fridge for something edible. When she heads to work, he goes out, figures out the restaurants with the food he prefers, forms his own opinion about which store to get their groceries at, decides which park’s his favorite. He tries to be subtle about the jobs he looks at in the Classified section of the newspaper Nancy brings home to show off the article’s she’s punched up. She tries not to get her hopes up.
It’s fun, and easy, and when Steve has to head back to Hawkins after a week of it, all the time off he could get, she has to swallow down the feeling they’ll never get it back.
He’s got his truck and the trailer parked on the street across from her apartment building. There’s a parking enforcement officer who’s been circling, which means the goodbye is quicker than either would want it to be.
They’ve already gotten through the bittersweet part of it, facing each other now with the reluctant realization it’s time.
“What do you think, I bring Henderson up next time? Show him around?”
To her one bedroom apartment?
There is a buzz to it, that he wants to bring his important people around. But still.
“I mean. You’d be okay without—?” She widens her eyes until he fills it in.
Sex. She means sex.
“Maybe he sleeps in the camper.”
She rolls her eyes at him, making them both smile. Inevitably the sadness creeps back in.
“See ya in a month?” He’s trying to stay positive, but there’s a catch in his voice that gives him away. She can’t say she isn’t right there with him.
She’s got an ‘I love you’ that’s so close to being said, her tongue feels thick from it. But she doesn’t want it to be a goodbye, or the thing that he gives up his life in Hawkins for.
There’s no guarantee here. Just the trust that they’ll figure it out together now.