Archive of Our Own

By two o’clock, the cigarette packet they shared between them was low enough that Jonathan had pushed himself off of the bed, his hair twisted in the back into knots from Steve pouncing onto him and forcing him into the sheets, and he suggested sheepishly, “Maybe we should go out. Go to the store.” He stroked his hand down Steve’s shin and then pulled his hand up to kiss his knuckles. “I can cook you dinner later, if you’d like.” 

From the spot on Jon’s bed, where Steve had an arm behind his head and the ends of a burning cigarette nestled in his mouth, he could see the flush that spread from the bottom of Jon’s earlobe down into the collar of the t-shirt he’d slung on about fifteen minutes ago. The t-shirt, black with a wrinkled, peeling design on the front, had streaks of cum across it that clenched the fabric into spirals where Jon’s hands had pinched it as he had run across both of their bellies once they were finished. It was a far sight from the box of tissues that Steve kept in his bedroom for himself and the three flannels in rotation in his en suite bathroom for anybody who stopped over. Women didn’t want clumps of toilet paper or the smear of a shirt; they wanted a warm, wet towel and Steve’s mouth on the inside of their thigh. Steve, however, wanted the rasp of Jon’s tongue to clean him up, but he wouldn’t argue with the soft, over-washed fabric of his clothing either. He’d mark it like that. He wondered if he could somehow coerce Jon into leaving with the t-shirt still on so that he might wander around his new neighbour, slathered in Steve’s ejaculate, like some sort of dirty art project. 

“Dinner would be really nice, thank you,” Steve whispered, not quite able to find his voice after letting himself destroy his throat groaning and gasping into Jon’s shoulder as the man trapped below Steve had jerked them off, both pressed tightly together in his hand as Steve hovered above him with Jon’s thighs clamped on either side of him. No other way had been viable, given how worked up they had been, just about lucid enough to yank down their underwear to beneath their balls and rut against each other before Jon’s fist sealed the deal. Jon’s slightly coffee-stained teeth had been exposed as his lips peeled back and he’d almost snarled at Steve when he’d climbed atop his lap and luxuriously rolled his hips back and forth, putting a hand onto Jon’s convex ribcage to steady himself as he felt the hysteria as it took over. He had wanted to hurt Jon. He had wanted Jon to hurt him. That way they could take it right back to the beginning and make it all right from then onwards. Reset and redo everything, right from the time they’d been beating the shit out of each other on the streets of Hawkins.

But Jon hadn’t hurt him, and neither had he in return. What he had done was lean down and kiss him, open-mouthed and softer than a kiss should be when your tongue was in someone else’s mouth, and then splattered cum onto Jon’s fist and up his own sternum with the force of someone who hadn’t touched themselves in almost two weeks for fear that somebody in his home might hear him moaning Jon’s name around the fingers he’d stuffed into his mouth. 

“There’s a great music store down the block. Tons of great restaurants, too, if you were ever—you know—if you wanted to do that.” Sadly, Jon had started to pull off the soiled t-shirt and changed into a shirt, his fingers shaking gently as he buttoned himself up. Remnants of leftover adrenaline zigzagging its way around his nervous system like speeding cars racing down backcountry roads. Potholed outskirts that caused a lack of inhibitions. That sort of thing. The thrill of the chase and the smell of Steve’s sweat and tears still in his sinuses, Steve could see it in the damp shine of Jon’s eyes as he pulled on a pair of jeans and watched as Steve slid his hand down his belly and into his pubes. His tongue dipped into his bottom lip as he continued to watch him, depressing the flesh in the centre as he zipped up his fly and muttered, “Get out of bed, Harrington.” 

“You want to take me out for dinner?” Steve shifted on the bed. A winding river of musty sheets pooled up from the valley of his hips and followed along to his chest, where it puddled. “That’s cute. Real cute.” He watched as Jon spidered his fingers onto his hips as he stood, watching Steve with a silent kind of curiosity that, previously, Steve might have found creepy. But there, in the bedroom, he just looked pretty. “I’m interested to find out what was keeping Nance around for so long.” 

Jon scoffed, suddenly plastering on a sour face as he turned towards the doorway and wandered off. Not without tossing back a gripe of, “Get the fuck out of my bed.” 

All appeared to be forgiven, though, by the time they were out on the street. All signs pointed towards a truce as Steve let Jon steer him towards the nearest bodega, his hand in the small of his back as they lingered around the cluttered aisles inside of it and argued over which sandwiches to buy and what flavour drink to get. All the while, a round orange cat watched them from a crushed chips box that he had made his bed in. It watched them with its green eyes, blinking slowly when Jonathan slid across the money for foil-wrapped, hot rolls, their snacks, and a handful of cigarette packets. The reasoning for that, Jonathan had said sagely, was that the less they needed to leave the apartment to buy smokes, the more time they could spend spinning records, getting off, and arguing. Hot cheese and yolk spilt over Steve’s finger in rivulets as he laughed on a street just off from Greenwich Avenue, butting his forehead into Jon’s shoulder blades softly as he let the warmth from the roll seep into the frigid ends of his digits and he spluttered, “Come on, man, arguing? I thought the whole point of this was that we were past being at each other’s throats all the fucking time?” 

Jon picked swiss from his sandwich, sticking it into his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and making Steve feel soupy and unstable inside. Turned upside down and then right side up again, feeling everything slosh around, hitting the edges. It wasn’t made any easier, either, when Jon, around a mouthful of mushed-up bread and egg, said, “I always thought that was part of the charm.” The city was louder than Steve had expected and the sound of the cars drowned out the muffled laugh that left Jon in a burst of sound before he said secretively, “You call me a pervert; I fuck your girlfriend.” 

“Jesus Christ, Byers,” Steve laughed, “that’s cheap, even for your broke ass.” 

“I still bought you lunch.” Tentatively, Jon’s hand moved around again to the small of Steve’s back, nestling itself in, secreted away from the passersby that listed past as they leant against the freezing stone of one of New York’s dauntlessly huge buildings. They were thankfully small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things when Steve let his shoulders thump into the granite and felt how Jon’s tireless want was translated into him being unable to keep his hands to himself. In Hawkins, he could have shot away like a cat on a hot tin roof, but here, in the middle of a city that was ruthlessly ambivalent to two men skulking on a street, he allowed his eyes to follow the path of Jon’s profile. He watched as Jon’s nostrils flared and his lips parted, as his own sandwich rested on the edge of his chin, leaving a greasy smudge, and Jon said, “You know, as weird as it sounds, I enjoyed what we had—the almost-boring, high school rivalry shit. It was something that was so benign compared to everything else that was happening.” He finished his roll, balling up the foil and then shoving it into the pocket of his jeans before he lit up a cigarette. The mechanical clink of his lighter as his thumb pulled down on it was somehow louder than the bustle in the street and Steve began eating ever faster to try and get closer to being able to do the same. “It was childish and stupid,” Jon said around the cigarette, “and that’s why it was—it was fun. For what it was. It was fun.” 

The lighter was passed between them and that’s when Steve realised something. “You don’t smoke,” he said, then laughed and went to pull the cigarette from Jon’s mouth, but he ducked out of the way before Steve’s fingers could connect with it. “No, no. Come on. You fucking hate cigarettes. Nance told me—she fucking told me!”

“Yeah, well,” Jon began, “maybe I started today.” 

Despite the fact there was most definitely piss along the skirted edges of the sidewalk, mysterious watery puddles that were drawing Steve’s eye despite his best efforts to look away, and a cloud of cigarette smoke around the two of them like they were in another world, all Steve wanted was to pitch forward and kiss Jon on the mouth. Maybe on the delicate tip of his nose afterwards. He’d wanted to kiss him hard when they’d been in that vast, sombre world that had been threatening to come crashing down, too. Back when Jonathan had smirked at him and told him that he still didn’t like him. Steve knew it was a lie. Big, fat, stinking lie. 

The climb back up the stairs to Jon’s apartment, with the wood groaning beneath their feet and the sporadic juts of light through the punched-out windows that were cut squarely into the stone, was meandering and full of Jon’s hands roaming around Steve’s ass as he tried to dart out of the way. The stairwell echoed with bright laughter until Jon’s door was kicked shut and Steve’s face was stuck into his neck, where it smelt like cigarette smoke Jon shouldn’t have been inhaling. Jon’s fingers still had remnants of congealed cheese from where it had melted onto them when they drifted up the edge of Steve’s arm, leaking little yellow crumbles that he tutted at and brushed away as Jon giggled. 

“It’ll kill you.” Steve’s mouth moved over Jon’s skin and he walked him backwards towards where the trampled, lurid orange rug drew a ragged circle on the floorboards. Everything in the apartment was second-hand and pre-loved, gathering footsteps and memories from somebody else before it had fallen into Jon’s possession. It matched the interior of the previous Byers’ homes. Old tat that had been repurposed and turned into a home. Steve had always thought that about Jon’s house back home in Hawkins. Somebody loved it. Nothing clinical, unlike the polished edges of his family home and the swimming pool out back, turning green from disuse. 

“What will?” Jon had a dopey look in his eyes. His hands never stopped moving on Steve erratically, sucking in his details, feeling him out. Understanding what was in front of him as he tripped lightly on the rug. 

“The cigarettes,” Steve said. 

“Maybe I just wanted something to share with you,” Jon said, the words getting garbled up in his mouth as he tried to futilely swallow all of the saliva that was piling up like rainwater in a catcher. “Shit—Steve.” There was a thump that went through the whole apartment as Steve’s knees hit the floor. “Is that so stupid? Wanting to do something with you, just because it’s you?” 

“We can find something that isn’t smoking.” Steve could hardly get the words out from around his teeth. His fingers were barely able to catch on Jon’s zipper, too big and clumsy as Jon pushed his fingers through his hair. They spun around the ends of it, letting the strands slip between them. Below, Steve opened his mouth and let it form around Jon’s erection, speaking into the skin and the fabric of his underwear through the triangle of his open fly. “Something we can share.” 

It wasn’t so bad. The rug underneath his knees was pilled up, clumps of synthetic wool that rose and fell in thick balls beneath him. He could feel every single one of them and smell the mildew that was embedded into the corners of the building like fragments of the Upside Down that had followed them, even there. He inhaled hard, both to smell it all and also to try and retain some oxygen as Jon’s cock filled his mouth. He couldn’t get much of it in and the edges of his lips pulled tight like saran wrap, he could almost hear the creak of his jaw as Jon made a small apology and put the flat of his palm on Steve’s brow to shove him away. A string of spit was knitted between his cockhead and Steve’s mouth and it snapped in a moment before Jon was joining Steve on the floor and begging, “Let me fuck you. I—I want to fuck you. Can I? Please, Steve, let me.” 

“I don’t know—” Steve had to stop to let Jon bite his mouth, drawing blood to the wobbly, dashed lines on his lip that it left, making it go almost purple in the afternoon light that was battling through Jon’s filthy, dirt-streaked windows. The rain had oil in it over there. Sea creatures. Messy sluices of life that left streaks from the sheets that battered against the buildings while Steve was across the country, sleeping in his childhood bed and just wanting to be with the kids again. Robin. Nance and Jon. Anyone who knew why he pissed the bed at age nineteen because he was so scared he had died in his sleep, alone in a faraway world he still had yet to truly comprehend. “Jon, I don’t know how.” 

“Me either,” Jon laughed out the words, clasping Steve’s cheeks and kissing him. “I could take a guess. Stab in the dark.” He licked over his chin. Sloppy swipes of the muscle as Steve whined and shoved a hand down into the pilled rug to try and steady himself as Jon attacked him, rabid, like a newly cut-loose animal. “I—I’ve got condoms. Over in the bedroom. I’ve got a nice, soft bed, perfect for a prom king.” He was rambling, dick still springing out of his fly almost comically, pink and thick, as Steve tried not to laugh too hard at how ridiculous the situation was. “Nance thought I was gentle when—when it was me and her. I won’t hurt you.” 

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I know.” 

“Do you want a beer?” Jon hadn’t bothered to pull either of them off the floor and they looked stupid, both kneeling still down there, with the crumbs and dirt that Jon hadn’t even begun to notice. Steve would have offered to clean the whole place if it solidified his place in Jon’s life, as embarrassing as that thought was, as he used Jon’s shoulders to lift himself to his feet, stumbling slightly on that damn rug while Jon tucked himself away, still hard, and said, “We could watch a tape otherwise, if you want. Smoke some hash. I’ve got some in the bedroom. It’s good. Make you forget all about—well—just about everything.” 

“I thought you were done with getting stoned,” Steve said, finding that his mouth still tasted like the salty, sort of gummy taste of Jon’s cock when he tucked the tip of his tongue against his back molars. It didn’t taste a great deal like pussy, less tangy and more earthy. Musky. Unpleasant in a way that made him horny and want to figure out the ins and outs of Jon’s proposal. So he grabbed a fresh cigarette from his jacket pocket, lit it up, and murmured, “Don’t need hash. Or beer, for that matter. But, if you’re willing to give it a go, I’ll let you do me.” 

“Yeah?” Jon sounded breathless. He scampered up, a spring in his step which Steve hadn’t seen before. He wondered if he’d been puppyish and giddy with Nance when she’d started offering up things onto the table when it came to the physical side of their relationship. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it might to linger on the idea. That was the past, like him and her were. Just childhood nothings that amounted to nothing and would stay nothing, because this was now. Plus, it was hard to ignore the subtle twitch of Jon’s chest beneath his shirt as he worked himself up over the alluring possibility of getting Steve back into bed with him and there it was again. The power of it all. It was like a tremor beneath the streets, infinitesimally small until it was compounded into an earthquake that was shaking the windows and driving Steve to grab Jon’s wrist and tug him into the bedroom. Somewhere that the two of them shouldn’t have ever been exploring together, but just like your life could change in a second in Hawkins, Indiana, so could it in a miniscule apartment off of Soho. Steve had seen a shed cicada once. Peeled-away skin was just the beginning when it came to the entire physiological difference between himself at age sixteen and the man smoking a cigarette as Jonathan Byers pulled his jeans down to his thighs at age twenty-three. 

“Finish that,” Jon said, nudging his head towards the cigarette in between Steve’s fingers, his own hands battling with getting Steve’s jeans past his knees as he made no attempt to assist him. If Jon was going to be in charge, he’d be in charge of it all, not just the fun parts. 

“I’m getting there; hold your horses,” Steve replied before tapping ash into Jon’s hair and smiling as he batted his hand over the crown of his head. Not quite willing to scold Steve for it, in case that would send him back down his burrow. Jon was clever, exceptionally clever, and to lure something out, you didn’t go in all guns blazing. So he kissed the bare skin of Steve’s thighs in front of him and let a rush of breath out against him, warming where he’d left traces of saliva, little bits of him and his DNA, smeared across Steve. Neither of them was getting out of this without being identified.

The jeans piled at Steve’s ankles and both of them exhaled. Frighteningly, there was no record playing, the only accompaniment being the slew of horns sounding down below and the constant drip of Jon’s leaky kitchenette tap as it fell and splattered onto the pile of pans he had lurking in there, begging to be washed. To which Steve’s fingers itched to pull on some gloves and get down to business, just so Jon might nod his head and tell him that he’d done such a good job that he should stay longer than the handful of days they had together. Stay forever. And then some. 

“Step out,” Jon murmured. He had a particular tone of voice that, despite the way it wobbled around in pitch, giving away the fact he was nervous, remained absolute. Steve didn’t have to think. He just simply put one hand onto Jon’s shoulders and stepped one foot, then the other, out of his jeans and sucked on his cigarette until it was close enough to the filter that he felt comfortable smashing it into a coffee cup that Jon had, moulding, on his work desk behind them. Jon made a sound around the back of his throat as though he didn’t approve of that, but Steve drifted his fingers through his hair, no doubt rubbing in the ash, and he relented quickly with a muttered, “Take your shirt off. Please.” 

“What about you?” Steve said, muffled into his shirt as it wormed its way over his face and then ended up on top of his jeans in a heap on the floorboards. It was just chilly enough that Steve could see the alert spring of his arm hair, standing to attention as he was studied by Jon from his position still knelt on the floor, like a knight, waiting to be touched upon the shoulders and granted some sort of great honour. Which was fitting. Steve had always thought that those who he ended up getting into bed with were being bestowed something special, and when he had told Robin that, she’d laughed right in his face and changed the subject. “Are you going to take any clothes off or—what? Just me?” 

To make a point, Steve let his ass meet the edge of the bed, still rumpled and fusty from where they had been messing around earlier. He shuffled back, stretching out one leg and pulling up the other into a bent peak, his hands laced together at his middle with an elbow resting on the bed to steady himself. He didn’t smile. He didn’t raise any eyebrows or do anything that could be construed as flirting. He just sat there, waiting for Jon to do something. He knew he was gorgeous. He always had done.

Jon visibly and audibly swallowed. His face was pale, even more so than usual, and he put a hand over his belly. An unconscious motion that suggested to Steve that the hunger had leached into him, spread like spores in the air, and breathed out from Steve’s body and ingested into Jon’s. His insides must have been black and rough with the way they’d been dancing around each other for months, festering this strange, new hunger that made Jon clutch his stomach like a little kid, trying to find the words to explain why he hurt. In a couple of months, Steve would be twenty-four. The yearly anniversary of the kids’ graduation had been and gone in the blink of an eye, a stark reminder Steve had been chewing on his nails and rocking on his heels the whole time, wondering about whether it would be better to never open his mouth again or let all that infection come spilling out. Over a year of hanging on the phone, listening to Nance and Robin discreetly chide him for not exhaling. Over a year of rejecting Jon’s invitations to visit him with a wave of a nonchalant hand and a shrug, telling him that he had work. 

None of that felt like it mattered when Jon, keeping the hand on his belly, rubbing it in circles, said, “I just thought it would be nice to look at you.” He stepped forward. Closing in on the bed and making Steve feel like he’d been rolled out flat, left to dry. Mangled in such a way that all that was left was the base instinct to lie on his back and open his limbs. “I didn’t—earlier, I didn’t really get much of a chance to look properly. I was preoccupied.” 

“What?” Steve was well-versed in faux bravado and he spun it naturally. “Never had a guy as hot as me in your bed?”

The edges of Jon’s mouth turned down, but it wasn’t exactly a frown. “Of course I haven’t.” He inhaled, expanding his body like an animal puffing itself up to survive danger, even as he lowered his shoulders and morphed into something paradoxically predatory. But not in the way that Steve had cruelly insinuated when they were kids. In a way that made his guts have to readjust themselves, ready to allow something to breach him. Nature followed a course, and that course for him, in that moment, was showing the channel of his throat and hoping it would all be over soon. Which was made worse as Jon’s clothes brushed against his bare skin, sending goosebumps bubbling across it, and he said slowly, “It’s only ever been Nancy, for me,” then, “and—uh—you.” 

“Oh, fuck,” Steve sobbed. Genuinely sobbed. Slapping a hand over his eyes as Jon kissed his knee, then his thigh, then his hips. Up, up, up. Until he was grazing his teeth over his belly, clamping down on where Steve had started to get fat from too much beer and his father’s genes making themselves known. Not that he minded. Perversely, he liked to lie in bed and cup his hand over the lump of fat that sat at the bottom of his belly and rounded his hips and pretend that—well. That was for him to know and nobody to ever find out. “Jon. Fuck. Jon, can you take your fucking clothes off and come kiss me or something?” 

Not overly eloquent, but it did its job.

“Is that all you’re crying about?” Jon’s hands pushed Steve’s thighs apart, moving between them before he acquiesced and undid enough buttons on his shirt that he could then wrench it off. “What a hard life, Harrington. Once a spoilt brat, always a spoilt brat. Crying just because you need me to fuck you that bad.” 

Steve laughed. He was incapable of making any other sound, because if he had, he would have started moaning and never stopped. He was dizzy and faint, trapped in the high beams of Jonathan’s unshaken gaze, hopping right down the path he’d been laying as some uncharacteristically adept hunter. He might as well have drawn a target on his forehead with Nance’s red lipstick. Somehow, he blamed her for this. If she hadn’t put the two of them in such close proximity, he might have come out unscathed from a hammered-together love triangle that slipped out of its fittings and somehow became a straight line, just for the two of them. Meanwhile, Nance was surely laughing somewhere. Smug. Pleased. 

“Shit,” Steve breathed, “you mean it, don’t you?” 

“I’ve got experience in the area.” Jon smiled. Not quite a smirk, but it had the makings of one. 

It had its intended effect though, and Steve pulled a face and said, “I don’t need to know.” 

“Really? Here I was, thinking that you might be interested in all the ways I could make Nance come that you couldn’t.” 

Steve laughed again, delirious. “Shut the fuck up, man.” 

“Hey,” Jon said, sort of conspiratorially, “you’d tell me though, wouldn’t you?” Jon toyed with the edges of Steve’s underwear, playing with the elastic that was starting to wear out, and Steve took the initiative to start unzipping him, reaching into the warm space in between his jeans and underwear. Cupping his dick into his hand as Jon shut his eyes and ignored it while he said, “If you changed your mind about any of this. If you just wanted to take things slow. I—I’d be super cool with that. I’m not trying to push you or anything, I swear.” 

“Jonathan,” Steve said, “it’s okay. I want it.” The ‘you’ was unspoken in place of the word ‘it’. But the look on Jon’s face, pink and taken aback, meant that he could read right between the lines, especially when Steve pushed his hand into his boxers and pulled him down by the back of the neck. He angled their mouths together with a sigh that bubbled up over a year of thinking about what Jon’s bed might feel like underneath his back as he twisted about on top of it, inexperienced and full of the emptiness that had perpetuated his existence since they’d killed Henry Creel. As he craned his face up, he realised that he expected Jon’s bed to be a lot less comfortable, assuming that Jon slept on rocks and walked around in the dark to save money. Which was just a moronic leftover from Steve’s snooty upbringing, hanging around like a bad smell. 

When Jon’s jeans and underwear came off, as had Steve’s, Jon knelt in between Steve’s thighs. An air that emanated from Steve’s unexpected subjugation held him upright as he put a firm hand into the top layer of Steve’s muscle on his thigh and he observed him with those same plum-coloured, harrowingly deep eyes. The darkness that was shuttered from his forehead downwards made Steve have to open his mouth to be able to get enough oxygen into his body, panting like livestock in the perpendicular, metal railings. Clanging about hectically before the boltgun was lifted between his eyes. He couldn’t help the way that his hands drifted to Jon’s cock, thin and long, bigger than his and pinker at the head, rather than the deep colour his went when he was hard. His hip bones were sharp and prominent, rising distinctly out of his thin, pale skin as Steve jerked his fist around him, watching the way his foreskin had pulled back. It wasn’t anything new. Steve wasn’t cut either, but whereas it was something he’d never think about on himself, watching the head of Jon’s cock peek out from the skin as his dick filled up, it was aggravatingly moreish to play with him. Running his finger along the slit, rubbing the skin on the underside. It wasn’t hurried or chaotic like it had been when Jon had been touching them both earlier. Steve had the time to run his palm over the hot skin and then down to hold him in the circle of his fingers, feeling the scratch of his pubes against his palm as he waved Jon’s erection back and forth. Playing, just playing. Having fun. Breaking the tension until Jon was laughing and leaning forward to kiss him. 

“Stop messing around,” he muttered into Steve’s mouth, nestling their erections together and rolling his hips until Steve could have imagined the ever-growing pit in his body that sought something to fill it in. It was endless. Vying for friends, acceptance, love, sex, success and, most of all, as he let him chew on his neck with such ferocity that Steve was afraid his veins might burst, the big, black pit in him wanted Jonathan. Out of everybody. Wasn’t that just the biggest joke to come out of the whole process of saving the world multiple times before he’d seen his twenty-fifth birthday?

“What are you going to do, Byers?” He ached for a swift slap to the face and then a kiss to chase it, but he knew Jonathan wouldn’t fall into the folly of Steve’s stranger proclivities that easily. He was, above everything, a sweet, kind boy. He just fought well because he was loyal to a fault and pushed back against Steve’s past snideness with the gusto that Steve had enjoyed back in the day. He envisioned their future fights as something that would be groundbreaking and riding the line between sexual deviancy and ultra-violence. “You going to put me in my place? Like you always wanted to do back in high school?” 

“Do you want me to do that?” The sincerity of the question was ugly. Or, maybe just hard to bear, because Steve shrank under Jon and had only one answer to give. 

“No,” he said quietly, “not really. Not this time, I guess.” 

“Steve—do you want me to take care of you?” Ignored at their middles was the fact that Jon was still grinding their erections together, clammy and slippery, the same kind of feeling that Steve would get all the way in his ribcage when he’d rub himself against someone’s open cunt. Sometimes, not that he’d want to admit it, he enjoyed it more than any sort of penetration, because he liked to watch the minutiae of the girls’ faces when they realised that their bodies were concaving in on themselves to finally get him inside of them. With Jon’s body on top of his, Steve could feel the way he was moulding into somebody he’d only seen below him. Preening beneath that specific kind of bone-deep sincerity that Jon had perfected as he peered at him and seemed to expect a verbal answer to the prior question. So he repeated himself, giving Steve time to think as he whispered, rubbing their mouths together, “Is that it? Do you need someone to just—you know—be nice to you?” He pushed a finger along Steve’s forehead to drag back a piece of hair, smiling like he was built to be somebody’s rock in the sand. “I can do that. I can fill that part. Can I take care of you?” 

“Yes,” Steve groaned, the sobbing threatening to cut back through like a hysterically wielded blade. “Jon, please. Do it. Whatever you need to do. You have to.” He was going to come from the crush of Jon’s pleased mouth against his own and just their dicks rubbing together. Either that, or he would be sucked down into the bed and flushed out into whatever world was next lined up for him to have the misfortune of encountering. The Abyss had nothing on the vastness of Steve’s need to shove Jon inside of him and let him live there. 

“Okay. Okay. Just chill out.” Jon kissed him in between his words. “Are you always this crazy in bed?” 

“Fuck you, man,” Steve laughed with his eyes closed and his lips chasing Jon’s as he backed away, just so he could look at him. Look at Steve’s body and assess what he was going to do next. Which turned out to be shifting down the bed until he could nuzzle his face into Steve’s chest hair and, without much warning, start sucking on his tits until Steve had cramps in his calves from tensing his whole body in a desperate attempt to not buck Jon off and onto the floor with how good it felt. His chest hair ended up slick and in whorls on his breast, flattened by Jon’s tongue as he used one hand to manacle Steve’s wrists together, holding him at bay until he was happy with how Steve’s heartbeat was throbbing. Galloping, like horse feet. He sucked love bites onto his ribs and neck, like blood-red, rosy medals for Steve to wear underneath his clothing and press his fingers into when he was back in Hawkins for the new school year, ready to teach a new crop of kids how to stand their ground and swing a bat. 

“God,” Jon groaned into Steve’s skin, “you smell good.” He squeezed one of Steve’s breasts in his hand, compressing it into a pert, kissable little mound and he did just that—kissed it. Then he asked with the type of softness that Steve would desperately like to explore with another man, “Is it alright if I get up for a second?” He let Steve’s chest go, leaving dark fingerprints in their wake, and Steve allowed himself to take a gulping breath, so thoroughly turned on that he was going to have to throw away his little book of girls’ numbers. He’d settle for Jon grabbing him by the ass and tits over anything, even if he never had sex again. “I need to get a condom.”

“No,” Steve whined before he could stop himself. “I want to feel you.”

Shuffling back up the bed, Jon pressed his hands into the sides of Steve’s face, cocking his head as he grinned and asked, “Do you really think that’s a good idea? Don’t you teach sex ed?”

“My rationality is generally always outweighed by my horniness and stupidity,” Steve said, trying not to look too disappointed. “Have you ever met me? I had a big, dumb crush on a lesbian for a little while one summer.” 

Jon’s wonky teeth dug into his bottom lip, turning his grin into something bizarre-looking but not unpleasant. “Yeah. Robin told Nance about that. So then, of course, Nance told me.” He swirled a finger around one of Steve’s nipples, pushing it back and forth, making him flop his head back against the pillow and squirm as Jon, weirdly conversationally given the situation, said, “They’re not the greatest at keeping secrets. I think Nance just defaults to telling me everything because we were together for so long. It’s second nature to her now, whether she actively enjoys it or not. I’m always at the end of the phone for her. That’s my problem.” 

“Are you going to tell her about this?” Steve asked, hoping for casualness, even with both of them being completely naked and erect while the conversation was happening. 

Jon shrugged. “Not if you don’t want me to.” He was getting antsy. Drumming his fingers onto Steve’s ribs and glancing off to the side as, despite his adamant contrarianism about it in the time Steve had truly gotten to know him, he still managed to be like any other guy. Wanting to stick his dick into something and come. Even his upbringing, led by one of the kindest women Steve had ever known, was overshadowed by the way that Jon’s cock twitched and the lightning zap sensation of arousal shocked his system. “I don’t mind.”

“Yes, you do,” Steve murmured. “You’re a romantic freak.” 

Jon smiled bashfully. “I might want to tell her. Just a little bit.” Finally, he got up off the bed, forming a picture of outstanding eroticism with his dick protruding from his pelvis and his hair askew. If Steve was in range, he would have clapped a hand onto his ass and watched it shake and turn ruddy. “Like you don’t want to immediately call up Robin and tell her that you’ve had your first experience with the same sex.” 

Another cigarette would have been awfully nice to suck on as Steve watched Jon peel a condom out from a cardboard packet, flipping it around in his fingers as he held up a tube of Astroglide and asked, “This brand okay?” 

“Yeah. Yeah,” Steve murmured, tasting phantom cigarette smoke in his mouth and stroking his cock, just to stay hard while Jon pottered around. “Whatever, man.”

“Dude,” Jon said, “again, you’re the sex ed teacher. You’re being very flippant about this shit. It’s important.” 

“What’s important is you sticking your dick in my ass,” Steve scoffed. “I’m not allergic to it or anything. Trust me, my hand and I have been well acquainted with Astroglide for a long time. Even before you wanted to put it in me.”

“Well, that’s good. But I’m still wearing a condom.” The condom packet slapped onto Steve’s chest from where Jon had tossed it at him. A silver square on his chest breastbone, shiny but not seductive in comparison to his overbearing predilection, completely unbeknownst to anyone, even Robin, for the idea of allowing somebody to come in him. Created from the way girls would clutch at his back and repeat a manic mantra that they were on the pill, it was fine, please, just come in me. Inside, in me. It happened a few too many times that he started to get jealous. Not only were they living his fantasy of being fucked, but they were also allowed the reward of being held down at the end and being filled up. 

He wanted to know what it felt like. If it felt like anything much at all. Or if the glee was from the idea of being claimed. 

He watched as Jon crawled back onto the bed, dragging his palm along Steve’s knee. 

Or, maybe, it was the fear that came from the possibility of being bred. Unlocked like that primal dread that had rocketed Steve to completely decimate a demobat until it was nothing but a spine and red slop on the ground. 

He had always wanted kids. Maybe Jon was the one who might give him that.

It was worth a shot.

“On your back or on your front?” Jon asked, picking up the condom and waving it in front of Steve’s face. “I don’t mind if you have a preference. I mean, I have a preference, obviously.” With a hand below Steve’s knee, he pushed his leg up and to the side, exposing his hole. “I like doggy.” 

“I like missionary,” Steve lied. He also liked doggy. But the idea of not being able to kiss Jon while he fucked him made him want to cry. “So, looks like we’re at an impasse—”

Butting in completely, Jon asked with a rush of breath, “Can I eat you out?” 

The Astroglide in Jon’s hand was about to pop, squirting lube all over the ceiling, if he didn’t loosen his grip and Steve gently peeled it from his grasp before saying jovially, “If I had a pussy, yeah, man. Obviously.” 

Jon frowned at him. “Dude.” 

“What?” 

“I’m just shocked that Steve Harrington’s never stuck his tongue in a girl’s ass before.” 

Steve snorted. “I don’t play around with that kind of thing.” 

“Okay,” Jon said, “I do. Can I eat you out?” 

“Can’t you suck me off instead?” As Steve spoke, Jon’s thumb played with the rim of Steve’s hole before he sucked it into his mouth and went back in again. Steve even watched as he had to slurp up spit that started leaking from the corner of his mouth as he did it, so caught up in touching Steve and thinking about putting his tongue onto that soft spot where his thumb was. Steve’s face fell. Trying not to fall for the act. “It can’t be better than being blown. There’s no fucking way it’s better than getting head.” 

“I can’t imagine it is,” Jon said, still laser-focused on playing with Steve. “But I want to do it anyway. If you say I can.” His eyes rose, finally, and he stared at Steve, pleading with him through his pupils. “Steve—”

“Jesus, I’m guessing the pathetic puppy dog act got you far with Nance, huh?” It also got him far with Steve, because he’d pushed Jon away with the sole of his foot and then swivelled onto his front, with no qualms about soiling his reputation as some kind of big man at all as he slid his shoulders down, keeping his hips up. If anything, it felt natural to spread his thighs and swallow down the nerves as Jon’s eager puffs of breath fanned across his hole. “If I don’t like it though, I’m turning back over and you’re sucking my dick.”  

“You won’t need to turn over,” Jon said. 

Irritatingly, he didn’t need to turn over, as he was struck down with a mortifying case of Jon being completely right, and Steve ended up with his face crushed into the bedding with Jon’s thumbs holding his ass cheeks apart and his tongue lapping at him. Driving Steve up into the bed further with the intensity of it as he tried not to laugh at how absurd it was to be not only in that position but also letting Jonathan Byers treat him like some cheap date. Which, for the record, he was. He put out pretty easily. He craved the immediate validation of someone taking their clothes off in front of him on the first date, coaxed in by that constant, itching thought of, ‘maybe this will be the time that I finally feel something.’ 

He was certainly feeling something in Jon’s apartment, digging his fingers into the bedding and riding back against Jon’s face as he dribbled spit down his taint, over his balls and onto the sheets, creating a huge damp patch below them. Meanwhile, Jon was whimpering like it was him that was on the receiving end of something that Steve was going to be thinking about on the bus, on the plane, and in all of the mundane places that his mind tended to drift off, like standing in front of the washer. He’d be sorting his laundry back home, and he could tell that this was where his brain was going to go: the memory of Jon moaning, reedy and high-pitched, as he ate his way to the middle of him. The mixture of warm spittle and tongue made Steve woozy as he imagined what the crop of hair at the top of Jon’s head might look like if he swung a leg over his head, stuck his hands into it and rode his face the way he liked for his dates to do to him.

Vaguely, Steve was made aware of the fact that Jonathan was touching himself. Getting off on the taste of him. So much so he was fisting his dick, groaning into his hole.

“Jonathan,” he panted. “Jonathan, come on. Fuck.” He didn’t know what he was asking for. The quake of his thighs and the throb in his cock were the only pervading thoughts as he tried to wrestle a sentence together to let Jon know that he needed his fingers in him or the world was actually going to end. Cataclysmic and crazy. Not unlike the itty-bitty apocalyptic event that had finally pulled Steve’s head from his ass and shaken him by the shoulders, then landed him right in front of the terminal concept that maybe he and Jon might not be universes apart from each other, as they had both thought. It had been effortless to slip into a friendship with him, regardless of the history. They were just two guys tapping the frothing lips of their beer bottles in Robin’s uncle’s house and shooting the shit. Gravitating towards each other. Not those separate universes, as they both had argued, but instead two stars, rounding each other until they converged in the centre. 

And then, boom.

“What do you want me to do?” The word vibrated against Steve’s ass and he shivered as Jon flicked his tongue into his hole twice before he slapped the side of his ass, just a tap, and pressed, “You’ve got to tell me. Or I’m not doing it.” The air was cold against him when Jon backed away, swiping the back of his wrist across his mouth as he ran a fingertip along the seam of Steve’s balls, clearly just trying to shock a reaction out of him. “You’re not shy. Don’t act like you are now.” 

It worked, as Steve expected all of Jon’s tricks to work from that trip to New York onwards, and he breathed out into the sheets below before muttering, “Stop being a prick and get your fingers in me. Or I’ll finish myself off.” 

Behind him, without even having to turn around, Steve could hear how hard Jon was smiling. That stupid, goofy little smile that he’d adopted and started to shoot his way since the first time that Steve might admit he could give Jon’s behaviour towards him the label of ‘flirting’. “You’re such a fucking dick, Harrington.” He sounded giddy. Maybe a little bit in love. “It’s driving me crazy.” His thumb swiped across his hole a final time and he pressed a kiss to it. “Wait here. Get comfortable. I’m going to put a record on.” 

“You’re incessant,” Steve said, unwilling to move just yet, not with the way that his knees had locked into place and he had found the quiet joy in dragging his fingers up and down his cock. Not quite jerking off, just grazing skin against skin, keeping himself on edge as Jonathan slipped a record from the gatefold and placed it onto the slipmat. Steve had heard one of the singles from the band and as the bass thumped through the HiFi, he tossed the lube backwards at what he assumed was Jon, hearing the dull whap of it against his skin and the hiss of Jon’s disapproval. 

“Almost hit me in the balls, asshole,” Jon muttered, stooping to pick it from the floor at his toes.

“Which was it? Balls or asshole?” Steve peered back over his shoulder, and as the sound of the lead singer’s manic voice skidded around the room, all he could do was watch as Jon slicked up his fingers with a shudder that meant this was the first time he was doing this to another person. 

He ignored Steve’s joke, instead settling for mumbling the words of the song to himself as he clambered back onto the bed with a creak from the springs. “Debaser. Debaser.” 

“You going to break out into song, Byers?” Steve’s stomach felt like it might exit through his ass. Which he knew would dampen the mood slightly. 

“Shit,” Jon answered, although not to anything Steve had said, obviously just to the sight in front of him. “Have you ever touched yourself like this?” 

“Didn’t get far with it,” Steve said, trying a little frankness, just to match Jon’s own personal brand of it that was so endearing to both him and Nance, it would seem. “Just ended up half-sitting on my hand and it went numb.”  He arched his back, if only to stretch it and dissuade stiffness from creeping in, then asked, “What about you? You know what you’re doing?”

“No,” Jon said, laughing out the vowel. “I’ll just—I’ll go slow and try not to get too excited.” A flat, hot hand slid across the small of Steve’s back, rubbing gently, keeping him earthbound and soothed. Through and through, Jon was an affectionate bastard. “Maybe you could let me know what you like.” 

“Yeah,” Steve murmured, “but once you’ve fiddled around back there, I want to go on my back.” He slid back into a position that had his ass in the air and his cheek cushioned on his arms. Never in his life would he consider anything he did submissive. That wasn’t him. Even with Jon pushing his damp middle finger into him, with maybe an embarrassing amount of ease, as if Steve’s body was just naturally open. He wanted it and he calculated the risks to get them to that point. He was an athlete and he looked for the winning move from his peripherals at all times. Even if that win was found in the spread of Jon’s fingers, scissoring into a sharp V at the knuckles, once he’d got two fingers in. 

The check-ins weren’t a surprise, and if Steve were to glance around, he would imagine that he would find Jon looking grey in the face. Probably sweating at the line where his hair met his forehead, terminally nervous, even when he was leading the dance. He had always been malnourished, not in the traditional sense, but in the way that he’d been stifled by situation, time and place. He’d grown up invisible. Skirting at the edges of society because of his mother’s finger on the wobbling breadline, usually running just below it. Anxiety was sewn into the purpling bags under his eyes from the age of fifteen and the lingering shake in his hands, even when he knew that Steve needed him. More than anything. He could hold it at bay with the way he cleared his throat and muttered instructions with a scratch to his voice that made Steve shudder and debate that notion that he wasn’t married to the idea of submission, but it didn’t come naturally to Jon. He was sweet, like split peaches bursting out of their furred skins, too bold to not expose their flesh and be eaten. 

Steve barely noticed when Jon was pulling three fingers out of him and tapping his thigh to turn over, but he did it with a grunt and a small laugh in return from Jon. 

Sweet. That’s what he was. To match Steve’s sourness. Born wrong and lonely, bittering over the years. Pithy. So you might spit him out after a bite. That was until he’d met Nancy. Jon. Dustin. Eddie. Max. Endless people, who didn’t spit out his mealy interior. They savoured him. 

“Where are you?” Jon asked, smudging his thumb along Steve’s jaw. “You’ve gone somewhere.” 

“Just thinking about how weird this is. Don’t worry,” Steve said. “I’m not chickening out.” 

“It wouldn’t be like that. If you decided to back out.” He had such tired eyes, Steve noted, thinking about how Jon had gestured to the couch when he’d arrived. Hopefully, he wouldn’t need to squeeze himself onto it for a second night and he could push the sleep from the corners of Jon’s eyes tomorrow morning. Swiping the tip of his finger and gathering up the grubby bits of him that you didn’t mind when you—

“Who are you trying to convince with this shit?” Steve laughed. It was strangled. “Me or you?” He coaxed Jon back down, his dick having wilted slightly, and he stroked him back to hardness. Feeling the weight and the heat. “Put on that condom and fuck me.” 

Beneath his skin, Jonathan had sinewy muscles that flexed and bulged when he hefted a leg over the crook of his elbow and fed the wrapped head of his cock into Steve. His face was turned. Too shy to watch as it went in, but Steve followed the motion, keeping track of the centimetres and inches, until Jon was inside of him and the needle on the record in the living room was crackling again against the inner part of it. Harmonising with the drip of the tap and the heaving pants that Jon was having to steady himself with, lined with a few laughs, like he was incredulous about all of it. 

It didn’t hurt, not like Steve expected, but he probably had the additional benefit of being a torn-open wound for most of his life, so any kind of packed gauze stuffed into him would be a benefit rather than a hindrance. 

“Is it good?” he asked, hoping that it would sound seductive and grown-up, but it came out as breathless and genuine. Maybe a little bit timid. Was it good? Was he good? After everything, could Jon look at him and forgive him for it all? 

“Yeah.” Jon’s eyes were shut and he found Steve’s mouth by feel and sound alone, pushing their lips together and kissing him like he’d only ever practised kissing someone that he was in love with. Nothing messy and casual. Then, with the brush of his eyelashes against Steve’s—that’s how close they were—he said, “Are you okay?”

Steve smiled, shrugged, then said, “I think I am now.” 

After a certain point, Jon’s hands must have started to go numb where they were stuffed underneath Steve’s shoulder blades, trapped between him and the bed. Steve could feel the way he attempted to flex his fingers but refused to move them, too stapled to Steve’s body as Steve held up his legs with sweating hands on the backs of his equally sweaty knees. Allowing Jon to piston his hips into him, plastered together like two apostrophes in a spoken sentence, used to create sound and meaning. 

Everything Jon did in that secret, dim bedroom from then onwards was frantic. From the slap of his hips into Steve’s ass as he spread himself open to the staggered, almost scared pattern of breathing that he shuddered through in between murmuring wetly into Steve’s neck. Talking to him about how good he felt, how good he smelt, how gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. 

Or, in the last few moments before Steve fixed his legs around his back and pulled Jon in for a kiss to quiet him, how sorry he was. God. Wasn’t he just so helplessly sorry? 

“Me too,” Steve said right into Jon’s mouth. “I’m so fucking sorry.” 

Steve jammed his thumb under the unforgiving line of Jon’s jaw, sharp from all those years spent hanging on to the feeling of panic, and as he kissed him again, smearing their mouths together, moaning and grunting, Jon cut through the noise to whimper, “I’m going to come.” 

“Yeah?” Steve egged him on, clenching around him and angling his hips so he could feel the drag of Jon’s cock on his insides, like when he’d tilt his fingers up and forward inside a girl’s pussy and she’s start howling. He liked that thought a little bit too much. A mental comparison between him and the slew of girls he’d fucked. He knew it was strange and stupid, but he always had wished he’d end up as someone’s baby. So, to strip away the heady embarrassment of that person being Jonathan Byers, he said, “Hit me.” 

Jon shook his head. His hair was still a bit limp, in need of Steve to push him into the shower and scrub it. “No.” 

“I want it,” Steve moaned. “Hit me. Hit me.” 

As much as he would argue, Jon gasped and his hips sped up, almost shaking Steve up the bed as he crowded him and said through gritted teeth, “I’m not hurting you.” 

“Please,” Steve whispered. “Jonathan—”

“Fuck you,” Jon gasped, again. “Fuck. I’m going to come.” And, true to his word, instead of hurling back both of his hands, which had been extricated from behind Steve’s shoulders, and slamming them in a burst of red and white hot pain against Steve’s cheek like he imagined, he tucked his hands around Steve’s face and kissed him. Sliding their lips together but never involving anything else. No tongue or teeth. Just slick mouths and Jon whining into the little space they’d worked up together, his pulse hammering and his words stuck together as he garbled out, “I won’t. I can’t.” 

Guilty, something he was most of the time, Steve kissed him back and said, strangely lucidly, “Sorry, sorry.” Then, “Are you going to come? Going to come in me?”

Jon nodded, mangling the features of their faces together with the movement. It was impressive. To be drunk off of the sex and not even be the one being clamped down tight onto the bed and fucked within an inch of their life. He always was surprising like that. 

"Mm.” The sound dragged out of Jon, pitiful and elongated, like the sound of a dying animal on the side of the road. Pummelled by the force of something barrelling towards them with such speed that they never had a chance to think, let alone hop out of the way. “Going to come in you.” 

He didn’t hit Steve. That was so far off the table that it was in another room, at least for now, but he did rear back, gathering Steve onto his lap as he fixed his hand around his cock and stroked him, completely out of sync with his thrusts, like he was having a hard time keeping time. Amusing, for somebody who was so completely entrenched in the masturbatory hobby of overly enthusiastic record collection and could list all of his favourite producers by name and date of birth. 

But it was when Jon’s hand squeezed, making Steve’s stomach lurch, that he realised what was truly going on. He’d been so lost in the otherworldly notion of being fucked by Jonathan that he’d forgotten one of his favourite, key aspects of why he smiled at women at work and made sure he smelt good and never had food stuck in his teeth. He was that same kind of monster that Jon was. A guy, following his dick like a dowsing rod and obnoxiously interested in one thing: getting off.  

“Keep going,” he murmured, rolling in between pushing down onto Jon’s cock and back into his hand, mouth feeling gummy and useless. Only able to snap out brief sounds that could be words if you listened hard enough or moan, taking up the silence that was once filled by Jon’s particular preference in music. “Come in me, come in me.” 

Jon’s thumb pushed up underneath the head of Steve’s erection, the nail catching just a little on the overly sensitive skin, and Steve had a moment of clarity that this was Jonathan Byers. All ringing bells and Sunday mornings before church. White light. And he looked up at Jon, saw the creases around his eyes despite how young they both were, and the stippled flush across the top of his chest like poison ivy bite as he jackrabbit fucked his hips into Steve, and he had to curve his back into a bow and come so hard it splattered not just onto Jon’s hand but onto his sternum. Teardrop flecks which dribbled down him as Jon pulled a face like he was horrifically shocked by the outcome of Steve actually coming if they were to have sex and groaned out a sound that Steve had heard umpteen times when he’d been punched in the gut and pushed his cock as far into him as it physically could go and came. 

Cleanup was ignored for a long while, as Steve limply reached for a new cigarette and Jon lay face down on the bed, prone and exhausted. He still had the condom on and it was peeling off of his now soft dick, wrinkling into something unpleasant, bulging at the tip. If he didn’t want cum in a wet patch on the bed, he’d have to take it off soon, which didn’t seem like it was going to happen, so Steve rolled him over and did it for him. It left Jon’s dick wet and sticky, and part of Steve enjoyed the fact that there were no warm flannels, just two sweaty, unclean guys who then proceeded to share a cigarette. Slowly inching closer until Steve’s head was on Jon’s bare chest and he was coughing cigarette smoke onto Steve’s skin, his free hand scratching his nails across his scalp. It felt good to be made docile by anything that wasn’t peril. 

“I can’t feel my toes,” Jon said quietly, his lips curled around the butt of the cigarette as he leant over to ash it into a different coffee cup. They’d have to get out of bed and tidy up their mess sooner or later. “Shit. I feel hollowed out.” 

“If you’re desperate to tell this tale, maybe don’t tell Nance that part,” Steve said. He didn’t mention that Jon’s fingertips in his hair were almost sending him to sleep.

“I’ve never been desperate,” Jon murmured. “I just—you learn to sit back and watch things happen when you’re on the fringes.” Like a drizzle of rain, his hand ghosted in a rhythmic pattern along Steve’s ribs, tickling him enough to get him to squirm away, keenly aware that they both were naked. He could see all the scars and pockmarks on Jon’s skin, some in sporadic shapes and others flat and meaningful, making Steve feel very cold inside. Thinking about what sort of outcome one could hope for when you truly thought your brother was dead. “I’ve never had a good grasp on how to make a future for myself. Sometimes, I think I got stuck back on that day that Will went missing.” 

“So,” Steve said, clearing his throat, wanting to change the subject as swiftly as possible, but unable to focus on anything but the silvery dashes he could count on Jon’s skin, usually hidden well beneath clothing. “You going to make me dinner, huh, Byers?” 

Jon’s hand pulled him back in. So used to being in a concrete relationship that those old habits surely died hard, and Steve didn’t feel like arguing with the patter of bed-warmed hands and Jon’s lips worming their way through his hair to kiss his scalp, smelling him. “Of course I am. Told you I was.” He inhaled again, sighing out like he was happy to have his nose stuffed into Steve’s hair, and then saying, “There were a few days, at the worst time I could have picked, when I was going to propose to her. I had this vision where the rest of my life was going to be making dinner for someone. Doing all the mundane shit you do for that one person. It wasn’t like I was scared of it—that future—I just couldn’t do it in the end.” 

“Why didn’t you?” Steve asked, despite knowing the answer. He just wanted to keep Jon in bed with him, talking.

In return, he got a lacklustre shrug and Jon mumbling, “Same old thing it always is. We didn’t fit. We’d stayed together for the kids.” Which made Steve snort a laugh and wind an arm around Jon, feeling where he had stretch marks on the small of his back from getting bigger and stronger in the last handful of years. “Like you said, she needs to get out there and just—go be Nancy.”

“Away from the two of us,” Steve suggested. 

Jon laughed, nodding and kissing through where Steve’s hair had flopped down onto his damp forehead. “Something like that.” Then, with the urgency of someone who would have much rather stayed in bed, hanging off of a pretty boy, Jon rolled up onto his knees, sucking a kiss below Steven’s jaw and saying, “I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want to come into the kitchen with me, or would you prefer that I bring it to you in here, princess?”

Steve bristled pleasantly, smoothing his hands up onto his cheeks so that Jon might be saved from the way they turned pink. “This idea you have of me in your head really is pretty far off the mark, man. I don’t need you to wait on me hand and foot.” 

“No,” Jon reasoned, “I kind of like the idea of it though.” 

Flummoxed, with half a mind to fold his arms and let Jonathan fulfil this perverse need to treat Steve like he was his would-be wife, Steve sat cross-legged on the bed for a moment, listening to the muffled sounds of Jon ambling about in the kitchen. Sometimes, when the world was all broken glass edges and was so bright that Steve assumed the clouds had broken and split into fire, Steve would sit in Robin’s bathroom at her parents’ house, listening to her put her laundry away or thump around in her desk, trying to find misplaced jewellery. He’d close his eyes and count, more often than not unable to put the numbers into the right order, but it was enough to calm him down. He’d realised by the time he’d turned twenty-one that love was knowing someone was in the other room, even if you couldn’t see them.

Finally, he found the courage to pull on his jeans, right over his bare skin, and find Jon in the kitchen. He was standing, chewing his nails and watching coffee drip into the pot, one leg crossed behind the other as he used the breakfast bar to lean atop. His back was hunched, an organic, built-in posture, and Steve took great pleasure in placing his ear onto Jon’s spine as he curled around him. “See. Got out of bed all by myself. Didn’t even need nanny to come and prod me.” 

“How long are you going to stay?” Jon asked. No preamble to the question. 

“Uh,” Steve said, “As long as you’ll let me.” Beneath his hands, Jon’s heart had shot out of the gate and was already nose-down, following the rabbit. “Why? I can leave any time you want me to—”

“School starts soon,” Jon said, his hands slowly forming over the top of Steve’s. “My classes start up again. I’m guessing yours do too.” 

“Yeah, of course. Listen, if there’s something you need to do or something you want to say to me about all this shit that’s happened since the kids graduated—”

“Steve—”

“Holy shit,” Steve barked, incapable of not laughing as he gripped onto one of his biceps and spun Jon around, forcing him back against the countertop with a quiet grunt and a look that only a man so thoroughly practised in moping could deliver. “Will you just shut up for one second?” He fixed his hand around Jon’s jaw, angling his face up and watching as the late afternoon, cigarette-cherry-bloomed light, the kind that turned skin amber and shadows deep, made Jon look the picture of quiet, furious despair. “Will you be back in Hawkins for Christmas?” 

Jon frowned. A default look. “No. Mom’s in Montauk with Hop. I’m picking up Will and we’re going over to the house they’re renting in town. We haven’t seen it yet; they’ve been stringing out moving. I think Hop got weirdly attached to the cabin because—uh—you know.” He pulled a different face. Steve didn’t have siblings, but he knew that when Jon and Will looked like that, it was because they’d loved Jane just as much as they loved each other. Wistful and not ready to talk about it. “So, Christmas in Montauk. Mom says she’s going to get a dog and make Hop go on walks with her. Will’s excited.” 

“Are you going to invite me?” There was no point beating about the bush. 

“To Christmas?” Jon finally smiled. “You want me to invite you to a Byer’s Christmas? Are you fucking crazy?”

“Hey no, we can figure out the details in the next couple of months. Smooth out all the wrinkles. I’ll be out of work anyway, Christmas break and all. So I’m free, and I fucking hate Christmas at my house, man. It’s dull,” Steve said, casually beginning the process of winding Jon around his little finger with a few kisses to his chin. “Come on, Hopper likes me. So does your mom.”

“She might be a bit surprised to see the guy who beat the everloving shit out of me when we were kids turning up in a Christmas sweater.” 

“Well, jeez, Jon, prewarn her then,” Steve sighed. “You’re making a big deal out of this.” 

“Are you going to back down on this?” 

“I’m pretty stubborn. Ask Dustin,” Steve said, stamping his hands onto his hips and shrugging, holding on tightly to that air of simple boldness he’d cultivated so well when he was a teenager. “Tell her the truth.” 

“The truth,” Jon mumbled, maybe a little bit dazed. The coffee pot was full behind them. “Like how we—uh—”

“Dude,” Steve laughed, “do not tell your mom that we’re fucking. Just,” he paused, “tell her that I need it. That I’m completely miserable at home and you and I are friends. That you’re looking out for me, because you’re such a good guy.” 

“Friends.” Jon licked his bottom lip. The word must have tasted good. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. I could go for that. She’ll never let you go if you do come, though. I hope you know that.” 

There wasn’t a need to tamp down on the question that Steve wanted to ask so desperately, so he did. He asked, “and you?” 

“Me?” 

“After Christmas, should I keep visiting?” Drifting away, Steve flipped the record, turning it carefully in his hands and dropping it back onto the slipmat. Moving the arm and needle over as Jon watched, like the motions were even more sexual than the sex they’d just had. “Are you going to invite me around again? I’m sure there’s a bunch of shit in the city you could show me. Might even get a bigger apartment at some point. One that doesn’t smell like rot.” He pulled on a taupe, woollen cardigan strewn across the couch. It belonged to Jon and smelt a bit like sweat, but was soft against Steve’s skin as he perched on the arm of the couch, crossing a leg over the other, grinning at Jon as he asked, “Are you going to keep me?”

The small, grotty patch of linoleum around the kitchenette was cold when it met Jon’s bare feet and he sucked on his teeth before pouring out two mugs of coffee. It was going to be overly strong. Steve steeled himself to the thought of the taste of it with a forced gulp of claggy saliva, watching silently as Jon went through a range of emotions. Bouncing between them as he placed down the coffee pot with a clink of the stained glass at the base. Steve would let him think about it for weeks if he needed. Months, even. Right up until day dot of Christmas, when he was peeling open the curtains in the household of two adults who he’d already started to form a childish attachment to, regardless of if they knew it. 

A mug was pushed into his hands and Jon wavered in front of Steve, having come to a conclusion finally. When Steve glanced down, the mug he’d been given had a chipped logo of Kermit the Frog, probably something from Jon’s childhood that had been packed with care into a box and transported to his new home. He’d no doubt put his mouth around the rim again and again, and Steve lifted it to his mouth to feel the rumble of that memory, not minding that the steam licked at his lips. 

“I could come back to town, too,” Jon suggested. “Come and help you pack when you move into that place in Forest Hills.”

Steve smiled up at him. “I get the feeling I’m not going to be there long.”

“Uhuh,” Jon said as he nodded, that cat-like smile upturning the corners of his mouth. “Honestly, I’ve been looking for a roommate. You think you might know a guy?” 

Steve laughed loudly at that, jostling his coffee in his mug as he said, “You’re funny, Byers. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that. I like that about you.” 

Steve hadn’t ever noticed how pretty Jon could look either, with slabs of now sickly light from outside highlighting the highs of his cheekbones and the bow of his mouth, but he didn’t mention that part. He wouldn’t mention it until Christmas Eve, when Jon was illuminated by Hop’s wonky display of Christmas lights on his new home, as Will tried not to laugh too hard behind his hand as Steve stared holes into Jon’s face. 

“You know what, I still don’t like you,” Jon murmured. 

“Bullshit,” Steve said, echoing something from a very long time ago that didn’t hurt as much as it used to. “That’s complete bullshit.” 

The needle on the record skipped quietly, probably from Steve’s mishandling, bobbing up and down like a wave as Jon ducked down to kiss Steve, another spillage of coffee in the works as Black Francis barked, ‘Hey, been trying to meet you,’ startling Jon slightly and Steve ate up the laugh that followed. 

“You’re right,” Jon said. 

As if Steve had ever been wrong before. Jon would learn. 

They had time.