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The summer of 1985 was supposed to be different. Nancy Wheeler stood frozen in the Byers basement, her hand clamped tight over her mouth, swallowing the scream before it could escape.
Jonathan was dead.
There he was on the old couch, the place where they'd spent so many nights together… developing photos, trading secrets, building that fragile foundation for their young love. Now his throat was torn wide open. Something from the Upside Down must’ve gotten through. Blood stained his shirt, dry and rust-colored, and his skin was gray and waxy. She knew that look by now: meat gone bad, candles melted to exhaustion.
She knew she should call for help. She should rush upstairs, grab Joyce, call the cops… do anything normal people would do if they found their boyfriend murdered in his mom's basement. But Nancy locked the door instead.
"Jonathan," she whispered, her voice cracking as she inched closer. Her sundress brushed her thighs and the smell hit her… copper, shit, decay. But she didn't flinch. She'd survived worse in the Upside Down. And Jonathan...he was still beautiful.
Or maybe, somehow, even more beautiful. All the nervous energy that usually tightened his jaw or furrowed his brow had vanished. He looked peaceful, just sleeping, if she ignored the devastation in his throat and the weird angle of his head.
Nancy sat on the couch beside him, feeling his body stiffen from rigor mortis…heavy, solid in a way he never was while alive. She touched his hand. The fingers were curled, almost reaching for her.
"I'm sorry," she murmured, not even sure what she was apologizing for. Not being there when it happened? For what she was about to do? Or maybe for how alive she felt… heat pooling between her thighs, something she couldn’t explain, couldn’t deny, couldn’t stop.
She lifted his hand, struggling against its new heaviness, placing it on her breast. Through the thin cotton, there was no warmth, just the blunt pressure of flesh on flesh. Her nipple hardened and she pushed herself into his touch… moving his dead hand like a puppet’s.
"You're still here," she breathed. She didn’t know if she meant his body or something else… some leftover Jonathan-ness she refused to let fade. She climbed onto him, straddling his hips, feeling the stiffness through her dress. Blood soaked her thighs, spreading like Rorschach inkblots.
Nancy leaned down and kissed him. His lips were cold, parted, and unmoving. She pressed her tongue into his mouth, searching for warmth, finding only copper and the faint sweetness of decay. His teeth scraped her tongue and she moaned against his lifeless mouth.
"Come back," she begged. "Come back to me, Jonathan. Just for a little while."
Her hands shook as she worked open his belt and jeans. He was hard… he’d died hard, she realized, some clinical corner of her brain supplying the fact. Rigor had locked his cock too, rigid and thick and awful. She stared at it… dusky flesh, veins bulging against pale skin.
She wanted him. She needed to feel him.
Nancy pulled up her dress, pushed her underwear aside. She was soaked… God, so wet… her grief and arousal tangled together until she felt almost split open. She positioned herself over him, pressed the blunt head of his dead cock against herself, and sank down.
The cold shocked her, sent a jolt through her whole body. He filled her completely… hard and unyielding, without any of the gentle give and take of a living lover. She sobbed, rolling her hips, grinding down on him, aware of how his body didn’t respond, didn’t soften, didn’t yield except by physics.
"Jonathan," she cried, riding him harder, her hands braced on his chest… no heartbeat, no flutter, just bone and meat and the permanence of death. "Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan."
Her orgasm came like a prayer or maybe a curse, tearing through her… brutal, edged with horror and grief. She gasped and shook, clamped down on him, desperate for warmth, for any sign he felt her. But there was nothing. Only her.
But she wasn't finished.
She slid off him, his cock leaving her with a wet sound that made her shiver. She shifted him to face her… lifting dead weight, grunting, turning him onto his side, meeting his open, staring eyes that looked right through her.
She stripped off her dress and underwear, stood naked in the basement’s dim light. Then she lay behind him… spooning him, pressing her breasts to his back, burying her face in his blood-soaked hair. One hand reached around, stroking his cock…feeling the strange post-mortem texture, skin loose but rigid.
Her other hand found herself, slipping through the mess of fluids… her living arousal mixed with his dead stillness. She stroked herself and him together, building something nameless between her heartbeat and his silence.
"Stay with me," she whispered into his cooling neck, licking the dried blood, tasting him again. "Don't leave me, Jonathan. Please."
She came again, quieter, her hand tight on his cock until she feared hurting him… but he couldn’t hurt anymore, could he? Not now. She lay beside him until the rigor faded and his body softened, finally, truly dead. Nancy dressed, careful and calm, then went upstairs to tell Joyce her son was gone.
She didn’t tell her everything. That secret, she kept. She would hoard it, revisit it in darkness, remembering cold flesh and stiff cock, touching herself, chasing that twisted, perfect union of life and death.
Jonathan belonged to her now. In a way he never could’ve alive. And Nancy Wheeler never let go of what was hers.
—
They held a closed-casket funeral. Of course they did. Whatever killed him left Jonathan pretty much unrecognizable… or at least that’s what Joyce believed. Nancy handled the arrangements herself…steady hands, calm voice, lying about the “terrible accident” to the funeral director, hiding the truth.
She suggested the closed casket. She couldn't bear the thought of anyone else seeing him, judging him, seeing what she'd seen, what she’d touched, what she’d taken.
They buried him on Tuesday. Nancy wore the blood-stained dress under her black coat, the rust marks pressed against her skin like secrets. She cried at the service… real tears, honest grief. But beneath it all, something else churned: anticipation.
—
The cemetery was old, the Byers family plot tucked under thick, heavy oaks. Nancy memorized exactly where they put him, watched every shovel of dirt. She waited.
A week after the funeral, she returned at midnight.
The air was sticky, fireflies flickering between the headstones. Nancy carried her bag… shovel, flashlight, blanket, plus things she refused to name. Her heart hammered, alive and desperate.
She found the fresh mound right away. The digging was worse than she'd expected… her palms blistered, muscles burned, but Nancy Wheeler had faced monsters from other dimensions. She could do this. She would do this.
Two hours in, she hit the coffin.
Pine, simple. She pried it open, breath ragged, sweat drenched. The smell punched her first… fierce, unstoppable, the perfume of decay.
But Jonathan was still beautiful.
His body had bloated a bit, his skin greenish, eyes sunken. Maggots spilled from the wound at his throat, his nostrils, the corners of his lips.
Nancy didn't blink. She didn't care.
She climbed into the coffin beside him, the wood creaking beneath her, pulling the lid shut above them. Total darkness. Just her and Jonathan, alone with the night.
“Hi,” she whispered, her voice strange, loud. She found his face, felt the softness of bloated skin, where it had started to slide away. “I missed you.”
She kissed him, tasted rot, the end of everything. His tongue was swollen, but she worked hers against it, imagining response, imagining warmth. Her hands wandered, found places where Joyce’s suit bunched and twisted, exposing mottled flesh.
No more rigor; his body was pliable, easy to manipulate. Nancy worked his pants down, feeling the wet squelch, skin slipping under her fingers. She didn’t stop.
When she guided him inside her, he was room temperature. Slippery, yielding, the shape of his flesh changed by bacteria and time. She moved on him, the coffin rattling, dirt trickling down from above.
“I love you,” she gasped, her hips pounding, feeling something tear inside him, warmth flooding her as his body gave way. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She came digging her nails into his shoulders, puncturing skin, sinking into the soupy mess beneath. Nothing mattered except this…refusing to stop, refusing to accept the boundary between living and dead.
After, she lay her head on his chest, listening to the silence, feeling the soft rise and fall as gases escaped… almost breath. Almost.
“I’ll come back,” she promised, fingers tracing the melting lines of his face. “Every night. I won’t leave you alone.”
She stayed with him, entombed, breathing dead air. When she finally climbed out, put the coffin back, covered it with dirt, the sun was rising.
Nancy walked home through mist, dirt under her nails, Jonathan’s fluid dry on her thighs, and for the first time since his death she smiled. Really smiled. Hungry.
She’d be back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.
Forever, if she had to.
—
Summer drifted on. Nancy stopped going to work, stopped answering her phone, stopped eating regularly. She did nothing except return to the cemetery, to Jonathan, to her real home.
She brought things. A pillow so she wouldn’t sink into the rot. Perfume to mask the smell on her skin…though, honestly, she didn't really want to mask it. She wanted to wear it. To reek of him.
Sometimes she just talked, told him about her day, described the world moving stupidly on without him. Sometimes she wept, pressed her face to his dissolving neck, felt his skin slip from the bone like a mask unwinding.
And most nights… she fucked him.
His body changed, hour by hour. Less Jonathan, more material, but Nancy adjusted. Learned what parts still held their shape, what had liquefied, what could still anchor her grip. She angled herself to use his liquefying organs as lubrication. Loved the smell, the textures, the total surrender of flesh that could no longer resist, no longer live, nothing left but what she needed.
She was riding him the night the police found her.
The coffin lid was open. She hadn’t bothered closing it anymore… preferring the sky to the dark. Flashlights caught her as she moved, hips grinding down, the ribcage creaking, his jaw loose and broken from kisses.
“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered. Nancy didn’t stop. She looked up at the horrified faces of Hawkins’ finest and grinned, wild-eyed.
“He’s mine,” she said, and kept moving, still riding him, still claiming him. “You can’t have him. He’s mine.”
They dragged her out, screaming, clawing, biting an officer’s hand, kicking another in the throat. There were too many… eventually they pulled her away, shrieking Jonathan’s name into the night.
They locked her in a hospital. Soft walls, softer restraints. Fed her through tubes, cleaned her, talked about trauma and psychosis and young women who broke. Nancy didn’t care. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, her hands slipping down, always ready, trained to associate death with pleasure.
“Jonathan,” she whispered, every night, every hour, every minute.
Sometimes, just in the space between waking and dreaming, she felt him answer. Cold hands on her skin, rotting mouth on her breast, stiff cock inside her willing body.
Nothing could keep her away forever. Death was patient… and Nancy Wheeler had all the time in the world.
She’d find him again. She’d dig him up. She’d love him, again and again, until nothing was left but dust, memory, and the terrible knowledge that real love never dies.
It just changes shape.