Chapter Text
You have had the same dream, on a cycle, for a year and a half.
It starts with a floaty feeling. The split-second kind, where the bed suddenly disappears from under you, and your body jolts as you forget where you are. It’s exactly like that, just if that feeling kept going, if you never blinked and realized that the bed is right where you left it, and this is just your bedroom.
When you peel your eyes open, you’re in the underground tunnels at Starcourt Mall, back before it burned down. The lights flicker and the hallways stretch for miles. You’re always stunned by your surroundings like you haven’t had this dream a million times.
Before you can catch your breath, you run past -- yes, you, but nearly three years younger. A little more baby fat on your face. Longer hair. Different clothes. She bolts down the hallway as best as she can with a limp, glancing behind her as whimpers escape her lips, and she is drenched in blood -- more than you ever recall. She leaves a trail of it in her wake.
No matter what, she never pays you any mind. You’re not sure if she even knows you’re there. You never call for her, never reach out an arm and ask what’s wrong. She runs, you watch. Each time. Then, she hangs a left, and disappears behind a wall.
What happens after that changes periodically.
Some nights, you stay put. You stand there and wait for something to come -- the thing that’s chasing her -- but it never does. The rest of the dream is nothing more than you in an empty hallway. Sometimes, it’s silent, others, you can hear voices. Once or twice you’ve heard your name called somewhere, far off. More often than not, you can hear the pained screams of loved ones, somewhere deep in this maze, behind doors that are supposed to be soundproof. Either way, you stand there until you wake up.
Other nights, you’re enraptured with the same panic that your doppelgänger seems to have. While she runs away, you’re convinced you hear footsteps coming from the hallway she just ran from, and terror wells up in your chest. You sprint down a different path, always the one closest to you, and then you run until you can’t anymore. The hallways are never the same and never hold any rhyme or reason. You run until you wake up.
Then, though, there are the worst kind of nights. You always know when it’s coming, because this is the only world where you remember that you’ve had this dream before.
Every once in a while, after your clone passes you, all of your limbs will grow weak; when you look down, your skin is rotting. You’ll stumble like you’re drunk, gripping onto the walls while you beg yourself to snap out of it, but it never works. You fall to your knees, nothing in your body working to your command, and lose control of everything.
That’s when you hear someone down the hallway. They call your name tauntingly, long and drawn out, the kind of voice that predator calls to prey with. You’ll scratch at the floors and push with your elbows, but everything about you is heavy as you sink into the ground, your heart racing the closer the voice gets to you. It all elevates until you’re having a full-blown panic attack on the floor.
Then, you’ll look up, and in the hallway that you could’ve ran down, you’ll see some kind of scene. Something you’ve never seen before; something you shouldn’t even be familiar with. Sometimes, it’s harmless. Sometimes, it’s your little brother reading a book or one of his best friends asleep in their bed. Other times, it’s terrible. Other times, it’s your best friend and your boyfriend, beating each other to shit. Your girl friends, sinking into the floor and staring at you instead of fighting it. The boy who died defending your brother like you should've been there to do.
When the voice is close enough, when a hand clasps around your shoulder and someone shouts your name in your ear, when you’ve devolved into drugged-out tears and panting, that’s when you wake up. Those are the worst kind of nights.
Tonight is one of those.
A night where you're melting into the floor, where your limbs are amalgamations of liquid-like flesh and stiff joints, where your face is smushed into the floor and any movement will tear your skin clean off. A night where, down the hall, you get a clear sight of something you'd never seen in real life -- the child you couldn’t protect, floating in the air, her limbs snapping one by one, blood seeping out of her eyes, before collapsing in a heap on the ground. A night where you feel the fear she must've felt then.
Then the cold hand touches you. Then there's the sharp shape of your name.
And then your eyes fly open.
Your room is quiet when you awaken, your fists clutching the bedsheets and a thin layer of sweat coating your forehead. Your hair is still a bit damp from your shower a few hours earlier and a lazy arm hangs over your waist, deep breathing hot against your ear. The inhales are deep, long. They come out in little puffs in your clean hair.
But you’ve made a game of it, at this point -- slipping out of bed without being noticed. Though your breathing is sharp and heavy, you’re able to battle yourself for precision, untucking your legs from where they’re tangled, and playing limbo to get out of grasp. The arm falls limply on the bed and curls away, almost like subconsciously searching for you. Almost like not holding something is not right.
Your pillow seems to suffice where you tuck it into the crook of the elbow. A soft exhale escapes; maybe the smell is enough to get by.
Good, you're trying to tell yourself. That's good.
But you slip your hand into your nightstand before going.
Padding out of the room with a quiet closing of your door, you hurry into the bathroom with the finicky yellow light -- the one that takes a few seconds to turn on -- and exhale when you catch sight of your face. It’s perfectly fine, unharmed, not having a stroke or anything while all your limbs melt from underneath you. All it is is that you're panting hard. Just take a deep breath.
Easier said than done. Every deep breath shoots daggers into your lungs, like you've just learned how to breathe today. But you just keep seeing it -- her, hanging from the ceiling, twitching until she snapped, landing in a pile of bones. And your limbs feel like they're dissolving into the floor, and you swear you're watching your skin start to waste away off your face, your skull underneath no less panicked.
You run your hands over the sink. Just to prove that it’s there. Grip it with iron knuckles, so hard it starts to imprint in your palms.
You’re not wearing much. One of your boyfriend’s shirts and basically nothing else.
Except for a blooming bruise on the column of your throat.
Well, you think sarcastically. That wasn't there before.
In the middle of your panicked breaths, you exhale into a laugh, your hand coming up to prod at its edges. Dull pain tingles under your gentle fingers, but you can make out the shape of a familiar jaw spanning from the hollow to the side of your throat.
With a sneaking suspicion and a warm kind of ache, you look down. Sure enough, you find a trail of them -- like footprints in the dirt, trudging up from your knee to your inner thigh, all the same shade and color as your neck.
Asshole, you think lazily.
But as asshole behavior as it is, it is real in a way your dream wasn't. You take another deep breath and gather your thoughts, then glance down at the thing in your hand. The thing that calms you down after nightmares.
You don’t know why you do it. Maybe it’s sadistic, in some way. But when you have that dream, when you’re wracked by it, you pull out the same, yellowing piece of paper.
It’s old-ish now. The lines where it folds have grown flimsy and you’d accidentally torn the corner of it after a dream that left you particularly shaky (which you promptly had a meltdown about), and even though you basically know what it says word for word, you read it all, each and every time.
A letter. The one addressed to you.
If you’re reading this, it means I’m probably a sack of bones somewhere. Sorry about that. Hope it wasn’t too messy.
Okay, sorry for real this time. Lucas keeps saying not to say shit like that, but I don’t know. I think it makes me feel better to say. What are you even supposed to say when you’ve been marked for death?
I have a lot to say to you that I never do. I figure there’s no time like the present, especially if there’s no future…yeah, sorry again. I’ll stop.
When I met you in the junkyard, I didn’t know what to think of you. Dustin always talked about you like you were some second coming of Jesus, and considering what kind of person he is, I was a little worried. But then you came over to talk to me. You could've talked to Dustin or to Lucas, considering you'd known them so much longer than you'd known me. Anyone else would. Especially if the person in question was your thirteen-year-old little brother's grumpy friend who hadn't opened up to anyone.
But you wanted to know more about me. You and Dustin both. And nobody ever wants to know about me. Not until you guys.
I don't know if you remember, but you told me about Chicago and made me feel okay about Hawkins. I missed California, but seeing how well you fit in here made me realize that I could fit in one day too. You had your friends, you were friends with Dustin’s friends, and you even had enemies. (And look how that turned out!)
I don’t know if I always did fit in, but I know that you always worked hard to at least make me feel like it. Even when I started to drift away this year. Even when things got bad, you still tried. You said hi to me in the hallway at school and you always asked me if I needed anything. And you'd ask how my mom was doing. Nobody knew about my mom. I don’t think you even knew about my mom. But you cared to find out.
I'm sure you've done the math, but things have been really hard since Billy. And sometimes I can’t even look at you, because I know what he did to you. I remember watching it and feeling more scared than when he'd yell at me. Because...well, I guess this is dark, but when it was me, it was okay. But you had been nothing but nice to me, and just wanted to keep me safe, and then he did that to you.
He was a bad guy. But I mourn him, sometimes. Or, I don't know. I think I feel grief. I don't know if I really mourn him. But I feel bad about feeling grief for a bad guy, a guy that the world is probably better off without. And I don’t think you judge me for it, which makes it worse. Sometimes I wonder if that makes me a shitty person. I don't know. But I do know it makes you a really, really good person.
There’s so much I want to say to you that I'm too embarrassed to say out loud. I want to say thank you for your old clothes when my mom couldn't afford new ones, thank you for teaching me how to do makeup when Neil said it was for whores, thank you for letting me crash sleepovers at Steve’s place even when you were totally gonna get it on.
He’s a really good guy. And he treats you the way you should be treated. Unlike Billy.
Are you still with him? I don’t know why I’m asking, of course you are. See, I’m even confident in putting that in my pseudo-suicide note, because I know it for sure. Ha-ha. Sorry, I did say no more death jokes.
If I’m being honest, I’m scared to go. Sorry, just had to stare at that for a second and really register what I wrote. I’m scared to go because I don’t know what waits for me afterwards. Do you believe in heaven? I don’t know if I do. Maybe that’s why they won’t want me. Or maybe I really just am a shitty person for pushing everyone away. I don’t know. It’s not worth discussing, not now. The only thing I’m not worried about is leaving you all here, because you’ve provided me something I’ve never had: a home. A family. And I know you’ll all still take care of each other when I’m gone.
Just don’t let them think Eddie killed me. Maybe I’m your ticket out.
I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you for everything. Take care of Dustin, call Steve a second longer. Watch out for Lucas. And please don’t cry at my funeral. It’s a bummer.
One last thing: kill that Vecna son of a bitch for me.
Best,
Max.
P.S. You can take back the X-Men comics you gave me. They were fun to read. You were right, like you always are -- I loved Jean Grey.
With a shudder, you close the note back up. Maybe that kind of thing isn’t supposed to make you feel better, but in a way, it kind of does. You can feel like, for just a second, you’re talking to that little redheaded girl again -- though she’s not so little anymore.
The one who’s laying in a sterile-white bed on life support. The one they’ve started to consider taking off of it.
Jesus. You haven’t visited in a few days. You need to find some time.
Feeling a bit more like yourself, you refocus on the mirror. That purple spot on your neck is still there, of course. You have to tilt your head back to see the sheer size of it. It’s pretty gnarly, actually -- a little worse than you thought. You run your fingertips across it again, adding a little more pressure, and hiss at how sore it really is.
Shit.
Still a bit rattled, knowing you won’t be able to go to bed anytime soon, you flick off the lights and sneak back out. The kitchen stares at you in shadows and mistakable shapes of the dark, but somewhere in the countertop is a classic remedy. You rustle around in your utensil drawer before finding a spoon and shoving it into your freezer.
You sigh, noticing the walkman left askew on the counter. It belongs to someone who can’t come home to claim it. For all intents and purposes, it’s yours now.
He’d want you to keep it, your brother insisted, once upon a time. Just in case.
Well, you have about thirty minutes to waste. So, you slide the headphones on, you press the rewind button, and you wait for that tinny click. Then, the beat comes in. Drawls on and on until there’s a guitar, and then a snare:
I can’t seem to face up to the facts--
You and your best friend’s first ever mixtape, back from when you were twelve: the infamous, unbeatable, ‘79 edition. You slid it back into your walkman after the night you spent with him yesterday, driving around town because there’s nothing else to do, singing all the words to every song -- even the ones you don’t like anymore -- because you’ve listened to this damn mix so many times. He rolled down all the windows and turned the radio all the way up and you both screamed all the lyrics to Psycho Killer, and it felt like what you imagined being twenty was going to feel like, back when this was his favorite song.
It’s a familiar background noise. The grounding kind.
This place has a shitty bay window. Your landlord says not to use it, but that was pretty much the first rule you broke upon moving in. You slot into the corner you like there, resting against the glass -- outside is the perfect, morbid view of Roane Cemetery. You’ve grown a little accustomed to its odd peacefulness.
There’s a few names in there you should probably check on. And a paper you haven’t written. And a rotting pumpkin on the porch you need to yell at your roommate to throw out.
Rot. Like in the dream. The rot eating your skin as you stumble to your knees and lose your agency and fall onto the floor and watch as--?
Fuck. Ducking your head into your knees, you let the Talking Heads stutter in your ears, the cold from outside radiating off of the window. You take a deep breath, an outdoorsy kind of smell filling your nostrils, the letter heavy in your pocket as your breathing threatens to pick back up.
Shit, do you need to read the letter again? Your nails dig into the bite scar on your leg like it’ll ground you a bit more. It’s a stupid dream, who cares? You’re alive and your skin isn’t rotting, and for Christ’s sake, that was literally just the concept of a pumpkin. One that does, in fact, need to get thrown out.
Still, you don’t have it in you to move. Your breathing steadies out as the mix drones on, but you’re never eased. You never find a solid place to land. It’s like you know where you are, you know who you’re with, but you wonder if your limbs will work when you command them to.
So when the mix ends, when that tinny click rings out in your headphones, you decide to test that theory and glance up at the clock -- all digital in this apartment, nothing with a face -- and catch the time.
Close enough.
You slip off of the bay window and float, half-dead, over to the freezer to pull out your spoon. Cold metal-to-skin contact stings your finger tips, a quiet hiss sucked through your lips as you nudge the door shut. You hesitate. You've always hated this part.
Ugh. Fuck it. It needs to go.
You tilt your head back and press the head to your neck, hissing again at the sharp change in temperature. A tingle spreads through your bruise and into your warm skin, sending a chill down your spine and springing goosebumps up your arms.
You sigh, adjusting, rocking back and forth as you do, letting yourself be embraced by the darkness of the room. It’s stupid to do this now. Maybe worse to do it mid-freak out. But you like, at least, that the cold is grounding you. That it’s a tangible thing about the world that makes it real.
You close your eyes, inhaling deeply. It’s just your kitchen. There’s no winding Russian tunnels or scenes down the hallway or doppelgängers or flashing--
--light floods your vision.
You jump violently, whipping around to see the hallway by the lightswitch. Exhaling, annoyed with yourself, you turn back around. You should’ve known.
“Jesus,” you mumble. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Steve yawns, his hair all mussled, his shirt rucked up his hip and exposing the tan skin underneath. “What’re you doin’ up?” he slurs, still blinking sleep out of his eyes. “It’s late. Come back to--?”
He pauses, his swollen eyes suddenly conveniently able to see. He blinks a few times and adjusts to the light before really seeing you -- more importantly, really seeing the spoon against your neck.
There’s a very, very short moment of silence, before Steve bursts into laughter.
You glare at him, chewing back a smile. “It’s literally not funny.”
Steve grins smugly, waddling up to you as he rubs his eyes with his fingers. “Baby, it’s-- it’s really funny, I’m sorry.” He nudges your hand. “Can I see it?”
Rolling your eyes, you move your hand. Immediately, Steve snorts. He tilts your chin up with his calloused thumb and has to squat down to get a better view.
“Jesus Christ, I’m a goddamn vampire,” he murmurs, almost impressed. “That’s, like, half your throat.”
You slit your eyes at him. “You did it.”
“Hell yeah, I did it.”
You swat his arm and tut at him, but it only makes Steve snort again as he stands back up. The spoon falls back against your neck, and now he's tutting at you, an endeared, humored smile on his sleepy face, as one of his hands reach for yours.
“Baby, c’mon. You know this shit doesn’t work,” Steve scolds you harmlessly.
“It does sometimes,” you grumble, huffing.
A cheeky grin burrows into the corner of Steve’s lips, his gaze flickering back up to you knowingly. “What, you don’t like it?”
Folding your hand immediately, you roll your eyes. “Who even gives people hickeys anymore?" you chide. "You’re twenty-one goddamn years old and you don’t even know how to kiss a girl without making it look like she was in a car accident.”
Steve's jaw drops in playful offense. “I do!” he insists, laughing.
You cock an eyebrow at him. “Then what am I doing right now?”
“Noooooo, you’re different…” he whines, still giggling to himself. He wraps you up in a hug and buries his face into the slope of your neck.
“‘I’m different?’” you repeat, head coming up for air by his shoulder.
Steve just mumbles out a yes and stays put.
“How am I different?” you ask, looping your free arm around his back.
“‘Cause I can’t help it when it’s you…” Steve says, still half-asleep. “Jus’ wanna love all over you.”
You snicker, rolling your eyes. “That’s gross. You’re such a baby.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Steve’s arms tighten around you, moving his head to rest on its side on your shoulder, his voice much clearer now. “You just said it yourself. I’m twenty-one. Can’t be a baby.”
“You’re totally holding me like a baby,” you remark smugly.
Steve hums. “‘Cause I missed you.”
You roll your eyes again. Fucking sap. You’d think you’ve completely starved him of any physical affection at all. “I’ve been out of bed for, like, half an hour, Steve.”
Steve frowns. “Yeah, that’s too long.”
You sigh, ready to tease him a bit more, but Steve is much quicker to romantic action than you ever are. He shifts and presses soft, gentle kisses over the bruise on your neck, never minding the spoon.
“‘M sorry,” he professes between kisses, his fingers delicately cupping your jaw.
It sucks, because you'd like to play mad at him, but his lips are so soft, and his voice is even softer. It's full of such genuine reverence for you that you could get sick all over his back. Even then, you think he'd still hold you this way.
One of his hands comes down and finds your wrist -- he separates from you and straightens back up, his fingers slipping over yours. “Here," he murmurs, voice gravelly with sleep. "I got it.”
Steve takes the spoon from your hand and nudges you backwards until your back hits the countertop. Reaching behind your legs, he hoists you onto the surface, knocking your knees apart to stand between them.
In doing so, he sees the...collection you’ve got going on across your thigh. His face contorts from panic, to horror, to something like smugness as he whistles lowly. “Damn,” he breathes, tracing the outline of each of them.
You sigh. “Like I said. Car accident.”
Steve bends down to press an apologetic kiss to your knee. “It’s a really hot car accident.”
As he leans in to press the spoon back to your throat, a gentle hand tilting your head, you roll your eyes once more. “‘A hot car accident?’” you repeat.
Steve just hums, thumbing across your cheek, pretending to be focused on your throat. He presses a chaste kiss to your cheek.
“No, think about what you said just now,” you insist, laughing incredulously. “‘A hot car accident?’”
“Can’t talk,” Steve remarks pridefully. “Doing some important doctor stuff over here. Gotta focus.”
You snort. “Oh, doctor stuff? That sounds real official, Harrington.”
“Dr. Harrington,” he corrects.
“Right, Dr. Harrington, of course.”
He grins, looking absolutely fucking tickled with himself.
You sigh lazily, embracing the warmness of your boyfriend in front of you. His hand rests gently on your face where you lean into his touch. He still runs his thumb across your cheek soothingly. Sleep is still settled in his eyes where he looks down at your marks.
Smiling, a little heartened by the moment, you card your hand through his hair. Steve groans, his turn to glare up at you accusatorily.
“You can’t just do that while you’re covered in hickeys,” he sneers, like this should be obvious. “Seriously, woman. You don’t know your power.”
You snort. “My power?”
He deadpans you. “Do you want me to give you more?”
Your jaw drops at the insinuation. “Not really,” you laugh out.
“Then stop,” he says, with weight-crushing seriousness, though he can't hide the cheeky grin that peeks past his lips.
You pout overdramatically, knowing, well, your power. “I can’t touch you at all?” you whine.
Steve glances up at you, burying another groan in his throat. As soon as he meets your eye, he’s weak to your words. You know that; he knows that.
“You can…very politely put your arms on my shoulders," he decides, each word sounding pained and strenuous.
Your jaw drops playfully. “‘Politely?’”
“I just got out of REM, honey, you’re killin’ me,” Steve chastises, brows furrowed. “Keep it innocent or Robin’s gonna be super pissed.”
You snort, obeying him for once, wrapping your arms around his neck. The spoon still stings against a now-numbing spot on your throat. “Robin’s gonna be pissed when she hears us either way.”
“Yeah, well, I would prefer it if I was clothed for it…” Steve mumbles, refocusing on the spoon, tilting it in a new direction.
You sigh. You like the game of this; what you do to him. Proving to him just how much he likes you. The easy control you have over the little ways his body reacts.
So maybe you're biting your lip as you get a little bold. But your hand snakes up the nape of his neck and buries into his brunet curls, similarly damp from the earlier shower, smelling like your shampoo. And maybe your fingers wrap around a few of the strands and tug. Just a little.
Steve shakes his head warningly. “Classic.”
“Baby."
“You didn’t really come out here just for this, did you?”
You pause, the smile slipping off of your lips when you realize just how badly you’d misread his tone. The panic from before starts to bubble up in you again, everywhere, even in crevices of your body you didn't know could feel anxiety. Your spine straightens; your tongue rolls around in your mouth. The letter is heavy in your pocket.
Your limbs feel like they’re going limp again.
“Bad dream?” Steve asks quietly.
You hesitate before you nod carefully, inhaling and exhaling as deeply as possible. Just to remind yourself that you’re okay now. Just to make sure that you are.
Steve’s eyes widen quickly. “No episode, though, right?”
“No,” you say, just as fast. “No, there wasn’t. I promise.”
He exhales in relief, nodding to himself. He breathes out something like okay before glancing back up at you. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
You shrug, playing with your fingers on the other side of his head. His hair brushes against your wrists. “It’s just the same as normal," you tell him. "Starcourt. Shaking and rotting. That shit.”
“Who’d you see tonight?” Steve asks.
Max.
“Mike,” you say. “It wasn’t really anything. He was just…he was writing out one of his campaigns, I think.”
Steve laughs humorlessly. “Scary.”
“Terrifying,” you agree.
Steve rotates the spoon again -- you can hardly feel its coldness anymore. Though he always knows when you’re lying, though he can certainly tell you’re doing it now, he doesn’t comment on it. He doesn’t even take it personally.
“I’m sorry you had a bad dream,” he mutters instead, totally earnestly.
“It’s okay,” you respond. “Not your fault.”
He knows that. Reasonably, he knows that. But you happen to know that Steve can’t remove himself from anything -- that anything that happens to you is something he considers preventable, as long as he’s around. And he’s been around for a while now -- two pretty awesome years -- but those two years together pale in comparison to the years without.
Which is the thing. With what you’ve seen, with what you’ve been through, you’ll always have some part of that in your life. Some part of you will always be in another world, with monsters and dark wizards and dead friends. If it ever ends at all. And all Steve can ever do for you is watch.
You’d be fucking wrecked too.
But he doesn't say that. And you don't either. You think maybe it's understood between the two of you. He likes normal.
Well, actually you like normal. Steve likes domestic. Steve likes homely.
He leans in and presses another quiet, apologetic kiss to your mark. This one is slow, drawn out. He lets it linger and his brows furrow like he's trying to memorize the feel of it under his lips, like he hadn't been doing this earlier, like he hasn't done it a thousand times. Even so, your hand rakes through his hair. Petting him. A quiet return of the favor.
Steve moves off your neck, eventually, though it must pain both of you, and pulls the spoon with him. He puts the head in his palm, squeezing the metal to test it out.
“I think the spoon is shitting out on us,” Steve quips dryly.
You tilt your head back. “And how’s it look?”
Steve takes one quick look at your wound and tries his absolute, world-class best not to wince at it. It comes out a little constipated: “Uh…" He swallows thickly. "Like you should probably just wear a turtleneck tomorrow.”
You sigh dramatically, letting your head fall back and thunk against the cabinets. You can't help but chuckle to yourself, a bit embarrassed. Steve laughs too, moving his hands to thumb circles into your hips.
“I’m sorry,” he drawls again, his quick fingers not apology enough for him. “I’ll do better next time.”
You peek an eye open at him, catching the soft look on his face. The reverent, down-on-his-knees, prayer-at-the-alter kind of look that he's always giving you.
And then you sigh.
“No, you won’t,” you insist knowingly, hopping off the counter. The hardwood is cold against your bare feet.
A grin spreads on Steve's face that you think he was trying to hide, almost relieved to let it fly out into the open. “No," he chuckles, "I won’t.”
And he reaches down to cup your face and kiss you.
It’s soft, as always. A gentle slotting of lips that were designed to meet each other one way or another. He always kisses you like he means it. It’s never an afterthought -- it’s always his only thought. You and your lips and his.
Then, of course, as it often does with Steve, one kiss becomes two, then three, and suddenly you’re stretching your arms to sling over his neck, and he’s sliding his palms against the flesh of your hips, already underneath your shirt. His teeth meet at your bottom lip experimentally; it makes you grunt, pulling away.
“What happened to ‘innocent?’” you tease, a smug smile on your face.
Steve groans annoyedly. “You started it,” he declares, before crashing back into you.
The spoon ends up in the sink as tomorrow’s problem and the lights are flicked off somewhere along the way. When you close your door, you tuck your letter back in your drawer before a tug on your shirt makes you tumble back into your bed. You let out a little shriek, going without a fight.
Steve hovers over you, caging you into the mattress with his arms, a mischievous look on his face.
"Oh, God, Classic, we gotta stop meeting this way," he murmurs, all proud of himself. His fingers lace in your hair and pulls some strays out of your face.
You shake your head. "You basically shoved me back here."
"Tomay-to, tomay-to, potato, whatever," Steve mutters, and then leans back in to kiss you.
It’s just you and him. Him and you. This stupid bedroom you pay way too much for.
And that’s one thing your stupid, recurring dream can’t take away.