Those Days Are Over (Don’t Worry, Baby) — Steve Harrington ( 3 )
part one part two part three ᵎᵎ
pairing — steve harrington x fem!reader
summary — four years ago, steve harrington had chosen his future and it wasn’t you. you’d chose to leave hawkins entirely and that worked out fine until it didn’t. now you’re sleeping in your sister’s guest room and picking up your nephew from baseball practice where steve harrington is teaching kids how to slide into home. some things, it turns out, you can’t outrun.
content warnings — 20.4k words. minors dni!!!! sexual content/semi-explicit ( grinding, heavy making out ), established relationship, hurt/comfort heavy, emotional hurt, veryyy unresolved past, exes to lovers, second chance, past heartbreak, insecurity and self doubt, miscommunication, trust issues, anxiety, crying, being emotionally vulnerable, domesticity, tense parental dynamics (towards steve)
author’s note — thank you so so much for waiting so long for this update!!! i’m so excited to share this part even though i’m a little unsure about it. thank god i wanna write a part 4 though as if this isn’t already a 50k word monster; these two genuinely won’t let me go and i’ve decided to stop fighting it
It was strange to hold Steve so tight after years, it almost hurt. Your left arm had gone numb sometime in the night, pinned between your body and his, and when you tried to flex your fingers, they responded with that pins-and-needles static that made you wince. You let them rest there; you didn’t want to disturb whatever fragile peace had settled over the two of you in sleep.
You hadn’t slept like this in four years—pinned and with someone else’s breathing setting the tempo for your own—and your body had clearly decided to make up the deficit all in one night. Steve was a furnace at your back, he always had been. You’d forgotten that the way you’d forgotten a dozen other facts about loving him; he ran hot, he slept like he was braced for the bed to be taken from him, he made a low sound in his throat when you so much as shifted, as though he was some sleeping animal accounting you were still there.
A pipe somewhere ticked as something warmed or cooled. The fridge cycled on, shuddered as it held a note. A car went by below and laid a slow bar of light across the wall, left to right, and then it took away again.
Steve’s hand was open on your sternum, fingers loose as the whole broad weight of them just placed there, rising and falling with you. At some point in the night, it had migrated up from your waist and settled over your breastbone, and you understood that it had gone to your heart. He’d done that as a teenager, too, in his parents’ rec room with a movie neither of you watched; you’d teased him for it because, at that age, you teased the boy for the tender thing instead of letting him just have it. You wished, slightly uncomfortably, that you’d just let him have it.
Steve breathed in differently, nearer to awake. His face was in your hair and you felt the breath go in long and catch slightly at the top like his body was still finding the parts of itself the crying had moved around. The weight of yesterday came back then, the simple physical fact of everything that had been said redistributing itself across your chest.
You couldn’t move your fingers.
It would have been the smallest thing to flex them and get the blood back, to end the bright fizzing ache of them. But that would have meant moving your arm, and moving your arm meant the chance—small, ridiculous, you knew it was ridiculous—that the whole arrangement would come apart, that he’d surface and the light would be wrong and it would turn out you’d assembled all of this out of want the way you used to assemble a future out of apartment listings. So you kept still and let your hand keep hurting, and you readily chose the ache; you tried to not think about how your first thing in the first morning was already to hold something uncomfortable very carefully and not say a single word about it.
Steve’s hand moved, fingers drawing in a fraction against your sternum and going loose again. You felt his breath change behind it, going longer, then held, then a rough exhale that you knew meant he’d decided to awake.
For a moment after the exhale, you felt the stillness arrive in him, as though he was taking inventory of his surroundings. You knew what he was taking into account, you could feel him counting; the math that came with waking up alone for years, and it had not yet been told the equation had changed.
His arm closed, far from gentle, and it contracted as he drew you back into him hard all at once. His hand splayed wide and certain over your ribs as his face pressed down into the nape of your neck like the limit of two bodies was a technicality he could negotiate. His breathing had come apart, going fast and shallow against your skin, and you lay there and let him hold you too tight and breathe wrong against your hair.
His nose dragged up the back of your neck like he was after the actual scent of you. Then his mouth found the top knob of your spine and stayed there, open, not quite a kiss, more a man pressing his lips to a thing to make certain it was warm.
“Don’t,” he said into your skin. His voice was wrecked, gravel-low. “Not yet. Don’t get up.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Good.” His hands slid off your ribs and down, flat, splaying over your stomach to haul your hips flush into his, and you felt exactly how not asleep the rest of him was. You felt it through the thin nothing of what you’d slept in, and he let you feel it—pressed against you slow, unhurried, and almost lazy, as though the point of it was the closeness and the rest was just truth that came attached. “Stay right here. Just—God.” His mouth moved to the side of your throat. “Stay right here so I can—”
You felt yourself let out a small chuckle. “So you can what?”
“So I can be normal about this.” He was smiling against your neck; you could feel the crooked shape of it. “Working on it. Gimme a second. I’m gonna be so normal about you.”
But his hand had started moving again, going up slowly, the broad heat of his palm dragging from your stomach to your ribs and stopping just under the curve of your breast, his thumb resting there. His hips shifted again, a slow press, and the sound that came out of him when you rocked back into it—just slightly, only to see—was low and ruined and so, completely involuntary.
“That’s not—you can’t do that.” He laughed, breathless, mouth still at your throat. “That’s not fair. I just woke up, I haven’t even—” He bit down, almost gently, on the spot below your ear, and you felt your own breath catch and him catching it. “There she is.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m in love,” he corrected, like it explained the hands and the hips and the mouth. The maddening thing was that out of his mouth, this hoarse and this early, it sort of did. “You want me to be cool about it?” His thumb finally moved, one slow stroke, and your spine arched into it before you could decide. “Not happening. You’re gonna have to let me be a little crazy about you for like—a month. Minimum.”
Despite the gnawing ache somewhere at the bottom of your chest, you felt your chest seize his words. A part too of you, too large to be considered normal either, tucked away his words to the girl who longed to hear them.
“We have to get out of bed at some point,” you said, the words coming out too quiet for your liking.
Steve stilled for a moment, lips pursing against your neck. Then, he let out a low hum, as though he was contemplating. He stayed silent for a while, resting his mouth against the side of your throat, and you could feel him thinking, not thinking, and being there, taking the weight of it all the second time.
“In a minute,” he said. “We’ve earned a minute.”
His arm remained exactly where it was, the dead weight of it across you not loosening even by a degree, and you understood he meant it less as a plan than as a refusal. The world could have the rest of the day, it could not yet have this.
“Thank you,” he said, quieter.
It came out so quietly you hardly heard it, the words pressed flat against your skin, and they sat there being strange. They felt far too small for whatever freight he’d loaded onto them; these words were a thing held for doors, a borrowed pencil, cookies. They weren’t meant for this, and he seemed to know it, for he let the words be insufficient and let you feel him knowing it.
“For—” He stopped. You waited for the rest and the rest never arrived; you felt the sentence simply run out of the road somewhere against the back of your neck, and he didn’t go chasing after it. Steve had never been able to say enormous things head-on. He said them sideways, in pieces, or three years later. “I keep thinking I got away with something,” he said instead, which was sideways, the closest he could get. “Like someone’s going to come here and tell me you’re not for me.”
“Steve.”
“I know.” His mouth found the top of your shoulder and pressed there, apologetic. “I know it’s dumb.” His thumb started up again over your ribs, that unconscious arc, back-and-forth across the same inch of you.
You turned over. Your numb arm came along like luggage, flopping uselessly between you, and your knee cracked into his, and your elbow caught him somewhere soft enough that he let out a low oof. Then, he huffed a laugh against your forehead, and his hand found your hip to guide the last of the turn.
You were facing him, and he found your face like the whole clumsy tangle of limbs had only ever been in service of getting your eyes back in front of his.
He looked like himself in a way that hurt a little. The morning had stripped him down to it; his hair had gone soft and undone, falling forward his forehead in pieces, longer than he’d worn it as a boy, dark where it curled his temple from sleep. His face had filled out the lanky sharpness of seventeen; there was a sharper line to his jaw now, a day of stubble coming in uneven along it. His eyes were swollen at the rim still, lashes stuck into wet points, and there was that total unguarded, slightly stupid attention present in them. A pillow crease raw pink and deep down one cheek.
“Hi,” he said.
“I missed you, Steve,” you said, the words tumbling out of your lips before you could give it a micro-second of thought.
It hit him somewhere you could see. His brows drew in first, a small pull at the center. Then his throat worked, one slow swallow, the shift of it under his jaw a few inches from yours. His eyes had gone bright too fast, the swollen rims of them catching, and he blinked once, hard, like he could send it back down by force and was annoyed he couldn’t. The hand on your hip flexed—closed, opened, closed—gripping on nothing, at the warmth of you through the cotton.
“You—” He didn’t finish the sentence, choosing to kiss you instead. It was four years with the brakes off, his hand coming up hard into your hair, his mouth on yours like the kiss was an answer he couldn’t get out another way. He made a low sound that caught in his throat, and his other arm dragged you in by the small of your back until there was no inch of you he wasn't touching.
“Say it again,” he said against your mouth. “C’mon. Say it again.”
“I missed—”
He kissed the rest out of you, greedy and a little desperate about it, his teeth catching your bottom lip. You felt him smile when your breath went.
“Been so long,” he muttered, complaining, dragging his lips along your jaw, down, to the spot under your ear. “Missed you so much it was stupid. It was actually—” Another kiss, lower. “—embarrasing. Ask anyone.”
You laughed and it came out shaky. He lifted his head at the sound of it, wanting to see it.
His eyes were wet, and he didn’t bother hiding it, too undone to bother. They moved over your face, and his thumb came up and pressed to the corner of your mouth, holding the edge of your smile.
“There,” he said, quiet now, the heat in his voice going soft underneath it. “That. Do that again and keep doing it forever.”
You got off at four because Mrs. Mayer’s root canal had been cancelled and Dr. Feldman had looked at the empty two-thirty and three-fifteen slot and told you, with too much generosity, to just go. So now there was a whole unspent hour in your hands, and the light was going long and yellow and a little nostalgic, laying itself flat across the outfield grass like it had been poured there. You came up the path on the third-base side and the chain-link was warm under your fingers where you trailed them along it, sun-warmed, humming faintly when you pressed. You stopped before you got to the dugout, wanting to not be noticed for just a little longer.
On the mound Steve had a kid by the shoulders, squaring him up to do something, and he was crouched to do it. He was down to the boy’s height, the backwards cap and the whistle and the dirt already worked into one knee of his pants. He was saying something that made the kid nod hard twice. The rest of them were scattered infield in the loose orbit; someone’s glove was on the grass.
That was something that still got you. Younger, Steve had never once in his life folded himself down to someone’s level—his entire being had been built on people looking up—and here he was, one knee on the dirt, down to a child’s height, patient in a way the boy you’d once known wouldn’t have recognized in himself. It was a thing he learned somewhere you weren’t, and you hated, a little, that you hadn’t been there to see him learn it.
It was Carter who found you first. He was out near second, doing something with his glove that had stopped being baseball a while ago—turning it over and inspecting the webbing—and he looked up for no reason and saw you at the fence. His whole face opened, and he didn’t wave so much as throw his arm up, the whole thing, fingers spread, the gesture too big for the small distance.
“Auntie!” he hollered, in case the wave had failed to cover it, and a couple other kids to look at the spectacle of an aunt, found you unremarkable, then looked back.
You lifted a hand, smiled, mouthed a greeting.
Steve turned then, doing an automatic head-count that had likely been woven into his primal instincts as someone who had to take good care of children. His gaze swept and caught on you and stopped. You watched it happen from sixty feet away; his face, mid-instruction, running a scan, it hitting you, and the whole thing went still for a beat, reticulating. His hand was still on the kid’s shoulder, he’d forgotten it was there. The kid looked up at him, waiting for whatever sentence had been happening, and Steve seemed to have forgotten there had been one.
He came back to himself pretty quick, said something quick to the boy, gave the shoulder a pat that was half-apology, and straightened up. His whole face changed, it did it every time and you were beginning to suspect you’d never get used to it. You couldn’t possibly get used to it, not when it brightened, helpless, top-to-bottom, the neutral falling off it. It had only been five days, but he looked at you like it had been considerably longer and also like no time had passed, as though you were both the most expected and least believable thing to have existed in Hawkins.
“Alright—” His voice carried, pitched for the field, as he clapped once. “Two laps and grab your stuff. Two, Daniels, I can count. Carter—” because Carter had already abandoned all pretense of practice and was making for the fence, glove flapping. “—two laps means you, too, bud. Your aunt’s not going anywhere.”
“She might!”
“Trust me, she’s not,” Steve said easily to Carter, but his eyes had come back to you when he said it.
Carter, robbed of his argument, groaned the groan of the deeply wronged and peeled off toward the outfield to serve his two laps, glove still on. You watched him go. You watched, too, the small mutiny of the rest of them.
Steve crossed the infield to you, trying to look like he wasn’t hurrying and failing at the trying. He was still half-turned toward the field as he came, lobbing instructions over his shoulder, his voice running on its own track while the rest of him aimed itself at the fence.
He reached the other side of the chain-link and stopped. For a second, you just had the two of you and the diamond pattern of the wire between, and he looked at you through it, and grinned.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You’re early.” He said, sounding like an accusation he was over the moon to be making. “It’s not—you don’t get him for another half hour.”
“Mrs. Mayers cancelled her root canal.”
“God bless, Mrs. Mayers, then.” He hooked his fingers through the links, up near yours, the backs of them warm against the backs of yours. There was something almost shy in it, the fence still between you, a boy at a school dance unsure of the rules. “She’s getting a Christmas card.”
You let out a small chuckle. “You don’t even know her.”
“Don’t need to.” His fingers shifted against yours through the wire. “Did me a favor.” His mouth pulled. “She gave me a whole extra hour with you, I’m just grateful.”
Then, he added, “Come here.”
“I am here.”
“No, you’re—” He gave the fence a small affronted shake, the whole panel of it rattling. “You’re there. I can’t work like this.”
“You’re supposed to be working anyway. There are children.”
“The children are fine. They’re running laps, it’s the one part of practice that runs itself.” He’d already let go of the wire, though, already started moving down the length of the fence toward the gap where the gate was. He didn’t wait to see if you were following, just trusting it, and you found you were following. The both of you walked your opposite sides of the chain-link toward the one place it would let you be on the same side. “Come around. C’mon. Humor me.”
He reached the gate first and held it, one hand flat on the swing of it, grinning almost ridiculously.
“You’re holding it like a car door,” you said, faintly amused.
He shrugged. “Get in the car, baby.”
You shook your head, chuckling. “You’re gross.”
You still went through the gate, and the second the fence wasn’t a thing between you two anymore, his arms came around you. He hooked you to his side as his arm settled across your shoulders and turned the two of you to face the field. You understood, in the first few seconds of it, that he was going to keep the arm there and you were going to watch the back half of the children’s practice pinned to the coach’s side.
“There.” The whole long line of him eased against you. “Better. Now it’s a good practice.”
You slightly nudged his side, shaking your head. “I don’t know why these kids even like you.”
“They worship me,” he said with a serene confidence like he had never once been worried about it, “because I’m an incredible coach and a positive role model.” Then his eyes cut to you, checking, the certainty thinning at the edges the second the audience narrowed to just you. “You’re not gonna confirm that for me, huh.”
“No.”
“Yeah,” he sighed, expecting nothing better. “That’s fair.”
“Carter thinks you’re the one who decides who goes to the major leagues. You’re just a liar.”
Steve traced its slow arc against your arm where his hand hung off your shoulder. Then, he tipped his chin to rest it on top of yours. “They like me ‘cause I tell them they’re good and mean it. Kid that age, all they need is for someone to tell them they’re good and mean it.”
You let that one sit. There was something underneath it that made you ache to think about, something about a boy who’d grown up in a big cold house with a piano player at Christmas and parents who were always elsewhere, something about Steve knowing the going rate of a grown-up meaning it.
Out on the field, the laps had come apart entirely. Daniels was lying flat in the outfield grass, arms flung wide. Two guys had given up on baseball for a conversation that required their whole bodies to conduct. And Carter had run two laps and was jogging the long way back toward the diamond. You watched the exact moment his course bent and the moment his eyes found the sideline.
Steve felt it too. A small huff went through his chest. “Here he comes.”
Carter slowed and stopped ten feet out, glove dangling from one hand. He looked at the two of you with an open, laboring face, eyes going to Steve’s arm and your shoulder under it. Then Steve’s face and back to the arm.
“Why are you doing that?” Carter asked.
You felt Steve hold down a chuckle beside you. “Doing what, bud?”
“That.” The whole hand came up to point. “Your arm.”
“Free country,” Steve said. “I can put my arm wherever I want.”
“It’s on my aunt.”
“Oh, I know exactly whose aunt it’s on,” Steve said, voice teasing.
Carter made a sound of betrayed outrage in his throat. “I’m telling mom.”
“Please do tell her,” Steve said without missing a beat.
Carter narrowed his eyes at the two of you, holding the suspicion a moment longer. Then, the matter apparently not yielding any more information, he moved on to the part that concerned him. “So, is he—” His gaze swung up to you. “Is Coach Steve gonna be around you?”
You knew Carter meant nothing by it, it was more a logistics question asked by a kid who thought in terms of stuff, of the time you spent with him, of dinners, and the shape of a regular week. He was already half-distracted, picking at the dirt crusted in his glove while he waited on the answer.
You felt yourself hesitate. It was nothing—half a beat, a beat, the space where you should have said yes easily and didn’t. Because the question had reached somewhere Carter hadn’t aimed for it to reach; Carter didn’t know about the ring or the car or the year you’d come home wrong. He’d lived inside the after of his whole conscious life, and now he was standing in the gold light hoping, you could see him hoping, and you understood all at once that this was a part of it all, too. That at twenty-two, being with Steve existed beyond the bubble that the two of you lived in. In many ways, it was the way you had expected you’d live when you were a teenager.
The beat passed, and you opened your mouth to give Carter the easy answer, but you knew Steve had already felt it.
Of course he had, he felt everything about you. The arm around your shoulder stayed there, but some warmth went thin in him, the brightness dimming by a notch you couldn’t possibly miss. He went quiet, a little careful, and you knew exactly what your half-second sounded like in his head.
“Yeah,” you said to Carter, and you made it land right, made your voice do the warm easy thing. “I don’t think we’re getting rid of him.”
Carter accepted this with a warm shrug, likely not realizing the gravity of having Steve around in the manner the two of you were heading toward. He was already gone, jogging off, glove flapping, the whole exchange behind him.
You stood there in the quiet he left, hating, a little, how quickly you'd reached for the patch.
Steve was still beside you, quiet, and once Carter was far enough off, he turned his head. His voice came out quiet and just for you, hesitant in a way he never allowed himself to be. “Hey.” His thumb moved on your arm. “I’m in. You know that, right? Like—” He stopped, then starting again, fumbling toward it. “I know me saying it—it doesn’t prove it. I just need you to know it. That’s all. However slow, I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere.”
You felt the corners of your lips twitch as your body relaxed just slightly. He just set the warmth down in front of you, all of it, asking for nothing back. You felt your chest do a helpless grateful thing as you nodded jerkily.
“I know,” you said and turned to face him, tilting your chin up to meet his eyes. “How about we start with a date?”
“A date,” Steve repeated, and you watched the grin start at the corner of his mouth and lose the fight fast, spreading until it had the whole of his face.
“Yeah. A date,” you confirmed. “Where you—”
“Where I pick you up.” He was already nodding, already somewhere ahead of you with it. “Yeah. Yeah, okay—” and then his hand came up to your jaw and tipped your face up to kiss you, quick and certain, grinning. It was quick enough that none of the kids caught the peck.
“I think I’d like a Steve Harrington date once again,” you said.
“You’re gonna get the best one I’ve got,” Steve said. His thumb moved once along your jaw before his hand dropped. “I’ll figure it out. Something good.”
“I don’t think anything can top the time you drove me to the water tower for my birthday.”
Steve’s grin shifted, and something even more fond entered his expression. “You loved the water tower.”
You had; he’d picked you up at seven with a cooler in the back seat and no information at all, deflecting every question the whole drive. He’d taken one hand off the wheel at the last stretch of the road to cover your eyes so you wouldn’t catch the turn. He'd climbed up first and reached back for you, and there'd been a string of those cheap battery lights he'd looped along the rail, and the cooler had a bottle of something stolen from his parents' garage and a cake from the grocery store. Sixteen, and the whole of Hawkins laid out small and lit-up underneath you, and Steve watching your face the entire time instead of the view, because your face had been the thing he'd built it for.
He watched your face carefully, and whatever it was doing made him pull you in closer. “This is gonna be even better.” When you raised your brows, he immediately said, “And don’t bother fishing. I know you. I won’t tell—”
“Coach Steve!” The voice came from third base. Marcus, a gangly boy with his glove planted on his hip, wearing a posture of pure withering judgement you didn’t even think was possible for an eleven-year-old. The rest of the kids had drifted into the loose disorder of an unsupervised practice, and Marcus had clearly appointed himself shop steward of the situation.
“You’re supposed to be coaching us,” he announced to the field, to the parking lot, to Indianapolis. “You’ve been standing there the whole time.”
Steve’s head turned. “I’m coaching right now.”
Marcus turned to you, raising his brow in question. Despite yourself, you felt yourself shrinking underneath the kid’s judgement, causing you to pull Steve off of you by the elbow, a mortified shove. “Go coach. Steve. The children are angry.”
“They’re always angry.” But he was already losing the argument and he knew it, for Marcus’s stare had the weight of a much older and much more disappointed man. Steve sighed longly for being dragged bodily back to his job. “Fine. Okay, Marcus. You happy? One day you’re gonna like someone and remember this.”
“I will not,” Marcus said immediately with an iron certainty that clearly meant he had never given the idea much thought.
“You will. It happens to everybody,” Steve said, pushing off the fence, conceding the field. His hand caught yours on the way, the last bit of contact, holding on a beat past when the rest of him had left. “Infield. Let’s go.”
He started for the diamond, and he didn’t let go of your hand, so you got towed a full step and a half before you planted.
“Oooookay.” You dug your feet into the ground, causing Steve to turn. “I’m not co-coaching with you.”
Steve looked back at you, then down at the hand he was still holding, then at you again, as though this had genuinely not occurred to him as a problem. “Fine. Just stay here then.”
You realized that this was the first and last time you’d come to watch baseball practice.
The apartment was three-quarters yours already, and that was why most of the gaps in it showed so much. You’d had a week of evenings alone in it before today, trying to convince yourself that you did, in fact, live there despite the lack of furniture. So the rug was down, the good one, the one with the rust-colored border that you'd hauled up three flights by yourself in two trips and a half. The paper lantern you'd hung over the main room glowed even now, mid-afternoon, because the bulb was warm and you'd wanted it warm. There were plants on the kitchen sill in a row, leaning their whole green selves toward the brick-shadowed light, and a record crate by the wall, and a lamp with one of your mother's old scarves draped over the shade, throwing the light amber where it pooled on the floorboards.
The couch wasn’t here yet; it was down in Eddie’s van, and so the main room had a sofa-shaped emptiness in the middle of it the rug was pretending it wasn't there. Your books were in towers along the baseboard, waiting for a shelf that was also in the van. The bed was a frame in four leaning pieces against the bedroom wall. It was a room with a soul and no skeleton, and you’d found that you didn’t mind the order it came in. After four years of the reverse—of furnished rooms that stayed somebody else's no matter how long you slept in them—you were willing to wait on a couch.
You heard a long graceless scrape and thud working its way up the stairwell, punctuated by Eddie’s voice, then Steve’s, lower, the two of them negotiating.
“Pivot—pivot, Harrington. That’s a wall. You’re putting it through a wall—”
“It’s not going through a wall—”
“Yes, it—”
You held the door, smiling as Eddie met your eyes. The couch came through at an angle that defied a few things about geometry, Steve walking backward with the brunt of it and Eddie steering the rear. And then it was in, and then it was down, finally filling the gap. It looked, immediately and completely, like it had always meant to live here.
Eddie straightened up and put both hands at the small of his back like a man twice his age. “That,” he said, “is the worst one. From here it’s all small stuff.” He turned a slow circle, taking the place in. You watched him register it, watched the appraisal land somewhere genuine. “Huh. It’s good in here. You did all this in a week?”
“Yup. Most of it.”
Steve hadn’t said anything yet. He’d done a slow read of the apartment the same way Eddie had done, except Eddie’s circle had ended on liking it, and Steve’s didn’t seem to have landed anywhere at all. His eyes went over the lantern, the rug, the four leaning pieces of the bed frame against the far wall. The single mug by the sink. His hands had gone into his pockets somewhere in the looking.
“It does look really nice,” Steve said finally, and you could hear he meant it. Only, it just came out a half-degree under the pitch the afternoon had been running at.
Then he crossed the room to you, and the thin thing in him from a second ago he seemed to leave behind somewhere on the way. His hands found your waist, turning you a little so your back fit against his front, and his chin came down on the top of your head.
“You decorated so much better than me. I’m sort of jealous,” Steve said.
“Mm. Because you didn’t decorate,” you said. You reached up and pressed your palm flat over the back of his hand where it sat at your waist, and felt him go quiet and pleased above you, and across the room Eddie made a noise of discovery.
“Okay,” Eddie said. “What is this?”
You looked over. Eddie had surfaced from the box marked MISC, holding something up between two fingers, the way you'd hold up something found under a fridge, and it took you a second to place it from across the room.
The first shoes, soft pink leather gone gray and stiff with age, the elastic all but perished, scuffed nearly through at the toe. They were child-sized, which meant absurdly small that didn’t seem like they could ever have been on a real foot. Madame Petrova’s from when you were seven; you’d carried them through the dorm, through places that were even less than temporary, through Devon’s house, through every set of rooms that hadn't been yours, and you had never once been able to explain to anyone, including yourself, why a box always had to have them in it.
“Those are mine,” you said, which answered nothing.
“Obviously. I figured they weren’t Harrington’s.” Eddie turned them over, examined the worn-through toe, the size of them. “These are—Harrington, did you know your girlfriend keeps haunted baby shoes—”
He said it without weight, ‘girlfriend’ just the nearest word his sentence had reached for, already turning the shoes over to find the angle that would explain them. He wasn't waiting on anyone. He didn't notice he'd done anything at all.
But you turned to look at Steve, and he looked at you. You both caught the stalled expression on the other’s face that meant the word had landed somewhere it hadn’t before.
It was true, and that was the almost-funny part, the part sitting between you two, light and a little absurd. It was completely true that neither of you had once said it. Three months in—his razor on your sink and your tea in his cupboard, his arm slung around you in a parking lot in front of the entire Hawkins parent body, a thing so large and obvious it had its own weight—and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the two of you had simply never gone back and picked the small ordinary word up off the floor. You'd skipped it. You'd been busy with the enormous version and forgotten the plain one existed.
“Huh,” Steve said. He was looking at you with his eyebrows slightly up, fighting a smile and losing, like he’d been handed a piece of excellent news on accident. You felt your own face doing something embarrassingly similar.
“Don’t,” you said, trying to bite down the smile that threatened to capture your face.
“I’m not doing anything.”
You gestured at his face, at the pleased expression on it. “We have a bookshelf to work on. You can do this later.”
“I’ll remember that,” he agreed, not remotely chastened. “I’m gonna say it at the worst possible time. At the grocery store. And I’ll say it loudly.” And let you go—but slow, his hands trailing off your waist like they were trying to decide against it.
“I’ll break up with you.”
“Can’t. You’d have to call me your boyfriend first. There’s an order to these things.” He looked insufferably pleased with the loophole. You crossed the room to take the shoes back from Eddie before he could find a worse thing to say about them.
“My shoes are not haunted,” you said, affronted. They weighed almost nothing and you set them on the windowsill instead of back in the box, where the late light came through and showed how thin the layer had gone at the toe.
Eddie watched you do it with mild interest, raising a brow. “Did they make you spin around on sandpaper—” He stopped when you pointed him with a glare, albeit with no heat behind it. He crouched and started working the bookshelf free of its cardboard.
“Thank you,” you said, “for the help.”
Eddie turned his neck to face you, lips curving up into a smile. “Well, I couldn’t have let Harrington do it all. He would’ve broken his back and we both would have had to take care of him.”
Steve huffed out a laugh at the words as he finished the work of pulling the panels of the bookshelf out. “Yeah, I don’t think I’d want you at my bedside, Eddie.”
Eddie patted Steve on the back. “You’d want me there,” he said, and that seemed to settle it for him.
The two of them got down to the shelf. The wrong screws obviously came first, then the right ones, Eddie holding it square while Steve drove the brackets, you reading the instruction sheet aloud to a room that had unanimously decided the instruction sheet was beneath it. The light moved across the floorboards while you worked. Somewhere below, the building did its evening sounds, a door, a faucet, somebody's television.
You watched them more than you read, after a while. They had a shorthand; Eddie said half a sentence and Steve already made a move to meet it, a joke that was clearly the worn-down nub of an older joke, the easy conversation between two people who’d done a hundred dumb tasks together and would do a hundred more together. It was a hollow feeling, in your chest, of standing at the edge of someone’s life and seeing, laid out plain, how much of it had gone on being rich and full and populated in all the years you weren't in it. Steve had become somebody’s person, several somebodies’, a fixture in their lives with their own regulars. You'd felt it once before, in a bar, watching Robin and Vickie fit together like they'd been cut from one piece. You filed it under nothing. You went back to the instruction sheet.
“What time is it?” Eddie said from the floor, hardly looking up from the bracket. “I told Jonathan I’d call him before it got stupid-late. He’s trying to lock down the Philly weekend and won’t let it go.”
“Like five,” Steve said.
“Okay, I’ve got time.” Eddie sat back on his heels and looked over the half-built shelf. “He wants the fourteenth confirmed. You still good for that?”
“Yeah. Tell him I’m in.” Steve fit the last bracket and pressed it flat to check if it held. Then, he looked up to where you stood, figuring out the right place for the lamp. “That’s—yeah. If that’s okay with you.”
You met his eyes. “If what’s okay?”
“Me going. The fourteenth,” he said, like it was obvious. “I don’t have to. If you’ve got stuff that weekend, or you just—want to do nothing. With me.”
“Steve.” You almost laughed. “Go to Philly.”
Steve shrugged, looking slightly offended. “I’m just saying it’s an option. Me, here, doing nothing with you.”
“It’s an extremely sad option. You have to go.”
Later that night, the lamp was the only thing either of you had thought to turn on, and neither of you was going to do anything about it. It would have meant moving, and moving, just then, was unthinkable. So, the bedroom had narrowed to the reach of one light, a scarf knotted over the shade, throwing it low and amber, and everything past the edge of it gone soft and dark and able to wait.
You were already undressed, wound into the warm dark shape the two of you made of a bed, and Steve was over you, braced on one forearm, and there was nothing hurried in him at all. You’d learned that about him in the last three months, that for all the want he carried around like something overfilled, when he finally had you like this, he went slow, almost unbearably so, as though the approach was its own country and he had no intention of passing through it quickly.
His hand was proof of it. It had been moving a while now, unhurried, deliberate, mapping you because he already knew exactly where your breath caught and how. He drew it out of you on purpose. You felt him feel it when your spine gave, when the sound you’d held in came out loose, and you felt the answering move through him. He let out a low, rough exhale against your jaw, his own hips pressing down into the space against your thigh, seeking.
You could read the tightening of his shoulders, the catch in his breath, and you knew the exact register of the sound that meant he was holding himself back from more. You turned your head and put your mouth to his throat, shifting your body down so you could neatly roll your hips against his, just to feel him lose a little bit of the grip. He did. A groan went through his chest as his forehead dropped against yours.
Then, he met your movement, grinding down with explicit, almost hungry intent. You felt the hard line of him press flush against you. He braced his weight on one arm so he could use the other to keep you pinned, and rocked against you with a rhythm that was deliberate and maddeningly slow.
It dragged a sound out of you, and Steve’s mouth curved where it rested against your temple, pleased, the small smug flicker that lived in him even now. He did it again, the same slow grind, and watched your face for what it would do. He'd built whole evenings around your face. He braced harder on the pinning arm, fingers spreading wide and certain over your hip, and the crooked bed frame gave its small complaint beneath the both of you and went ignored.
“Steve—” His name came apart in the middle.
“I know.” His voice had turned to gravel, wrecked and warm against your side. “Not going anywhere.”
And maybe it was that, those words, said into the curve of your jaw with his whole body so achingly familiar over yours. Or maybe it was the lamp, the late hour, and three months of this, of being wanted so completely and thoroughly. But the word came up in you and would not be talked backed down. It had been sitting in you since the early evening, since Eddie had said it, and now, here, with nothing left between you and no one to be anything for, it simply wanted out.
“Hey,” you said. It came out unsteady, even the single word. “Steve.”
“Mm—” His mouth was at the corner of yours, hips not stopping. “Yeah. What—what is it, baby?”
And then the giggle got loose before you could stop it—embarrassed and completely out of your control, the question right behind it and tangled up in it—and you felt your face get warm with the absurdity of what you were about to do.
Steve went still enough to lift his head. His hips slowed but not quite stopped, the rhythm going lazy now, almost absent. The rest of him propped up to look down at you with an expression of pure, undone, mock-wounded suspicion.
“What.” His brow had pulled together. His voice was still rough, but there was a thread of genuine affront laced through it now, for he had been giving this his entire and undivided gravity and had just, apparently, been laughed at for it. “What’s funny? Why are you—” He pressed down against your hips once, trying to make a point about the work he was in the midst of. “I’m right here being—what is so funny?”
“Nothing.” You were still laughing. You couldn’t help it. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid—”
“Now I must know.” He huffed, indignant. His forehead dropped to yours. “You’re laughing at me. Just tell me. C’mon. Tell me what’s funny.”
And so you did, because he'd cornered you into it, because his face was right there waiting and the giggle wouldn't quit and there was nowhere left to put it but into the words.
“Would you like to be my boyfriend, Steve?”
For a second, all of Steve simply stopped. Every part of him went still all at once, the offended expression wiped clean off his face like it had never been there. He lifted his head to fully look down at you, the amber light catching the whole undone wreck of him; pupils blown dark, hair a ruin from your fingers, mouth still parted on a sentence he’d abandoned. And what surfaced underneath that was so soft, so plainly struck, that you felt your own laugh die somewhere in your throat at the sight of it.
“You—” he said, and the word broke off. Whatever had been in his chest pushed out of him instead as a sound—low, wrecked, and something close to a delighted laugh—and his nose dragged along the side of your forehead. “Yeah.”
It came before anything else, just the bare word breathed out against your mouth. The answer escaped him the way the truest things always managed to escape Steve, too fast and ahead of his pride. His hand had come up off your hip to cradle the back of your skull, fingers spreading into your hair, and he was already moving again, the paused rhythm of him resuming low and certain, like the question had only ever been a thing he'd stopped to let through.
“Yeah, I’d like to be your boyfriend,” he said the words into the corner of your mouth, into your cheek, as though he had to imprint them into several places of you to make sure it landed. “Course I am. C’mere.”
You were already there. He kissed you anyway, deep and a little clumsy with how much was in it, and you felt him smiling against it, helpless, unable to hold the shape of a kiss for the grin breaking through it.
He pulled back just an inch, and the betrayal had arrived.
“You weren’t supposed to do that, though.” He tried to seem wounded, but there was no chance for it to pass through with the smile on his lips. “I had a plan. I was gonna ask you. Properly.” He huffed, indignant, pressed his hips down harder against you, as if that was a punishment at all. “And you just said it—”
“You took too long.”
His eyes widened slightly. “Since when did you become so bossy?”
“Since we forgot to put a label on it,” you said immediately.
He laughed then, stopping his movement. “I don’t know how. I’ve got a drawer here.” Then, he tipped his chin down to meet your eyes again. “Girlfriend, huh?”
“That good with you?” you asked, raising your brow.
“Fuck—yeah. Obviously,” he said, all the breath behind it, like the word had cost him something just to get past the want sitting in his chest.
He shifted his weight off the braced arm so he could give you both of his hands, one sliding up your ribs and the other coming to your jaw, tilting your face up to exactly where he wanted it.
“My girlfriend,” he said against your mouth, just to feel the word there. He kissed you on it—once, slow—and then again, deeper, and you felt the shift in him. His hand left your jaw and moved down, splaying flat and certain over the lowest point of your stomach, thumb dragging low, and the sound you made got caught somewhere and he swallowed it, pleased. “I love you so much,” he whispered.
Carter had decided, sometime in the last month, that Steve belonged to him.
It came out in small, administrative ways an eleven-year-old laid claim to a person. It was Carter who’d answered the door, hauling it open before you’d got your hand off the screen, and Carter who performed introductions the house didn’t need—that’s Coach Steve, he’s here, he came—as though Steve were a rare bird he’d sighted. It was Carter who directed him by the sleeve, now, through the den and past the roaring oven fan and the TV, narrating the tour of the house Steve had stood in a hundred times before.
That’s the chair Grandpa won’t let anyone sit in. That’s where the cat throws up. That’s my drawing, the horse, I did the horse.
Steve received each fact with the grave full attention of a man being shown state secrets, ducking his head to look where Carter pointed, asking a follow-up question about the horse that made Carter light up like a struck match.
You stood in the doorway with your coat half-off and watched it. You felt the scene land in you sideways, the way the truest things tended to. Carter was easy with Steve, uncomplicatedly so; there was no reserve in it, no second track running underneath, none of the carefulness the rest of the house would be performing all evening. It took you a moment to place why it made you so uneasy, and the answer sat in your chest like a swallowed rock. Carter had never met the other Steve, the one who existed in this house before, the one with the shadow on him. To Carter, there had only ever been this one—Coach Steve who’d spent months teaching him baseball and was now in his grandparents’ home—a man with no before attached, no wreckage trailing him to the foyer. Carter got to have the simple version.
Your mother came out of the kitchen with her hands still in a dish towel and a smile she’d been wearing on and off since you’d asked if you could bring Steve. It was a real smile, and that was the thing you’d been turning over for two days; that it was real, and that it was also being held, the way you'd hold a glass you'd already dropped once.
“Steve,” she said his name, and you heard the missing ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’ that you had once grown so used to her calling him. The names came out easily, without her ever thinking about it. Tonight, it was just Steve, chosen, and that was both a kindness and its own verdict all at once. “Look at you.”
“Hi. Yeah. Hi.” Steve shifted the wine bottle to his other hand and then held it out to her, a beat too quickly. “This is—for you. For dinner. Thank you for having me,” he said to a house he’d once been allowed to walk into without knocking, and you heard the carefulness in it.
Your mother let Steve catch his breath anyway, giving him a generous laugh, and took the wine. She looked at the label for a moment longer than needed. “That’s too nice,” she said. “You didn’t have to bring something this nice.”
“I wanted to.”
“Well.” Your mother turned the bottle so the label faced away, the way she did with anything that threatened to be a fuss. “It’ll be wasted on us. Your father can drink it like its juice.” But she set it on the counter with a small care that said she’d noticed it, and would remember it.
“Where do you want me?” Steve asked, straightening up even further. “I can chop, carry—I’m good at carrying.”
“You’re a guest,” your mother said.
“I can be a guest who helps.”
“Sit down, Steve,” she said, the old warmth creeping into her tone just slightly, and you saw him take the half-inch gratefully, eyes brightening.
He hovered at the edge of the kitchen, and you were about to rescue him from his own posture when your father came in from the den.
Your father came in slow, he never rushed toward anything with feeling in it; he arrived at those the way weather arrived, from a way off, with time to see it coming. He had the newspaper still in one hand, folded, a man holding his place in his own evening. He looked at Steve. Steve straightened, and put his hand out.
“Mr—”
“Steve.” Your father took the hand, giving it one firm shake, and then he held it just a half-beat past where it should’ve ended. He held it long enough that you watched Steve decide to stand inside it and be looked at rather than pull free. “Been a while.”
“Yes, sir. It has.”
You saw your father swallow and let the hand go. “Carter talks very highly of you.”
“He’s starting at second, actually,” Steve said before he could stop himself, the pride in it unguarded, and then—hearing the eagerness, hearing how much he wanted your father to like the answer—he reeled it back a notch. “He’s earned it. He works hard. He’s good.”
He looked at Steve a moment more, and you stood there with your coat finally all the way off and could not, for the life of you, read him, and you had known this man your entire life. “We’ll see how the season goes.”
It was far from unkind, and it was a door left ajar, with a man told plainly that he'd be the one to prove which way it swung. Your father went to fold himself into the chair nobody sat in, snapped the newspaper back to the page he wanted, and the foyer let out a breath.
You found Steve’s hand down low, fingers flexing slightly. He looked at you, and the easy face—the one that came so naturally for Carter—had vanished. What sat in its stead was much younger and barer. His jaw was set a little too hard, working at nothing; his eyes had gone bright and over-busy, doing too much reading of the room, checking doorways; he was breathing like he had to force himself to do so. His hand found yours, but his fingers had gone stiff, almost too cold.
“Hey,” you whispered to him. “You’re doing great.”
You caught a forlorn smile gracing his lips for a moment. He turned his hand to thread his fingers through yours completely and hold on a degree too tight. “I’m okay. I want to be here.”
You knew he meant it completely. You knew he was cold-handed and over-careful and glad. He was glad to be paying it, because Steve had just spent four years in the wrong side of this house, and a guarded welcome was still a welcome, and the loud warm overlit kitchen with the chicken in it was the precise thing he had been working, all this time, to be allowed back into.
He turned to look at you then, as if he could sense your worry for him. “I love you,” he said, “and stop looking so worried. Your face is doing a thing.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s a little doing it.” He squeezed your hand once, and let the easy face come back partway, enough to get the both of you moving toward the noise.
Devon was already at the table, and she, mercifully, did anything but guarded. She did the opposite by appointing herself as the evening’s friction (much to the begging you’d done without telling Steve you’d done it), and she spent the first twenty minutes aiming dry, glancing things at Steve the way you'd lob a tennis at someone to see if they'd catch it. ‘They let you near impressionable youth; how’s that going for the impressionable youth. Are they impressed?’ It was close enough to be standing next to kindness, Devon poking Steve like a brother she was deciding whether to keep, and Steve, who had grown up an only child in a house with too much quiet in it, caught every ball she threw and looked grateful for the bruise.
By the time the chicken came around the table he'd loosened a notch. By the time your father was carving seconds nobody had asked for, the dinner had found a real rhythm.
“And Coach Steve—” Carter was saying.
“Honey, I think you can stop calling him Coach at the table,” Devon said, interrupting him. You were sure it was because she’d heard the word coach thrown around one too many times here, and was probably hearing it every waking hour at home.
Carter looked startled for a moment. “What should I call him, then?”
Devon shrugged. “Steve might be nice.”
“Ste—” Carter made a face like that sounded all wrong. “Coach Steve—” he finished, the compromise failing to reach, “is going to—somewhere. He told us he’s gonna miss a practice.”
“One practice,” Steve said. “I already told you. I’ll be back before the game.”
That appeared to satisfy Carter who returned to his potatoes.
“Where’s the practice you’re missing for?” your mother asked conversationally, keeping the table's small wheels turning. “Somewhere good?”
“Philadelphia.” Steve had a roll halfway to his plate. “Just a weekend thing. Some friends out that way.”
“That’s a haul.”
“It’s not so bad once you’re past Columbus, honestly,” he said it, a fact worn smooth from handling, and you registered that distantly.
It was Devon who turned the conversation to Steve, buttering a roll with most of her attention. “Who’s in Philly?”
“Some people from high school,” Steve said. “We planned to do it couple times a year. Tried to do every month but—” He shrugged, smiling sheepishly. “It’s easy, though. It runs itself at this point if everyone’s available.”
You caught her turning to glance at you before she said, “Sounds nice.”
And it was, that was all that was. There was a shape in these sentences if you’d held them up by light. Every month, a thing he wanted to be monthly. Something several-years-deep with its own regulars and its own drive. Devon asked questions for you, and you let the answers pass over you and reached, instead, for the thing you’d been carrying into this dinner all night, the actual reason your hands had been restless since the chicken.
“I’ve got another thing,” you said. “To say, while everyone’s—” You gestured at the table, the fullness of it. “While everyone’s here.”
The wheels of the table slowed, and you caught Carter looking just a tad betrayed his story was getting delayed even further.
“I mean, it’s not a big announcement.” You were already hedging it, already shrinking it on the way out of your mouth, because that was what you did with the things you wanted most; you brought them out small so the room couldn't drop them. “It’s just. I’ve been—for a few months now—putting money aside. And looking at this space by the food market? It’s by the hardware store and it’s been empty forever.” You turned your water glass a quarter-turn on the cloth.
Devon raised her brow. “You signed something, didn’t you?”
“Not yet,” you said through gritted teeth. “But I’m planning on it. I want to open a studio. A dance studio. Mine. I’ve already, well, talked to some of the parents from rec classes, and I think there’s eleven girls who’d follow me. Their moms said as much, at least. And that’s—that’s almost enough, right? That’s almost a school.”
For a second, the table absorbed the words. Then, your mother’s hand came up to her mouth, and your father set his fork down. Your father, who set his fork down for almost nothing. Your mother was around the table before you'd finished bracing for it, her arms coming over your shoulders from behind, and she didn't say anything for a moment, just held on, and you understood that she was somewhere past words, somewhere back four years ago in a daughter who couldn't fill out a job application, measuring the distance between that girl and this one. Your father was asking the practical questions because were the only language he had for ‘I am proud of you’ and you'd learned to hear them in translation a long time ago. Carter wanted to know if there'd be boys. Devon wanted to know everything else.
When you finally let your eyes land on Steve to gauge his reaction, he was looking at you, jaw set like he wanted to say something that he’d say later, his eyes gone bright and over-fast. He reached his hand out underneath the table and lightly squeezed your leg.
“God help Hawkins,” Devon said, sitting back. “Both of you. Her with the dance kids and him with the baseball kids.” She gestured between the two of you with her wine. “Your kids are going to be insufferably well-adjusted.”
The word sat in the middle of the table, dropped there light and without weight. Devon was reaching for the beans like she hadn’t said anything at all, less of all something with that much weight. You did not look at Steve. Steve did not look at you. You both, very carefully, looked at your plates because you had just been handed a future across a dinner table and were each pretending the other hadn't heard it. Under the cloth, his knee came to rest against yours and stayed.
The studio emptied out in a loud ragged wave, and then all at once. The last of the intermediate girls collected, and then just you and the long mirror and the silence a room filled with movement left behind it. You were doing all the closing things you’d worn into a groove by now: chairs, the schedule for tomorrow, the lights in the back room that you had to leave a minute to warm up. Your hamstrings had a complaint lodged since the third class. There was chalk, somehow, on your wrist.
You knew Steve was back before the bell rang, because you knew the cough of his car settling into a space on the street too small for it, and you’d known it for a few months now. This was the fourth time he’d driven back from Philadelphia and come straight to wherever you were, the weekend coming off of him like weather.
The bell went, and the cold came in with him. The door swung shut and sealed the latter back out, and then Steve, filling the frame of it, a duffel over his shoulder and his hair windblown because he probably drove the last stretch home with the window cracked. He took the studio in a half-second flat, a quick sweep to find you. And then the duffel was sliding off his shoulder, already hitting the bench by the mirror without a single degree of his attention.
“There you are,” he said, movement never slowing as he came toward you. “C’mere. I’ve been in a car for hours, come on—”
He had you then, with no negotiation. His arms came around you and folded you in against the cold front of him, one hand splaying wide between your shoulderblades, the other pushing up into your hair. He made a sound low in his chest, half sigh and half something more wrecked than that.
“You’re freezing,” you said into his jacket.
“I know. Don’t care. Drove with the windows down.” His voice was muffled into the top of your head, his mouth already there, pressing. “You can warm me up or something.” He pulled back far just far enough to find your face, and then let the sentence die, because looking at you seemed to take the sentence out of his hands. His thumb came up to your cheekbone. His eyes went over you like he wanted to read the two days off your face. “Hi.”
“Hey—”
He kissed you, quick first. Then, not quick at all, his cold hands warming by degrees against you, one of them curving around the side of your neck to put his hand over your pulse, and you felt him smile, the kiss going crooked with the grin he couldn’t keep out of it. Making up for the deficit, you assumed. And when he finally let you go enough to speak, he rested his forehead against yours as his thumb moved against your jaw.
“Two days,” he said, complaining. “Two days is stupid. Whose idea was that?”
“I’m pretty sure it was yours.”
His nose dragged along yours. “Thought about you the whole car ride.”
You let out a small laugh, unable to keep the fondness out of it. “That’s very romantic, Steve.”
“It was, actually.” He kissed your forehead, your temple, the corner of your mouth—small ones now, scattered—and only then, with his face still close and his hands still on you, did he lift his head and look past you, around the studio: the chairs half-stacked, the back room dim and warming, a child’s drawing tacked crooked behind a desk. “You’re not done yet. It’s late.”
“Nearly. Give me five minutes.”
“Mm.” He sounded almost disgruntled. His eyes did a slow second circuit of the room, and something moved through his face—light, almost nothing, a small thoughtful quiet—and his hand settled more certainly at your hip. “You hardly ever go home on time.”
You sighed slightly, the breath coming out shaky. “It’s a new studio. I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“You think?”
“It’s my first new studio.” You let the five minutes go. The chairs could wait; the schedules could wait; the back room could continue warming itself. You stayed inside the circle of him instead, your hands flat against the cold front of his jacket, and waited him out. He took the staying as the invitation it was and walked you backward two unhurried steps until your spine met the cool of the long mirror. His hands slid from your waist to brace either side of you against the glass, caging you in there without any hurry about it at all. “Steve, there’s chalk all over the mirror—”
His mouth had found the side of your throat, the cold of him gone warm now where the two of you pressed together, and you felt him talk against your skin more than heard it. “Don’t get to not see you for two days and talk about a mirror.”
“You went on your own—”
“I know. Bad planning. It won’t happen again.” He dragged his nose up the line of your neck, slow, and you felt the studio's quiet close around the both of you and his hand came off the glass to tip your chin up, his thumb at your jaw, and he kissed you properly.
“Come over,” you said. “You’ve been gone two days. I’m not letting you be sad in your own apartment tonight.”
“I gotta go to mine, though,” he said into your hair, reluctant, the words practically dragged out of him. “Just for a second. I haven’t got anything at yours right now—I think. I drove straight here. I don’t even have a shirt for tomorrow.” He plucked at the collar of it, the one that had done four hours in a car. “I’ll have to swing by mine, grab a bag I packed, and then I’ll meet you at yours. It’ll be like forty minutes.”
You made a disgruntled sound.
“Tops.” His mouth found your jaw. “Maybe thirty if I speed. Which I will, for you.” Then, he huffed a laugh against your skin. “It’s a stupid amount of driving to do in one day.”
He pulled back to look at you, his eyes slightly careful now. “This would all be easier,” he said, “if I just lived with you.”
He hadn’t planned to bring it up here, or now even. You could see that his words had surprised him a little, the way that had walked out of him on the tail of a sentence about his shirt. But it was, for what it was worth, out, and he chose to not dress it up. He just held still inside it, his hands gone careful at your waist, watching your face like he’d just flipped a coin and was waiting to see which side it landed on.
“I think—”
He pushed a hand back through his hair. “I keep meaning to do these things right and I keep just—” He breathed, and it came out cleaner. “But I’m basically there all the time. I drive to my place maybe four times a week to pick up stuff, and I drive to yours and that’s—what I think of as home. I don’t know.”
He’d set the whole wish down in the open at last; months of it and a drawer and half a marriage's worth of his things migrated quietly into your kitchen, all of it finally said.
You felt the want lift in you to meet it. The seventeen-year-old who’d agonized over a future she’d been so sure of, she was still there, and she wanted this, wanted the shared address and the one coffee maker and the door that didn't shut between you, wanted it with her whole chest.
And underneath it, in the same breath, the other thing turned over. The small, flat, cold thing that had signed a lease alone and aged six weeks doing it. The part of you that had wanted—needed—one set of rooms in the world that were yours because you decided they would be, after four years of spaces that stayed someone else’s no matter how long you stayed in them. The apartment was the first thing you had chosen. And some part of you, the part you kept the lights off in, did not want to give back the only door you'd ever gotten to stand on both sides of.
Both of them at once, in the same body. Two true things could sit in you.
You sighed. “You’ve been driving for hours.”
You heard your voice reach for a warm register, the soothing one, because it was easier and that was a thing you knew how to do.
“That’s not a no,” he said quietly, going hopeful as he watched you.
“It’s not a no.” You went up and kissed him, soft, and he took it gratefully, probably because this hadn’t ruined anything. “You’ve got road-brain. We can talk about it when you’ve slept and got a real reason to be sure.”
“I am already—”
“We’ll talk when you’ve slept, Steve.”
He looked at you a moment longer, and then he let it go. You watched him fold it back up, the way he folded up the things you weren't ready for, and pulled you in against his chest instead, his chin coming down on the top of your head, the cold of his jacket and the warm of him underneath. “Okay,” he said into your hair. “Thirty minutes. Don’t start the good part of the night without me.”
You got home with your shoes already half-off, one of them surrendered somewhere between the cab and Steve’s door because the night had that loose-jointed quality the good ones got. There was a cake somewhere near you still, THREE MONTHS piped on in a blue that had stained both your tongues. Steve had eaten the corner piece with the most frosting and had been unrepentant about it. He’d done the whole thing at the studio. He’d strung cheap battery lights along the barre when he thought you weren’t looking, the same kind from the water tower a hundred years ago, and you'd pretended not to recognize them so he could have the reveal, and he'd known you were pretending, and neither of you had said so.
Now his apartment was dim and warm around the two of you. You were on the couch with your feet in his lap and his hand around your ankle, thumb moving in absent circles. You were watching him tell you something about Eddie that he kept laughing too early in, ruining his own story, starting it over. The lamp was the only one on. Your jacket had missed the hook. The night felt like it required nothing more, where the day has been gotten safely through and the two of you are just spending what's left of it down to the wick.
“You aren’t even listening,” Steve said, delighted, because you’d been watching his mouth instead of listening to the story.
“I’m listening,” you said, making a vague motion with your hands as if to wave him off. “Eddie. The thing with the thing.”
“The thing.” He huffed, and his hand tightened once around your ankle, fond, and he tipped his head back against the couch to look at you down the length of it, and the lamp did something gold to the side of his face
“Tell me again,” you said. “I’ll listen this time.”
“It’s gone now. You killed it,” he said mournfully, and you laughed, and he grinned at having got the laugh.
He pressed his thumb into the arch of your foot, and you made a sound you didn't mean to make, and he looked unbearably pleased with himself about it.
“Don’t do that.” You nudged him in the stomach with your other foot, lightly, just to feel him catch it, which he did, folding his hand over it like he was collecting the set. “You’re being annoying.”
“It’s called being affectionate.”
“They can look the same. With you.” But you'd already given yourself away, the smile doing the thing it did, and he'd already seen it, and there wasn't much point in either of you pretending you meant the complaint.
He went quiet after a moment, though. His thumb kept its slow work at your ankle. He was looking at you in a way you could feel without checking. “It was a good one tonight.”
You felt your lips twitch up. “I had a lot of fun.”
Something moved through his face, fond and a little undone by itself. “Thank you. For letting me have it.”
You laughed, almost in disbelief. “Thank you for making me celebrate three months of opening the studio. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I did,” he said simply. “It’s a long time. Had to put frosting on it.”
“Somebody had to eat the frosting off of it.”
He tipped his head back against the couch again, looking at you down the length of himself, and for a second he didn't say anything else, just looked, and you let him, because you'd gotten better at being looked at.
Then, he shifted reluctantly. “Okay, I’m gross. I’ve been running around all day trying to get everything together.” He moved your feet off his lap and onto the cushion, careful about it. “Five minutes. Stay right here.”
“Yeah, I was planning on going back home,” you said drily.
“You would never.”
You threw a cushion at him. It missed by a wide, unbothered margin and he didn't pretend to dodge it. He grinned, and then the bathroom door, and the pipes shuddering as the water came on, and his voice picking up underneath the rush of it, tuneless and muffled and happy, a song that wasn't quite a song.
You stayed where he'd left you. You kept his spot warm, because of course you did. You lay there with your eyes on the ceiling, smiling at nothing.
The phone rang then. You almost let it go. It was late, and the couch was warm and some lazy part of you was sure it would stop on its own. It didn’t. It ran again, loud in the small apartment over the muffled rush of the shower, and so you got up and crossed Steve’s apartment in your bare feet and lifted the receiver with not one thought in your head.
“Steve Harrington.” A woman, already mid-stride, skipping clean past every formality a hello was built to carry. “I cannot believe you. Jonathan has left you two messages—two—and you can’t manage to pick up the phone? He’s going to drive out there himself—”
The shower ran on behind the wall and you listened to the voice you’d never heard before talk to him—talk at him, easy, exasperated, with a sort of buildup that can only be born out of practice. She’d earned the right to do so, you thought. You waited for her to finish the sentence so you could correct her, feeling no alarm doing it. You want, later, to be able to find the alarm somewhere in that moment and you never can; there wasn't any. There was just you, full of cake, holding a phone.
“Sorry,” you said when she finally drew a breath, voice coming out almost breathless. “Steve’s actually in the shower right now. Want me to pass him a message?”
It went quiet for half a second. “Oh—” Her voice came back scrambling pleasantly, embarrassed at itself. “God, sorry. I just assumed it would be Steve—you must be—” She said your name then, punctuating it with a small chuckle aimed inward. “Sorry. Let me start over. I’m Nancy, a friend of Steve’s.”
Two soft syllables, a stranger being polite on the telephone, and for a whole second it was nothing at all. And then it landed somewhere with a history attached and you felt the floor of the kitchen do a small, slow thing under your bare feet.
You had known the name for years, the way you knew a scar you no longer looked at directly; Nancy, who Steve had seen while he was still holding your hand, Nancy from the part of the story you had folded up and put somewhere high and not taken down. You had never had a voice to go with it. Now you did and it was a nice voice. It was warm and a little flustered and it was being kind to you, and that was somehow the worst available version of it.
“Hi,” you said. You were faintly, distantly impressed by how even it came out.
“Hi,” Nancy said and you could hear her smiling, hear her relax, because she had no idea. “It’s so nice to finally talk to you. God, this is so silly, we’ve never actually—Steve talks about you a ton, though, I feel like I already—” She caught herself, laughed again, light. “Anyway, I won’t keep you. Could you just tell him two things? Jonathan, obviously. Jonathan’s been waiting for a call back; he thought Steve was just ignoring him but I think you guys were probably busy. And tell him that we landed on the weekend, finally, so he doesn’t need to keep holding all of them. It took us long enough—”
She kept talking and you let her. Her voice went on being warm in your ear, small ordinary words with no weight holding onto a single one of them. She was only reciting logistics, and you stood in the middle of them, and felt each one go past you and not stop, and understood—slowly—that you were being told something. The thing you were being told was being handed to you plainly, kindly, and with no idea it was being handed over to you at all. And that you had not known any of it, the size of it; the long ordinary four-year shape of a thing that everyone, apparently, had simply always known about except you.
“—Anyways, I’ll let you go. Sorry about the interruption,” she said, and you caught onto the tail-end of it.
“It’s no interruption,” you said, and it came out warm. Your hands knew how to do this even when the rest of you had gone somewhere cold and far. You'd had years of practice being gracious over things that were costing you something. “I’ll tell him. Jonathan. The weekend. I’ve got it.”
“Thank you, genuinely.” Nancy's smile was still right there in her voice, easy. “It’s really nice to finally talk to you. Okay. I’m letting you go, I mean it this time. Tell Steve I said hi.”
“Will do.”
“Night.”
“Goodnight,” you said, and you waited for the click. It came, and then there was the long flat tone of a line with no one on it, and you stood with the receiver against your ear a few seconds longer than there was any reason to, listening to the nothing, because putting it down meant the next thing and you did not yet know what the next thing was.
You set the receiver back into the cradle the way you'd set down something you didn't trust your hands around, and then you didn't move, because moving was a decision and the part of you that made decisions had stopped reporting in.
You found your hand come up over your mouth and press there. You tried, honestly, to work out the size of what had happened—tried to hold it up and measure it—and you found you couldn’t get a grip on its edges. Was it large? It had to be large; your body had decided it was large. But when you reached for the why of it, the Nancy of it—his ex, every month, all of them—some flat honest part of you turned the answer over and set it back down, unconvinced. That wasn’t it, you knew it. You’d have known if you cared like that.
If it wasn’t that, then why was the floor gone?
You were still standing there with your hand over your mouth, when the water shut off.
You didn’t have time to arrange your face. You had perhaps a minute and you weren’t able to think of a single thing to do with it. You couldn't decide what your face should be, couldn't locate the version of yourself that would walk back to the couch and keep his spot warm. There wasn't one. You just stood where the phone had left you.
The bathroom door opened with its gust of steam. “—okay, I changed my mind. I’m starving again,” Steve said, coming out rubbing the towel over his head, damp, warm-looking. “Do we have anything in the fridge?”
He saw you then, and you watched his face do the involuntary brightening it always did when he found you. You watched it get halfway up and then stop, because the rest of his face had caught up and read yours and could not make it agree with the night he thought he was in. He took the towel off his head.
“Hey,” he said, careful. The good mood had drained out of his voice in real time, draining with a practiced patience. “Hey—what. What is it?”
“Nothing,” you said, and then heard how it sounded, then tried again. You laughed, or at least your mouth reached for the shape of one and a little air came out of you, and you both heard the failed attempt at one. “Um, you’re supposed to call Jonathan back,” you said too quickly, like you were in a hurry. “And they—the weekend, they picked the weekend. I forgot the exact date, so you should probably ask.”
You felt your brows draw together as you spoke, mouth moving on autopilot.
Steve had gone still by the bathroom door. The towel hung from one hand. He was looking at you like he was reading you—and he was good at it, he had always been good at it, years apart had not cost him the knack—and you watched him not be able to make the read come out clean.
“Ohhhh-kay,” he said gently, addressing you like you were a spooked thing. “Okay, hey.”
He started crossing the kitchen to you. He did it in the same way he always did when you were upset, unhurried, without asking for permission because that had never once been a thing he’d needed for this. His hands came over your waist, warm still from the shower, settling there with bone-deep certainty. The gesture worn so smooth between you that it had stopped being a gesture and become a place you lived.
You stepped back without deciding to. There had been no moment you chose, your body simply took a slow half-step out of the circle of this arms and left his hands holding the shape of where you’d been. You felt the surprise of it move through you the same moment it moved through him. You hadn’t known you were going to. You didn’t, even now, know why. You only knew that his hands had come up to you like they had a thousand uncounted times, and that this time something in you needed the inch of air, had reached for it the way you reach for a breath, and had taken it before you could be consulted.
Steve’s hands stayed in the air for a second too long where your waist had been. Then he reluctantly took them down, back to his side.
He looked at the small new distance between the two of you—eight inches of his own kitchen, nothing, a width you’d closed a thousand times—and not understand it, and be frightened by not understanding it. You’d stepped out of his hands. You, who leaned in. You, who’d lain awake for hours in his arms rather than move an inch off him. He stood there with his palms empty and his hair dripping a slow line down the side of his neck and looked at you like the floor had gone out from under him now too, like he'd been handed a thing in a language he'd never been taught.
He shook his head slowly then, lips pursing as he looked at the distance, then your face. “I’m worried,” he said.
“I know,” you said, voice coming out gently. It was just that the level, flattened thing your voice had gone to had a softness on the surface of it, the way deep water looks calm, and you heard yourself be kind to him and could not have stopped it if you'd wanted to.
“I just need a second.” You wrapped an arm across yourself, your hand closing around your own opposite elbow, holding on to something. “I need to—trying to work something out. I need you to let me work it out before—” You stopped, took a deep breath in that felt like your chest constricting on itself. “Just give me a second.”
And the worst part, the part that you felt land on him and felt land on yourself in the same breath, was watching him obey it. Steve—who crossed rooms toward you, who had never once in the entire span of you needed to be told to keep his distance—plant himself by the with the towel still strangling slowly in his grip, and stay.
He stayed because you'd asked. It was visibly costing him, every cell of him angled toward you and held back by nothing but your sentence, and you understood that you had taken the one tool he had and set it down out of his reach, and he had let you, because he could tell—even without knowing why, even with the floor gone under him too—that reaching for you right now would be the wrong thing.
His eyes went down to your arms—at the way they were wrapped tight across your front, your hands fisted on its opposite elbow like you were holding something inside your ribs that wanted out—and you watched his jaw work once around nothing.
“Baby, I’m really worried,” he said, the last word breaking in his voice, coming out uneven. “I really am. Whatever this is, can you just—I’m right here.” His voice had gone careful, every word picked up gently and set down again where he hoped you could reach it. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just—going to stand here. Tell me, please. Whatever it is.”
His hands had come up again without him meaning to. He noticed this time. They froze halfway and he made a small frustrated sound at his own arms, at himself, and lowered them slowly back to his sides like he was setting down a thing that wouldn't stop trying to be useful.
“I’m scared,” you said, between a shaky breath, because that was the only thing that you could muster up then. You needed to get the words out because, despite it all, you couldn’t take seeing Steve like this. “I don’t wanna say the wrong thing, or do something and have it be the thing that—I don’t want to break it. I don’t want to be the one who—”
“I don’t know what I’m scared of.” Your hand tightened on your elbow. “I’m scared and I don’t know if I’m being—” The word ‘crazy’ almost got out. You bit it back. You would not give yourself that word, not even tonight, not even to him. “I don’t wanna get it wrong. I wanna get it right, and I’m scared I can’t.”
“Hey,” he said, his voice coming out soft. “Whatever you say, you can’t get it wrong. There isn’t a wrong. It’s me.” He took a breath. “It’s me.”
That had always been true. It had been true always. It’s me, coming from Steve, had been the safest sentence in your life. And he’d meant it, and you felt the held shape of you start to give.
Your body decided to move before you could, the way it had when you stepped back from him. One step, and then the next, and then the rest of it, slow, the way you walk toward a thing you can't be sure of and can't make yourself not walk toward. Steve watched you cross. He didn't move his hands. He didn't say anything. He stood very, very still by the bathroom door and let you come.
You stopped just short of him, close enough you could feel the warmth coming off his bare shoulder and the shower-damp of him not yet dried. You couldn’t unwrap your arms from around yourself just yet, so you leaned forward, slightly, until your forehead came to rest against the side of his throat where you used to sit and stayed there.
You felt his breath catch under your forehead, the small unsteady intake of it, and you understood he was going to refrain himself from putting his arms around you and he was killing himself to do so.
You stayed there a long moment, feeling the pulse at the side of his neck creating an unsteady tap against your skin.
“I just realized now,” you said into his throat, into the warmth of him. “That Nancy goes to Philly with you. She—well, Eddie didn’t say, you didn’t say, Vickie didn’t, no one—I just. I picked up the phone and she was—she’s very nice, Steve, and I just—”
The sentence didn’t finish. You just pressed your forehead harder against his and felt him swallow.
His hand came up slowly to tilt your face up off his throat with two fingers under your chin, so, so gentle the way he used to do when there was something he needed you to see in his eyes. He looked at you and his eyes were wet, a small crease formed between his brows as he tucked his lower lip between his teeth in what looked like contemplation.
“Baby,” he started, voice coming out soft. “No, that’s not it. Nancy’s a friend. She has—Robin’s there, everyone’s there, the whole—it’s a group of us. It’s always been a group of us.” He shook his head, thumb moving once at your jaw, certain, soothing. “There’s nothing there. Nothing. I would never, ever do that to you. You know that.”
His whole face was lit with how much he meant it, his eyes searching yours, his thumb steady on your jaw, a man putting his hand into a wound and being absolutely certain he was helping.
You felt something go quiet inside you in a way that was anything but relief. It was worse than that. It was the kind of quiet that arrives when a thing you have been turning over and over without being able to read it finally turns the right way up.
You felt your head start to shake, small, slow, almost not moving. His thumb stilled at your jaw.
“I don’t—” you started, head shaking still. “I do, well, know that,” you said dumbly. “No—God, Steve,” you said, through a breath, in disbelief. “Why is that—why is that what you—”
Steve opened his mouth, brows furrowing further. “I—what did you think then?” It came out faster than he’d meant for it to, and you watched him reel back his words. “I mean—when you said her name, I just thought you—”
You forced yourself to keep your eyes on him. “Why didn’t you just tell me she was there?”
His mouth opened, then closed. “You never asked.”
“I couldn’t have asked, Steve,” you said, voice level. “I couldn’t have known.”
“Okay, but—” He exhaled, the breath unsteady. He was trying to find a way in and there wasn't one. “I told you about Philly. I told you about—”
“I didn’t know there was anything to know.”
His face caved in slowly, and he paused his words for a moment. His thumb stayed on your chin. His eyes had gone glassy again and he was looking at you and you watched, with a clarity that had nothing pleased in it, how lost he looked, unable to figure out how to talk to you, and trying to, and getting it wrong, and trying again, and getting it wrong, and not understanding why.
“You just—” Your voice rose slightly, realization settling. “Assumed I thought you were—what? Cheating?”
Something went out of him by inches; his teeth caught his lower lip, it usually did when he was working up to something, except there was nothing to work up to here. You watched him realize that, watched the bracing collapse into the plain stunned understanding underneath.
“That’s what you thought,” you said, shaking your head slightly.
“I—” His voice broke a little. “Baby, I didn’t want you to—I didn’t want you to feel like this. I didn’t. I didn’t want you to react like—I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”
You felt something in your body give at his words. “Listen to yourself.”
“What?” His voice rose then, out of confusion or disbelief that he was, for once, not able to get through.
You stepped away from him then. “Why would you think that would’ve made me feel bad?”
“Because—obviously—there’s—you know, history there,” he said, words spilling out quick. “And that night—before we started again you—” He stopped his words, like the memory of it all was too much to say.
“I’ve been standing here.” Your voice cracked then. “I’m not hurt, Steve. I’m not—insecure—”
“I never said you were,” he said immediately.
“You didn’t have to,” you said, voice quieter. “You didn’t say anything because you think I am. Because of—what? Because I couldn’t stop remembering everything one night? That’s what made you decide I couldn’t hear that she’s a part of your life?”
He took in a long breath. “You know that’s not true.”
“I don’t know that. Fuck, Steve.” Your voice cracked at the end, on his name, and you watched him step closer.
“I just never wanted to hurt you,” he said quietly. “I love you. I didn’t want to see you hurt.”
You closed your eyes, feeling a tear slip down your cheek. “And I love you,” you said. “But I really, really don’t like how you see me.”
“That’s—” His brows drew together, the wet earnestness on his face cut with something almost wounded. “That’s not how I—” He couldn’t get a sentence out. He shook his head, half-laughing under his breath, small and ruined and without any humor. “You don’t even know. God, you don’t even know how I—”
The sentence trailed off and he held himself back from finding the rest of it. He stood there with his hand half-lifted between you, and you understood, watching him, that he had hit the bottom of whatever he was reaching for. He couldn’t find the next word; You could feel him trying for it and not finding it, the way you'd been not finding things all night.
“I should go home.”
“What?” His head came up, the frozenness going all out of him and being replaced by a feature more panicked. “No. No, baby—no. Don’t do that. You don’t have to.”
You felt your own grip slip as he talked. “Steve.” His name trailed off uneasily.
“It’s late. Stay, come on. We don’t do this.” His hand came up again, the hand that had been half-raised in the air, and reached for you, and you took a step back from it, and his face did something unbearable. “We’re so, so far in. We don’t go to bed like this, we don’t do this.”
“Please, Steve.”
“What do you need?” The words came out fast, scared. “Whatever you need, whatever it is, tell me. I’ll sleep on the couch. I won’t sleep. You stay here—” His voice broke on it. “Just don’t go. Let’s not let it be this.”
You closed your eyes. The please in his mouth was its own knife, because you had been hearing him say it in beds and on couches and in the warm dark for nine months, and tonight it was at his front door, asking you for the one thing you couldn't give him.
“I need you to let me go home,” you said, trying to keep your voice even. “I’m not—I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving your apartment. That’s not the same thing.”
“They feel like the same.”
“I know they do, but they aren’t.”
You could see his chest moving with it, the small unsteady rhythm of a man trying not to come apart in front of you, and you had to look away from it for a second, at the cake, at the towel still on the bathroom floor, at anything else.
“We’re not in the same place right now,” you said, and your voice was almost gentle, because you didn't have the energy for it to be anything else. “We keep talking and we keep—Steve, we keep saying things and they keep meaning different things. I can’t—we can’t fix that by staying. I’ll just say more things, and you’ll hear them wrong. You’ll say more things, and I’ll hear them wrong. And—and one of us is going to say something we can’t take back, and I—I don’t want that. I’m trying not to do that, I’m trying really hard.”
You watched him hear it, not all of it—you didn’t think he had room in him to hear all of it—but enough. He’d heard enough that the reaching hand finally came down. He stood there and looked at you, and you saw, for the first time all night, that he was exhausted; he’d been holding himself up through the whole conversation on terror alone, and that had finally burned through.
You put your hand on his cheek. He made a sound. Small, breathed-out, for he had been waiting an hour and a half to be touched by you, and the touch was goodbye. His eyes closed. His head turned into your palm. The wet of his cheek caught on the heel of your hand.
You let him have it for a moment.
Then you stepped up onto the balls of your feet—the way you used to have to, since you'd been seventeen—and pressed your mouth to his cheek, just once, the spot below the bone where you'd kissed him a thousand uncounted times. He smelled like his shower, the warm of him. He smelled the apartment and the cake and the night that had been your night four hours ago.
You held the kiss for longer than you meant to. Then you came down off your toes and your hand came down off his face, and his eyes were still closed, and you watched him keep them that way, because opening them meant looking at you leaving, and he was buying himself one more second of not having to.
“Can you—” His voice was small. “Can you call me when you get there? Just so I—”
“I will.”
“Just so I’ll know.”
“I’ll call.”
You turned to pick up your jacket from where it had missed the hook hours ago. You found your bag. You found, in the entry, the one shoe you'd lost coming in; it was under the small console table, and you had to crouch to get it. You put it on standing up, one hand braced against the wall.
You kept yourself from looking back at him before you opened the door. You couldn’t, was the thing. If you looked back you wouldn't go, so you didn't look. You opened the door, and the hallway lights were a different color than the apartment lights, cold and fluorescent after the lamp, and you stepped into them, and you pulled the door shut behind you, and you stood for a second in his hallway with your hand still on the knob from the outside.
Thursday came, indifferent to what happened on Tuesday in Steve’s apartment. The drive to the field was the same one you took every Tuesday and Thursday. You sat in the car for a minute after you turned it off because the practice was running a little long, and you watched, through the chain-link, Steve in the middle of the diamond with one hand on his hip and the other moving in the gesture he did when he was explaining a thing for the third time. The kids were standing in a loose half-circle around him. One of them was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Carter was at the back, with his hat askew, doing nothing in particular.
You got out of the car and walked across the gravel to the fence, putting your hands on the chain-link as you waited.
Steve saw you, his body registering your presence before he could even decide to turn to look at you. He finished the sentence he was on with the kids—you watched his mouth move; watched the bouncing kid stop bouncing; watched Carter's hat get pushed back into a more reasonable place by the kid next to him—and then he clapped his hands once, and the half-circle broke up.
He crossed to you with a slower gait than usual, a little hesitant. “Hi.”
It had only been a day in-between now and the night in his apartment, and the only exchange you’d had with Steve was over the phone; the first, to let him know you’d made it back home safely, and the second being yesterday.
The second one had been yesterday, him checking in on you. The way he always had been—calling you at the end of the day for nothing except to put his voice in your ear before you slept, if you weren’t sleeping next to him. Except there had been a reason, and it was sitting in the phone between both of you, and he called anyway, because to not call would have been making a statement you didn’t think he could make, one that you weren’t sure you could take, either. He’d asked how you were doing, and you heard how careful he was being with the ordinary words, like the line might break under any weight at all.
You’d said you were okay and he’d said okay; then you both sat in in the silence you’d never had, not since he’d become a part of your life once again. You'd both spent the last however-many months building something with no room in it for that quiet, and here it was anyway, breathing on the line, sounding exactly like the thing you'd promised each other was over. He'd tried. You’d heard him try—the small intake of breath, the one you knew better than your own—and then nothing, the sentence abandoned somewhere it hurt to leave it. You both said goodbyes that were too quick, then. You'd hung up and sat with the phone in your lap for a long time, and missed him so much it didn't make sense, given that you'd just been talking to him.
“Hi.”
He came around the gate and you met him halfway. His hands found your waist and you put yours on his shoulders. He leaned down and kissed you, his mouth landing where it always did on your mouth briefly, the one you’d calibrated for a fenceful of eleven-year-olds. His mouth was cold from being outside.
Half a second later, his forehead tipped down to yours, his cold nose brushing the side of yours, breathing you in once like he was topping off something that had run low. His hand had slid from your waist to the small of your back somewhere in it and pressed, just barely, just enough to tell you exactly how much of this he was holding still on the leash for the sake of you; his thumb dragged one slow line up your spine before stopping itself. You felt the whole weight of him decide, with visible effort, to behave.
He kissed the corner of your mouth, chaste, a consolation prize to himself. Then he made himself do the small adjustment that ended it, and you made yourself help him do it, the two of you stepping back out of the moment by mutual mechanical agreement.
“Hey, you,” you said, and your voice just didn’t sound right.
“Hey,” he murmured. His thumb did a small swipe at the bone of your hip where his hand had been. “Did good today. Did you see the last drill?”
“Missed it. I was on the road.”
“Carter ate Mason’s lunch. He took the entire—anyway. There’s a whole thing Devon’s gonna find out.”
You laughed lightly. “You’re supposed to make sure he has room for dinner.”
His face flickered slightly. “I’m not getting involved. I’m a coach, not a peacekeeper.”
It was the closest thing to them you'd had in two days, and you watched him hear it land and not push past it, watched him stand there in his coaching jacket with the wind catching the ends of his hair and the late-afternoon light doing something gold to one side of his face, and you understood, with the kind of clarity that arrives in unsupervised moments, that you were not going to be able to keep doing two more days of almost-right. You couldn't. He couldn't. Standing in the parking lot performing okay-ness to each other was going to break something neither of you wanted broken.
Carter showed up at your elbow before you'd worked out how to ask.
“Ice cream today?”
“No,” you said through a chuckle. “I just heard you ate Mason’s entire lunch.”
Carter turned to look at Steve with what looked like betrayal.
“Sorry. Had to tell her.” Steve nodded, grave. “You can’t go around eating other people’s food.”
“You’re not supposed to be on his side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side, bud.”
You let them go. You waited until Carter had finished cataloguing the day and Steve had finished pretending to take them seriously, and Carter had gotten distracted by a stray ball at the edge of the lot and ran after it. Steve turned back to you and his hands went into his jacket pockets and the off came back into the air immediately, the way it had been getting into and out of the air the entire time you’d been here.
You'd been working it out in your head for an hour. You said it before you could re-litigate the saying of it.
“Hey, do you—do you maybe wanna come with me to drop Carter off?”
Something shifted across his face. “Yeah. Yeah. I—”
“You don’t—I just thought. If, after I drop him at Devon’s, we could—” You couldn't quite finish it, and you watched him not need you to.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and rubbed once at the back of his neck. “Let me grab my bag. Two seconds. Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
He looked at you a second longer than the moment required. The corner of his mouth tried for something and didn't quite get there. He turned and crossed back toward the dugout, and you stood there at the fence in the late afternoon with your hands in your jacket pockets and watched him go.
“Shotgun,” Carter said the second he registered Steve coming back toward the car with his duffel slung over one shoulder, still truly believing saying the word was a legal claim that overrode everything else. He was already moving for the passenger door.
“No,” Steve said flatly, slightly amused, without breaking stride.
“Why?”
“Because that’s my seat, kid.”
It came out matter-of-fact, the way Steve said things that weren't actually up for discussion, and he didn't even slow down. He was already at the passenger door before Carter had finished processing the sentence. He pulled it open with the easy proprietary motion, like he had no intention of pretending otherwise in front of an eleven-year-old.
“You can’t just—”
“Watch me.”
He ducked into the seat with his bag still on his shoulder. Carter, in the small horror of having his entire announced shotgun-call overridden by the largest available adult, stood there with his mouth half-open.
“You can’t be mean to me. You’re my coach.”
“Not right now. I’m off the clock.” Steve was settling in, knee against the glove compartment, one hand reaching back to push the seat the inch he always had to push it because the last person in it had been considerably shorter. He had not so much as glanced at Carter through the open door. “Back seat. Let’s go. Time’s wasting.”
Carter made a sound of pure adolescent grievance—somewhere between a groan and a ‘seriously?’—and stomped around to the back door with his backpack dragging on the gravel.
You got in the driver's side buckled your seatbelt and adjusted the rearview that didn't need adjusting and Steve, in the seat beside you, took up the exact amount of space he always took up, his knee canted toward the console, his arm along the door rest, his attention undivided.
“You’re mean today,” you said to Steve.
You glanced at him. The smugness was still there, lower now, settled in, the version of it that lived in him on Sunday mornings when he watched you stretch in his bed and pretended he was looking at the window. He didn't look away when you caught him. He never did, anymore. There had been a few months early in when he would have, when getting caught had been a thing he had to bear, but somewhere he had stopped pretending he didn't watch you.
Carter, in the back seat, mumbled, “She doesn’t even want you there.”
Devon raised a hand at you from the porch, and you raised yours back. The screen door closed behind Carter and the porch light, which had been on since before you got there, finally registered as the only light on a slate-blue afternoon. You stayed in the driveway. You let the car run a second longer, then reached and turned the key, and the engine quieted, and the car began the small ticking-cooling sounds it made when you'd been driving with the windows up.
Steve was angled toward the passenger window still, hand on his thigh.
You leaned back against the headrest and let your eyes close for a second. The off—the one between you and Steve—came back into the car fully, for there was no Carter to push it back out. The car held it, you held it, he, beside you, was holding it too. You kept your eyes closed; you wanted, briefly, the world to wait.
The world did wait for about fifteen seconds. Then Steve said, quietly, to himself, “Fuck.”
You opened your eyes and he was looking through the windshield at Devon’s porch with his jaw set. His hand had come up off his thigh and was pressed flat against his own forehead, the heel of it dug in over one eyebrow.
“Sorry.” The word came out fast and low. “Sorry. Sorry. I have to say something. I can’t sit here—baby, I can’t do another minute of—” He gestured at the air of the car, at the ‘this,’ the two days, and his voice came apart somewhere in the middle of the gesture. “I really, really can’t.”
He took his hand off his forehead and turned in the seat, his entire body, knee knocking the console, and looked at you. His eyes were wet, they likely had been for a while, and you just hadn’t looked because you were too afraid to find it.
You turned your head against the headrest. The driveway had gone very quiet given that your car wasn’t making its usual white noise. Your pulse was going unevenly under your jaw; it had been doing since Tuesday, a thing you weren’t able to talk your body down from. “Me too,” you said. “I can’t either.”
He made a small sound and his head dropped, his eyes going to his own knee. “Me too’s got a lot of—that could mean a lot of things.” His jaw worked, and he let out a chuckle devoid of any humor. “Just tell me you’re not—” He breathed in shakily. “Because I keep thinking you’ve finally—” He shook his head, like he could maybe get rid of the sentence and the thought entirely. “I don’t wanna say it. If I say it, it’s like—I’m not going to say it.”
“No,” you said too quickly, your hand coming off your collarbone toward him before you'd decided to move it. “No. God, Steve. Not that.”
“Yeah?” His voice came out rough.
“Steve, I haven’t slept.” Your hand had come up off the wheel without your noticing, was pressed flat against your own collarbone. “And I miss you. So much that it doesn’t feel real. And—” You took in a breath. “I have to say some things. Can I—can I just talk? For a minute? I don't think I have it all right. I just—I have to—I have to try.”
He nodded once and reached to lay his hand flat on the console between you, palm up.
You looked at the steering wheel. “I just, I can’t be with someone who thinks I’m going to break.” You forced yourself to keep your eyes forward. You heard him take in a quick, sharp breath, the words sending him into fight-or-flight immediately. “I’m not—I’m not breakable. I’ve been hurt before. I got hurt really badly, by you, actually—” you huffed, and he flinched. “I lived. And I’ll be hurt again. And I—I keep finding out you think I am. Breakable. Insecure.” The word came out with more bite than you’d intended, and that was maybe the small part of you that wanted to fight against the label.
“Baby, I don’t—”
“I know. I know you don’t think you do—”
“I don’t think you are—”
“On Tuesday, you didn’t tell me about Nancy because you thought I’d—”
His jaw worked. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Okay, yeah—I hear that,” He dragged a hand down his face. “But I don’t think you’re breakable, or fragile, or insecure—whatever it is you think I think of you.”
You fiddled with your hands in your lap.
“I have never thought that. Not once. I think—you’re the toughest person I’ve ever known.”
You let out a small chuckle then—it sounded almost meanly sarcastic—as you shook your head.
“I’m serious.” His hand on the console opened wider, like he was offering the words on a flat surface.
“I hurt you. Once. And I never—I didn’t ever fix that. I just left and you left and it stayed broke. And now every time I think something might hurt you, I—I want to move it out of your way before you can—” His voice became looser. “I always want to take care of you.” He shook his head, slow, almost disbelieving at himself.
“But it wasn’t that, though. I felt sick when I realized that when you left. It’s never about what you can’t take, it’s about me. I can’t—I don’t want to be the one who does that to you again. So I just, don’t let it near you. Even if it is nothing.” He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum, hard, the way he did when something hurt there and he wanted it to stop. “I messed up by leaving stuff out rather than risk being the guy who hurt you again. That’s so—it’s been such a shitty thing I’ve been doing to you.”
He turned to look at you then. “I’m sorry. For making you feel that way, for hiding everything. I will—will, if you let me—try harder.”
You watched his hand on the console for a long moment. “I just, I don’t know. I just want to be part of your life,” you said into the console. “I’m scared you’re going to have things I don’t know about and people I don’t know and weekends I’m not in—and one day I’m going to wake up, and your life will just be different. And I’m scared, I think, of being on the outside of you again. That’s—I think that’s what this is.”
“I can’t—” He pressed the heel of his palm to his chest. “You let me back in. That’s the, I broke the whole thing, and you still let me try again. And I keep—” His words shook slightly. “I'm so scared of losing it again I hide stuff from you. Which is the thing that loses it. I know. I know that.”
“Steve.”
And a part of you knew you were talking in circles yet again, that maybe this conversation was a whole front to hide how truly terrified you were.
He shook his head, forcing his eyes away from you. “You being outside; that’s backwards. The four years was the outside. That was me. I don’t—” He stopped, then started, words slowing down. “Now, there’s no part of any of it I want with you not in it. None of it is—it’s just stuff I’m doing until you’re there, too.”
He looked at his own hand on the console. “I think about stuff, with you.” He moved his jaw. “I have been, since I was sixteen. I never stopped, not even when I was being an idiot.” He took a rough breath. “So you’re not gonna wake up outside of me. You’d have to leave. And I’m just gonna be here.” He turned to look at you. “However long you will have me.”
You took in a breath that felt too sharp. “You can’t promise that.”
“No.” It came out fast, like he'd been waiting for you to catch it, almost relieved you had. “No, you’re right. I can’t. I can’t promise you’ll never feel it. I'm not gonna stand here and lie to you, I did enough of that already.” He tilted his head like he was looking for the right words. “But I can work, I’ll work at it so you never have to feel like that. That's the thing I can actually promise. Not that it won't happen. That I'll never stop trying to make sure it doesn't.”
He looked at his hand again. “And you gotta tell me when I’m doing it. Because clearly—” He let out a short laugh. “Clearly I’m not good at seeing it myself. I thought I was protecting you and I was just—so you gotta say it.” He swallowed. “I’ll believe you over me. Everytime.”
You stayed silent for a moment, letting the words soak you up. It was with a sharp, almost comforting feeling you realized that—even if you do end up in this situation a million times over—you would be in, all in. But you stayed quiet a moment longer than that, longer than was comfortable, because the old reflex to fix Steve’s face, smooth the ruin off it, was there. Watching Steve hurt was always the thing you couldn’t sit in, but you forced yourself to sit in it now.
And he let you, waited with his hand open on the console, breathing wrong and letting you take the time. He was doing, already, the exact thing he’d promised ten seconds ago, before the promise had even cooled.
So you did put your hand in his. His fingers closed around yours like he’d been waiting his whole life for the permission to. He made a sound that was in the middle of being broken and relieved; he brought your knuckles up to his mouth and held him there, lips breathing against them.
“Okay,” he said into your hand.
“Yeah,” you said, the word coming out in a breath.
The engine had gone cold under the hood. The porch light was the only thing left of the afternoon, and neither of you moved toward leaving.
“Tell me what you did,” he said eventually, lowering your hand so he was still holding it. “The two days. All of it. What did you do?”
You laughed shortly. “It was a day and a half. We talked on the phone.”
“That doesn’t count.” He made a face. “That was awful. What’d you actually do? Hour by hour. Go.”
“Nothing happened. It was the most normal day and a half of my life.”
“Good. Perfect. Tell me the normal.” He shifted lower in the seat, getting comfortable, settling in for it, your hand kept hostage in his hold. “I missed it.”
“Mm. Went on a date in the morning, looked for a new—”
“You can mess with me,” he said, quieter than the joke deserved with his brows raised. “I don’t even care. I’d still be grateful you’re talking to me right now.”
You blinked at him. “You’re supposed to play along.”
“I know. I can’t. You’re being mean and it’s making me like you more.”
“Oh my god, I hate you so much.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up. “And what’d you do after your date?”
