love… love at first sight
synopsis ➜ robin gets stuck with murray on a transport. and murray does what he always does
november 6, 1987 — hawkins, in
The Bradley’s Big Buy truck rattles like it’s held together with duct tape and bad decisions.
Robin has one knee pulled up in the passenger seat, sneaker planted on the cracked vinyl, arms wrapped around it. Her breath fogs faintly against the cold windshield, smearing the view of the highway into streaks of orange and white. Cardboard boxes of VHS tapes rattle behind them every time they hit a pothole.
Murray Bauman drives with the intense focus of a man who doesn’t trust other people, physics, or possibly the concept of roads.
“Tell me again why I’m here,” Robin mutters, tugging her leather jacket tighter. “And why we had to leave after my shift instead of, I don’t know, when the sun still existed.”
Murray squints over his glasses at the road. “Because, Radio Girl, the tapes need to be in Indianapolis by morning, and Bradley’s Big Buy is tragically understaffed in the ‘questionable men willing to drive at night’ department.”
“You’re not even on the employee board.”
“I’m freelance,” he says. “Like a raccoon. Or a private investigator. Same thing.”
Robin snorts despite herself. The WSQK lanyard still hangs around her neck, laminated ID card rattling against the zipper of her jacket when the truck bounces.
“And your boss,” Murray adds, “said you needed the hours. Something about student loans and your tragic addiction to records.”
“I do not have an addiction,” Robin says. “I have a curated collection.”
“Mm.” He side-eyes her. “And you wanted to get out of town for a night.”
That shuts her up faster than she likes. She stares out the window at the blur of dark trees. Hawkins is somewhere behind them, a pocket of lights in the rearview mirror.
Getting out of town had sounded really good when he’d showed up at the station with his fake-real truck driver credentials and a ridiculous paper hat from Bradley’s.
It sounded less good now that she’s trapped in a rolling metal confession booth with him for three hours.
The radio between them hisses with static, then catches a station. Synths, drum machines, someone wailing about broken hearts. Murray hums off-key, drumming stubby fingers on the steering wheel.
“So,” he says casually, which means not casual at all, “how’s the show going?”
Robin brightens a little. “Good, actually. They’re letting me do more talking between songs. Less ‘you’re listening to WSQK, the squawk,’ more… you know, words.”
“Dangerous,” he says. “Giving you a microphone that reaches the entire county.”
“I use my power for good.”
“You used your power last week to rant for ten minutes about the bass line in that Cure song.”
“It’s a really good bass line, Murray.”
“Mm.” He lets that hang a second. “Lot of callers?”
“Some,” she says. “Kids, mostly. Bored people who work nights. Steve called pretending to be an old woman again.”
“Ah, Harrington,” Murray says, amused. “And Wheeler?”
The name hits Robin like somebody jerked the wheel. She tries very hard not to react, which means her whole body reacts at once. Shoulders stiff, fingers tightening around her knee, eyes flicking away.
“Why would Nancy call?” Robin says, overshooting casual into hostile. “She has better things to do than listen to me ramble about the B-52s at midnight.”
Murray’s beard twitches. “Didn’t say she called,” he says mildly.
Robin realizes she’s walked right into that and wants to bite through her tongue. “You’re extremely annoying,”
“Occupational hazard.”
“What occupation is that, exactly? Government conspiracy guy? Professional lurker?”
“People reader,” he says. “And truck driver. Evidently.”
“This is kidnapping disguised as carpooling,” she mutters.
He smiles to himself and drops it, for about ninety seconds. The tires hum on the asphalt. Robin watches the dashed center line strobe by.
“You’re louder when you lie, you know,” he says eventually.
Robin groans and thunks her head back against the window. “Can we not? It’s past midnight. Don’t you turn into a pumpkin or a CIA agent or something after eleven?”
“I told you,” he says, “I’m freelance.”
“Murray.”
“Fine, fine.” He lifts one hand from the wheel in surrender, then puts it back. “We can talk about something else. Like your love life.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I’d rather talk about the Upside Down.”
“I would not,” he says flatly. “I have nightmares for that.”
She grimaces. He’s not wrong.
He glances over again, eyes catching the glow of the dashboard lights. “What’s her name again? The one from band?”
Robin tenses. “Vickie,” she says cautiously.
Murray snaps his fingers. “Right. The redhead. Overly enthusiastic about woodwinds.”
“She plays clarinet,” Robin says reflexively. “And she’s very talented.”
“Mhm.”
He lets another beat pass, the truck’s engine filling the silence.
“Oh,” he says suddenly, like something’s just clicked. “Vickie. We like Vickie.”
Robin nods too fast. “Yes. Yes, we—we like Vickie.”
“But,” Murray says, and his tone shifts, needle sliding into a different groove, “we don’t love Vickie.”
Robin’s mouth opens on instinct to argue, but nothing comes out.
He doesn’t look away from the road. “See,” he continues conversationally, “this is usually the point where people tell me to go to hell. You’re just sitting there malfunctioning.”
“I am not malfunctioning,” she says faintly.
“Kid, your ears are turning the color of a stop sign.”
She slaps her hands over them. “You are the absolute worst.”
“Debatable,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve met the absolute worst.”
Robin drops her hands into her lap, fingers twisting in the hem of her shirt. Her heart’s doing that stupid fast rabbit thing, the way it had last week when Nancy walked into the station lobby unexpectedly with a thermos of coffee and that little pinched smile she has when she’s pretending everything’s fine
Murray’s still talking.
“When people love somebody,” he says, “and they’re trying not to, they do this thing. They talk around them. Like they’re a swear word in a church.”
“I do not—”
“Yes, you do. You say ‘Wheeler’ like it’s going to bite you.”
“That’s just— that’s just her last name.”
“And when she walks into the room,” he continues, ignoring her, “you, Robin Buckley, who never shuts up, suddenly forget every language you know and stand there making noises like a distressed guinea pig.”
“I do not make guinea pig noises.”
“They’re very specific,” he says. “You want me to imitate them?”
“Please don’t.”
He does anyway. It’s horrifyingly accurate.
Robin covers her face with both hands. “Oh my God.”
“You’re welcome.”
“This is my personal hell. This truck. You. The weird smell. Whatever that is.” She gestures vaguely at the dashboard, where something’s definitely burning just a little.
“That’s character,” he says.
“That’s a fire hazard.”
He shrugs. “So’s unrequited love.”
She freezes.
“Murray,” she says slowly, dropping her hands enough to squint at him. “She has a boyfriend.”
“Mm,” he says.
“She’s had a boyfriend. Several. Named Jonathan and Steve and, like, Responsibility.”
“Responsibility is not a boyfriend,” Murray says. “It’s a disease.”
“She is—” Robin flails for a word that isn’t ‘straight’. “She’s Nancy. She’s… Nancy. She’s organized murder board Nancy. She’s, like, pressed-blouse, straight-A, ‘let’s break into the newspaper office’ Nancy. She’s not—”
“Into girls?” he supplies mildly.
Robin’s throat closes. Her fingers curling in on themselves.
Murray’s voice softens a fraction. “You know, you don’t have to say it.”
“I’m not— I’m not scared to say it,” she lies immediately. “I just don’t feel like dying of embarrassment in a moving vehicle tonight.”
“Your funeral,” he says. “But for the record, you already said it. Just, you know, in… subtext.”
“I hate subtext.”
“That’s because you live in it,” he says. “It’s like a fish complaining about water.”
She stares at him, offended. “Are you calling me a fish?”
“A gay fish.”
She makes a strangled sound. “I’m going to roll out of this truck.”
“We’re going fifty-five,” he says. “You’d die.”
“Worth it.”
He chuckles. “Look, kid. You want me to turn this thing around and take you home, or do you want me to keep psychoanalyzing you? Because I can do both, but not at the same time.”
She slumps back against the seat, defeated. “Is there a third option where you crash into a tree and I inherit the truck?”
“No.”
She sighs. The windows hum. Someone on the radio croons about love being a battlefield, which feels personally insulting.
“I like Vickie,” she says at last, quieter. “I do. She’s sweet. She listens to my show now. She called in once and requested Madonna and pretended not to know it was me answering the phone, but it was obviously her, she was doing this awful fake voice—”
“You’re stalling,” Murray says.
“She smells like strawberries,” Robin continues stubbornly. “She writes little stupid doodles in the margins of her music sheets. She always asks how I am. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Of course it does,” he says. “It counts as ‘we like Vickie’.”
She glares at him. “You’re really attached to that line.”
“I make good lines, I reuse them.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to—” Robin bites her tongue.
He waits.
“Don’t want to what?” he prompts.
She picks at the cracked seam on the dashboard, nails worrying at the foam underneath. “I don’t want to be… stuck on someone I can’t have, okay? Again. Or at all. Whatever.” The words come out in a rush, like water from a burst pipe. “It was bad enough with Tammy Thompson, and that was just, like, sad trombone unrequited crush, and this is—”
“Different,” he says.
“Yes.” Her throat feels tight. “She listens to me. Actually listens. She remembers little things I say and then brings them up days later, like she’s been… keeping them. She lets me correct her grammar and doesn’t murder me. We fight and then we… don’t. We fight next to each other. That’s… new.”
“And,” Murray adds, “she looks at you like you’re the one person in the room who isn’t insane.”
Robin makes a face. “She looks at you that way too sometimes.”
“That’s pity,” he says. “Different thing.”
She huffs unwilling laughter.
Murray shifts his grip on the wheel, the truck drifting slightly before he corrects it. The highway sign ahead flashes green, announcing an exit in two miles.
“You know,” he says, “I once told Wheeler she was in love with two boys at the same time.”
Robin’s head snaps toward him. “What?”
“Back in ’84,” he says. “She and Harrington were doing their sad break-up-make-up dance, and Byers was hovering with his big camera eyes. She was trying very hard not to explode. I essentially told her she didn’t have to pick yet, but that the truth was real either way.”
Robin tries to imagine that Nancy. Younger, softer around the edges, torn between Steve’s hair and Jonathan’s… Jonathan-ness. It makes her stomach twist unpleasantly.
“Why are you telling me this?” she askes.
“Because she didn’t punch me,” he says. “Which means she listens, even when she doesn’t want to. And because she has a habit of loving more than one person at a time. It’s… expansive, with her. Annoyingly so.”
Robin stares down at her hands. They’re shaking a little.
“And what,” she says carefully, “exactly do you think she… loves now?”
“Not my job to answer,” he says immediately. “I read people, I don’t live their lives for them.”
“That is a lie,” Robin says. “You absolutely do that.”
“Fine. I offer suggestions,” he amends. “But I don’t… push the last domino. That’s on you kids.”
“Great,” she mutters. “So helpful.”
“Hey.” He nudges her shoulder with his. “Look at it this way. You’re not crazy.”
“Debatable.”
“I mean about her,” he says. “You two, you’re… something. You orbit. You argue like a married couple, you finish each other’s sentences, you both look like you swallowed a battery when the other one’s in danger. That’s a thing, Robin. That’s not you being delusional.”
Her eyes sting unexpectedly. Damn it.
“She’s with Jonathan,” she says, defaulting to the safe script.
“For now,” Murray says. “Long distance is a bitch. Journalism majors move around. Life happens.”
“And what, I’m supposed to just… wait around and hope her relationship fails?” Robin says, appalled. “That’s— that’s villain behavior. I’m not the mustache-twirling lesbian in the corner.”
“I’m not telling you to sabotage anything,” he says. “I’m saying, be honest with yourself. You don’t love Vickie. Not with the way you look at Wheeler.”
She swallows. Her voice goes small. “I don’t even know if I’m allowed to look at Nance that way.”
“Allowed by who?” he asks. “The government? Newsflash, they already hate you.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Little bit funny,” he says. “Look, kid. The world is going to tell you every day that you’re not allowed to love who you love. You can’t also be the one telling yourself that. That’s too many people on the ‘no’ team.”
She stares straight ahead, blinking hard.
“Steve knows,” she blurts, quieter. “About… me. But not about Nancy. I mean, he suspects, I think, because he’s weirdly perceptive when he’s not being stupid, but I haven’t… said it.”
“What would happen if you did?” Murray asks.
“She’d… laugh?” Robin says weakly. “Or freak out. Or never speak to me again. Or tell me she’s flattered but, you know, thoroughly heterosexual. Or—”
“Or,” he cuts in, “she’d look at you the way she already does, but more so.”
Robin’s heart thuds painfully. “You can’t know that.”
“I can’t,” he agrees. “But I’ve seen how she looks at you when you’re not paying attention. Same way she used to look at a certain pair of idiots. Only difference is, with you, there’s less guilt and more… panic.”
“Comforting.”
“Means she’s scared,” he says. “Scared usually means it matters.”
Silence falls again, thicker this time. The truck roars up the slight incline of an overpass.
Robin kicks her heel gently against the glove compartment. “If I tell her and she doesn’t… feel that way,” she says, “I could lose her. As a friend. As a… co-conspirator. Whatever we are. I barely survived losing Tammy, and she didn’t even know I existed. I don’t know if I can do that with someone who actually sees me.”
Murray’s jaw works behind his beard. For once, he seems to consider his words.
“Then don’t tell her yet,” he says finally. “Tell yourself first.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means,” he says, “stop pretending you’re in love with Vickie because she’s… safe. Because she’s the version of this story where you don’t blow up your life. Admit, at least in here,” he tapped his temple with one finger “that it’s Wheeler who’s got you twisted up like a pretzel.”
Robin makes a face. “Why are your metaphors always so… gluten-based?”
“I’m hungry,” he says. “We passed a gas station an hour ago and you wouldn’t let me stop for jerky.”
“Because it’s made of mystery meat and despair.”
“My point stands.”
She slouches lower in her seat, chin tucking into the collar of her jacket. The words sit heavy in her chest.
Okay, fine. She thinks, silently, furiously. I’m in love with Nancy Wheeler. Happy now?
Her heart answers with a painful little flutter that feels disturbingly like relief.
She blows out a long breath. “Okay,” she says aloud, eyes on the blur of highway. “Maybe I… like Nancy. In a way that is… more than friendly, less than… safe and reasonable.”
Murray snorts. “You just defined love.”
“I hate this,” she says.
“I know.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Yup.”
“It’s going to end terribly.”
“Almost certainly.”
She laughe, wet and broken at the edges. “You’re supposed to be encouraging.”
“I’m being honest,” he says. “Encouraging comes later. After coffee.”
The exit sign looms ahead. He flips on the blinker, the tick-tick-tick loud in the cab.
“There’s a diner off this ramp,” he says. “Greasy burgers, terrible pie, coffee that tastes like burned mud. We’ll stop. You can decide whether you want to keep talking about Wheeler or switch topics to the eldritch horrors from beyond this dimension. Dealer’s choice.”
“Those are my only options?”
“Those are the only ones you care about,” he says. “Everything else is just… commercials.”
She snorts. “Fine. Burgers. But you’re paying.”
“Bradley’s card,” he says. “It’s like stealing from capitalism.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said all night that I fully agree with.”
He grins, satisfied.
As the truck rumbles down the exit ramp, Robin glances at him out of the corner of her eye.
“You’re not gonna, like… push me at her, right?” she asks, sudden panic flaring. “Like you did with Joyce and Hopper, and Steve and Nancy and Jonathan, and—”
“I am retired from that particular line of work,” he says. “Also, if I meddle any more in Wheeler’s love life, I think she might actually shoot me.”
“Good,” Robin mutters.
“But,” he adds, “if you ever want to talk strategy… I make excellent coffee and terrible emotional decisions. It’s a winning combination.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ll… think about it.”
“That’s all I’m asking, Radio Girl.”
The diner appears, neon sign buzzing weakly against the dark. Murray swings the truck into the lot with more confidence than the vehicle deserves.
As they roll to a stop, Robin unbuckles her seat belt and pauses, hand on the door handle.
“Murray?” she says.
“Mm?”
“Thanks,” she mumbles. “For… you know. Reading me like a really invasive horoscope.”
He smiles, a little softer this time. “Anytime, kid.”
“And if you ever tell Nancy anything I said in this truck,” she adds, “I will hot-wire this vehicle and run you over with it.”
“There she is,” he says, pleased. “There’s the terrifying lesbian fish I know.”
She flips him off and climbs out into the cold night, heart still pounding, something new and fragile and terribly honest finally sitting where the denial’s been.
Behind her, the truck ticks quietly as the engine cools, full of rattling tapes and unspoken conversations that will have to wait for another drive.
