hello beloved suni. for valentine's day ficlet prompt... a lumax valentine's day perhaps?
(ft. lucas going Overboard and max secretly loving it?)
abby i would literally give you the world if you asked me to <3 happy early valentine's day and i hope you like this one !!
“I don’t understand this holiday,” El frowns, peering over the displays of red cardboard boxes and bulk-order roses. This corner of Melvald’s is completely decked out, with glitter and flowers and plush teddy bears as far as the eye can see– or at least until aisle three, where the store returns to its regularly scheduled programming of household cleaning supplies.
The floral scent is almost nauseatingly strong, and Max is suddenly extremely thankful she’s nowhere near as allergic to them as she used to be, or Mrs. Byers would have had to drive her to the hospital as she broke out in hives. “Me neither,” Max says, squinting at a teddy bear with particularly beady eyes. “Consumerist nonsense.”
El gives her a bit of a weird look. “Um–”
“It means they just overdo the lovey-dovey thing to get people to buy stuff,” Max adds, and El’s frown smooths itself out.
“Oh, okay. I was just going to say that I don’t know why there’s only one day out of the whole year to buy someone flowers.” She reaches out, touches a tentative finger to one of the petals on the nearest rose, and then immediately retracts her hand as the petal falls off and flutters slowly to the checkered tiles of the floor. “Oh no.”
Max bites back a laugh. “I bet those flowers have been sitting in storage since the beginning of the month.”
“I don’t get this holiday,” El says again, and shakes her head. “Why buy someone flowers that have been sitting outside for two weeks?”
“Again,” Max says, rolling her eyes at the 20% off! sign, “they just want to make money off this stuff. They don’t care about love.”
“Bullshit,” El says, so suddenly that Max can’t bite back a laugh in time to keep herself from giggling loudly, the sound ringing through the quiet of the store. Half an aisle over, a guy in a suit shoots her a glare. She pulls a face at him.
“Bull– yeah, I guess so,” she says, as El turns to study the display of chocolates on their other side. “So jaded already?”
“I don’t know what jaded means,” El muses, “but I think this holiday is bullshit.”
“Yeah, that’s– yeah,” Max nods. “You got it. Hey, if these chocolates are on sale, then maybe we should get some anyway.” She picks up a heart-shaped box and flips it over. “You’re not allergic to nuts, are you, El?”
“I don’t think so. Won’t Lucas buy you chocolates?” El asks, turning back around to give Max a curious look. “He’s your boyfriend.”
“Yeah, well,” Max sighs. “This whole thing is so cheesy. I don’t need him to buy me chocolates, I just need him to put up more of a fight before I beat him at Super Mario Bros. I swear it’s not even fun anymore.”
El wrinkles her nose. “At least it would be better than what Mike did.”
“Oh yeah?” Max raises her eyebrows, then puts the box of chocolates down. The handful of change in her pocket can be spent on better things than overpriced and over-marketed chocolate anyway. “What did Mike do?”
“He got me a card that said I like you.”
Max stares. “I like– you’re joking. Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Nope.” El pops the p, and gives Max a look like yeah, I know.
“Okay, well, good riddance,” Max snorts. “I’ll be praying for Will. Poor guy.”
“I think it probably helps to actually love the person you give the card to,” El says thoughtfully, which is a pretty good point, and Max honestly doesn’t have much to add to that. She gives another cursory glance over the piles of sickeningly-sweet flower displays, the rows upon rows of stuffed bears that all look exactly alike, and then her eyes land on a discount bag of M&Ms.
“Okay, well, I still want these,” she says as she grabs them. “M&Ms are good no matter the day. You want anything, El?”
El peers around the corner of the aisle, and her face lights up. “Reese’s!” she cheers, then disappears from view. “One second!”
Max sighs, tossing the bag of chocolate up and down in one hand as she waits. She can imagine it now, being one of those poor schmucks at school who get bombarded with tacky cards and flowers that are on the brink of collapse. Just another way to flaunt relationships that are equally on the brink of collapse, probably. No one goes through the motions of over-the-top, elaborate stuff like this unless they’re trying to compensate for something.
She thinks about it, for a fleeting second– being given roses at school. The secondhand embarrassment of it all. A teddy bear that’ll no doubt collect dust on her bookshelf for the next ten years. Cheesy greeting cards– be mine and hugs and kisses and–
“Ready to go?” El pops back into her field of vision, a bright orange package clutched in one hand.
Max blinks. “Yeah,” she says, then firmly banishes any thoughts of cheesy greeting cards from her mind. No, thank you. She’s fine with her discount chocolate– that she got herself, mind you. No consumerist bullshit for her this time. “Yeah, let’s head out. Maybe Mrs. Byers will let us use her employee discount again.”
—-
Max knows something is off the next morning before she even gets in the car.
“You look weird,” she frowns, in lieu of a greeting. “What’s with you?”
Lucas ignores her. “Good mooorning,” he says, long and drawn-out and not nearly as obnoxious as it should be. “Are you ready for today?”
Max slams the passenger door shut behind her and says, “Well, my history presentation is today. So, no.”
“You’re going to crush it,” Lucas says, even though they have different history teachers this year and of course Max got stuck with the nitpicky one. “World War II isn’t going to know what hit it.” He takes the car out of park, backs slowly away from the lot in front of the trailer, and onto the main road. “But come on, that’s not what I mean.”
Max raises her eyebrows. Look, she’s not dumb, okay. It’s February 14th and she’s dating Lucas Sinclair. She knows there’s only one place this conversation is leading to. “Oh yeah? Well, I heard they’re serving chicken nuggets in the cafeteria today,” she says anyway, just to be difficult.
Lucas indulges her. He always indulges her. “Well I’m ready for chicken nugget day,” he says, even though he shouldn’t be, because Max is certain they haven’t used chicken to make them since before Indiana was even a state. He reaches for her hand over the console and says, “You might have to drive me to the hospital after but it’ll be worth it.”
Max bites back a smile and looks out of the window before he can see. “Loser,” she says. It comes out too fond for her to have any hopes about hiding it, and even though the radio is blasting Madonna, she hears him laugh as he squeezes her hand.
She thinks he’s dropped it, or maybe he’s picked up on the hint and hastily canceled whatever it was he’d been planning, but of course, no such luck. “Okay, well,” he says, as they get out of the car and make their way up to the school. “Can I walk you to your locker at least?”
She stops in her tracks. It wouldn’t have been suspicious if he didn’t ask, because he always walks her to her locker before class starts, but now–
“No,” she decides, walking away as fast as her legs will allow. “Don’t you have Calculus to get to?”
He catches up to her easily. “Come on,” he grins, matching her pace effortlessly. “It’s–”
She holds a finger up to his face. “Don’t say it.”
Lucas holds both hands up in surrender. “I didn’t say anything!”
“You’re thinking something! I know it! You’re– you’re scheming and you’re– up to something, I don’t know. Up to no good.”
“Up to no good?” Lucas laughs. “What are you, fifty?”
“Shut up,” she says, and then they’re basically at her locker already, and his grin grows exponentially which leads her to believe that maybe this was the plan all along.
“You should open your locker,” Lucas says, leaning against the adjacent one and clearly trying his hardest to look blasé about the whole thing. “Just saying. Because your books are in there and stuff.”
“If I open this and something jumps out at me,” Max grumbles, spinning the combination lock. “I’m going to–”
She trails off. Stares.
“Um,” Lucas is saying, peering around the open locker door. “You’re going to– what?”
“Kill you,” she whispers, before reaching into her locker and pulling out the biggest fucking bouquet of roses she’s ever seen. “What the hell?”
“Happy Valentine’s Day!” Lucas smiles. There’s something a little nervous about it, like maybe he was worried that she had some deep, lifelong trauma rooted in the holiday and maybe she was about to start crying in the middle of the hallway. “Do you like them?”
She could lie and say no, just to keep up appearances, but that would be mean, probably. “Yeah,” Max says, feeling herself smile before she can help it. “What– how did you get my locker combination?”
Lucas waves a hand dismissively. “Dustin,” he says, like this explains everything. Maybe it does– she doesn’t know. She tries not to keep up with whatever they have going on, because the less she knows the better. “But seriously– do you like?”
“Of course,” Max says softly. They’re pink roses, the real kind, fragrant and fresh and not falling apart at the seams like the flowers that had been shedding all over the Melvald’s floor yesterday. She wonders where he got them. She wonders how much he paid for them. “They’re– how?”
“I have my ways,” and okay, apparently Lucas is a total man of mystery now, and Max does not care enough to find out what his ways are, because–
Oh, these flowers are gorgeous. Like actually, genuinely, mind-blowingly gorgeous.
“You got me flowers,” she says, more to herself than Lucas, like maybe stating this fact as just that– a fact– will make it easier to comprehend.
He got her flowers. A lot of flowers.
Apparently Max Mayfield is, after all, one of the poor schmucks being given flowers at school.
“Well, I figured you’d think the red ones are dumb,” Lucas goes on, blissfully ignorant of the way Max can literally feel her entire face turning hotter than the inside of an oven. “And I know you like red, but they're red roses, which I know you’d think are tacky, so I figured these would be more your speed. More subtle. More– uh. Max?”
She blinks. “Huh?”
“Are you okay?” Lucas frowns, waving a hand in front of her face. “You haven’t blinked in, like, a minute.”
Max is definitely very, very red now. “I’m fine,” she gets out, “it’s just– thank you. These are nice.”
“Oh.” The tension slips away from Lucas’ shoulders, and he stands up a little straighter. Puffs his chest out just a bit, which makes her laugh. “Good. I’m glad.”
“I might just– leave them here for now, though.” She motions to the locker and tucks the flowers back inside. “If that’s okay.”
“Fine by me,” Lucas grins, then slings an easy arm over her shoulder. “Now about your history presentation–”
—-
And Max isn’t stupid, per se, but maybe it wasn’t the smartest of her to assume that it would end there. At lunch, Max is about to resign herself to her fate of a pathetically soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when Lucas’ grinning face pops up in front of her.
“Hey!”
“Jesus Christ,” she gasps, and Mike snickers softly as she jumps.
“No,” Lucas says, pointing at himself. “Lucas.”
Max peels back the cling film around her sandwich with a growing sense of trepidation. “Why are you smiling like that?”
“Oh, no reason,” Lucas says, and so obviously Max does not believe him in the slightest. He’s got both hands behind his back, and Will is next to him stifling a laugh into his hand, and Max doesn’t trust Lucas as is but she especially doesn’t trust him if Will is involved.
“Could someone just tell me–”
Lucas sets a plastic tupperware container in front of her. “Ta-da!”
Max frowns. “What’s this?”
“Well maybe if you opened it,” Mike starts, and then she elbows him and he lets out a sharp, offended gasp. “Ow!”
“Shut up,” she says, peeling off the lid of the box. And then, “Lucas.”
He grins. “Yes?”
What the fuck. Max reaches into the box and pulls out the most perfect cupcake she’s seen in all seventeen years of her existence. “Did you– did you bake me a cupcake?”
Lucas scratches the back of his neck with one hand and says, “It’s from a box mix but. Technically, yes.”
“And it’s–”
“Red velvet!” Lucas announces, and he’s definitely being a little smug about it now, but Max supposes it’s probably deserved, with the way she’s been staring at this thing for the past forty seconds. “Um. Your favorite.”
“I–”
No one’s ever baked her anything before. She figures that no one’s really had any reason to, before Lucas, but that means it’s something that hadn’t even been on her radar of things that you can do for other people until now, which also means that she’s been staring at this damn thing long enough for Mike Wheeler to reach across her and try to scrape some of the frosting off the top.
That spurs her into action. She swats his wrist away. “Hey! Get your own!”
“I don’t have my own,” Mike pouts dejectedly. He looks over at Will. “Can you make me a cupcake?”
Will sets a second tupperware down in front of Mike. “One step ahead of you,” he laughs, “but you ruined the surprise.”
Mike’s mouth drops open, then closes, then opens again, in an excellent impression of a goldfish. “What–”
“Will came over last night,” Lucas announces, and they both have identical grins on their faces now. “While El and Max were off wreaking havoc on the poor city of Hawkins.”
“We went to catch a movie,” El chimes in, shoveling baby carrots into her mouth. “Hawkins is fine.”
“I can’t believe you,” Max hisses, because this is the second time Lucas has made her turn redder than a beetroot today.
Lucas just grins wider. “You love me,” he says, linking their fingers together across the cafeteria table.
“Gross,” Mike gags next to her, and then Will touches a hand to his wrist and he falls blessedly silent.
“You were saying, Wheeler?”
“Oh, shut up.”
—-
Max thought that maybe going home would mean an end to her suffering, but apparently not.
She frowns. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic. It’s not like the roses and the desserts and the cheesy greeting card Lucas had pressed into her hands before dropping her off are hurting anybody. She rolls over onto her side in bed, hours later after dinner and homework and when she’s done boiling herself alive in the shower, and stares at the card where she’s propped it up on her desk.
I love you bear-y much, it reads, with the most ridiculous cartoon illustration of a bear behind it. So ridiculous, in fact, that she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d totally just picked it out to see the look on her face when he gave it to her. And it must have worked, and she totally gave him exactly the reaction he’d been looking for, because he’d laughed for, like, a solid three minutes after pulling up in front of her place.
“This is so stupid,” she’d said in the car, fighting back a laugh with every molecule in her body, and it’s true– it is stupid, maybe one of the most stupid things she’s ever seen– but suddenly her cheeks hurt and there’s something warm and fuzzy and gross bubbling up inside her chest, and she’s smiling.
“What the hell,” she whispers aloud, horrified, hiding her face in her pillow like there’s anyone around to witness her throwing all sense of morality to the wind and partaking in stupid greeting card traditions.
Clink.
Max sits straight up in bed. There’s a noise from the window, like someone’s tapping on it, but there’s no one there.
She frowns. What? Maybe it was a stray gust of wind, or a tree branch, or–
Clink.
A pebble comes flying at her windowpane, so small that she barely even sees it, then bounces off harmlessly.
“What–”
Lucas Sinclair is standing outside her bedroom window, waving like a maniac. “Hi,” he says, as soon as she gets the window open. “Are you busy?”
“Lucas?” Max looks down at her pajama pants and t-shirt, one she’s had for so long that she’s started to wear holes in it. “No, I was just– what the hell are you doing?”
“Being romantic,” Lucas says simply. “I was going to bring a boombox and blast something cheesy but I figured maybe waking up your mom and the entire community was less romantic and more asshole-y.”
“Asshole-y is not a word,” she says, in a meager attempt at a distraction from the smile breaking across her face. “You could have just knocked. At the front door.”
Lucas makes a face. “But that’s boring. Now are you going to come outside or do I need to climb through your window again?”
“You’re ridiculous,” Max decides, even as she swings one leg through the open window, shaking her head. “You are so ridiculous.”
“You’re laughing,” Lucas says gleefully. Her feet hit the grass and she shivers slightly, the ground gone icy with the February chill.
“Yeah, so?”
“And you’re also cold,” he says, and then he’s shrugging his jacket off and holding it out. It’s his varsity jacket, the one he has on almost every day. She’d never tell him, but she loves wearing it because it’s already a little big on him which means it’s huge on her and maybe the most comfortable thing she’s ever put on.
She accepts the proffered jacket without a fuss, which is maybe out of the ordinary for today, but whatever. “Someone’s being real gentlemanly today.”
“Please. I’m always a gentleman,” and he says it kind of laughingly, but it’s not a joke. Not really. Lucas is the most gentle person she knows, and he brought her flowers and baked her cupcakes and gave her the most stupid card ever, and–
“Thank you,” she says earnestly, tucking the jacket in around herself.
Lucas shuffles his feet on the grass. “I know you’re cold,” he starts, “so I won’t stay too long. I just wanted to see you.”
“You wanted to see me?” Max stares. “You saw me all day at school. And you picked me up and dropped me off and–”
“I meant just you,” Lucas corrects, tugging her arms down from where she’s got them wrapped around herself, twisting their fingers together. “No rush. No first period bell. No basketball practice in the way.”
“I,” Max starts, throat gone completely, embarrassingly dry. God, she’s dating this guy, and she has been for forever, so why the hell is she still getting so flustered? “Really?”
“Uh, yeah?” Lucas says it like a question, like it’s obvious. “And I know Valentine’s Day isn’t your thing because you think it’s totally stupid, which is fine, because you’re kind of right, but– I don’t know. All I could think about all day was how lucky I am to be dating you.”
Jesus Christ. This is not a good look for her. If Mike ever asks, Max kept her composure, and was calm and collected and as totally cool as a cucumber.
“Really?” she squeaks, just a little bit, because the unfortunate reality of the situation is that she is not as cool as a cucumber and is, instead, as warm as– something that’s very warm. “You– really?”
Lucas laughs lightly. “Yes, really,” he says, thankfully ignoring her sudden combustion into a thousand little Max-shaped pieces. “And I’m sorry if the flowers and everything was over the top and they were so cheesy, but I literally just could not help myself.”
Max shakes her head. “No,” she says, warm and fuzzy and so happy that it’s threatening to spill over and out of her entirely. “No, it’s– I loved them,” she admits softly. “I did. They were lame and corny but I loved them. Even the bear card,” she adds, and he laughs again. “But holy shit, Lucas, you gave me so many things.”
“You deserve lots of things,” Lucas says. “Lots of good, corny, cheesy things.”
“I’m going to need you to shut up now,” Max says, then promptly buries her face in his chest. He doesn’t even seem fazed by the impact, solid and steady and unmoving as she wraps her arms around him. “But happy Valentine’s Day, stalker.”
She hears him laugh, somewhere above her. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he says, and kisses her on top of her head. “I love you.”
