[prettyglad]

safe until sunset — steve harrington

part one

summary — steve harrington is your bodyguard. he's your bodyguard you've become overly fond of. you spend too much time with him. then, you're on your way to spain for a press tour, and steve is acting weird. he's cold and distant, and mean. you find out why.

chapter summary — after everything that happened in spain, you don't know how to fit in the world anymore. you don't know how to do anything, especially now that you don't have steve. he gets reassigned, and you realise you need him. depsite the version of him you saw on that street in barcelona.

or "Steve flagged it himself. Steve sat across from someone — from your father's security director, from some operational review committee, from whoever receives these things — and he told them that the professional boundaries of the arrangement had not been appropriately maintained, and then he accepted the reassignment that followed, and he didn’t call you, and he didn’t knock on the door, and you have not spoken to him since the ambulance doors closed in Barcelona."

content —15.8k words, bodyguard!steveharrington x reader, she/her, mentions of violence, making out, slowburn!!!

note — ohhhh my god it's finally finished!!! thank you to all the love and appreciation on my silly little version of steve harrington i love u all. hope you enjoy!! mwah

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Your father's study smells the same as it always has.

Old paper and leather and the cedar of the panelling that runs floor to ceiling along the east wall, the wall with the fireplace that hasn't been lit since your mother left and that nobody has ever suggested lighting again. 

There are books on shelves that have been in the same positions for as long as you can remember, their spines faded to the same warm brown as the wall behind them. The desk is enormous and clear, the way powerful men's desks always are, paperwork filed elsewhere by someone else, the surface kept empty to suggest that whatever happens here happens at a different scale from ordinary work.

You've been sitting in the chair across from it for eleven minutes.

Your father is still reading something.

This is a thing he does — finishes what he's doing before he turns his full attention to a room, a person, a conversation. You grew up understanding this as a statement about the relative importance of things. You grew up understanding a lot of things in this room.

Outside the tall windows, the grounds are green and fresh. The fountain near the back terrace still flows, attracting birds and such. Everything is the colour of late summer, you swear the trees have gotten bigger in the weeks since you were last home.

Three weeks since Barcelona.

Your stitches came out eight days ago. Four small scars, barely anything, the kind that will fade to near-invisible within a year. The doctor had said so and been right, and you'd looked at the four small marks in the mirror and thought about what they cost.

Your father sets down whatever he was reading.

He looks at you. He has a particular way of looking at you — the look of someone taking inventory. You’re in your twenties and this look still makes you feel like you've been called to account for something.

"You look tired," he says.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't say you weren't fine."

You hold his gaze. He holds yours. This is also a thing you grew up learning to do.

"I'd like to know what the plan is," you say. "Going forward."

"That's what we're here to discuss."

"Good." You fold your hands in your lap. "Then let's discuss it."

Your father leans back in his chair slightly, the leather making its small sound, and he looks at you for another moment in the inventory way.

"The man has been charged," he says. "Formal charges were filed in Spain last week. There are parallel proceedings here, given the domestic incidents. The legal team is satisfied with the trajectory."

"I know," you say. "Amelia sent me the update."

"Then you know the immediate threat has been addressed."

"The immediate threat," you repeat.

"That's the appropriate framing."

"Is it?"

Your father's expression doesn't change, exactly, but something in it adjusts slightly. He is very good at conversations — better than almost anyone you've met, which is where you get it from, probably, though you would never say so. He reads subtext the way other people read text, and he’s reading yours right now.

"What would you like to know?" he asks.

"I'd like to know what happened," you say. "The full version. Not the update Amelia sent, not the version that was managed for my consumption. What actually happened."

A pause. He doesn’t hesitate, but you think he wants to look like he is. "The threat was identified in March," he says.

March. March is four months before Barcelona.  Four months.

"March," you say.

"A pattern was identified. Your movements were being tracked. The team ran an internal assessment, and the decision was made to monitor the situation rather than alert you."

You know this. You’ve heard it over and over. 

"The team," you say. "Or Steve?"

"The decision was made collectively," he says, which is an answer that contains another answer inside it.

"But Steve knew."

"Harrington was briefed, yes."

Harrington. The use of the last name in that register — the management register, the business register — lands in a particular way that you can’t identify.

"The team monitored the situation for four months," you say. "Across multiple locations. Hotels, venues, my building." You say it the way you've been saying it to yourself for three weeks, not because you don't know the facts but because saying them out loud to your father makes them a different kind of real. "He accessed restricted floors at two hotels."

"Attempted to access."

"Attempted to access." You look at the empty fireplace. You smile. "And the decision throughout all of that was that I should not be told."

"The assessment was that knowing would affect your behaviour in ways that could compromise the operation."

"I've heard the assessment."

"And?"

You look back at him. "And I think someone should have told me. That's all. I think as the person whose life was being organised around a threat I didn't know about, I had a right to know about the threat." You say it without heat. You've had three weeks to get the heat out of it. "I'm not angry about it anymore. I was. I'm not now. But I want to say it clearly to you because I don't think it was the right call, and I think you should know that I think so."

Your father is quiet for a moment.

"Noted," he says.

It's not an apology. You didn't expect one. Your father doesn’t apologise for operational decisions, considers it a category error. But noted from him carries a specific weight — it means it has been received and it won’t be forgotten.

You nod. "I'd like to talk about what comes next," you say.

"Yes," he says. "There are some changes to discuss."

Something in the way he says it. You look at him more carefully.

He’s picked up a pen from the desk, is turning it slowly between his fingers, which is the closest thing he has to a tell. You learned to read that pen a long time ago.

"What kind of changes?" you say.

"There will be a full security review," he says. "Given the events in Barcelona, the current protocols are being reassessed at every level. Staff, procedures, communication structures."

"That seems reasonable."

"It is reasonable." He pauses. "As part of that review, adjustments are being made to the close protection team."

The room is very quiet. Outside, the sun presses against the windows.

"What kind of adjustments?" you ask.

"Rotations," he says. "Reassignments. When a situation reaches the point that Barcelona did, it indicates a structural issue in how information is being managed. The review indicated that the current configuration had developed certain—" He pauses, choosing the word. "—inefficiencies."

"Inefficiencies," you say.

"In terms of information flow. Decision-making."

"You're talking about Steve?"

He doesn’t blink. "I'm talking about the team structure."

"You're talking about Steve," you say again, not a question this time.

"Harrington has been reassigned," your father says.

The study is very still.

You hear the clock on the mantle. The particular measured tick of it, the clock that has been in this room for your entire life, the clock that has counted down every difficult conversation you have ever had in this room.

"When?" you ask.

"It was confirmed last week."

Last week. While you were in this house, in your room, not answering calls and watching the grounds from your windows, it was confirmed last week, and nobody called you, nobody knocked on your door.

"Where?"

"He's been placed with another principal. The arrangement suits his profile."

Another principal. The arrangement suits his profile. The professional language of it, the complete removal of Steve from the sentence, and the reduction of eight months to a profile being matched to a placement.

"I wasn't consulted," you say.

"This is an operational decision."

"He was assigned to me."

"He was assigned to your security detail," your father says, someone drawing a distinction they've thought about in advance. "Reassignments within that structure are not subject to—"

"He was assigned to me," you say again, and something in your voice this time makes your father stop.

He looks at you. Turns his head towards the floor only slightly, and squints his eyes. 

You hate it. You look at the empty fireplace again because looking at your father right now requires something you're not sure you have.

"I see," your father says, after a moment.

"Don't," you say.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to."

A pause. Then: "Was it mutual?"

"It doesn't matter," you say, quickly. So quickly you don’t know you’re saying it.

"It might matter quite a lot."

"Not to the decision that was apparently already made last week without anyone telling me."

Your father picks up the pen again. Sets it down. The tell, running twice in three minutes.

"Barcelona changed the situation," he says, carefully. "What happened there — the threat, the response, the circumstances of it — indicated that there were complications in the current arrangement that could not be resolved within the existing structure."

"What complications?"

He doesn’t say anything for a second, and you understand that he’s known. Has known for some time. Probably longer than you've known yourself, which is the specific humiliation of fathers who are very observant and very quiet about what they observe.

"The review flagged a concern," he says, carefully, "about whether the professional boundaries of the arrangement had been appropriately maintained."

The professional boundaries of the arrangement. You sit with that.

"Who flagged it?" you say.

Your father is quiet.

"Dad." You say it the way you said it when you were seventeen and sitting in this room the first time something happened that required this kind of conversation. "Who flagged it?"

"It was part of the broader review," he says. Which means it wasn't the broader review.

"He flagged it himself," you say.

Your father says nothing. Which, with this man, is the same as saying yes.

Steve flagged it himself. Steve sat across from someone — from your father's security director, from some operational review committee, from whoever receives these things — and he told them that the professional boundaries of the arrangement had not been appropriately maintained, and then he accepted the reassignment that followed, and he didn’t call you, and he didn’t knock on the door, and you have not spoken to him since the ambulance doors closed in Barcelona.

He flagged it himself.

You think about I couldn't afford distractions said across a restaurant table with a candle burning low between you, and you think about not distractions from the job, and you think about eight months of him maintaining the wall, and the wall developing a fracture, and him apparently deciding, at some point in the aftermath of Barcelona, that the fracture had become structural.

That the only way to fix the structure was to leave it.

Your throat is very tight. You hold on to the arms of your chair so hard the tips of your fingers pinch. 

"The new arrangement," you say, and your voice comes out level, which surprises you slightly. "When does it take effect?"

"It already has," your father says.

Of course it has. "And the new detail lead?"

"A man named Reeves. Excellent record. He'll come to you for an introductory briefing before the end of the week."

Reeves. You file the name somewhere distant, the part of you that has been managing your exterior since you were old enough to understand the value of it.

"Fine," you say.

"It doesn't have to be fine," your father says, and it's the closest he gets to the thing underneath the operational language, the closest he comes to the version of this conversation that isn't about security structures and professional reviews. "It's all right if it isn't."

He’s not a warm man, your father. He was never the kind of father who sat beside you on this kind of thing, who put an arm around the shape of a difficulty and made it smaller. But he’s perceptive, and he’s honest, and right now the way he is looking at you is the way he looked at you the first time something broke. When you were trying to pretend it hadn't, and you know this look, you've known it since you were seventeen, and it is still the hardest look to be on the receiving end of.

"I'm going to need some time," you say.

"Of course."

—

Carter calls Steve on a Wednesday evening in the fourth week.

This isn’t unusual — they've maintained working contact, professionals operating in the same field, the ordinary commerce of people who do the same job in adjacent spaces. Carter calls with operational things fairly regularly. 

What's unusual is that Carter calls at eight in the evening, which is not an operational hour, and opens with How's Hartley? in the tone of a man who does not particularly care about the answer to that question. He doesn’t actually care about Steve’s new principal.

"Fine," Steve says. "Uneventful."

"Good." A pause that is doing something. "How are you?"

"Fine."

"Right," Carter says. He doesn’t press on the word fine and its limitations.

"She's okay," Carter says, after a moment. "If you were going to ask."

Steve doesn't say anything. He doesn’t think there’s anything banked in his mind to say. He’s caught off guard.

"Stitches came out clean. She's been at the estate mostly." A pause. "Quiet, Amelia says. But working. She went back to work a couple weeks ago."

Steve looks at the wall of the Kensington flat. He thinks about you going back to work. He thinks about what that looks like — the particular focused quality you get when something is actually demanding your attention, the way the professional exterior slides into place so naturally that most people can't see the effort in it. 

You’re good at it. Better than you know, probably. Better than he's ever told you, which is its own category of thing he's not going to look at directly tonight.

"Reeves seems capable," Carter says.

"His record is good," Steve says.

"You looked him up."

"Yes."

Carter doesn't comment on this, which is generous. "She's been—" He pauses, choosing. "There was a thing with the coffee. Apparently took three weeks to get right."

Steve closes his eyes. Opens them. Sighs.

"She asked for your location," Carter says. "Did they tell you? In the briefing."

"Yes."

"She said she wasn't going to do anything with it." Another pause. "Wanted to know where you were."

Steve looks at the packed second bag in the corner of the bedroom. He looks at it for a moment, the bag he hasn't unpacked, which has been in the corner for weeks, which he is going to unpack eventually when this placement stops feeling like something to keep one bag packed for.

"Carter," he says.

"I know," Carter says. "I know. I'm not — I'm just telling you."

"Okay."

"She's okay," Carter says again, softer. "She's getting there."

Steve thinks about getting there as a destination. As something with a location you can be moving toward.

"I had the cloth ready," Steve says. It comes out differently than he expected — something with more weight. "In Barcelona. In the inside pocket of my jacket. I'd been carrying it since before we left the hotel because I'd already assessed it as a possible outcome."

Carter is quiet. Steve can hear people moving around him.

"I went to dinner with her," Steve says. "I sat across from her, and I talked about tomorrow's schedule, and I had the cloth in my pocket because I'd run the numbers and decided that what was coming toward us was close enough that the contingency was real." He pauses. "And she still got hurt."

"Yes," Carter says.

"So the reassignment was right."

"Steve—"

"The conflict of interest was real," Steve says. "That's what the review found. It's what I told them before the review found it. I was making decisions with something in them that shouldn't have been there, and even with all the preparation, even with the cloth and the team and the planning, it still—" He stops. Starts differently. "If the outcome had been different. In Barcelona. If what happened to her had been worse. I couldn't have—" He doesn't finish.

Carter is quiet for long enough to be saying something.

"You flagged it yourself," Carter says eventually. "Before they'd found anything. You walked into that room, and you handed them the problem before they'd identified it." A pause. "I don't think you know what that is."

"It was the right call."

"I know it was the right call," Carter says, with a patience that suggests he's been waiting to say this for some time. "That's exactly my point. You knew it was the right call, and you made it anyway. You made it knowing what it meant. You sat in that briefing room, you were clear, and you were honest, and you took the reassignment without—" He pauses. "You were very clean about it. And I don't think you've given yourself any credit for that."

Steve doesn't say anything. He chews the inside of his cheek raw. He’s been doing it since way before Barcelona.

"She asked for your location," Carter says again.

"I know."

"She has an address in Kensington that she's had for six weeks."

"I know."

"And she hasn't—"

"I know," Steve says. "Carter."

"Right," Carter says. And then, simply: "Get some sleep."

He hangs up.

Steve stands in the kitchen of the Kensington flat in the fourth week and looks at the cold tea on the counter. He thinks about an address being kept for six weeks unused. He thinks about what it means to hold something and not act on it — not because you don't want to, but because you're still figuring out what acting on it would mean.

He thinks about this for longer than he should, standing in a kitchen at eight-thirty in the evening. Then he pours the tea down the drain, picks up his phone and puts it face down on the table, and goes to bed.

He doesn't sleep for a long time.

He knows the shape of that, too, by now. The specific texture of the Kensington ceiling in the dark, the ambient sound of the street below, the way the night stretches out when there's something underneath it you're not looking at directly.

He looks at the ceiling. He thinks, getting there. He thinks about what it looks like when you reach it.

Eventually, he sleeps.

—

You're not sure what you're looking for when you open your messages app — probably nothing, probably just the insomniac phone habit of scrolling through the recent conversations looking for something to rest your brain on — and then his name is there, and you stop.

You haven't deleted the thread.

You've thought about deleting it several times. The last message in it is from June, a week before Barcelona, something practical and logistical about a schedule change, and you've thought about deleting the whole thing because having his name sitting in your phone is its own particular ongoing thing that you've been managing alongside everything else.

You didn't delete it. You're looking at it now. It’s been six months.

And then, because your thumb is moving before your brain has fully weighed in, you tap on the text field, and the drafts folder opens — the messages app's automatic archive of things typed and not sent — and there they are.

Eleven of them.

You didn't know there were that many. You knew there were some. You'd typed things and then not sent them, and apparently, the app had been more diligent about preservation than you'd been about erasure.

You read them in order.

August 31st Steve I don't know if you've been told I asked for your address but I want you to know I'm not going to do anything with it. I just needed to know where you were. 

September 4th The new detail lead is fine. He's good at his job. I just wanted you to know that I'm not comparing. I just wanted to say something to someone and you're the person I wanted to say it to, which is its own problem I'm working on.

September 13th I found out from my father that you flagged it yourself. I don't know if I'm angry about it or not. I think I understand it. 

Novmember 25th Are you okay? I know you don't owe me an answer and I know Carter would have told me if something had happened but I still think about asking. I still think about whether anyone is asking you that.

December 11th I had a bad night. Nothing happened, I'm fine, I just wanted to tell someone and you were the person I reached for and then I remembered.

December 19th I'm not scared of you. I want you to know that. I was, for a little while, and I've thought about it a lot, and I'm not anymore. I don't know if it matters to you. I just wanted to say it somewhere.

January 2nd Happy new year.

January 9th I've been thinking about the dinner. The restaurant in Barcelona. The way you ordered for me because you knew I wasn't going to be able to read the menu properly. I didn't say thank you for that at the time and I've been thinking about it.

January 14th I think you made the right call about the reassignment. I think you were right and I think you did it for me and I've been trying to figure out how to feel about that for three months. I don't have an answer yet.

January 21st Do you ever think about Portugal? I know it was a cover story. I know we made it up. I just—

This one ends there.

February 4th I miss you. I've been not saying that for six months. I miss you and I don't know what to do about it and I'm still not sure I would know what to do if I were standing in front of you but I think I'd like the chance to find out.

You put your phone face-down on the nightstand. You look at the ceiling of your room, which is the ceiling you've been looking at for months, which knows everything you've been thinking at eleven o'clock at night since July.

You pick the phone back up. You look at the last one.

I miss you. I've been not saying that for six months.

Your thumb hovers over the send button for a long time. You put the phone down. You don't send it. But you don't delete it either.

—

You're in your room at the estate at half past nine in the evening, when the house has settled into its nighttime quiet, and the only sounds are the ones the building makes to itself. You're reading a book, but not really. The grounds are dark beyond your bay window, the fountain off for the winter, the garden doing its bare and quiet thing.

Your phone rings. Unknown number.

You look at it for two full rings. Unknown numbers have a different quality now — they carry a low-level wariness that wasn't there before Barcelona, before you understood what it means to have your movements tracked by someone you didn't know was watching.

You pick up anyway. You always pick up.

"It's me," he says.

Everything goes still. The hum of your humidifier. The crackle of the candle beside you. The soft tick of the clock on the wall. All of it continues. None of it matters.

Your hand tightens around the phone, and you let the silence hold for a moment because the specific fact of his voice — just his voice, at half past nine on a Tuesday, through a phone you nearly didn't answer — does something immediate and physical to the centre of your chest that you weren’t prepared for.

Six months. Six months of his name sitting in your messages app, eleven unsent drafts, the address in Kensington that you've looked at more times than you've admitted to yourself.

And now just: it's me. Like, no time has passed. Like, six months haven't been six months.

"I know it's late," he says, into your silence.

You find your voice from somewhere. "When did you get a new number?"

It's not the question you meant to ask. It's the one that comes out, the deflective practical one, the one that gives you a second to locate yourself before anything more loaded has to leave your mouth.

"New phone," he says. "Since January."

"Right." You swing your legs over the edge of your bed and stare at your socks. At the little sheep. "Why are you calling?" It’s not an abrupt question, but you wouldn’t mind if it came across that way.

A pause. Not long. The kind he uses when he's choosing words carefully rather than when he doesn't have them.

"I've been trying to figure out the right time," he says. "And I've decided I've been using that as an excuse. There isn't a right time. There's just time."

You don't say anything immediately.

You press your free hand flat against your bed and screw the sheet in your hands, and let yourself think for a second before you speak, because the temptation is to say something that sounds fine, something that keeps the surface of things managed and level. You've been doing that for months, and you're tired of it, and also, you're still not entirely sure what you want the alternative to be.

"Okay," you say, and even you can hear that it isn't quite okay, that it's the sound of someone not ready to give more than that yet.

You’re sure he hears it, too. "Are you—" he starts.

"Don't ask me if I'm okay," you say. Quickly. Before he can land the question cleanly and require you to answer it honestly in your bedroom at half past nine on a Tuesday.

"Okay," he says quietly. And then: "I wasn't going to ask that."

"What were you going to ask?"

"How you are," he says. "Which is different."

You look at the mirror across from you on the far wall. At your own reflection in it. "Getting there," you say finally.

The silence that follows has a different texture from the first one. Less the silence of shock, more the silence of two people in the same held breath from different places.

"I've been better," he says, after a moment, and it's quiet and undefended when he says it, which is what makes it land the way it does. "The job is fine. Everything else is—" A pause. "It's been a long few months."

You close your eyes briefly.

It would be easier if he were fine. It would be easier if you could maintain the careful distance you've built by being angry at him, or afraid of him, or uncertain enough that staying away felt like the obvious choice. But he says it's been a long few months in a voice that has something stripped out of it, and you can't locate the distance you're supposed to be maintaining.

"I know," you say, and hear how much you mean it.

"I thought about calling a lot," he says.

"I drafted texts," you say. "Eleven of them. I didn't send any."

Something changes in the quality of his silence.

"What did they say?" he asks. Careful. Like the question might be too much and he's bracing for you to say so.

You could deflect. You know how to deflect. You've been deflecting for months with some proficiency, and it would be easy now, easier than saying it out loud, easier than handing something to him you've been keeping to yourself since July.

"Different things," you say. "On different nights."

He waits.

And maybe it's the hour, or the darkness outside, or the fact that it's been so long and the drafts are still sitting in your phone unsent and it is very late to still be holding all of this alone — or maybe it's just him, on the other end of the phone, waiting without pushing, which is the thing he has always done that you have never been able to fully close yourself to.

"December third," you say. "I asked if you were okay. I said I know you don't owe me an answer. I said I think about whether anyone is asking you that."

The silence stretches. Too long for your liking.

"Nobody was," he says. The words come out very level and very controlled and don't quite hide what's underneath them. "Nobody was asking me that."

Something in your chest pulls tight. A hollow thump that stretches up into your throat. Like a pebble stuck in a stream.

"I know," you say.

Which is worse, somehow, than if you hadn't known. Knowing and not sending it anyway. Knowing and choosing the distance because the distance felt safer than what might happen if you closed it.

"February fourth," you say, before you can think better of it. "I wrote that I miss you. That I'd not been saying it and didn't know what to do about it." A pause. You press your palm harder against the bed. "And that I still wasn't sure what I would do if I were standing in front of you. But I thought I'd like the chance to find out."

"Yeah?" he says, and the word is very quiet and very steady, but you can hear everything underneath it, the not-calling and the new number, and there's no right time, there's just time.

"I don't know what that means yet," you say, quickly, because you need him to understand that. You need the acknowledgement to not be more than it is. "I'm not — I'm not saying everything is fine. It's not fine. There are still things I haven't worked out, and I don't want to pretend I have."

"I'm not asking you to pretend," he says.

"I know," you say, and you do know, which is the problem. He has never once asked you to pretend.

"Can I ask you something?" he says.

Your jaw tightens slightly. You wish you could see his face. Or maybe not. No, you want to see his face, and his stupid eyes, you want to look past his face and up into his hair because you can’t look him in the eyes. You wish he could be here, making you nervous. He’s so tall.

"Depends on the something."

"The step back," he says.

There it is. Your breath goes out slowly through your nose. "What about it?"

"I've thought about it every day since then," he says. "Not with—" He stops. Starts again. "Not with any expectation attached to it. I just want to know if you've been able to make sense of it."

You think about the drafts. About December nineteenth — I'm not scared of you. I want you to know that. I was, for a little while. About the months of turning it over, looking at it from every angle available, arriving at something that feels like the truth, even if it doesn't feel like a resolution.

"I think," you say slowly, "that my body decided before I did. About something it didn't have context for." You pause. "If I'd known. If you'd told me what you'd been carrying all week, what I was actually seeing when you—" You stop. "I think the step back would have been smaller. Or not there."

"That's generous," he says.

"It's honest," you say. "There's a difference." And then, because you're tired and it's late and the tea on your bedside table is cold and you've been holding this particular thing for months: "I'm not scared of you, Steve. I was. I'm not anymore." 

The silence that follows is long enough that you almost say something into it just to fill it, except you've learned, over the eight months of proximity, that some of Steve's silences don't need filling.

"I know I should have told you," he says eventually. "Earlier. About the threat. I've gone over it enough times to understand that the calculation I made was wrong in ways I didn't see clearly at the time."

"You were scared," you say.

"Yes."

"Of what would happen to me."

"Yes." A beat. "And of what knowing would do to the — to how things were between us. Before Barcelona. I told myself that was tactical. It wasn't only tactical."

There it is. The thing underneath the professional explanation, the thing that's harder to say and that he's saying anyway.

You sit there with it.

"I know," you say. "I think I've known that for a while."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I want to say that clearly. Not as a professional apology. As the actual one."

Something inside you that has been holding itself carefully for so long shifts slightly. Acknowledges the weight of it being said.

"I know you are," you say.

"That's not the same as it being enough," he says.

"No," you agree. "It's not. But it's something."

The house is very quiet around you. It’s dark and cold, and the night is going on without you, indifferent and ongoing, the way nights do.

"I should let you sleep," he says, after a while.

"Probably," you say, though you both know you won't.

"I just wanted to—" He stops. You hear him make the small sound he makes when he's choosing between things. "I wanted to hear your voice. That's all."

You close your eyes for one second. You nibble your lip between your teeth, and you worry it might split. You don’t think you have it in you to care. You let it go and absentmindedly decide to pick at the skin around your thumbnail instead.

"Okay," you say, and this time it doesn't sound like the managed version. It sounds like what it is.

"Okay," he says.

A pause.

"Goodnight," he says.

"Goodnight," you say.

He hangs up.

—

He doesn't call again.

You tell yourself this is fine. The call happened, things were said that needed saying, the line between you has been reopened if not fully repaired, and that is — that is something. That is more than you had in January. You hold this in both hands and try to let it be enough.

It almost is.

On a Wednesday in March, you're in the estate's sitting room with a book you've been reading for two weeks without making meaningful progress, the late afternoon light doing its grey winter thing through the tall windows, when you hear tyres on the gravel.

You don't look up immediately. There are always cars at the estate — Amelia, deliveries, the occasional meeting your father has here rather than at the office. The sound of tyres on gravel is not, in itself, interesting.

Then the car stops.

And there's a pause — a pause where you're not sure if a car has stopped to turn around or stopped because it has arrived — and then a door, and then footsteps on the stone path toward the front entrance.

Amelia would ring the bell. The delivery services use the service entrance. Your father's associates tend to arrive in twos.

You put your book down.

The doorbell doesn't ring. There's a knock instead — three, measured, unhurried. Something in the quality of it reaches you across the hallway before you've even stood up.

You know that knock, and you hate that you do. You stand up. You cross the hallway. You open the front door.

He's standing on the step with his hands in his coat pockets — the dark coat, the one that isn't the work overcoat, the one that belongs to the version of him that exists outside of professional contexts — and he looks at you when the door opens the way he has always looked at you, the immediate, automatic thing that has never once required a run-up.

For a moment, neither of you says anything.

The February air is cold around him. The drive behind him is empty except for his car — a rental, you notice, not the company vehicle, not anything that belongs to the security firm — and the afternoon light is low and grey and doing nothing to help anyone look their best, and he looks tired in the accumulated way, the way that lives in someone's shoulders rather than their eyes, and he’s here.

He is just here.

Without telling you.

Without giving you a chance to prepare for it, or to talk yourself out of opening the door, or to manage the first moment of seeing him into something more controlled than what is currently happening on your face.

"Hi," he says.

You look at him.

You look at him, and you don't say anything for a second because you're busy doing the thing you're always doing with him, the thing where you have to catch up to yourself, find the gap between where you are and where you were a moment ago and figure out what happened in it.

"You didn't call," you say.

"No," he says.

"You could have called. You had the number."

"I know."

"So why didn't you?"

"Because you would have had time to decide not to let me through the gate," he says simply. Just the truth of it. "And I didn't want to give you that chance. Not because I think you should have to see me. Because I think you'd have talked yourself out of it and then regretted it."

Your jaw shifts. He's right. You hate that he's right. You stand there in your doorway and feel the truth of it settle in your chest and hate it thoroughly.

"That's presumptuous," you say.

"Yes," he agrees.

"You drove all the way from Kensington on the presumption that I'd open the door."

"I drove all the way from Kensington," he says, "because I've been trying to find the right way to do this, and there isn't one. And I decided showing up was better than another night of not showing up."

He doesn't fidget. He just stands on your doorstep in his coat, lets you look at him and waits. He's always been very good at waiting. It’s always been one of the most difficult things about him.

"Come in," you say finally.

Something in his face does something small that he doesn't try to manage. He steps through the door, and you step back to let him pass, and close it behind him. The house swallows the sound of it, and you stand in the hallway together for the first time since Barcelona.

He looks around the hallway briefly. You think it’s a security sweep, there’s probably a part of him that is, but you think he’s adjusting to being back in this house. You see it settle in his chest. He takes a breath in and holds it for a second.

"How long are you planning to stay?" you say, arms folded, leaning against the opposite wall.

"As long as you'll let me," he says. "I'm not making assumptions about that."

"Good," you say. "Don't."

He nods once.

You unfold your arms, push off the wall, and turn toward the kitchen because the kitchen is where everything happens in this house, because you need something to do with your hands, and because standing in the hallway staring at each other is not going to get any easier the longer you do it.

"Coffee," you say over your shoulder. "And then you can explain yourself."

"I wasn't aware I needed to explain myself."

"You showed up at my house without calling," you say. "That's an explanation situation."

"Fair," he says, and follows you.

He sits at the island.

He sits where he used to sit, the specific stool at the specific angle, and you're struck for a moment by how completely this kitchen absorbed him — how he became part of the geometry of it without either of you deciding that was happening, until the shape of him in that spot became something you knew without thinking about it.

You fill the kettle, find the coffee and do the small procedural things of making it, which buys you some time and gives you something to look at other than him.

"The call," he says, after a moment. "Tuesday. I didn't plan it the way it came out."

"Which part?" you ask, not turning around.

"Any of it." A pause. "I've been running conversations in my head for some time. None of them went the way Tuesday went."

"What did the ones in your head go like?"

"More controlled," he says. "Better arguments. Better sequencing." Another pause. "Tuesday was none of those things."

You turn around with both mugs. You set it in front of him. You stay on your side of the counter and wrap both hands around your own, and look at him.

"I just wanted to hear your voice," you say.

He looks at you.

"That's what you said," you say. "At the end. Before you hung up. You said it like you hadn't planned to."

"I hadn't," he says.

You look at him across the counter in the dull afternoon light.

There are things you've prepared for this conversation — things you've been holding in reserve since, the ones that needed saying in a room rather than a text draft, the ones that deserve to be said out loud to his face rather than to the ceiling at eleven o'clock at night. And you intend to say them. You intend to be very clear about several things.

But first:

"Nobody was asking if you were okay," you say. "That's what you also said on Tuesday."

His jaw tightens slightly. "It's not—" He stops. "Carter. Occasionally. But not — not the way you mean."

"Not the actual question," you say.

"Not the actual question," he confirms.

You look at him. At the tiredness sitting in the accumulated way through his shoulders. At the lines of his face which know you and have always known you, which you have spent months and too many unsent messages trying to reconcile with the face you saw on a Barcelona pavement doing something you hadn't known he was capable of.

"Are you okay?" you ask.

He meets your eyes. "No," he says. "Not particularly."

"Okay," you say.

"Are you?" he asks.

You think about the question. Actually, think about it, the way you haven't let yourself for months, the way the real answer has been sitting underneath the getting there and the I'm managing like sediment.

"No," you say. "Not entirely."

Something in him exhales. You feel it, the small release of something that had been held too tight.

"The step back," he says, after a moment. "On the pavement in Barcelona. I've been—" He stops. "I need to know if you're still—"

"I'm not scared of you," you say, before he can finish the question, because you've been holding that particular thing in, and he deserves to hear it before anything else. "I was. For a while. I'm not anymore."

He waits. His hands tighten around his mug, and his knuckles almost turn white. The steam curls up his arms and disappears into the air. He hasn’t looked away from you since you sat down.

"I'm still angry," you say, and your voice stays even when you say it, which takes some effort because it's true, and has been true since the hospital. It’s been sitting underneath everything else. "I know you had reasons. I know they were real, and I know you thought you were doing the right thing. I'm still angry that I walked around another country, not knowing someone was following me. I'm still angry that you decided on what I could handle without asking me."

"Yes," he says. There’s nothing defensive about it, and you appreciate it.

"And I'm angry," you say again, quieter now, "that you removed yourself. That you sat in that room, flagged it and accepted the reassignment and didn't — " You stop. Regroup. "I understand it. I've thought about it from every angle, and I understand the logic of it. But the part of it that was about me, the part where you decided the safest thing for me was to not be there, and you made that decision alone — I'm still angry about that too."

"I know," he says.

"You don't get to make that call for me," you say. "I needed to say that to you in person."

"I know," he says again. "You're right. I should have—" He stops. "There's no version of how I handled this that I'm fully satisfied with. All of it was made with one idea in mind, and I got the execution wrong in several directions."

"What was the idea?" you ask.

"Keeping you safe," he says.

"From him."

"From everything," he says, and it's quiet enough that it takes you a second to hear the full weight of what it covers.

You stand there with it. The kitchen is warm. The coffee is cooling in your hands.

"The sitting room has better light," you say.

He blinks. The tiniest fraction of something that might have been tension leaves his shoulders.

"Okay," he says.

"We can talk there," you say. "Properly. I meant what I said — I'm not promising anything, and there are still things I need to say. But—" You look at him. "You're here. So we might as well talk."

"Yeah," he says, and stands up from the stool.

You lead him out of the kitchen, down the hallway and into the sitting room. You sit. He sits across from you.

And there, in the room with the better light, with forever between you that are neither forgiven nor forgotten but that you have both carried here and are finally, carefully, beginning to put down in the same place at the same time 

You start to talk. Really talk.

The kind that takes the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, and that ends not with anything resolved but with something opened, something that had been sealed against itself for four months finally given air.

When he eventually stands to leave, it’s completely dark outside.

He stands in the hallway the way he stood on the step three hours ago, hands in his coat pockets, looking at you with the look that has always been specifically yours and that months of absence haven't changed the quality of one bit.

"I'll call," he says. "Before I come next time."

"Next time," you say.

"If there is one," he says carefully.

"Call first," you say.

The corner of his mouth moves. "Okay," he says.

He leaves.

You stand in the hallway after the door closes and listen to his car on the gravel, and then the silence of the estate settles back around the space he occupied, and you stand there for a while in the quiet and let the evening be what it is.

—

The call doesn't come.

Not the day after he leaves the estate, which you'd half-expected and half-dreaded in equal measure. Not the day after that, which you'd spent doing things with the concentrated attention of someone deliberately not checking their phone. By the end of the first week, you'd gotten through with some dignity. By the middle of the second week, which had started to feel less like patience and more like slow frustration, like waiting for a thing to happen and watching it not happen.

By the third week, you've stopped telling yourself you're waiting.

You're not waiting. You don't wait. You have a life and a schedule and work that needs doing and friends who call and a house full of the quiet machinery of your own existence, and you are not sitting by the phone like some relic of a century with fewer communication options. You are living your life. The phone is simply also present while you live it.

And then on a Thursday evening at six o'clock, you're standing in the kitchen eating crackers over the sink because you forgot to eat lunch and the address in Kensington has been sitting in your phone since November, and you put the crackers down and pick up your keys.

It's not a decision, exactly. It's the end of a decision that's been made for three weeks without your full participation.

You're in the car before you've thought about what you're going to say when he opens the door.

The drive is forty minutes in the Thursday evening traffic.

You spend most of it not thinking about what you're doing, which requires some effort, and the remainder thinking about it in the abstract rather than the specific. The fact of going, not the thing you'll say when you get there. 

You've learned, at some point in the last few months, that planning what to say to Steve Harrington is largely a waste of time because conversations with him rarely go the direction you've planned them in, and by the time you reach the right street in Kensington it's almost seven and the evening is blue and cold, and you've found a parking space and you're getting out of the car and that's that.

The building is a converted Victorian terrace, red brick, the kind that looks expensive without trying. Third floor, the address said. You find the buzzer panel in the small lobby and press the right number.

It takes long enough that you start to think about what you'll do if he isn't there — whether you'll wait in the car, whether you'll leave, whether you'll text I'm outside your building, I know— and then the intercom crackles.

"Yeah," he says.

"It's me," you say.

A pause. Not a long one. The door buzzes open.

He's waiting in the doorway of the flat when you come off the landing. Third floor, last door, and he's standing there with his arms loosely folded and his shoulder against the door frame. He's wearing a grey t-shirt and dark jeans, not the suit, not the overcoat, not any version of the professional armour you've seen him in for those eight months — and he's looking at you with an expression that is not shocked.

Not shocked at all, actually. More like someone whose calculation has just come back confirmed.

"You said you'd call," you say, stopping a few feet away.

"I was going to," he says.

"When?"

"Soon."

"That's not a specific time, Steve."

"No," he agrees. "It's not."

"You drove all the way from Kensington without calling," you say. "Three weeks ago. And then I've been waiting for a call that apparently was coming soon, which—"

"So you drove all the way from the estate without calling," he says.

"I learned from the best."

The corner of his mouth moves. He unfolds his arms.

"Come in," he says, stepping back from the door.

The flat is smaller than you'd imagined.

There's a sitting room and a kitchen that's separate from it, a hallway with two other doors, a window in the sitting room that looks over the street below. But smaller than the estate, smaller than anything you associate with Steve's presence, which tends to make spaces feel larger rather than smaller. 

Here, the walls are close, and the furniture is the particular style of furnished rentals — inoffensive, mid-range, slightly too beige — and there are signs of him layered over the top of it in the way you layer yourself into a space you haven't fully committed to.

A jacket over the back of the sofa. Running shoes by the door. Two mugs on the kitchen counter. A book on the arm of the chair.

And by the hall — a bag.

Partially unpacked. Sitting there with its zip half-open like it arrived and got partially dealt with, and then was left, which means it's been here for months still half-unpacked, which tells you something about the degree to which Steve has committed to this space.

He hasn't. He's been here without quite being here, which is its own kind of thing to notice.

"Tea?" he says, from the kitchen doorway.

"Wine if you have it," you say.

"I have it," he says.

You sit on the sofa that isn't quite his sofa and look around the sitting room while he opens a bottle in the kitchen, and you think about all the times you've been in his professional space — your kitchen, your sitting room, cars, hotel rooms, terminals — and how different this is. 

This is where he actually lives. This is the shape of his private life, the one that exists when nobody is watching, and it’s smaller and less settled than you expected, and for reasons you couldn't entirely articulate, it makes something in your chest loosen slightly toward him.

He comes back with two glasses and sits at the other end of the sofa, at the comfortable middle-distance of two people who have decided not to make a thing of proximity, and hands you yours.

"You could have called," he says.

"You could have called," you say.

"I know." He settles back against the sofa, easily like someone in their own space, which is the version of him you haven't seen much of — unguarded in the physical sense, taking up the room without calculating it. "I was drafting things."

"How many?"

He considers. "Not eleven."

"How many?"

"Four," he says. "Five, maybe. I deleted as I went."

"That's worse," you say. "At least mine are documented."

He looks at you sideways, and then something happens — a sound that is brief and low and surprised out of him, the beginning of a laugh that he doesn't quite finish — and it does something to the atmosphere in the room, that sound, because you don't have a lot of data points for Steve Harrington laughing. 

You find that you want more of them.

"What did yours say?" you ask.

"Things I've already said in person," he says. "More or less."

"More or less."

"Some things were harder to say in person." He turns his glass in his hand. "I rewrote the same paragraph about the restaurant in Barcelona four times. The part where I ordered for you."

You look at him. "I wrote about that too," you say. "In January."

"I know. You told me."

"I didn't say thank you at the time," you say. "For that. I've been thinking about it."

He looks at you with a specifically quiet look, the one that receives things without making a production of it. "You don't have to thank me for that."

"I know I don't have to," you say. "I wanted to. In person."

He nods. Accepts it. Doesn't deflect it back the way people sometimes do when they're uncomfortable being thanked — he just takes it and lets it be, which is something you've always noticed about him, the way he receives things without either dismissing them or inflating them.

You sit in the small sitting room with your wine and the quality of an early Thursday evening, the street below doing its quiet business through the window, and you try to locate yourself inside the fact that you're here, in his flat, without the professional context for the first time since knowing him.

"This is strange," you say.

"Very," he says.

"Not bad strange," you say quickly.

"No," he agrees. "Just different. I keep waiting for something to require managing."

"I know." You look at him. "I keep waiting for you to boss me around"

He almost smiles. "Is it worse?" he asks. "Without the—" He makes a gesture that seems to mean all of it, the whole professional structure.

You think about it. "No," you say honestly. "I'm just recalibrating."

"Me too," he says.

The recalibrating takes the form of talking for the next hour in a way that starts carefully and gradually stops being careful.

It starts with the work things — both of your lives since July, the things that happened and can be described without being loaded. He tells you more about Hartley, who is exactly as professionally uneventful as advertised, and something about it makes him more specific than he was in the phone call, more willing to characterise, less restrained. He does an impression of Hartley explaining the merits of a particular kind of parking space, and it catches you completely off guard.

"You're funny," you say, like this is new information.

He looks at you. "I've always been funny."

"You've always been dry," you say. "That's not the same thing."

"It's a subset."

"I've never heard you do an impression before."

"You've never been in my flat before," he says. "Different context."

"So in professional contexts, you don't do impressions?"

"In professional contexts, I don't do a lot of things," he says.

There's something in it — the easy way he said it, the way it landed without weight, the fact that he's sitting here in his grey t-shirt doing impressions of his boring principal and making you laugh in his half-unpacked flat — that feels like a door opening. Ajar, enough to see through.

"Like what?" you say.

He considers this with the thoughtfulness he applies to most things, except tonight it doesn't have the controlled professional cast to it. "Laugh," he says. "At things that are actually funny rather than things that are politely funny." He tilts his head. "Tell people when they've said something that's landed."

"You do that?"

"Not at work." He takes a drink. "I notice a lot at work. I don't say most of it."

"Like what did you notice?" you ask. "That you didn't say."

He looks at you sideways. "Specifically?" he says.

"Specifically."

He looks at the window for a second. Then back. "The colour-coded tabs," he says. "You said, Oh my god when you saw them. I thought that was funny. I didn't let myself think it was funny for about four minutes because I was trying to brief you, and then I thought about it again, and I had to stop looking at you."

"I saw that," you say. "I thought you were annoyed."

"I was trying not to smile," he says. "Which in professional contexts looks identical to being annoyed."

You laugh. A proper one, the kind that arrives before you've curated it, and you watch him watch it happen with the attentiveness he's always had, except tonight it isn't managing attentiveness, it's just him. Paying attention to you because he wants to.

"The bathroom breaks," you say.

"Movement windows."

"You called my bathroom schedule a movement window."

"It's a more elegant term."

"It really isn't," you say, and he exhales through his nose, and his mouth does the full version of the thing it's been doing all evening, the actual smile, unhurried and slightly crooked and entirely directed at you, and you sit there with it for a second.

You're on your second glass of wine when it comes up.

Not because either of you planned it. It's the way conversations find the hard things when the room has gotten warm enough and late enough and safe enough — they circle and circle and then settle, just there suddenly, the way you become aware of a sound that's been in the background the whole time.

He'd been talking about something else — the Hartley placement, working in a low-risk environment after eight months of a very different one — and then he stops, mid-sentence, and looks at his glass.

"I owe you something," he says.

You swallow. "For what?"

"Barcelona," he says. "Specifically—" He pauses. Sets his glass down on the coffee table. "The street. What you saw."

The room goes slightly quieter around the word, the way rooms do.

You hadn't planned to have this conversation tonight. You'd thought, somewhere in the drive over, that it might take a few visits to get here, that you'd circle it the way you'd been circling everything before finally approaching. But he's sitting here on his sofa in his grey t-shirt, and he's put his glass down like he’s decided to say something, and you find you don't want to manage it away.

"Okay," you say.

He looks at you. "I scared you."

"Yes," you say. Simply. You’ve already told him this.

"I need to say sorry for that." He says it directly; the way he says things he means. "Not for what happened — I'm not sorry for stopping him. But for what it looked like. What I — how far it went."

You hold your wine glass and look at him and wait, because there's more, you can hear more underneath that, and you're not going to fill the space before he's had a chance to put it in.

"I don't—" He stops. Starts again more carefully. "That isn't who I am. In general. I need you to know that."

"I know that," you say.

"You watched me do something that night, and I'm aware of what it looked like from where you were standing. I don't want you to think I’m—" He seems to run out of the sentence. Picks up the glass again. Puts it back down.

"Steve," you say gently. "Tell me."

He exhales slowly through his nose. "I'm trained," he says. "I've done the courses, and I know the protocols. In professional situations, I apply those things in the right way. I don't over-extend. I stop when the threat is neutralised. That's how it's supposed to work, and that's how it works ninety-nine times out of a hundred."

"And the hundredth?" you ask.

"The hundredth is Barcelona," he says. "The hundredth is what happens when the threat isn't abstract." He looks at his hands, resting on his knees. "It's different when you're the person in the middle of it. When I saw what he'd done. When I saw your hand."

Your hand presses briefly, automatically, toward the place below your ribs.

He watches the gesture. Something in his jaw tightens.

"I stopped being the right me," he says. "I stopped running the protocol. It became something else, and I let it become something else for longer than I should have, and the three people who pulled me back are people whose job it was to pull me back, and I'm not proud of it."

"You were protecting me," you say.

"That's not a justification," he says, and he says it firmly, not at you but at the space between you, the way someone says something they've been saying to themselves repeatedly and have finally said out loud. "The fact that I was scared for you doesn't make it okay that I kept going past the point where I needed to. Those are two different things, and I've been trying not to confuse them."

"You've been thinking about this," you say.

"Since then," he says. "Most days."

"I didn't know you could be like that," you say.

You say it, and he receives it without flinching. "I know."

"I knew what the job required. I'd thought about it in a general way." You look at your glass. "I hadn't thought about what it actually looked like."

"No one's supposed to see it," he says. "That's the point, usually. You manage it before it gets to that stage." A pause. "Barcelona didn't give me that option. He was there before I'd fully understood he was there, and then your hand was—" He blinks. "I stopped being a professional."

"You became something else," you say.

"Yes," he says. 

"Something more," you say, slowly, trying to find the right word. "More than just the job."

"You weren't just protecting a principal," you say. "You were— It was different because I'm different to you."

His jaw shifts and he can’t look at you. "Yes."

"And that's the part you couldn't calibrate."

"I've been in difficult situations. I've had principals I cared about in a professional sense. This was—" He stops again. He seems to keep running out of the sentence, which is unlike him, the man who chooses words with care and usually lands exactly where he means to. "You were hurt," he says finally. "I saw it. And everything else went."

You look at the careful, tired quality of his honesty. The way he's holding his own hands loosely on his knees, just sitting in what he's saying.

"Does it—" You choose the words. "Does it happen? In general. Is that something that—"

"No," he says, and it comes out certain. "No. In twelve years of doing this work, I have never lost control of a situation the way I lost control of that one. Not because I haven't been in dangerous situations. Because I've always been able to keep the distance." He looks at you steadily. "You are the variable, not the work."

"I'm the variable," you say.

"Yes," he says. “It became more difficult to maintain.”

"In general," you say. "Or specifically in Barcelona."

"Both," he says, and the honesty of it is simple and completely uncushioned.

Something you've been carrying since then — the fear-that-isn't-fear, the image of the narrow street, the three people it took, the way it had gone past the point of necessary — shifts very slightly.

You don't think it entirely vanishes. But it shifts, accommodated by the new information, fitted into the shape of a man who lost his control for a very specific reason and has been sitting with the knowledge of that without excusing it.

"Thank you," you say. "For saying it."

He looks slightly surprised. "I owe you more than—"

"You explained it without justifying it," you say. "Those are different things. You didn't tell me it was fine or that I shouldn't be bothered by it. You just told me what happened and took the responsibility for the part that went wrong." You look at him. "That matters."

He's quiet for a moment.

"I was terrified," he says, and it sounds like the truest version of several things at once. "When I saw your hand. When I understood what had happened. Everything I'd been trying to prevent for months had happened anyway and I—" He breathes. "I'm sorry. That's what I needed to say. I'm sorry for scaring you. Not for being there, not for any of the rest of it, but for the part where I lost the line, and you had to watch that."

"I know," you say.

"I mean it specifically," he says. "You specifically. Not as the principal. As the person you are."

"I know," you say again, and mean it differently this time.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay," you say.

You reach over and put your hand over his. He turns his hand under yours and holds it.

Neither of you says anything.

After a moment, you both reach for your wine glasses, and the sitting room settles back into the easier register of the earlier part of the evening, and the conversation finds its way to other things, and that is the end of it.

"Have you eaten?" he says, later on.

"I had crackers," you say.

"Before you drove here?"

"Yes."

He gives you the look. "I have food," he says. "If you want."

"You don't have to cook," you say.

"I know I don't have to," he says.

"I can get something delivered—"

"I have pasta, and I have the ingredients for the sauce May makes," he says. "It takes twenty minutes. It's better than delivery."

"You cook?”

"I cook," he says, simply, like this isn't information that somehow feels revolutionary. "Less so when it's just me, but I cook."

"Less so when it's just you," you repeat.

"Cooking for one is an exercise," he says. "Everything is too much or not enough."

You follow him into the kitchen because there's nowhere else to go in the flat and because the kitchen is where things happen, and this seems like a thing that's happening.

The kitchen is small — smaller than the one at the estate, smaller than your kitchen at your flat, the closeness of a London kitchen that was designed for efficiency rather than comfort. There's a window above the sink that looks at a wall, which is a very London window, and the counter space is limited enough that when you sit on the only available surface — the small stretch of counter beside the fridge — and Steve moves around the kitchen getting things out of cupboards, you're closer together than you'd be in any other configuration.

He doesn't seem to mind.

More than that, he moves around you, reaches past you for the olive oil without asking you to move, hands you things to hold without explanation, and treats your presence in his kitchen with comfort.

"Hold that," he says, handing you a can of tomatoes.

"Am I helping?" you say.

"You're in the way," he says. "Which is adjacent."

"I can move—"

"Stay where you are," he says firmly, reaching past your shoulder to the spice rack, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him, and your hand tightens slightly around the can of tomatoes.

He doesn't acknowledge it. He moves back to the stove.

"What's in May's sauce?" you ask.

"If I told you she'd lose her greatest leverage," he says.

"She doesn't know I exist."

He glances at you over his shoulder. "She knows you exist."

You smile at him. "You told her about me?"

"She asked about the assignment," he says, turning back to the pan. "I gave her information appropriate to what she asked."

"Which was?"

"Who the principal was." A pause. "And then she asked other things, and I gave her information appropriate to those, too."

"What other things?"

"Things I'm not going to tell you in my kitchen," he says, which is itself information, and you sit with it on the counter holding the can of tomatoes while he cooks and the kitchen smells of garlic and olive oil.

"I would like to know," you say.

"I know you would," he says.

"Steve."

"The sauce needs the tomatoes," he says.

You hand him the tomatoes.

—

You open a second bottle of wine because the first is finished, and this feels like a second-bottle evening. He tells you more about May, who sounds like the kind of person who would ask other things and receive the answers with absolute equanimity. 

You tell him about Dana, who had made an observation in December about the kitchen feeling different since July, and had not pressed for an explanation, which you describe and which makes him do the sound again. The low brief one. The almost-laugh.

"You're doing it again," you say.

"Doing what?"

"The thing where you almost laugh but stop yourself."

He turns from the stove. "I'm not stopping myself."

"You are," you say. "You've done it three times tonight. You get almost there and then you—" You make a small gesture.

"Okay," he says. "Fine. What would you like me to do about it?"

"Just laugh," you say. "Like a person."

"I am laughing like a person."

"You're laughing like someone who was told at some point that laughing freely in a professional setting was wrong and never figured out how to turn that off."

He stares at you for a moment. Then, unhurriedly, he turns back to the stove.

"That is an extremely specific observation," he says.

"I have eight months of data," you say.

"And now you're analysing it."

"I've always been analysing it," you say. "I was just more subtle about it when you were my bodyguard."

He makes a sound then. The full version. Low and genuine and surprised by itself, the laugh that didn't get stopped in time, and it fills the small kitchen in a way that does something to you, hearing it — the warmth of a sound you've been waiting for without knowing you were waiting.

You smile at your wine glass. He doesn't see it.

Or if he does, he doesn't say anything, just turns back to the sauce, and you sit on the counter. The kitchen smells of garlic, and the evening has gotten properly dark outside the wall-window, and the flat is warm and small and full of the particular texture of this.

Dinner is at the kitchen table because the sitting room doesn't have one. It's a small table, the kind that technically seats two and practically seats one and a half — close, knees almost touching, the plates taking up most of the available surface.

The pasta is good.

Genuinely good, something made by someone who knows what they're doing and isn't showing off about it, and you tell him so, and he accepts it the way he accepts things, without deflecting.

"May's recipe?" you ask.

"Adapted," he says.

"What did you change?"

"More garlic," he says. "She goes light on the garlic. I've never understood it."

"More garlic is always correct," you say.

He looks at you with a warmth that is very simple and very present. "Yes," he says. "Exactly."

You eat and talk, and the talking is different from the talking in the sitting room — lighter, somehow, the food giving it something to organise around, a conversational structure that keeps it from getting too pointed in any one direction. 

He listens to you talk absentmindedly with his fork in his hand and his eyes on you, and asks questions at exactly the right points, the questions that open things up rather than close them down.

He’s looking at you, and his eyes are sparkling, and he hasn’t taken a bite of his food in probably three minutes. You worry it’s going to go cold.

He reaches across the table.

Not for your hand — he reaches past your glass, straightens the salt shaker that's been sitting at a slight angle the whole meal, and retreats. A completely unnecessary adjustment to a salt shaker that wasn't causing anyone any problems.

You look at the salt shaker. You look at him.

"Was that necessary?" you say.

"It was crooked," he says, with perfect composure.

"It was off maybe a three-degree angle," you say.

"It was bothering me."

"Since when?"

"Since we sat down," he says. "I've been thinking about it."

"You've been thinking about the salt shaker?" you ask, in the tone of someone who doesn't believe a word of this.

"Among other things," he says, and the corner of his mouth is moving, and his eyes are doing the other thing, and you look at him across the small table in his small kitchen. The evening is full, and the pasta is great, and the wine is warm in your chest.

"Among other things," you say.

"Yes," he says.

You carry the plates to the sink.

He washes. You dry. This is the most domestic possible thing, and it happens without discussion, the natural division of two people who have been in proximity long enough to develop instincts about each other's preferences.

He washes efficiently, the way he does most things. You dry with the tea towel that was hanging over the oven handle, which is the obvious tea towel, and you stand side by side at the sink in the small kitchen, and it is the most ordinary thing and also somehow everything.

"You said you didn't know how to act without the boundaries," he says, after a while, handing you a plate.

"Earlier," you say. "Yes."

"Do you still not know?"

You take the plate and dry it and think about it. "I'm figuring it out," you say. "It's easier tonight than I expected."

"Why?"

"Because you're different here," you say. "You're—" You look for the words. "Less managed. You laugh. You have opinions about garlic and salt shakers, and you cook pasta. You did an impression of your principal that made me actually laugh, and you're—" You stop.

"I'm what?" 

"More," you say. "You're just more. Of yourself. And I'm adjusting."

He hands you the last thing — a pan, still warm — and turns off the tap, leans against the counter beside the sink, close, the small kitchen putting you within arm's reach of each other naturally, without either of you navigating toward it.

"This is the part that's strange," he says. "For me."

"What part specifically?"

"The part where I don't have to—" He pauses. "Where I'm not upholding anything. Where talking to you doesn't have a function except talking to you." He looks sideways at you. "I've been thinking about how to be around you without the job, and I didn't know it would feel this much like—"

"Like what?" 

"Like breathing," he says on an exhale. "Like something I don't have to think about."

You put the pan down on the counter.

You turn and look at him properly, half-facing him in the small kitchen with the tea towel still in your hands, and he's already looking at you, has been looking at you, and the distance between you is less than a foot and has been less than a foot for most of the last twenty minutes without either of you doing anything about it.

"Steve," you say.

"Yeah," he says.

"The salt shaker wasn't crooked," you say.

His mouth moves. "No," he says. "It wasn't."

"Okay," you say.

"Okay," he says.

He looks at your face. He does this with the quality he has — directly, the full attention, the thing that has always felt like more than looking. And then his hand comes up, and he tucks a piece of hair back from your face with two fingers, the lightest possible touch, and leaves his hand there at your jaw, warm and unhurried.

Your breath shifts.

"Is this okay?" he says.

"Yes," you say, and mean it.

He closes the distance.

It's not what you expect, and it's exactly what you expect — the same time, the same moment. It's quiet and deliberate, the way he does most things, no rush to it, his mouth against yours with patience like he’s thought about this for a long time and isn’t going to waste it by doing it quickly. His thumb traces a small, slow arc along your jaw. You drop the towel, and your hand finds the front of his shirt without deciding to.

He pulls back just slightly. Checks. The way he always checks.

You close the distance again.

This time it's softer and longer and his other hand finds your waist and you think, distantly, that this is what it was always going to feel like — inevitable like the way things that have been true for a long time and are only now being allowed to be true, just the particular rightness of two things that fit coming together after a long time of being kept apart.

When you finally separate, it's gradual.

You look at each other. You're still holding his shirt. He's still holding your jaw.

"Hi," you say.

Something does what it does on his face — the slow warm version, the full one, the one you've been cataloguing for months from what you'd once thought was a safe distance.

"Hi," he says.

Neither of you moves.

This seems to be a theme — the two of you in a room together, neither of you moving, some invisible current running between you that you'd both been pretending for months was something else. Professionalism. Circumstance. The natural intensity of a situation with high stakes. You'd been very creative about what you called it. You'd had to be.

His thumb is still moving. That small, slow arc. Like he's not aware he's doing it, or like he is and has decided he's done pretending he doesn't want to.

"Steve," you say, and then don't know what comes after it.

"I know," he says.

Which is the thing about him. He usually does.

You look at his face — properly, the way you've been careful not to, all these months. The line of his jaw. The particular steadiness in his eyes that you'd catalogued as professional once and then revised, quietly, to something else. 

You don't say you're nervous. It seems important, for reasons you can't entirely articulate, not to say it. As if saying it will make it larger than it is. As if the shape of the evening will change if you admit out loud that your heart is doing something irregular against your ribs.

He sees it anyway.

He always sees it. That's his job — reading rooms, reading people, clocking the thing that's slightly off before it becomes a problem. You'd resented it sometimes, early on, the feeling of being legible to him when he remained so carefully, professionally unreadable. It had felt like an imbalance. It probably still is. But right now, with his hand at your jaw and his eyes on you in the quiet, you find you mind it less than you expected.

"You don't have to be nervous," he says, low and careful.

"I'm not nervous."

A beat. He doesn't argue. He looks at you very steadily and simply waits.

"I'm not," you say again, smaller.

"Okay," he says.

"I'm really not."

"Okay," he says again, the same way, the same tone, which means he is allowing you this completely and doesn’t believe a word of it, and something about that combination makes your chest ache in a way you're not prepared for.

"You always let me say something that isn't true and don't correct me."

Something shifts in his expression. Softens, maybe, though that's not quite the right word for it — it's more like the professional layer going briefly transparent, something underneath showing through. "It's not my job to correct you," he says. "Not about that."

"What is your job, then? Right now."

He looks at you for a moment. Then he says, quietly, "Making sure you're alright."

You look at him. You think about all the versions of that sentence you've heard from him. Stay close. Don't open the door. I've got you. All the iterations of the same basic thing, which is that he pays attention, and he’s careful, and he doesn’t let things go wrong if he can help it. You'd understood it as professional once. You'd understood it as dedication, as competence, as someone who takes their work seriously.

You understand it differently now.

"I'm alright," you say. And then, because it's true, and because the evening seems to have become the kind of evening where the truth is allowed: "I'm just — this is the first time."

He goes still. Not alarmed — more like recalibrating. "First time," he repeats, carefully.

"I mean — not—" You make a small, frustrated gesture. "The first time with you. First time this. First time any of this is — real. And I just—" You stop. Try again. "I've thought about it a lot. And I didn't know what it would actually feel like, and now I do, and it's—"

"A lot," he offers.

"Yeah." You exhale. "It's a lot."

He doesn't say anything for a moment. He just looks at you, and you let him, because you're tired of being careful about what you let him see. Then he moves his hand from your face — slowly, deliberately — and takes your hand instead, and just holds it. His hand is bigger than yours. Warm. Completely steady in a way that makes you aware, by contrast, of the slight tremor in your own fingers.

He notices. Of course he does. He doesn't say anything about it.

"Come here," he says instead.

His bedroom is the way you would have guessed, if you'd let yourself guess. Spare. Ordered. Nothing on the surfaces that doesn't need to be there. A single lamp on the nightstand, already on — the low, warm kind.

The bed is made with the corners tucked. There are no decorative pillows. There’s another book on the nightstand, face down, which is the most personal thing in the room and somehow the detail that stays with you.

He sits on the edge of the bed, looks up at you and waits.

The way he can hold a position, physical or otherwise, without it costing him anything. You've always found it slightly unnerving. Right now it's something else.

You sit beside him.

Not quite touching. Close.

Your hands are still loosely linked between you, resting on the mattress. You look at them — his hand around yours, his thumb not moving now — and you think about all the times you've been in proximity to him and pretended not to notice the proximity. 

All the car rides. All the briefings. All the times he'd put a hand briefly at your back, guiding, and you'd catalogued the weight of it and told yourself it was nothing and known, on some level you didn't look at directly, that it wasn't.

"You're thinking very loudly," he says.

"I'm not."

"You are." Observational. "Your face does a specific thing."

"It does not."

"It does." He says it simply, not as a challenge. "It's not a bad thing. I like that I can tell."

You look at him. Something about the admission — small, unguarded — does something to the nervous thing in your chest. Rearranges it slightly.

"What does it look like?" you ask. "The specific thing."

He considers. "Like you're solving something," he says. "Working something out. You get a line here—" he reaches up and touches, very gently, the space between your brows— ", and you go a little still. And then whatever you were working out either resolves or you decide to leave it for later."

"You've been watching me for a long time," you say.

"Yeah," he says. 

"I'm still nervous," you say.

You don't know why you say it. Maybe because the room is quiet enough to be honest in. Maybe because he's been honest, and it seems only fair. Maybe because you're tired of holding it, the pretending, the I'm fine, I'm not nervous, everything is normal, which has been the primary activity of the last several months.

He looks at you. Doesn't say I know, though he could, though he clearly does.

"It’s alright," he says instead. "You don't have to not be."

Something in your shoulders releases. A little. Almost involuntary.

He brings your linked hands up slowly and presses his mouth to your knuckles, a press, warm and deliberate, his eyes on yours the whole time — and holds it for a moment and then lowers your hands back down and doesn't let go.

"Nothing's going to go wrong," he says. "I'm not going anywhere. There's no rush." A pause. "We don't have to do anything."

"I want to," you say immediately.

Something in his expression shifts. "I know," he says. "I know you do. I want to be clear that you don't have to."

"I know I don't have to."

"I know you know." He says it gently, patient in the way he is about most things. "I'm just saying it so it's been said."

You look at him. The lamp. The book face-down on the nightstand. His hands, which you have thought about — you realise now, fully admit now — for considerably longer than you'd been willing to say.

"Okay," you say. "It's been said."

He almost smiles. "Okay."

You lean in first this time.

It feels different from the first time. This is quieter. More room in it. He makes a soft sound when your mouth meets his, and his hand comes up again to your face, to your jaw, that same place, and you understand that it's going to keep going back there, that it's where his hands want to be, and something about that knowledge settles warm in your sternum.

He kisses you slowly. With considerable patience. Like he's making good on something.

His other hand finds your waist, and then the small of your back, and draws you slightly closer without hurry, and you go, and you're still nervous, but it's different now — lighter, less like dread and more like the feeling of standing at the edge of something and choosing to step off. 

You bring your hand up to the side of his neck and feel his pulse there, steady and unhurried, and yours is not steady and not unhurried, but he doesn't say anything about that.

He pulls back a fraction. Forehead almost against yours. Checking.

"Still okay?" Low. Private. Just for the room.

"Still okay," you say. Your voice comes out softer than you intend.

He kisses you again.

This one goes longer. He's unhurried — like it has more room in it than it usually does, like the space between seconds has expanded to fit something larger. You stop thinking about what you look like or what you're doing with your hands or whether you're doing this right. 

You stop, somewhere in the middle of it, being nervous. Not because the nervousness resolves into something else but because it simply gets crowded out, the way noise gets crowded out when something takes your full attention.

His thumb is doing the thing again. The slow brush. You lean into it without deciding to.

He makes a quiet sound. Low and involuntary, almost. It catches you somewhere central, and you bring your hand up from his neck to the back of his head without thinking, and he tilts into it, just slightly, and you think — distantly, because you're not quite capable of full thoughts — that you have never had someone's complete attention like this. Not the professional kind. The other kind.

When you separate, it's slow again. It's always slow with him. The city is still outside. The lamp is still on. His forehead rests against yours and you stay there, breathing, his hand at your face and your fingers in the short hair at the base of his skull, and neither of you says anything for a moment.

"Okay," he says, eventually. The word seems to mean several things.

"Yeah," you say.

"You're still thinking," he says.

"Constantly," you say. "It's a problem I have."

"What are you thinking about?"

You consider lying, or deflecting, or making it a joke. You consider all of these things and then don't do any of them. "That this is real," you say. "I keep — I keep landing on that. That it's real."

He looks at you. Very steadily. "It's real," he confirms.

"I know."

"I've wanted—" He stops. Starts again, and you realise you've almost never heard him do that, restart a sentence, which means this one costs something. "I've wanted this for a long time," he says. "I want to make sure you know that. That this isn't—" A breath. "That I'm not going anywhere."

You look at him. The lamp. The book. His hands.

"Okay," you say.

"Okay?"

"I believe you," you say. Which is true. Which is maybe the most frightening thing about the evening — not the kissing, not the nervous thing, but how completely and without reservation you believe him.

He looks at you for a moment, and then he does something — a full smile, the warm, slow version, the one you've been cataloguing from what you'd once thought was a safe distance — and it turns out that being close to it is different from cataloguing it. It turns out it does something different when it's aimed at you from a foot away in a quiet room.

"Come here," he says again, quieter, and opens his arm. You shift so you’re in his lap, your legs over each side of his waist, and he leans against the wall behind him. He wraps around you and settles, and it's that easy, and somehow that's the part that gets you — how easy it is, how right, like this is where you've always been supposed to fit.

His chin rests on the top of your head. His breathing is even.

"Still nervous?" he asks.

You think about it honestly. "A little," you say. "Less."

"Less is good."

"Yeah."

Outside, the city does what it always does. The lamp casts the same light it was casting before, which feels strange — that the room looks the same when the room is entirely different. You’re aware of the weight of his arms, the warmth of him, the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest.

"Steve," you say.

"Mm."

"The book on your nightstand."

A pause. "What about it?"

"What is it?"

Another pause, slightly longer, which means he's deciding something. "History," he says. "Fairly dry. I like something that doesn't require a lot of—" He stops.

"Something you can put down," you supply.

"Yes." And then, quieter: "Usually."

You sit with that for a moment. The idea of him in this room in the evenings, picking up the dry history book and putting it down again. The version of him that exists when there's no job, no function, no professional frame. You've been trying not to think about that version for months. You let yourself think about it now.

"I have questions," you say.

"I know."

"About you. The—" You gesture vaguely. "Non-professional you."

"I know," he says again, and you can hear something in it, a warmth, a patience. "We have time."

It lands quietly. We have time. As if the evening is not a single event but a beginning. As if he is already past the question of whether there will be more evenings, has already folded it in as a given, is simply waiting for you to catch up.

You press a little closer. He adjusts his arm.

"Okay," you say, and you mean it the way he meant it — in the multiple-things sense. Yes, and I understand, and I think I believe that too, and I'm still nervous but less, and you can keep talking or we can be quiet, and either is fine.

He seems to understand all of it.

"Okay," he says back.

You stay there, in the quiet, in the particular rightness of things finally being allowed to be what they are — and you think that this is the part no one tells you about, the part after the moment, the soft and unhurried settling of two people figuring out what comes next.

You find, somewhat to your surprise, that you're not nervous anymore.

[oncasette]

congrats on 4.5k !!!! oh em gee so exciting…..may i req pretty pls….

“What did they do this time?” w/ eddie munson because I know you’d have to go to eddie every time your shitty boyfriend upsets you or lets you down, and eddie would be your best support because he hates the guy and hates seeing you upset :p

Thank u ily mwah

this one's for you and your problems.

best friend!eddie munson x fem!reader

summary: 0.8k

“Dump him,” he grunts.

“You always say that,” you say, wiping at the fresh tears rolling down your cheeks. 

“And I always mean it,” he says. He wants to be sympathetic, truly. And, he is to the fact that you’re crying, but he hates the fact that you won’t listen to him. Your boyfriend sucks and, for some reason, despite how smart he knows you are, you won’t leave him.

or the one where eddie hates your boyfriend because of how bad he is to you.

content: hurt/comfort, your boyfriend #sucks, emotional cheating (r), suspected cheating (not eddie)

masterlist

Eddie’s two seconds away from falling back asleep when the knocking starts back up again. He assumes, for a second, that it’s Wayne and he just forgot his keys before he remembers that Wayne’s three hours away at a convention. Which, in his sleep-addled brain, only leaves…

“What’d he do this time?” he yawns as he opens the door to poor, pitifully upset you. He stretches out in the doorway, scratching at the band of skin that exposes above the waistband of his boxers. Hm. Maybe he should’ve put some pants on. 

“He’s so stupid,” you huff, big fat tears already threatening to slide down your cheeks. Your voice is wet and squeaky like you’d already been crying on your way over and Eddie’s heart pangs as he steps out of the way to let you into the trailer. He skirts past you on your journey to the couch to go and grab the mug you like and the hot chocolate powder from the top of one of the cabinets. 

He knows this routine. In fact, he’s mastered this routine. Your sorry excuse of a boyfriend does something idiotic, you come over, you cry to Eddie, Eddie comforts you, he tells you to dump the jerk. You, of course, don’t listen ever, but he thinks he’s starting to get through to you just a bit. Delusionally, maybe. 

He glances over at you once he’s got both mugs in the microwave. He doesn’t like how small you look. How small you’ve made yourself since you started dating that guy. It was just so… not like you. Not like the girl he remembers, his best friend, the girl he’s been selfishly in love with for as long as he can think back to, not that he’ll ever tell you that last bit. 

“So?” Eddie prompts once he’s joined you on the couch and handed you your steaming mug. You’re both sideways on the already cramped couch, feet and knees touching each other and backs pressed against the respective arms so that you can sit face to face. 

“He’s going to Chicago this weekend to go see his ex,” you say, wiping your nose with the sleeve of your hoodie. 

“What the fuck?” Eddie grunts. Oh, but what he actually means to say is What the fuck? 

“And he won’t…” your voice stalls out with a squeak. “They stayed ‘friends’ after their break up, I guess, but I just don’t…”

“Hey, you’re okay,” Eddie attempts to soothe you with a hand on your knee. 

“I tried to go with him and he said no,” you sniff. You set your mug down on the coffee table and he catches the way your lip wobbles in the lamp light. It’s decided. He wants to kill your boyfriend.

“Dump him,” he grunts.

“You always say that,” you say, wiping at the fresh tears rolling down your cheeks. 

“And I always mean it,” he says. He wants to be sympathetic, truly. And, he is to the fact that you’re crying, but he hates the fact that you won’t listen to him. Your boyfriend sucks and, for some reason, despite how smart he knows you are, you won’t leave him.

Eddie grabs your hand gently, sliding his fingers up to your wrist before tugging you closer. His heart jumps at the way you let him maneuver you, tucking you between his legs. You’re chest to chest, your head beneath his chin, as his fingers smooth up and down your back.

“You don’t love him,” he whispers. 

“Wha- Eddie,” you huff.

“You don’t,” he hums. “You know you don’t. You wouldn’t keep coming to me if you did.”

“That’s not true,” you say. “You’re my best friend, of course I come to you.”

“You come to be because you know I don’t like him,” he says. 

“Eddie,” you whine, dragging on the last syllable, but you don’t move. In fact, you nestle down further against his chest.

“Just leave him, sweetheart,” he sighs. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

He feels the way your face presses harder against his chest, feels the hot tears beginning to soak into his t-shirt. 

“Sweetheart, c’mon…” he murmurs.

“What if no one else will love me?” you ask, and Eddie’s heart cracks in two. 

“Oh, no,” he exhales. “No, that’s insane.”

“What if this is all I get?”

“Baby, stop.”

Both of his hands come up to cradle the sides of your face, pulling you out of his chest enough that he can look you in the eye. His frown deepens, thumbs running under your eyes to collect the tears still falling. 

“I love you,” he whispers, even though he knows you won’t take it the way he means it.

“I know,” you say. “It’s not the same, though.”

“It’s better.”

His nose scrunches up with a grin when you start to smile. 

“Yeah, see? There she is,” he says, which scores a wet giggle out of you as well. One day he’ll get through to you, he thinks. Maybe not today, but some day hopefully soon. 

[prettyglad]

Omg I need Eddie Munson so bad like ????? like unfortunately I need protective best friends to lovers with him 😔😔🧍🏻‍♀️

[honestlydarkprincess]

in a polyamorous relationship with the oxford comma and the em dash

[oncasette]

anddd one more! can I get “look at me. you okay? yeah? good.” with either peter parker or mark grayson, you choose!!

swinging around.

peter parker x gn!reader

summary: 0.6k

“You wouldn’t let me get hurt,” you hum as you crawl closer and plant yourself in his lap. He adjusts easily. His hands find your waist and he gently swipes his thumb across the band of skin that exposes beneath your shirt as you move. “Would you, Petey?”

or the one where your boyfriend finally gives in to your pleas to take you swinging.

content: web slinging, established relationship

masterlist

“C’mon, please,” you huff dramatically, tugging on the sleeve of your boyfriend’s hoodie. Peter was busy fiddling with his web shooters. He was also, coincidentally, ignoring each and every plea you had been slinging his way for the past fifteen minutes. Or, the past… since you discovered he was Spiderman. 

“We’ve been over this, baby,” Peter sighs as he sets his shooters down on the coffee table. He turns toward you on the couch, gently grabbing the hand that was tugging on his sleeve, and lacing his fingers through it. His free hand reaches up to brush your hair back behind your ear. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You wouldn’t let me get hurt,” you hum as you crawl closer and plant yourself in his lap. He adjusts easily. His hands find your waist and he gently swipes his thumb across the band of skin that exposes beneath your shirt as you move. “Would you, Petey?”

“You know I wouldn’t,” he says. He tilts his head up a bit to maintain eye contact and warmth floods through your belly. 

“So…”

“That’s why I’m not taking you swinging,” he chuckles. 

“Peter,” you whine, lips jutting out in a pout. He mimics you for a moment before planting a quick kiss to your lips. 

“Pout’s not gonna change my mind,” he murmurs. A thumb comes up to tug at your bottom lip. 

“You sure?” you mumble against his lips, still trying your damndest to convince him with puppy dog eyes. 

“I’m sure.” “But, Peter-”

“Baby,” he groans, head dropping forward to rest against your chest. 

“You’ll keep me so safe,” you say. You run your fingers through his hair in the way you know he likes. Peter might never admit to it, but he was fairly easy to butter up if you put your mind to it. 

“You ready?” Spiderman asks. The grin cutting through your face is blinding, so tight your cheeks ache. 

“Yes, yes, so ready!” you nearly squeal. Your head snaps around, looking up at the tops of the tall buildings and skyscrapers surrounding you. You follow a pigeon with your eyes for a moment before looking back at Peter.

“You sure?” he checks again. 

“I’m sure,” you smile. 

“Okay,” he says. You can taste the apprehension still wafting off of him, but he wraps an arm around you all the same. Lifting, he helps you jump and cling onto him like a child. Once he’s sure you’re secure and locked in as tight he could be–not as tight as he would like–you hear the thwip of his web shooter releasing and suddenly you’re off the ground.

It’s instinctive. The scream that comes out of you. 

Your eyes squeeze shut and you’re sure you’d be hurting Peter with how hard you’re squeezing him if he weren’t superhuman. 

“I’m sorry!” Peter shouts in a panic. “I’m so sorry, baby!”

He finds the top of the nearest building he can swing to and drops down as soft as can. His hand cradles the back of your head as soon as he releases the web. 

“Are you okay?” he asks shakily. “Baby? Please look at me. Are you okay?”

He guides your head back enough to see your face. Your beautiful face that he was sure was marred with fear and tears and God, you’re never going to look at him the same way again. You’re never going to trust him again, and-

You’re laughing. Giggling, more like. You squeal and squeeze his shoulders and it feels a whole hell of a lot more like delight than panic. 

“That was so! Fun!” you laugh. “Again! Again! Again!”

“Woah, slow down,” he exhales, currently experiencing an extreme bout of emotional whiplash. “Look at me. You okay?”

You nod vigorously. “Yeah?” he asks, prompting more enthusiastic nodding. “Okay… okay, good.”

He smooths his gloved hand down your back. 

“Can we go again?” you ask.

“Yeah, yeah. We can,” he exhales. “Hold on tight.”

[prettyglad]

I need a Peter Parker oh my god

[prettyglad]

Just watched the documentary Dear Zachary and I swear to god that was the most beautiful but depressing thing I’ve ever watched

[prettyglad]

Steve Harrington fic based on Honeybee by Olivia Rodrigo

honeybee — steve harrington x reader

summary — all the times in your relationship where you let everything get ahead of you. what if steve leaves? what if this goes wrong? he's really good at reassuring you.

and I hope I never see, what your fave looks like going.

content — steve harrington x reader, no pronouns, anxious!reader, reader feeling worthless. pretty much me as hell.

note — thank u!!!! I took too much inspiration from my own thoughts and accidentally made this

You have a habit of memorising things you're afraid to lose.

The exact weight of his arm across your shoulders. The way his laugh sounds when something actually catches him off guard, the real one, the one that gets away from him, breathless and a little helpless, like he didn't see it coming and couldn't stop it if he tried.

The temperature of his kitchen at seven in the morning, when you're stealing his orange juice, and he's pretending to be annoyed about it, and the light is coming through the window at that particular angle that makes everything look like it's been dipped in gold.

The specific way he says your name when he's not trying. When he's distracted or half-asleep or just talking, and your name comes out of him like something he doesn't have to think about, like breathing. Like you've always been a word he knew.

You memorise these things the way someone presses flowers. Carefully. While they're still alive.

And you know, intellectually, that this is a little bit sad. You know that the average person in a happy relationship is not cataloguing each moment with the careful, aching attention of someone who has already decided it's temporary. You know that somewhere there are people who just enjoy things, who wake up next to someone they love and don't immediately calculate the distance between here and losing them.

You are not one of those people. You have never been one of those people. But with Steve Harrington, it's gotten particularly bad because with Steve Harrington, there is so much to memorise.

It's a Tuesday in October, and you're lying on his bed with your book open on your stomach, and Steve is at his desk doing absolutely nothing productive, spinning a pencil between his fingers and occasionally throwing paper balls at you when he gets bored, which is often. 

There's a tape playing on his stereo, something slow and warm that he'd made a face about when you put it on, but hasn't actually complained about since. The afternoon light is doing that thing again, that low October angle that makes the whole room feel like gold, like something preserved, and you are — happy.

You are so specifically, painfully happy.

There it is, you think. There's the problem.

Because happiness like this has weight. It has a shape. It takes up room in your chest in a way that makes it very obvious how much space it would leave if it left.

"You're doing the thing again," Steve says.

You look up from your textbook. "What thing?"

"The thing where you get really quiet, and your face does..." He gestures vaguely at his own face, a sort of sweeping motion that implies interiority, complexity, and general emotional weather. "That."

"My face doesn't do anything."

"Your face does everything." He swivels his chair to face you fully, dropping the pencil, elbows on his knees, and you hate it — the way he just looks at you. Like you're something worth looking at. Like you're the most interesting thing in the room, which is absurd, because you're lying on his bed doing homework, and yet. "What are you thinking about?"

That I love you, you don't say. That I love you, and I'm terrified of it. That you are so good, Steve Harrington, so unexpectedly, uncomplicatedly good, and I don't know what I did to get here, but I'm already waiting for the part where it stops. I'm lying in your room in the October light, and I'm already mourning this, and I know that's insane, and I can't seem to stop.

"Wizards," you say.

He holds your gaze for a second, like he's deciding something. Then he throws another paper ball at you.

"Liar," he says cheerfully, and turns back to his desk.

Your chest does something involuntary. You look back at your book and read the same sentence six times.

Here is what nobody tells you about falling in love with someone good:

The good ones. The ones who actually show up. The ones who call when they say they will, and remember what you said three weeks ago about your mom's birthday, and ask about it without being prompted.

The ones who hold your hand while they're driving without making a big deal about it, like it's just what hands are for, like where else would they be. The ones who show up at your door with takeout on a bad day, without you having to say it was a bad day, because they've been paying attention, they've been keeping track of you.

With those ones, you can't protect yourself. There's no armour to deploy. You've already handed over the whole thing before you knew you were doing it, and by the time you understand the scale of the transaction, it's too late, the exchange has already happened, and there you are, standing empty-handed, having given everything you have to someone you have absolutely no guarantee of keeping.

Steve Harrington is a good one. That's the problem. That's the entire, stupid problem, standing six feet tall with ridiculous hair and a heart so open it's almost embarrassing to witness. He doesn't seem to know he's supposed to be more guarded than this. Nobody told him. Or maybe they told him, and it didn't take.

You've seen him sit on the floor of his own living room for two hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of thirteen-year-olds who were absolutely delighted to have him, deeply confused about everything that was happening, asking questions like wait, so can I be a wizard? and what if I roll a one, is that bad? with such earnest willingness to be there, to learn the thing they cared about, just because Dustin asked him to, and he doesn't know how to say no to people he loves.

He loves people so loudly. So shamelessly. Like it doesn't cost him anything, or like the cost doesn't matter.

You want to live inside that forever, and you are already grieving the moment you might have to leave.

—

November. His car, your driveway, 11:47 PM.

You've been sitting here for twenty minutes because neither of you has started the process of saying goodbye yet. It's a thing that happens with you two. You'll be in the driveway, and you'll both know it's time to go in, and then someone will say something, or ask something, or just sort of drift into another conversation, and the time keeps moving without you. Tonight, the inside of the car is warm from the drive home, and neither of you has made any move toward the door.

The radio is off. The car is contained, separate from everything, like being in a snow globe. Outside is your street, your neighbour's porch light, the November dark. Inside is this, just this, the two of you in the small warm dark of his car.

"Hey," Steve says softly. Just that. Hey.

"Hey," you say back.

He reaches over the centre console and pushes a piece of hair out of your face, and his fingers trail along your jaw for a moment after, and you feel it everywhere. Down your spine, through your ribs, settling somewhere low and warm and permanent-feeling, which is the thing you're supposed to not think too hard about.

"You're okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say, because you are. That's what you can't explain, even to yourself. You are so specifically okay. You’re sitting in a car in your driveway, twenty minutes past when you said you'd be inside, and you are so precisely, completely okay that it almost hurts. "I'm just —" You stop.

"Just what?"

You look at his face in the dark. The shadows under his eyes, the particular mess of his hair at this hour, the way he's watching you like you're something he's been waiting for, that he finally has and doesn't intend to look away from. And the feeling comes up again, that dual thing, joy and dread wound together so tightly you can't find the seam between them, like two threads braided so many times they've become a single rope.

"I just really like this," you say, which is not the full thing but is at least true.

His mouth curves. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He leans across and kisses you, slow and unhurried, and you let yourself have it. You let yourself be entirely present in it for once instead of standing to the side, cataloguing, archiving, already mourning. Just for a second. Just the warmth of him, the press of his mouth, the sound he makes low in his throat when you move closer, the quality of the quiet around you.

When he pulls back, you can feel him smile against your lips.

You gather your bag, your jacket, your composure. You open the car door and the cold rushes in.

"Hey," he says again, before you've fully unfolded yourself out of the seat.

You look back.

"I'm not going anywhere." His voice is easy, quiet, like he's saying something obvious, like he's reminding you of something you already knew. But his eyes are doing the steady, slightly serious thing they do when he means something all the way down.

Your heart does something complicated.

"Okay," you say.

You say it as if you believe him. You say it like the part of you that doesn't believe him, the part that lies awake at three in the morning with your hands pressed flat against your sternum like you're holding yourself together, waiting for the moment the math stops working in your favour — like that part doesn't exist.

Some nights, almost.

You shut the car door, go inside, and you don't look back, because if you look back, you'll see him watching you walk to the door, which he always does; he always waits until you're inside, and if you see that, you'll be done for tonight.

You go upstairs. You sit on your bed. You press both hands flat to your chest and breathe.

He's not going anywhere, you think.

And then: yet.

—

Your best friend notices before anyone else.

Robin has known you since fourth grade, and she has, over the years, developed a very specific talent for identifying when you're about to do something emotionally complicated, and making you talk about it over mediocre diner coffee before it gets worse.

"You're in love with him," she says, across a formica table in the first week of November, like she's telling you something obvious.

"I know," you say.

"Like, really in love with him. Not the fun kind."

You look up. "Is there a fun kind?"

"There's a kind where you're happy about it," she says. "You don't look happy about it. You look like someone gave you a really great gift and you're already worried about losing it."

You’re quiet for a moment.

"He's really good," you say, finally, which doesn't quite answer the question but which she seems to understand anyway.

"Yeah," she says. "I know." She stirs her coffee. "Has he done anything? To make you think —"

"No," you say immediately. "No, he's — no. He's the most there person I've ever dated. He calls. He shows up. He remembers things. He's —" You stop. "He's so good, Robin. That's the problem. He's so good that when it ends, I'm not going to be able to explain why. There's not going to be a reason. He's just going to eventually realise there are easier people to love and he's going to leave. It's going to be completely reasonable of him, and I'm going to be devastated."

Robin looks at you for a long moment.

"What if he doesn't?" she says.

You open your mouth and close it.

"What if you're sitting here pre-suffering for something that never happens?" she continues. "What if Steve Harrington is just actually in love with you, and that's just the thing that's true. You're wasting time being scared of it instead of being in it."

You look at your coffee.

"That would be worse," you say. "If I let myself believe that and then I was wrong."

Robin sighs. The sigh of someone who has been friends with you for many years, who loves you and finds you exhausting.

"You're going to have to decide at some point," she says, "whether the fear of losing it is worth the cost of not fully having it."

You don't answer her. You pay for your coffee, you drive home, and you call Steve on a whim. He picks up on the second ring and just says hey, I was just thinking about you, easy as breathing, and the thing Robin said sits in your chest like an unread letter.

—

December comes in cold and certain.

You've developed routines with him the way you develop calluses — gradually, without planning, through repeated contact. Friday nights are almost always his place or yours. Sunday mornings have become a thing, slow and domestic, whoever wakes up first makes coffee and the other one shuffles in and steals it, and it turns into a thing before either of you named it. 

He texts you when something makes him think of you, which is apparently fairly often, The early slightly-formal texts, then the ease, then the inside jokes that require no context, then eventually just hey and come over, and I'm outside with no preamble because none is needed.

One Friday in December, you drive to his place in the snow, he opens the door before you've knocked because he heard your car in the driveway, and this small thing — this tiny, unremarkable thing — undoes you completely for approximately thirty seconds while you're standing on his porch.

He heard your car. He knew the sound of your engine, and he came to the door.

"You okay?" he says, reading your face.

"Yeah," you say, which is true and also wildly insufficient.

He steps aside to let you in. You go in, and he takes your coat and the evening folds around you like something you've had for a long time.

Later, when you're sitting on the floor of his living room with takeout containers between you and a movie that neither of you is really watching, you think: I am going to remember this forever.

You think: I am going to remember every single thing about this.

—

You don't tell him. Not in a way that has words.

But maybe you tell him in the way you reach for him first in movie theatres, before you're even seated, just automatically, your hand finding his. In the way you let yourself lean all the way into him when he has his arm around you instead of holding some small, cautious part of yourself back. 

In the way you've started saying yeah, next week and I'll come over Friday and we should do that sometime, making casual plans in the future tense without flinching. Letting yourself just exist in time with him, forward-facing, like someone who believes in the future.

In the way you press your face into his shoulder sometimes, in quiet moments, for just a second longer than you need to. Like you're checking that he's solid. Like you're confirming he's there.

One morning in mid-December, he catches you watching him pour coffee, and he looks up and his face does something soft, some unguarded thing, and he says:

"What?"

"Nothing," you say. "You're just —" You shake your head. "Nothing."

He sets down the coffee pot. He walks over, unhurried, and he sets down his mug. He tilts your chin up with two fingers and looks at you for a long moment, this searching, steady look, like he's reading something written in a language he's been learning.

"I know," he says quietly.

You blink. "Know what?"

"Whatever it is." He brushes his thumb along your jaw, once, the way he does. "I know."

You don't know what that means exactly. You're not sure either of you is ready to say it out loud yet. But something in you unclenches. Something that has been held at low, constant tension since September releases, just slightly, just a little.

Your heart, stupid and loyal, and already entirely gone on him, just opens up like a hand.

—

There's a night in January when it almost comes apart.

Not because anything happens. Not because he does anything wrong or you do anything wrong. Just because you're tired and the fear gets loud, and sometimes that's enough.

You've been at his place for dinner, and the evening has been fine, good even, but then his phone rings. He moves into the other room to take it, and you hear him laughing at something, the laugh he uses with people outside of this, people from his other life, and for just a moment, you have this sudden, stupid sense of all the parts of him you don't know. All the rooms of his you haven't been in. All the people who knew him before you and might know him better and could, at any moment, matter more.

He comes back, and you’re quiet. He notices immediately, because he always notices.

"What happened?" he asks.

"Nothing," you say.

He sits down next to you. His shoulder against yours, waiting.

"I don't know," you say, eventually. "Sometimes I just —" You press your fingers to your collarbone. "I get scared. Of this."

"Of me?"

"No. Of how much I —" You stop. "Of how much this matters to me."

He’s quiet for a moment. Outside, the January wind, thin and insistent.

"That's a bad thing?"

"It's a vulnerable thing," you say. "When something matters this much, you can get really hurt."

He turns toward you. He has that face he gets sometimes, the serious one underneath the surface, the one that he doesn't show everyone. "Yeah," he says. "You can." He holds your gaze. "So can I."

The admission of it — that this is also something that could cost him, that the vulnerability isn’t one-directional, that you aren’t the only one standing exposed in this.

"I didn't think about that," you say, quietly.

"I know," He half smiles. "I think you forget sometimes that this is —" He gestures between you. "That it goes both ways. You act like you're the only one who could get hurt here."

You look at him.

"I could get hurt too," he says, simply. "If you left. If this ended. I'd be —" He makes a small sound, not quite a laugh. "I'd be a mess, honestly. Just so you know."

"Steve," you say.

"I'm just saying. You're not alone in this. Whatever you think is happening, you're not the only one with skin in the game." He reaches over and takes your hand. Turns it over. Holds it in both of his. "Okay?"

You breathe.

"Okay," you say.

—

January cold. His bedroom, a Saturday afternoon, the particular grey light of a January that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to snow.

You're lying on your stomach on his bed, and he's lying on his back next to you, arm behind his head, and you've both been reading — or supposedly reading — for an hour and it's been mostly quiet except for the occasional turn of a page or the sounds of the house settling.

This is something you've learned about being with him: he's good at quiet. He doesn't fill silences just to fill them. He can be in the same room with you, just existing, both of you parallel and unbothered, and it feels not like absence but like presence. Like a different kind of company.

You're watching him from the corner of your eye. He's not looking at you. His eyes are on his book, and his face is relaxed, and he has no idea you're watching him. It’s the real version, the unobserved version, the Steve who exists when he's not performing anything.

You love him so much.

You love him. You are in love with Steve Harrington. You have probably been in love with Steve Harrington for a while now, and you've been calling it other things — really like, care about, have feelings for — as though the smaller words could contain it, as though naming it correctly would make it too real to survive.

It is too real to survive. You’re going to have to survive it anyway.

He turns a page. His profile in the January light. The particular way he bites the inside of his cheek when he's reading something dense.

"Steve," you say.

He looks over.

"Hi," you say.

He looks at you like you've said something that made sense, smiling slowly. "Hi," he says.

You look at each other for a moment.

You don't say I love you. You're not there yet, the words aren't ready, they need more air before they can be spoken. But you let yourself look at him the way you feel it, just for a second, without the protective overlay of self-consciousness. Just your face, your actual face, the way it looks when it's doing everything.

He goes a little still. He looks at you with something careful and warm.

Then he reaches over and tucks your hair behind your ear, a gesture that means nothing and everything, and goes back to his book.

—

February. Snow. His car again, but this time going somewhere, nowhere in particular, just driving because he wanted to show you how the town looks in the first real snow of the year. You've lived here your whole life, but you look anyway.

Because it's different with him. That's the embarrassing truth of it. Hawkins looks different with him in it. Things look different when you're in love, when you're in this suspended terrified hopeful state, when the ordinary world has been overlaid with something that makes it glow at the edges.

He has one hand on the wheel. The other is holding yours across the console. His thumb moves occasionally, absently, like punctuation he doesn't know he's adding. Outside, the snow is coming down steady and soft. The streetlights are making haloes in it and everything is very still.

The town is white and quiet, and Hawkins looks almost like somewhere you'd choose to be.

"What are you thinking?" he asks. He always asks.

This time you don't lie. "That I'm happy," you say.

He squeezes your hand.

"That I'm a little scared of it," you add, and your voice is smaller than you want it to be but it gets out. It makes it into the air between you.

He's quiet for a moment. The wipers move slow. The snow comes down.

"Because it might go away?" he says.

You nod once, looking out at the white. He squeezes your hand again, tighter this time, his fingers laced through yours.

"It won't," he says.

"You don't know that."

"No," he agrees, and you love him for not arguing with the truth of that, for not pretending certainty he doesn't have. "But I know I'm not going to be the reason it does."

You turn and look at him. His jaw. The line of his profile. The small, serious set of his mouth. The snow in the headlights. The sound of his thumb moving against the back of your hand.

"Steve —"

"I mean it," he says, and he says it so simply, so quietly, without any flair or performance, the way you'd state a known fact. Like the sky is blue, or it's cold out, or I'm not going to leave you. Just a thing that's true that he's telling you.

The feeling breaks over you like a wave. The kind that lifts you instead of knocking you down. The kind you can float in.

You hold his hand, just for this mile, just for the length of this road, for the white quiet of this February night with him, believe him.

—

Spring comes. The ice thaws and the days get longer and Hawkins shakes itself out into something almost pretty, the way it does for about six weeks in April and May before the summer makes it flat and still again.

You're sitting on the hood of his car in an empty parking lot at nine pm in late April, which is something you've started doing — just finding empty places and sitting in them together. It costs nothing. It requires no plan. It's just the two of you and whatever sky happens to be available.

Tonight the sky is doing something lavender and soft and there are the first real stars of the year visible through it, or maybe just the first time you've been still enough to notice. Your shoulder is against his shoulder. You have his jacket on because you said you weren't cold and were wrong, and he gave it to you without comment. Your feet are dangling off the hood, his are too, and you're looking at the same sky from the same angle, and it's so —

It's so simple. That's the word. It's so simple and so full.

"Can I ask you something?" he says.

"Yeah."

"Are you happy?" He says it straightforwardly, turning slightly to look at you. "Like. Not in a complicated way. Just — are you?"

You think about it. You actually think about it.. You think about the last six months. The kitchen light, the Sundays, the lamp left on, the snow, his hand, and the way he said I mean it in the dark.

"Yeah," you say. "I really am."

"Good," he says, simply. Like that's what he needed to know. Like the answer matters to him practically, usefully, the way weather matters — because he's planning around it. Because he's building something and the conditions are important.

You look at the sky.

"Are you?" you ask.

He doesn't answer right away. He looks up at the stars for a moment, considering.

"Yeah," he says. "More than I expected to be, honestly." A beat. "I wasn't — I mean, things were kind of." He makes a vague gesture. "Before. Not bad. But kind of empty. Like I was just going through — anyway." He stops. Starts again. "You make things feel worth paying attention to. If that makes sense."

It makes sense. It makes so much sense it takes you a second to breathe around it.

"Yeah," you say. "I know what you mean."

He puts his arm around you and you lean into it, all the way in, the way you've learned to do, and the night is warm for the first time in months.

The fear is there. It's always there, the small stone, the distant clouds.

But the field is so full of light.

—

Late April. The diner on Route 12. The one where it all started, more or less.

You're in the same booth, across from each other, and the pie is still actually insane. At some point in the last six months this diner became a place that belongs to you. To this, to the two of you.

He's telling you something, some story about Dustin and a radio, and an incident that had apparently involved a minor property dispute, and his hands are moving while he talks the way they do when he's animated. He's laughing already because he knows where the story is going and so does the laugh, and you're watching him.

You’re watching him, and the love in your chest is so specific, so particular. It's not just the abstract warm feeling of loving someone. It's him, this exact configuration, this precise person.

The way his eyes crinkle. The way he reaches the punchline of his own story and then laughs at himself before you do. The way he looks at you when he's done, looking for your reaction, wanting to share the funny thing with you specifically.

You make things feel worth paying attention to.

You think about what he said. You think about all of it.

You think: I am going to love this person for a very long time.

And then — softer, quieter, underneath: maybe that's okay.

Maybe you don't have to carry the grief of the ending while you're still in the middle. Maybe the fear doesn't have to be the loudest voice in the room. Maybe you can hold the fragility of it — you can know that things end, you can know that love doesn't guarantee permanence — and still let yourself have it completely. Not in spite of the fear but alongside it. Both things true at once.

The field and the clouds. Joy and the knowledge of impermanence. Love and the terror of it, inseparable, which is maybe just the definition of love.

"Hey," Steve says. "Where'd you go?"

You smile at him. "Nowhere," you say. "I'm right here."

Something in his face softens. "Good," he says.

He reaches across the table and takes your hand, his thumb moving across your knuckles, and he goes back to his story, and you listen. The diner is warm, and you’re right here.

You are right here.

That night you lie in bed and press your hand against your sternum, and underneath it your heart beats with that familiar double rhythm. Joy. Fear. Joy. Fear. The one that’s been your whole relationship with loving him.

You breathe. You let it be true.

You have a habit of memorising things you're afraid to lose.

You still do it. You probably always will — that's just the shape of you, the way you're built, the shape of a heart that loves with its whole fist and knows it. You still catalogue. You still archive. You still watch the clouds.

But you've started doing something else too.

You've started letting yourself be inside the moment while you're memorising it. Not outside, looking in, preserving it from a protective distance. Actually inside. Warm hands and all, right in the middle of it, letting it matter the full amount it matters, letting yourself be as happy as you actually are without the mental asterisk, without the quiet hedge against loss.

He notices. Of course he notices.

"You seem different lately," he says one evening, not in a bad way, just an observation, his head tilted slightly, that look he gets.

"Different how?"

"More,” He thinks. "Here. Present or whatever." He shrugs, a little self-conscious. "I don't know. I like it."

You look at him. This boy. This specific, ridiculous, generous, good boy who heard your car in the driveway, and left the lamp on low, and held your hands, and said I'd be a mess, honestly like it was nothing, like it was just the truth and the truth was fine.

"I'm working on it," you say.

He grins. "Yeah?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say.

He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear and his hand lingers for just a moment at your jaw and you let yourself feel it all the way down, all the way through, the full warmth of it without flinching, without the hedge, without the yet.

Just this. Just the warmth. Just him.

[prettyglad]

Steve Harrington fic based on Honeybee by Olivia Rodrigo

honeybee — steve harrington x reader

summary — all the times in your relationship where you let everything get ahead of you. what if steve leaves? what if this goes wrong? he's really good at reassuring you.

and I hope I never see, what your face looks like going.

content — steve harrington x reader, no pronouns, anxious!reader, reader feeling worthless. pretty much me as hell.

note — thank u!!!! I took too much inspiration from my own thoughts and accidentally made this

You have a habit of memorising things you're afraid to lose.

The exact weight of his arm across your shoulders. The way his laugh sounds when something actually catches him off guard, the real one, the one that gets away from him, breathless and a little helpless, like he didn't see it coming and couldn't stop it if he tried.

The temperature of his kitchen at seven in the morning, when you're stealing his orange juice, and he's pretending to be annoyed about it, and the light is coming through the window at that particular angle that makes everything look like it's been dipped in gold.

The specific way he says your name when he's not trying. When he's distracted or half-asleep or just talking, and your name comes out of him like something he doesn't have to think about, like breathing. Like you've always been a word he knew.

You memorise these things the way someone presses flowers. Carefully. While they're still alive.

And you know, intellectually, that this is a little bit sad. You know that the average person in a happy relationship is not cataloguing each moment with the careful, aching attention of someone who has already decided it's temporary. You know that somewhere there are people who just enjoy things, who wake up next to someone they love and don't immediately calculate the distance between here and losing them.

You are not one of those people. You have never been one of those people. But with Steve Harrington, it's gotten particularly bad because with Steve Harrington, there is so much to memorise.

It's a Tuesday in October, and you're lying on his bed with your book open on your stomach, and Steve is at his desk doing absolutely nothing productive, spinning a pencil between his fingers and occasionally throwing paper balls at you when he gets bored, which is often. 

There's a tape playing on his stereo, something slow and warm that he'd made a face about when you put it on, but hasn't actually complained about since. The afternoon light is doing that thing again, that low October angle that makes the whole room feel like gold, like something preserved, and you are — happy.

You are so specifically, painfully happy.

There it is, you think. There's the problem.

Because happiness like this has weight. It has a shape. It takes up room in your chest in a way that makes it very obvious how much space it would leave if it left.

"You're doing the thing again," Steve says.

You look up from your textbook. "What thing?"

"The thing where you get really quiet, and your face does..." He gestures vaguely at his own face, a sort of sweeping motion that implies interiority, complexity, and general emotional weather. "That."

"My face doesn't do anything."

"Your face does everything." He swivels his chair to face you fully, dropping the pencil, elbows on his knees, and you hate it — the way he just looks at you. Like you're something worth looking at. Like you're the most interesting thing in the room, which is absurd, because you're lying on his bed doing homework, and yet. "What are you thinking about?"

That I love you, you don't say. That I love you, and I'm terrified of it. That you are so good, Steve Harrington, so unexpectedly, uncomplicatedly good, and I don't know what I did to get here, but I'm already waiting for the part where it stops. I'm lying in your room in the October light, and I'm already mourning this, and I know that's insane, and I can't seem to stop.

"Wizards," you say.

He holds your gaze for a second, like he's deciding something. Then he throws another paper ball at you.

"Liar," he says cheerfully, and turns back to his desk.

Your chest does something involuntary. You look back at your book and read the same sentence six times.

Here is what nobody tells you about falling in love with someone good:

The good ones. The ones who actually show up. The ones who call when they say they will, and remember what you said three weeks ago about your mom's birthday, and ask about it without being prompted.

The ones who hold your hand while they're driving without making a big deal about it, like it's just what hands are for, like where else would they be. The ones who show up at your door with takeout on a bad day, without you having to say it was a bad day, because they've been paying attention, they've been keeping track of you.

With those ones, you can't protect yourself. There's no armour to deploy. You've already handed over the whole thing before you knew you were doing it, and by the time you understand the scale of the transaction, it's too late, the exchange has already happened, and there you are, standing empty-handed, having given everything you have to someone you have absolutely no guarantee of keeping.

Steve Harrington is a good one. That's the problem. That's the entire, stupid problem, standing six feet tall with ridiculous hair and a heart so open it's almost embarrassing to witness. He doesn't seem to know he's supposed to be more guarded than this. Nobody told him. Or maybe they told him, and it didn't take.

You've seen him sit on the floor of his own living room for two hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of thirteen-year-olds who were absolutely delighted to have him, deeply confused about everything that was happening, asking questions like wait, so can I be a wizard? and what if I roll a one, is that bad? with such earnest willingness to be there, to learn the thing they cared about, just because Dustin asked him to, and he doesn't know how to say no to people he loves.

He loves people so loudly. So shamelessly. Like it doesn't cost him anything, or like the cost doesn't matter.

You want to live inside that forever, and you are already grieving the moment you might have to leave.

—

November. His car, your driveway, 11:47 PM.

You've been sitting here for twenty minutes because neither of you has started the process of saying goodbye yet. It's a thing that happens with you two. You'll be in the driveway, and you'll both know it's time to go in, and then someone will say something, or ask something, or just sort of drift into another conversation, and the time keeps moving without you. Tonight, the inside of the car is warm from the drive home, and neither of you has made any move toward the door.

The radio is off. The car is contained, separate from everything, like being in a snow globe. Outside is your street, your neighbour's porch light, the November dark. Inside is this, just this, the two of you in the small warm dark of his car.

"Hey," Steve says softly. Just that. Hey.

"Hey," you say back.

He reaches over the centre console and pushes a piece of hair out of your face, and his fingers trail along your jaw for a moment after, and you feel it everywhere. Down your spine, through your ribs, settling somewhere low and warm and permanent-feeling, which is the thing you're supposed to not think too hard about.

"You're okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say, because you are. That's what you can't explain, even to yourself. You are so specifically okay. You’re sitting in a car in your driveway, twenty minutes past when you said you'd be inside, and you are so precisely, completely okay that it almost hurts. "I'm just —" You stop.

"Just what?"

You look at his face in the dark. The shadows under his eyes, the particular mess of his hair at this hour, the way he's watching you like you're something he's been waiting for, that he finally has and doesn't intend to look away from. And the feeling comes up again, that dual thing, joy and dread wound together so tightly you can't find the seam between them, like two threads braided so many times they've become a single rope.

"I just really like this," you say, which is not the full thing but is at least true.

His mouth curves. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He leans across and kisses you, slow and unhurried, and you let yourself have it. You let yourself be entirely present in it for once instead of standing to the side, cataloguing, archiving, already mourning. Just for a second. Just the warmth of him, the press of his mouth, the sound he makes low in his throat when you move closer, the quality of the quiet around you.

When he pulls back, you can feel him smile against your lips.

You gather your bag, your jacket, your composure. You open the car door and the cold rushes in.

"Hey," he says again, before you've fully unfolded yourself out of the seat.

You look back.

"I'm not going anywhere." His voice is easy, quiet, like he's saying something obvious, like he's reminding you of something you already knew. But his eyes are doing the steady, slightly serious thing they do when he means something all the way down.

Your heart does something complicated.

"Okay," you say.

You say it as if you believe him. You say it like the part of you that doesn't believe him, the part that lies awake at three in the morning with your hands pressed flat against your sternum like you're holding yourself together, waiting for the moment the math stops working in your favour — like that part doesn't exist.

Some nights, almost.

You shut the car door, go inside, and you don't look back, because if you look back, you'll see him watching you walk to the door, which he always does; he always waits until you're inside, and if you see that, you'll be done for tonight.

You go upstairs. You sit on your bed. You press both hands flat to your chest and breathe.

He's not going anywhere, you think.

And then: yet.

—

Your best friend notices before anyone else.

Robin has known you since fourth grade, and she has, over the years, developed a very specific talent for identifying when you're about to do something emotionally complicated, and making you talk about it over mediocre diner coffee before it gets worse.

"You're in love with him," she says, across a formica table in the first week of November, like she's telling you something obvious.

"I know," you say.

"Like, really in love with him. Not the fun kind."

You look up. "Is there a fun kind?"

"There's a kind where you're happy about it," she says. "You don't look happy about it. You look like someone gave you a really great gift and you're already worried about losing it."

You’re quiet for a moment.

"He's really good," you say, finally, which doesn't quite answer the question but which she seems to understand anyway.

"Yeah," she says. "I know." She stirs her coffee. "Has he done anything? To make you think —"

"No," you say immediately. "No, he's — no. He's the most there person I've ever dated. He calls. He shows up. He remembers things. He's —" You stop. "He's so good, Robin. That's the problem. He's so good that when it ends, I'm not going to be able to explain why. There's not going to be a reason. He's just going to eventually realise there are easier people to love and he's going to leave. It's going to be completely reasonable of him, and I'm going to be devastated."

Robin looks at you for a long moment.

"What if he doesn't?" she says.

You open your mouth and close it.

"What if you're sitting here pre-suffering for something that never happens?" she continues. "What if Steve Harrington is just actually in love with you, and that's just the thing that's true. You're wasting time being scared of it instead of being in it."

You look at your coffee.

"That would be worse," you say. "If I let myself believe that and then I was wrong."

Robin sighs. The sigh of someone who has been friends with you for many years, who loves you and finds you exhausting.

"You're going to have to decide at some point," she says, "whether the fear of losing it is worth the cost of not fully having it."

You don't answer her. You pay for your coffee, you drive home, and you call Steve on a whim. He picks up on the second ring and just says hey, I was just thinking about you, easy as breathing, and the thing Robin said sits in your chest like an unread letter.

—

December comes in cold and certain.

You've developed routines with him the way you develop calluses — gradually, without planning, through repeated contact. Friday nights are almost always his place or yours. Sunday mornings have become a thing, slow and domestic, whoever wakes up first makes coffee and the other one shuffles in and steals it, and it turns into a thing before either of you named it. 

He texts you when something makes him think of you, which is apparently fairly often, The early slightly-formal texts, then the ease, then the inside jokes that require no context, then eventually just hey and come over, and I'm outside with no preamble because none is needed.

One Friday in December, you drive to his place in the snow, he opens the door before you've knocked because he heard your car in the driveway, and this small thing — this tiny, unremarkable thing — undoes you completely for approximately thirty seconds while you're standing on his porch.

He heard your car. He knew the sound of your engine, and he came to the door.

"You okay?" he says, reading your face.

"Yeah," you say, which is true and also wildly insufficient.

He steps aside to let you in. You go in, and he takes your coat and the evening folds around you like something you've had for a long time.

Later, when you're sitting on the floor of his living room with takeout containers between you and a movie that neither of you is really watching, you think: I am going to remember this forever.

You think: I am going to remember every single thing about this.

—

You don't tell him. Not in a way that has words.

But maybe you tell him in the way you reach for him first in movie theatres, before you're even seated, just automatically, your hand finding his. In the way you let yourself lean all the way into him when he has his arm around you instead of holding some small, cautious part of yourself back. 

In the way you've started saying yeah, next week and I'll come over Friday and we should do that sometime, making casual plans in the future tense without flinching. Letting yourself just exist in time with him, forward-facing, like someone who believes in the future.

In the way you press your face into his shoulder sometimes, in quiet moments, for just a second longer than you need to. Like you're checking that he's solid. Like you're confirming he's there.

One morning in mid-December, he catches you watching him pour coffee, and he looks up and his face does something soft, some unguarded thing, and he says:

"What?"

"Nothing," you say. "You're just —" You shake your head. "Nothing."

He sets down the coffee pot. He walks over, unhurried, and he sets down his mug. He tilts your chin up with two fingers and looks at you for a long moment, this searching, steady look, like he's reading something written in a language he's been learning.

"I know," he says quietly.

You blink. "Know what?"

"Whatever it is." He brushes his thumb along your jaw, once, the way he does. "I know."

You don't know what that means exactly. You're not sure either of you is ready to say it out loud yet. But something in you unclenches. Something that has been held at low, constant tension since September releases, just slightly, just a little.

Your heart, stupid and loyal, and already entirely gone on him, just opens up like a hand.

—

There's a night in January when it almost comes apart.

Not because anything happens. Not because he does anything wrong or you do anything wrong. Just because you're tired and the fear gets loud, and sometimes that's enough.

You've been at his place for dinner, and the evening has been fine, good even, but then his phone rings. He moves into the other room to take it, and you hear him laughing at something, the laugh he uses with people outside of this, people from his other life, and for just a moment, you have this sudden, stupid sense of all the parts of him you don't know. All the rooms of his you haven't been in. All the people who knew him before you and might know him better and could, at any moment, matter more.

He comes back, and you’re quiet. He notices immediately, because he always notices.

"What happened?" he asks.

"Nothing," you say.

He sits down next to you. His shoulder against yours, waiting.

"I don't know," you say, eventually. "Sometimes I just —" You press your fingers to your collarbone. "I get scared. Of this."

"Of me?"

"No. Of how much I —" You stop. "Of how much this matters to me."

He’s quiet for a moment. Outside, the January wind, thin and insistent.

"That's a bad thing?"

"It's a vulnerable thing," you say. "When something matters this much, you can get really hurt."

He turns toward you. He has that face he gets sometimes, the serious one underneath the surface, the one that he doesn't show everyone. "Yeah," he says. "You can." He holds your gaze. "So can I."

The admission of it — that this is also something that could cost him, that the vulnerability isn’t one-directional, that you aren’t the only one standing exposed in this.

"I didn't think about that," you say, quietly.

"I know," He half smiles. "I think you forget sometimes that this is —" He gestures between you. "That it goes both ways. You act like you're the only one who could get hurt here."

You look at him.

"I could get hurt too," he says, simply. "If you left. If this ended. I'd be —" He makes a small sound, not quite a laugh. "I'd be a mess, honestly. Just so you know."

"Steve," you say.

"I'm just saying. You're not alone in this. Whatever you think is happening, you're not the only one with skin in the game." He reaches over and takes your hand. Turns it over. Holds it in both of his. "Okay?"

You breathe.

"Okay," you say.

—

January cold. His bedroom, a Saturday afternoon, the particular grey light of a January that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to snow.

You're lying on your stomach on his bed, and he's lying on his back next to you, arm behind his head, and you've both been reading — or supposedly reading — for an hour and it's been mostly quiet except for the occasional turn of a page or the sounds of the house settling.

This is something you've learned about being with him: he's good at quiet. He doesn't fill silences just to fill them. He can be in the same room with you, just existing, both of you parallel and unbothered, and it feels not like absence but like presence. Like a different kind of company.

You're watching him from the corner of your eye. He's not looking at you. His eyes are on his book, and his face is relaxed, and he has no idea you're watching him. It’s the real version, the unobserved version, the Steve who exists when he's not performing anything.

You love him so much.

You love him. You are in love with Steve Harrington. You have probably been in love with Steve Harrington for a while now, and you've been calling it other things — really like, care about, have feelings for — as though the smaller words could contain it, as though naming it correctly would make it too real to survive.

It is too real to survive. You’re going to have to survive it anyway.

He turns a page. His profile in the January light. The particular way he bites the inside of his cheek when he's reading something dense.

"Steve," you say.

He looks over.

"Hi," you say.

He looks at you like you've said something that made sense, smiling slowly. "Hi," he says.

You look at each other for a moment.

You don't say I love you. You're not there yet, the words aren't ready, they need more air before they can be spoken. But you let yourself look at him the way you feel it, just for a second, without the protective overlay of self-consciousness. Just your face, your actual face, the way it looks when it's doing everything.

He goes a little still. He looks at you with something careful and warm.

Then he reaches over and tucks your hair behind your ear, a gesture that means nothing and everything, and goes back to his book.

—

February. Snow. His car again, but this time going somewhere, nowhere in particular, just driving because he wanted to show you how the town looks in the first real snow of the year. You've lived here your whole life, but you look anyway.

Because it's different with him. That's the embarrassing truth of it. Hawkins looks different with him in it. Things look different when you're in love, when you're in this suspended terrified hopeful state, when the ordinary world has been overlaid with something that makes it glow at the edges.

He has one hand on the wheel. The other is holding yours across the console. His thumb moves occasionally, absently, like punctuation he doesn't know he's adding. Outside, the snow is coming down steady and soft. The streetlights are making haloes in it and everything is very still.

The town is white and quiet, and Hawkins looks almost like somewhere you'd choose to be.

"What are you thinking?" he asks. He always asks.

This time you don't lie. "That I'm happy," you say.

He squeezes your hand.

"That I'm a little scared of it," you add, and your voice is smaller than you want it to be but it gets out. It makes it into the air between you.

He's quiet for a moment. The wipers move slow. The snow comes down.

"Because it might go away?" he says.

You nod once, looking out at the white. He squeezes your hand again, tighter this time, his fingers laced through yours.

"It won't," he says.

"You don't know that."

"No," he agrees, and you love him for not arguing with the truth of that, for not pretending certainty he doesn't have. "But I know I'm not going to be the reason it does."

You turn and look at him. His jaw. The line of his profile. The small, serious set of his mouth. The snow in the headlights. The sound of his thumb moving against the back of your hand.

"Steve —"

"I mean it," he says, and he says it so simply, so quietly, without any flair or performance, the way you'd state a known fact. Like the sky is blue, or it's cold out, or I'm not going to leave you. Just a thing that's true that he's telling you.

The feeling breaks over you like a wave. The kind that lifts you instead of knocking you down. The kind you can float in.

You hold his hand, just for this mile, just for the length of this road, for the white quiet of this February night with him, believe him.

—

Spring comes. The ice thaws and the days get longer and Hawkins shakes itself out into something almost pretty, the way it does for about six weeks in April and May before the summer makes it flat and still again.

You're sitting on the hood of his car in an empty parking lot at nine pm in late April, which is something you've started doing — just finding empty places and sitting in them together. It costs nothing. It requires no plan. It's just the two of you and whatever sky happens to be available.

Tonight the sky is doing something lavender and soft and there are the first real stars of the year visible through it, or maybe just the first time you've been still enough to notice. Your shoulder is against his shoulder. You have his jacket on because you said you weren't cold and were wrong, and he gave it to you without comment. Your feet are dangling off the hood, his are too, and you're looking at the same sky from the same angle, and it's so —

It's so simple. That's the word. It's so simple and so full.

"Can I ask you something?" he says.

"Yeah."

"Are you happy?" He says it straightforwardly, turning slightly to look at you. "Like. Not in a complicated way. Just — are you?"

You think about it. You actually think about it.. You think about the last six months. The kitchen light, the Sundays, the lamp left on, the snow, his hand, and the way he said I mean it in the dark.

"Yeah," you say. "I really am."

"Good," he says, simply. Like that's what he needed to know. Like the answer matters to him practically, usefully, the way weather matters — because he's planning around it. Because he's building something and the conditions are important.

You look at the sky.

"Are you?" you ask.

He doesn't answer right away. He looks up at the stars for a moment, considering.

"Yeah," he says. "More than I expected to be, honestly." A beat. "I wasn't — I mean, things were kind of." He makes a vague gesture. "Before. Not bad. But kind of empty. Like I was just going through — anyway." He stops. Starts again. "You make things feel worth paying attention to. If that makes sense."

It makes sense. It makes so much sense it takes you a second to breathe around it.

"Yeah," you say. "I know what you mean."

He puts his arm around you and you lean into it, all the way in, the way you've learned to do, and the night is warm for the first time in months.

The fear is there. It's always there, the small stone, the distant clouds.

But the field is so full of light.

—

Late April. The diner on Route 12. The one where it all started, more or less.

You're in the same booth, across from each other, and the pie is still actually insane. At some point in the last six months this diner became a place that belongs to you. To this, to the two of you.

He's telling you something, some story about Dustin and a radio, and an incident that had apparently involved a minor property dispute, and his hands are moving while he talks the way they do when he's animated. He's laughing already because he knows where the story is going and so does the laugh, and you're watching him.

You’re watching him, and the love in your chest is so specific, so particular. It's not just the abstract warm feeling of loving someone. It's him, this exact configuration, this precise person.

The way his eyes crinkle. The way he reaches the punchline of his own story and then laughs at himself before you do. The way he looks at you when he's done, looking for your reaction, wanting to share the funny thing with you specifically.

You make things feel worth paying attention to.

You think about what he said. You think about all of it.

You think: I am going to love this person for a very long time.

And then — softer, quieter, underneath: maybe that's okay.

Maybe you don't have to carry the grief of the ending while you're still in the middle. Maybe the fear doesn't have to be the loudest voice in the room. Maybe you can hold the fragility of it — you can know that things end, you can know that love doesn't guarantee permanence — and still let yourself have it completely. Not in spite of the fear but alongside it. Both things true at once.

The field and the clouds. Joy and the knowledge of impermanence. Love and the terror of it, inseparable, which is maybe just the definition of love.

"Hey," Steve says. "Where'd you go?"

You smile at him. "Nowhere," you say. "I'm right here."

Something in his face softens. "Good," he says.

He reaches across the table and takes your hand, his thumb moving across your knuckles, and he goes back to his story, and you listen. The diner is warm, and you’re right here.

You are right here.

That night you lie in bed and press your hand against your sternum, and underneath it your heart beats with that familiar double rhythm. Joy. Fear. Joy. Fear. The one that’s been your whole relationship with loving him.

You breathe. You let it be true.

You have a habit of memorising things you're afraid to lose.

You still do it. You probably always will — that's just the shape of you, the way you're built, the shape of a heart that loves with its whole fist and knows it. You still catalogue. You still archive. You still watch the clouds.

But you've started doing something else too.

You've started letting yourself be inside the moment while you're memorising it. Not outside, looking in, preserving it from a protective distance. Actually inside. Warm hands and all, right in the middle of it, letting it matter the full amount it matters, letting yourself be as happy as you actually are without the mental asterisk, without the quiet hedge against loss.

He notices. Of course he notices.

"You seem different lately," he says one evening, not in a bad way, just an observation, his head tilted slightly, that look he gets.

"Different how?"

"More,” He thinks. "Here. Present or whatever." He shrugs, a little self-conscious. "I don't know. I like it."

You look at him. This boy. This specific, ridiculous, generous, good boy who heard your car in the driveway, and left the lamp on low, and held your hands, and said I'd be a mess, honestly like it was nothing, like it was just the truth and the truth was fine.

"I'm working on it," you say.

He grins. "Yeah?" he asks.

"Yeah," you say.

He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear and his hand lingers for just a moment at your jaw and you let yourself feel it all the way down, all the way through, the full warmth of it without flinching, without the hedge, without the yet.

Just this. Just the warmth. Just him.

[prettyglad]

⋆˚꩜｡poly!marauders masterlist

you spend the summer holidays together

[prettyglad]

⋆˚꩜｡mcu peter parker

peter helps a clumsy!you all the time

[prettyglad]

⋆˚꩜｡ steve harrington

fics!

same boat, drifting pt one 5.7k

safe until sunset pt one 12.2k | part two 15.8k

drabbles!

steve notices you

a quiet moment with steve after the upside down

steve gets a new cute assistant baseball coach

steve hates watching guys flirt with you

steve is grumpy around you

confessions from a sick you

catching feelings for roommate!steve

bodyguard!steve

[prettyglad]

⋆˚꩜｡ bodyguard!steve harrington masterlist

fics!

safe until sunset pt one pt two

drabbles!

meeting your new bodyguard

first time going out with bodyguard!steve

bodyguard!steve buys you tampons

taking bodyguard!steve to a bar

bodyguard!steve is off duty when you go to the er

bodyguard!steve comes over to cook dinner

bodyguard!steve protects you in your home

you know each others habits too well

[prettyglad]

id like to thank the person who sent in the req for a steve oneshot inspired by honeybee by olvia rodrigo because yeah that's perfect cause that's me asf

[sugarpkts]

thank you to weird girls for being online

[prettyglad]

“No Ray…No, I don’t.” …….”Warning…47.”

[prettyglad]

steeb harrington reqs mayhaps??

[prettyglad]

hi honey,, pretty please may i request james x reader where she’s staying overnight at his for the first time (perhaps on a summer night after spending the day together…) <333

sunkissed — james potter x reader

summary — you and james gor for a swim and he cooks you dinner and let's you stay the night.

content — 2.7k words, james potter x reader. no pronouns.

note — rahhh thank you how did you know summer james potter is my favourite james potter???!!!

You'd known it was going to be that kind of day from the moment you woke up — the light already wrong at eight in the morning, too gold, too intense. By ten it was thirty degrees and London had done the thing it does in a heatwave, which is collectively lose its composure. 

People sitting on every available outdoor surface. The bus you took at half past ten a rolling warm box of other people's sunscreen.

James had a plan, which was typical, and the plan had been water.

The plan had been good.

You'd spent the afternoon at the lido in Brockwell Park, which he'd booked somehow in advance because James is the kind of person who reads an incoming heatwave forecast and immediately books a lido, a quality you'd found endearing and slightly impressive. 

The water had been cold. The way outdoor water is cold in the summer, and you'd been in and out of it all afternoon with no particular agenda, the day passing without watching itself happen.

He is good at days.

This is something you've been realising since February, since the thing between you became a thing rather than a careful almost-thing — the way he moves through time with an ease that carries everything near him along. 

He doesn't push days toward anything. He just creates the conditions for them and then inhabits them fully. Whatever you bring to the day is the right thing to bring.

By early evening, you're both pink-shouldered and chlorine-dried and very adequately fed on the chips you'd got from the place near the gate, and the day is doing its slow unwilling surrender to the evening, the sky going warm colours over the park. James is lying on his back beside you on the grass, looking at the sky with the contented expression of a man whose plan worked.

"Good day," he says.

"Very good day," you say.

He turns his head to look at you. He has grass in his hair. He’s had grass in his hair for at least three hours and has shown no sign of addressing it. You have decided not to address it either because it’s funny.

"Come back to mine," he says. "I'll make dinner."

"You don't have to make dinner," you say.

"I want to make dinner," he says. "I have the stuff for the pasta. Come back, and I'll make the pasta, and we can eat on the balcony if it stays warm."

You look at the sky. The sky is very warm.

"Okay," you say.

The flat is in Islington, third floor, the corner flat with the balcony that gets the evening light. You've been here before. Several times, but not like this, not at the end of this kind of day, not with this particular warm tiredness in your limbs and the evening still going.

He unlocks the door and holds it for you, and you go in, and the flat smells the way it always smells — something clean, something slightly woody, faintly the coffee he'd made this morning before coming to pick you up.

"Shower first if you want," he says. "The bathroom's yours."

He says it simply, like the offer is obvious, which it is. You've both been in a public lido and are comprehensively dried out. But the way he says it, the bathroom's yours, certain like he’s already decided you belong comfortably in his space.

"Thank you," you say.

"Towels are in the cabinet on the left," he says. "The middle shelf. There's a new toothbrush somewhere — actually, second drawer of the vanity, I think. Or the cabinet above. I'll find it while you're in there."

"You have a spare toothbrush," you say.

He looks at you with the guileless expression he has sometimes. "I bought it last week," he says.

"Last week," you repeat.

"In anticipation," he says. "Of you being here and needing a toothbrush."

You look at him. He looks back, entirely unabashed.

"James," you say.

"Go shower," he says. "I'll find the toothbrush."

The shower is good, the water washing off all the accumulated warmth and sun and salt, your shoulders going from tight to loose under the heat of it. You stand in it for longer than strictly necessary because it's that kind of shower, and the day has earned it.

When you come out, wrapped in the towel from the middle shelf, there’s a spare toothbrush on the edge of the vanity.

New, in the packet. Left there while you were in the shower by someone who had gone to mild but deliberate effort to make you feel looked after.

You stand there holding it and feel something fully and specifically.

You get dressed again, the soft summer dress that had seemed like the right choice for thirty degrees, which still seems like the right choice now, and go out into the kitchen where James is at the stove. In his most battered t-shirt and shorts, doing something to a pan, music coming from the small speaker on the windowsill.

He looks up when you come in. "Better?" he says.

"Much better," you say. "Thank you for the toothbrush."

"Told you I'd find it," he says, like this is the relevant part of the sentence.

"You bought it last week," you say again.

"I knew you'd be here eventually," he says, back to the pan.

You sit on the kitchen counter and watch him cook.

He does cook the pasta.

He cooks it with a seriousness that comes out when he's feeding someone he wants to impress, which is something you've clocked before — the way his attention organises itself differently around food he's making for you versus food he's making for himself versus food he's making for Sirius, who he claims has no palate and therefore receives whatever.

"What am I, palate-wise?" you ask from the counter.

He glances at you. "High standards," he says.

"You've inferred this."

"I've observed this," he says. "You have opinions about pasta."

"Everyone has opinions about pasta."

"Not the right opinions," he says. "Most people are wrong about pasta."

"And I'm not?"

"You said last month that overcooked pasta is an act of violence," he says. "That's correct."

"That's a strong position," you say.

"It's the correct position," he says.

You watch him be completely serious about this, his full attention on the pan, and you find it extraordinarily endearing in the way you find most things he does extraordinary — not because they're remarkable in themselves but because they're so specifically him.

"The sauce smells incredible," you say.

"I know," he says, which is not arrogance; it's just accuracy, and you love that about him, the way he receives a genuine compliment without deflecting or being modest. He worked on the sauce. The sauce is good. These are facts about the world.

You eat on the balcony.

The evening has held its warmth, which James had correctly calculated, and the last of the sun still warming the brick, the city making its low pleasant noise somewhere below, the first stars attempting themselves in the blue-going-darker sky.

You sit across from each other with the pasta and a bottle of white wine that was in his fridge, and the candle he'd lit without ceremony, just because, and the evening is warm and easy and full.

He talks a lot when he's happy.

This is something you love about him. The full unedited version of James, comfortable in his own space with you across from him. 

He talks. The stories and observations and things he's been thinking about since he last saw you, the funny things and the things that aren't, but that he trusts you to receive in the spirit intended.

You ask questions, and he takes them seriously, follows them wherever they go, and asks his own. It’s the best when conversations are where you're not tracking it, you're just in it.

At some point, the candle becomes the main light.

At some point, the wine is nearly done.

"Stay," he says.

Not do you want to stay, not you're welcome to stay — just stay, quietly and directly, looking at you in the candlelight across the empty pasta bowls.

You look at him.

There's a nervousness you've been managing all evening that you haven't fully acknowledged to yourself — small and low-grade, the kind that lives in the chest rather than the stomach. Nothing about James inspires nervousness. That's not where it's coming from. It's coming from the fact that this is new, and new things have a particular texture that you're still getting used to.

He seems to clock this.

He doesn't say anything about it. He just looks at you across the table with the expression that is patient and warm and entirely unhurried, and you know without him saying so that the stay is an offer and not anything beyond that, that the evening will be exactly what you want it to be, that James Potter has never once in his life pushed toward something before you were ready.

"Okay," you say.

He smiles — the real one, the one that reaches his eyes.

"Good," he says.

He finds things for you.

This is the specific soft thing about James in this context, the one you're going to think about later. He finds a t-shirt for you to sleep in — soft, old, the kind that's been washed so many times it's barely a garment, which means it's the comfortable one, the one he keeps rather than the one he puts out for guests.

He brushes his teeth at the same time as you, in the bathroom that now contains the spare toothbrush you've used, which seems briefly intimate and then immediately feels normal.

This is the thing — how quickly it becomes normal.

"Sorry the bathroom is small," he says, around his toothbrush.

"It's a perfectly normal bathroom," you say.

"The light is a bit harsh," he says. "I keep meaning to get a lamp."

"The light is fine," you say.

"You're being generous," he says.

"I'm being accurate," you say. "The bathroom is fine, James."

He rinses, looks at you in the mirror. "You look good in my bathroom," he says, simple and direct.

The nervousness in your chest, which has been sitting there all evening, does something unexpected. It doesn't go away entirely. It just takes on a different quality, lighter, less like anxiety and more like awareness.

"Thank you," you say.

He has the lamp on when you come into the bedroom — the small one on the side table, which casts everything yellow and softer — and he's already on his side of the bed reading, or holding his book at least, and when you come in, he looks up and smiles.

You get into bed.

He puts his book down without being asked, without making anything of it, just puts it on the table and turns toward you, close but not crowding, giving you the space and also not being anywhere near as far away as he could be.

"You okay?" he says.

"I'm okay," you say. And then, because it's true and because this is James: "A little nervous."

He looks at you. "About—"

"Just new," you say. "Not — it's just new."

"Okay," he says. A  look that doesn't probe or reassure extravagantly or make you explain yourself further.

"Is that—" you start.

"That's fine," he says. "Everything is fine. We can just sleep."

"I know we can just sleep," you say. "I know that."

"I know you know," he says. "I'm saying it anyway so it's in the room."

You look at him.

"It's in the room," you say.

"Good," he says. "It can stay there."

Something that has been slightly held in you all evening releases.

"Thank you," you say, for what is probably the fourth time tonight.

"You keep thanking me," he says.

"You keep doing things worth thanking," you say.

He looks at you with the expression that is warm, slightly helpless, and entirely specific to you. "Come here," he says, and it's gentle, and you do, and his arm comes around you. The light is warm, and the city is doing its quiet late-evening thing outside the window. He presses a kiss to your forehead, very lightly, and says nothing.

You lie there.

The nervousness is still there, small and low-grade, but it's surrounded now by enough warmth to make it feel manageable. Like something that will dissolve naturally with time rather than something that needs solving.

"James," you say.

"Yeah," he says.

"Good day," you say.

You can feel him smile against your hair. "Very good day," he says.

The lamp stays on for a while. Neither of you falls asleep immediately.

You talk quietly about nothing significant — the lido, the plan to go back before the summer ends, the thing Sirius said last week that James has been thinking about since and that only now finds its way into a sentence. Small things. The kind of things that fill the last half hour before sleep, when everything that needed saying has been said and what's left is just the company.

At some point, the talking stops, and the breathing slows, and James turns off the lamp. The room goes dark and warm, the city a low ambient glow through the curtains.

You are, you think, very okay.

More than okay.

His arm stays around you, and the night is warm and tomorrow is unscheduled and all of that is fine — very fine, the kind of fine that is actually a managed version.

You fall asleep.

—

In the morning, there’s light.

Summer morning light through curtains that aren't thick enough, the kind that announces itself before you've agreed to be awake, and you lie in the warmth of it with the gradual returning of where you are.

James's flat. James's bed.

James, who is apparently already awake because his breathing sounds like someone not asleep, the alertness of it, though he's not moving and isn't making you move.

"Morning," you say.

"Morning," he says.

"How long have you been awake?" you ask.

"A while," he says.

"What have you been doing?"

A pause. "Thinking," he says.

"About what?"

"Nothing urgent," he says. "Just—" A pause. "You were here. I didn't want to get up."

You look at the ceiling for a moment. "We can get up now," you say.

"Only if you want to," he says. "There's nowhere to be."

There isn't.

The day opens up ahead of you, unscheduled and warm, full of no particular demands, and James is here. The light is coming through the curtains, the nervousness from last night has dissolved so completely that you have to actively reconstruct its memory to confirm it was ever there.

"I could eat," you say.

He sits up, full of energy like he’s been waiting for a reason. "I have eggs," he says.

"I know you have eggs," you say. "You always have eggs."

"I have very good eggs," he corrects.

"You have a very strong relationship with your eggs," you say.

"They're good eggs," he says, already getting up, already moving toward the kitchen, and you watch him go — rumpled and morning-bright and entirely delighted about the eggs — and you think about the toothbrush he bought last week and the t-shirt on the end of the bed and it's in the room, it can stay there and the arm around you.

You get up.

You go and sit on his kitchen counter in his old t-shirt while he makes eggs on a Thursday morning in Islington, and the city outside is already warming toward another hot day, and the balcony door is open to let in the morning air, and the coffee is already on because James started it before he made the eggs because he knows you need the coffee first.

He knows you need the coffee first.

"Thank you," you say, when he hands you the mug.

"You're going to keep doing that," he says.

"Probably," you say.

He shakes his head, fond and entirely unbothered, and turns back to the eggs.

You drink your coffee. You are, completely and quietly, very glad you stayed.

[prettyglad]

hi honey,, pretty please may i request james x reader where she’s staying overnight at his for the first time (perhaps on a summer night after spending the day together…) <333

sunkissed — james potter x reader

summary — you and james gor for a swim and he cooks you dinner and let's you stay the night.

content — 2.7k words, james potter x reader. no pronouns.

note — rahhh thank you how did you know summer james potter is my favourite james potter???!!!

You'd known it was going to be that kind of day from the moment you woke up — the light already wrong at eight in the morning, too gold, too intense. By ten it was thirty degrees and London had done the thing it does in a heatwave, which is collectively lose its composure. 

People sitting on every available outdoor surface. The bus you took at half past ten a rolling warm box of other people's sunscreen.

James had a plan, which was typical, and the plan had been water.

The plan had been good.

You'd spent the afternoon at the lido in Brockwell Park, which he'd booked somehow in advance because James is the kind of person who reads an incoming heatwave forecast and immediately books a lido, a quality you'd found endearing and slightly impressive. 

The water had been cold. The way outdoor water is cold in the summer, and you'd been in and out of it all afternoon with no particular agenda, the day passing without watching itself happen.

He is good at days.

This is something you've been realising since February, since the thing between you became a thing rather than a careful almost-thing — the way he moves through time with an ease that carries everything near him along. 

He doesn't push days toward anything. He just creates the conditions for them and then inhabits them fully. Whatever you bring to the day is the right thing to bring.

By early evening, you're both pink-shouldered and chlorine-dried and very adequately fed on the chips you'd got from the place near the gate, and the day is doing its slow unwilling surrender to the evening, the sky going warm colours over the park. James is lying on his back beside you on the grass, looking at the sky with the contented expression of a man whose plan worked.

"Good day," he says.

"Very good day," you say.

He turns his head to look at you. He has grass in his hair. He’s had grass in his hair for at least three hours and has shown no sign of addressing it. You have decided not to address it either because it’s funny.

"Come back to mine," he says. "I'll make dinner."

"You don't have to make dinner," you say.

"I want to make dinner," he says. "I have the stuff for the pasta. Come back, and I'll make the pasta, and we can eat on the balcony if it stays warm."

You look at the sky. The sky is very warm.

"Okay," you say.

The flat is in Islington, third floor, the corner flat with the balcony that gets the evening light. You've been here before. Several times, but not like this, not at the end of this kind of day, not with this particular warm tiredness in your limbs and the evening still going.

He unlocks the door and holds it for you, and you go in, and the flat smells the way it always smells — something clean, something slightly woody, faintly the coffee he'd made this morning before coming to pick you up.

"Shower first if you want," he says. "The bathroom's yours."

He says it simply, like the offer is obvious, which it is. You've both been in a public lido and are comprehensively dried out. But the way he says it, the bathroom's yours, certain like he’s already decided you belong comfortably in his space.

"Thank you," you say.

"Towels are in the cabinet on the left," he says. "The middle shelf. There's a new toothbrush somewhere — actually, second drawer of the vanity, I think. Or the cabinet above. I'll find it while you're in there."

"You have a spare toothbrush," you say.

He looks at you with the guileless expression he has sometimes. "I bought it last week," he says.

"Last week," you repeat.

"In anticipation," he says. "Of you being here and needing a toothbrush."

You look at him. He looks back, entirely unabashed.

"James," you say.

"Go shower," he says. "I'll find the toothbrush."

The shower is good, the water washing off all the accumulated warmth and sun and salt, your shoulders going from tight to loose under the heat of it. You stand in it for longer than strictly necessary because it's that kind of shower, and the day has earned it.

When you come out, wrapped in the towel from the middle shelf, there’s a spare toothbrush on the edge of the vanity.

New, in the packet. Left there while you were in the shower by someone who had gone to mild but deliberate effort to make you feel looked after.

You stand there holding it and feel something fully and specifically.

You get dressed again, the soft summer dress that had seemed like the right choice for thirty degrees, which still seems like the right choice now, and go out into the kitchen where James is at the stove. In his most battered t-shirt and shorts, doing something to a pan, music coming from the small speaker on the windowsill.

He looks up when you come in. "Better?" he says.

"Much better," you say. "Thank you for the toothbrush."

"Told you I'd find it," he says, like this is the relevant part of the sentence.

"You bought it last week," you say again.

"I knew you'd be here eventually," he says, back to the pan.

You sit on the kitchen counter and watch him cook.

He does cook the pasta.

He cooks it with a seriousness that comes out when he's feeding someone he wants to impress, which is something you've clocked before — the way his attention organises itself differently around food he's making for you versus food he's making for himself versus food he's making for Sirius, who he claims has no palate and therefore receives whatever.

"What am I, palate-wise?" you ask from the counter.

He glances at you. "High standards," he says.

"You've inferred this."

"I've observed this," he says. "You have opinions about pasta."

"Everyone has opinions about pasta."

"Not the right opinions," he says. "Most people are wrong about pasta."

"And I'm not?"

"You said last month that overcooked pasta is an act of violence," he says. "That's correct."

"That's a strong position," you say.

"It's the correct position," he says.

You watch him be completely serious about this, his full attention on the pan, and you find it extraordinarily endearing in the way you find most things he does extraordinary — not because they're remarkable in themselves but because they're so specifically him.

"The sauce smells incredible," you say.

"I know," he says, which is not arrogance; it's just accuracy, and you love that about him, the way he receives a genuine compliment without deflecting or being modest. He worked on the sauce. The sauce is good. These are facts about the world.

You eat on the balcony.

The evening has held its warmth, which James had correctly calculated, and the last of the sun still warming the brick, the city making its low pleasant noise somewhere below, the first stars attempting themselves in the blue-going-darker sky.

You sit across from each other with the pasta and a bottle of white wine that was in his fridge, and the candle he'd lit without ceremony, just because, and the evening is warm and easy and full.

He talks a lot when he's happy.

This is something you love about him. The full unedited version of James, comfortable in his own space with you across from him. 

He talks. The stories and observations and things he's been thinking about since he last saw you, the funny things and the things that aren't, but that he trusts you to receive in the spirit intended.

You ask questions, and he takes them seriously, follows them wherever they go, and asks his own. It’s the best when conversations are where you're not tracking it, you're just in it.

At some point, the candle becomes the main light.

At some point, the wine is nearly done.

"Stay," he says.

Not do you want to stay, not you're welcome to stay — just stay, quietly and directly, looking at you in the candlelight across the empty pasta bowls.

You look at him.

There's a nervousness you've been managing all evening that you haven't fully acknowledged to yourself — small and low-grade, the kind that lives in the chest rather than the stomach. Nothing about James inspires nervousness. That's not where it's coming from. It's coming from the fact that this is new, and new things have a particular texture that you're still getting used to.

He seems to clock this.

He doesn't say anything about it. He just looks at you across the table with the expression that is patient and warm and entirely unhurried, and you know without him saying so that the stay is an offer and not anything beyond that, that the evening will be exactly what you want it to be, that James Potter has never once in his life pushed toward something before you were ready.

"Okay," you say.

He smiles — the real one, the one that reaches his eyes.

"Good," he says.

He finds things for you.

This is the specific soft thing about James in this context, the one you're going to think about later. He finds a t-shirt for you to sleep in — soft, old, the kind that's been washed so many times it's barely a garment, which means it's the comfortable one, the one he keeps rather than the one he puts out for guests.

He brushes his teeth at the same time as you, in the bathroom that now contains the spare toothbrush you've used, which seems briefly intimate and then immediately feels normal.

This is the thing — how quickly it becomes normal.

"Sorry the bathroom is small," he says, around his toothbrush.

"It's a perfectly normal bathroom," you say.

"The light is a bit harsh," he says. "I keep meaning to get a lamp."

"The light is fine," you say.

"You're being generous," he says.

"I'm being accurate," you say. "The bathroom is fine, James."

He rinses, looks at you in the mirror. "You look good in my bathroom," he says, simple and direct.

The nervousness in your chest, which has been sitting there all evening, does something unexpected. It doesn't go away entirely. It just takes on a different quality, lighter, less like anxiety and more like awareness.

"Thank you," you say.

He has the lamp on when you come into the bedroom — the small one on the side table, which casts everything yellow and softer — and he's already on his side of the bed reading, or holding his book at least, and when you come in, he looks up and smiles.

You get into bed.

He puts his book down without being asked, without making anything of it, just puts it on the table and turns toward you, close but not crowding, giving you the space and also not being anywhere near as far away as he could be.

"You okay?" he says.

"I'm okay," you say. And then, because it's true and because this is James: "A little nervous."

He looks at you. "About—"

"Just new," you say. "Not — it's just new."

"Okay," he says. A  look that doesn't probe or reassure extravagantly or make you explain yourself further.

"Is that—" you start.

"That's fine," he says. "Everything is fine. We can just sleep."

"I know we can just sleep," you say. "I know that."

"I know you know," he says. "I'm saying it anyway so it's in the room."

You look at him.

"It's in the room," you say.

"Good," he says. "It can stay there."

Something that has been slightly held in you all evening releases.

"Thank you," you say, for what is probably the fourth time tonight.

"You keep thanking me," he says.

"You keep doing things worth thanking," you say.

He looks at you with the expression that is warm, slightly helpless, and entirely specific to you. "Come here," he says, and it's gentle, and you do, and his arm comes around you. The light is warm, and the city is doing its quiet late-evening thing outside the window. He presses a kiss to your forehead, very lightly, and says nothing.

You lie there.

The nervousness is still there, small and low-grade, but it's surrounded now by enough warmth to make it feel manageable. Like something that will dissolve naturally with time rather than something that needs solving.

"James," you say.

"Yeah," he says.

"Good day," you say.

You can feel him smile against your hair. "Very good day," he says.

The lamp stays on for a while. Neither of you falls asleep immediately.

You talk quietly about nothing significant — the lido, the plan to go back before the summer ends, the thing Sirius said last week that James has been thinking about since and that only now finds its way into a sentence. Small things. The kind of things that fill the last half hour before sleep, when everything that needed saying has been said and what's left is just the company.

At some point, the talking stops, and the breathing slows, and James turns off the lamp. The room goes dark and warm, the city a low ambient glow through the curtains.

You are, you think, very okay.

More than okay.

His arm stays around you, and the night is warm and tomorrow is unscheduled and all of that is fine — very fine, the kind of fine that is actually a managed version.

You fall asleep.

—

In the morning, there’s light.

Summer morning light through curtains that aren't thick enough, the kind that announces itself before you've agreed to be awake, and you lie in the warmth of it with the gradual returning of where you are.

James's flat. James's bed.

James, who is apparently already awake because his breathing sounds like someone not asleep, the alertness of it, though he's not moving and isn't making you move.

"Morning," you say.

"Morning," he says.

"How long have you been awake?" you ask.

"A while," he says.

"What have you been doing?"

A pause. "Thinking," he says.

"About what?"

"Nothing urgent," he says. "Just—" A pause. "You were here. I didn't want to get up."

You look at the ceiling for a moment. "We can get up now," you say.

"Only if you want to," he says. "There's nowhere to be."

There isn't.

The day opens up ahead of you, unscheduled and warm, full of no particular demands, and James is here. The light is coming through the curtains, the nervousness from last night has dissolved so completely that you have to actively reconstruct its memory to confirm it was ever there.

"I could eat," you say.

He sits up, full of energy like he’s been waiting for a reason. "I have eggs," he says.

"I know you have eggs," you say. "You always have eggs."

"I have very good eggs," he corrects.

"You have a very strong relationship with your eggs," you say.

"They're good eggs," he says, already getting up, already moving toward the kitchen, and you watch him go — rumpled and morning-bright and entirely delighted about the eggs — and you think about the toothbrush he bought last week and the t-shirt on the end of the bed and it's in the room, it can stay there and the arm around you.

You get up.

You go and sit on his kitchen counter in his old t-shirt while he makes eggs on a Thursday morning in Islington, and the city outside is already warming toward another hot day, and the balcony door is open to let in the morning air, and the coffee is already on because James started it before he made the eggs because he knows you need the coffee first.

He knows you need the coffee first.

"Thank you," you say, when he hands you the mug.

"You're going to keep doing that," he says.

"Probably," you say.

He shakes his head, fond and entirely unbothered, and turns back to the eggs.

You drink your coffee. You are, completely and quietly, very glad you stayed.