for @stonathanweek's first round of stonathan sunday prompts!! based on the following: "I thought that was our arrangement now. I get to kiss you and you get to shut me up."
“I thought that this was our arrangement now,” Steve mumbles into Jonathan’s skin, breath hot, words slurred and strung together by the trail of open-mouthed kisses he’s leaving along Jonathan’s jaw. “I get to kiss you,” he continues, and then there’s teeth where Jonathan’s neck meets his shoulder and a hiss coming from his own mouth— “and you get to shut me up.”
That had certainly been the arrangement — not that they’ve ever come to a verbal agreement on it, and that was kind of the point in the first place. The thing is, when the one person who ties you together doesn’t want to talk to either of you, and the only thing you have to talk about is her, not talking at all is usually the best option. If it had been up to Jonathan, back when this all started, not talking would have meant not interacting at all, and of all the things he was losing sleep over, not having to interact with Steve Harrington wouldn’t make the short list, or the long list, or any list at all, really.
(It hadn’t been up to Jonathan, which didn’t come as a surprise, because nothing Jonathan actually wants is ever up to Jonathan.)
There had been a series of arrangements prior to their current arrangement, and none of them involved Steve until they did. After returning back to a considerably more apocalyptic Hawkins than he’d left it, there hadn’t been any choice other than to stay, and staying meant several things — first, finding a place to stay, their old house long-since sold. After that had been sorted — with Will posted up with Mike in his bedroom, Holly and Nancy sharing so that his mom could take Holly’s room, and Jonathan taking up residence in the basement — everything else seemed to implode, like the universe felt it had to make up for the fact that something in Jonathan’s life fell into place with relative ease. Being in close quarters with Nancy meant the truth about Emerson had nowhere to hide, and despite the fact that it didn’t look like either of them were going to college any time soon, if at all, she’d been mad enough and hurt enough to end it between them. Jonathan didn’t think she’d understand, because she never does, when it comes to things like this, but it still hurt; he also didn’t think it was possible to never see someone you shared a living space with, but Nancy manages fine enough to make it look easy.
It’d be nice to have someone to talk to about it — or anything — but Argyle had fled back to California the moment the sky had started bleeding red, and Jonathan doesn’t blame him for it. His mom is focused on El and Hopper and Will, always Will, never Jonathan, and he doesn’t blame her for that, either. And Will, who Jonathan knows would listen — who would probably love to listen, who would somehow be able to say exactly what Jonathan needs to hear — has enough going on without Jonathan adding the weight of his own trivial problems for his baby brother to bear. Jonathan doesn’t know how to blame Will for anything, so he doesn’t.
He does blame Steve. Because Steve is there — always has been, lingering in the edge of his peripheral, and no matter how hard he’s tried, Jonathan has never been able to block him out. He blames Steve, because Steve knows what it’s like to be iced out by Nancy; he blames Steve, because he knows the truth about what’s happening in Hawkins, all of it, without Jonathan having to explain; he blames Steve, because Steve had been the one to find Jonathan sitting on the hood of his car in the high school parking lot as he was burning through the last of the weed Argyle had left behind, and it was Steve who had plucked the joint right out of Jonathan’s fingers and taken a hit, and it was Steve who’d asked him about Nancy and Steve who’d said shit that Jonathan didn’t want to hear and Steve who’d only shut up when Jonathan made him, when kissing Steve to get him to quit seemed like a better idea than decking him.
It still hadn’t been a good idea, and Jonathan fully expected Steve to deck him instead — but Steve had kissed him back, open-mouthed and filthy and a little mean, and that had been the start of it. He doesn’t think they ever finished that joint, and he knows for a fact they’ve barely spoken a word to each other since then. Come to think of it, he’s pretty sure this is the most Steve has spoken to him in the past two months outside of propositioning him, which is weird, because Jonathan has never spent so much time with someone without really speaking to them before, and he spends a lot of time with Steve. And that, really, is the other thing — it’s really hard to spend so much of your time with someone and not end up caring about them, even if that someone is Steve.
Because, yes, Steve is there, and he knows, understands what’s going on without Jonathan having to explain, which is why hooking up with him is easy: they don’t have to talk or explain. They already know.
But Jonathan— well, Jonathan wants to talk to Steve. Jonathan wants to talk and be heard, wants to be heard and be listened to even more, and he thinks Steve might be good at both of those things. After all, he’s silently shown up for Jonathan in other ways — he stares back, a challenge, when Nancy’s eyes are on them any time they have to share the same space; he stays close when they’re on patrol together, like he’s trying to become Jonathan’s shadow; and sometimes, he’ll randomly swing by the Wheeler’s house to pick Jonathan up and just drive him around, no words or funny business, startlingly and uncannily always seeming to know exactly when Jonathan feels like the walls are closing in on him. In terms of physicality, the vibe has shifted entirely, so much so that Jonathan doesn’t even begin to know what to do with it. He doesn’t know when Steve stopped kissing him like he had something to prove, can’t pinpoint when everything they do together started to go soft around the edges, but it’s where they’re at. Even now, with Steve biting kisses into his neck — it’s not a mean thing, meant to hurt, the way it had been when this first started. It’s softer, more controlled, a clear effort being made to make sure it’s good, something Jonathan likes.
He’s not sure why, but it kind of makes him want to cry.
“I know,” he finally says, a little breathy. Steve’s hands slip under his shirt, settling on his hips, thumbs tracing circles into his skin, like he’s detected that Jonathan is coming to a conclusion in his head and is trying to give him more evidence to support it. “I just,” he starts, and then stops, because he’s not looking at Steve, but he’s right there — he’s right there, and they don’t talk, and Jonathan is worried that if he tries to, he’ll lose Steve altogether, and Jonathan doesn’t know how much more loss he can handle.
And then he remembers it’s already the end of the world, and he could die tomorrow, and he doesn’t want to go as quietly as he has lived.
“Maybe I want a different arrangement,” he manages, addressing the car ceiling. The bravery he felt to ask the question in the first place — do you want to talk, or some variation of it — has since evaporated, gone to become one with the cycled cabin air. His fingers tighten their hold in Steve’s hair, holding him in place when he tries to pull back. “Maybe I want to kiss you without shutting you up.”
There is an excruciating moment where the words hang between them, where Jonathan’s awareness has honed in on the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and Steve’s breath on his neck and Steve’s hands on his hips.
“Okay,” Steve says, and he doesn’t sound mad or weirded out, and the breath Jonathan didn’t realize he was holding breaks free from his lungs, his shoulders relaxing with it. “Okay,” he repeats, and when he tries to pull back this time, Jonathan lets him, fingers slipping from Steve’s hair. It’s dark, most of the interior lights in the front seat rather than the back, but he can still make out Steve’s face, the earnest way he’s looking at Jonathan. “I can— we can talk, too. Is that what you want?”
Jonathan can’t remember the last time someone has asked him what he wanted. “Yeah,” he says, and to his horror, his voice cracks, right in the middle. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah, I—yeah.” Another beat, an uncertain silence, and then: “Is that—okay?”
“Of course that’s okay,” Steve answers instantly. He looks properly upset, like the fact that Jonathan even asked is an affront to him. “Jonathan, I thought you didn’t” —he cuts himself off, looking down to Jonathan’s lips, and then the position they’re in, sprawled all over each other in the backseat, and then meets Jonathan’s eyes again, the rest of his sentence unspoken, but understood— “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t say,” Jonathan says.
“No, you didn’t,” Steve agrees. He leans forward, kissing him again — uncharacteristically soft, shy, even, before he pulls away completely. He stays close by, though, settles into the seat next to Jonathan, facing him, without being on top of him the way he was. One of his hands returns to his own lap, while the other settles on Jonathan’s knee, a comforting, steady weight through the denim of his jeans. “Alright,” Steve continues, suddenly alert. “What do you want to talk about?”
What Jonathan had thought to be the hard part — asking Steve to talk in the first place — seems easy in the face of Steve’s question now. There’s so much he wants to talk about that he doesn’t know where to begin — about how he’s scared, every single day; how he buried his brother once before, and doesn’t want to do it again. About how his mom keeps throwing herself into danger without any regard of how anyone feels about it, and Jonathan feels a lot about it. He wants to tell Steve that every time they’re patrolling together, he’s started to worry about Steve, too — about how losing Steve is shaping into just as scary of a thought as losing Will or El or his mom, and how badly that scares him. He thinks all of this might be too intense for their first real conversation, and he thinks about how nothing they’ve done in the past two months fits into any definition of normal or conventional, and he thinks that that’s not a bad thing.
“I don’t know,” he says instead of any of that, because self-preservation is a useful skill for when you’re trying to survive an apocalypse and for when you’re trying not to scare someone away. “I didn’t get that far.”
Steve laughs, languid and easy, his head rolling to the side. “Just—start easy,” he suggests, nudging Jonathan’s leg with his own. “Tell me about something you like.”
“Something I like,” Jonathan echoes.
“Something you like,” Steve says again, accompanied by a curt nod, sending a fluttering feeling throughout Jonathan’s chest. He thinks that if they make it through this, come out of the end of the world on the other side alive and well, he’d very much like to visit New York, take the camera he knows had the wrong name on the gift tag, and bring Steve, too. “Like— music,” Steve prompts, when Jonathan still hasn’t responded. “I know you like music.”
Jonathan shakes his head with a laugh. “We’ll be here all night if I start talking about music,” he says.
“Our former arrangement meant that we were going to be here all night anyway,” Steve replies with a wink. Jonthan likes that word – former. “Go ahead — I’m all ears.”
And Jonathan does.