Chapter Text
Your cheeks hurt from laughing, but you can’t stop. You look over at Steve as he belts out the lyrics to the song blasting through the speakers, reaching a hand out toward you dramatically.
“I don’t wanna let you go ‘til you see the light,” he sings, intertwining his fingers with yours. He’s being silly, but you have to admit you’re surprised that his singing voice is so good—smooth with a little rumble at the back, and he falsettos the high notes in a way that makes your insides sort of vibrate.
He’s still holding your hand when he pulls the car off the side of the road, the headlights illuminating the dense tree line. He cuts the engine, and the silence wraps around you almost tangibly.
“Where the hell are you taking me, Harrington?” You’ve been asking ever since he leaned over the counter at Family Video and asked if he could pick you up at midnight. You’d never snuck out past curfew before, but your mom takes a sleeping pill so it proved to be fairly stress-free. And the truth is, you’d go anywhere with him.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise ,” he says, giving you a sidelong glance. He squeezes your hand briefly before letting go and opening his door.
“I just want to make sure you’re not bringing me out here to murder me,” you tease as you get out of the car.
“Do I look like a murderer to you?” He smiles his most charming smile at you across the roof of the car, raising his hands in the air to demonstrate his innocence, and you laugh.
He grabs something out of the backseat on the driver's side, and then circles around the back of the car to you.
“I promise not to murder you.” He leans down and presses his lips to yours in a soft kiss.
“Thank you,” you say with a smile, and slide your hand into his. He tosses a blanket over his shoulder, clicks on a flashlight, and tugs you behind him into the trees.
You’ve been dating Steve for weeks now, but he just keeps surprising you. At first you couldn’t believe you had a crush on him. Then you couldn’t believe he liked you back. You’re constantly stunned at how dorky he can be, at how soft he can be, at how much he makes you laugh. Sometimes you like him so much it literally makes you feel starry-eyed.
There’s no path through the woods, but Steve seems to know where he’s going. He picks his way around the trees, over fallen limbs, and you follow close, the thick bed of leaves rustling under your feet, until suddenly you emerge into a clearing studded with massive rocks. Steve turns around to look at you, his arms out at his sides.
“Skull rock. What do you think?”
You look around at the trees, illuminated only by the bouncing beam of Steve’s flashlight and the light of the moon. It’s quiet, but you can vaguely hear the water lapping at the shore of Lover’s Lake off to your right.
“I think it looks like a great place to commit a murder,” you say, biting your lip to keep from laughing. But his smile is so contagious—he looks like a little kid on Christmas morning—and you can’t help but crack.
The largest rock, in the center of the space, is propped up against another, creating a triangle of space underneath, and you watch as he sets the flashlight on its end so it lights the space and then spreads out the blanket. You’ve heard of skull rock, vaguely, as a spot people go to hook up, but it’s one of those places you have to either already know where it is or know someone who knows where it is to find out. Hawkins High’s best kept secret.
“How’d you know where to find it?” you ask as you join him on the blanket.
“I practically invented it. These woods connect to the ones behind my house,” he says, pointing away to his left. “I used to come out here all the time when I was a kid.” He pauses for a moment, something vague and sad passing over his eyes. “Still do sometimes.”
That’s when you notice a few crushed beer cans, a couple of joint stubs littering the space where the largest rock meets the ground.
But whatever sadness came over him is gone quick as he turns toward you with that charming Steve Harrington smile.
“I’ve wanted to bring you here since that first night we kissed.” He pushes one hand into your hair, his lips just a breath away from yours. He smells so good—the clean scent of soap mixed with hairspray and probably-expensive cologne—that you want to just close your eyes and breathe him in.
“What took you so long?” You bite your lips, the anticipation of being kissed coursing through your veins, making you feel electrically charged, near dizzy with the way you want him. You wonder if you’ll ever get used to this feeling.
Finally he presses his lips to yours, and you go soft under him, hooking one arm around his neck to keep him with you as you sink back against the blanket. His tongue slides against yours, his hands wrapped around the back of your head. It’s languid and it’s easy and it makes you want to stay forever.
This isn’t the first time you’ve made out with Steve Harrington, but it is the first time you’re not worrying about getting home before curfew or parents walking in or accidentally leaning on the car horn. It feels different, special somehow. Like the quiet solitude of this space is a cocoon specifically designed for the two of you.
When his hands skate up under your shirt, you sit up slightly so he can pull it over your head. He holds your gaze as he unclasps your bra and slowly slides the straps down your arms.
“You are so beautiful,” he says, so softly it makes your chest ache.
He guides you gently back down to the blanket, coaxing your mouth open under his, shifting over you so his thigh preses up between your legs, and you gasp into his mouth, your fingers gripping harder in his hair.
His hands are everywhere, sliding hot over your ribs, your hips, your thighs. His thumb grazes across your nipple, and you hum against his lips at the zip of pleasure that rockets through you.
He drags his lips along your jawline, your pulsepoint, your collarbone, between your breasts. His tongue skims over your navel, tickling, but your giggles soon turns into a breathy moan as his fingers work their way behind the button of your jeans and into your panties.
His lips find yours again as his fingers slide over you gently, and your hips buck up against his hand, greedy for his touch. He smiles against your mouth before breaking away to sit back and shimmy your jeans down your legs.
Once your shoes and pants have joined your shirt and bra on the ground, he runs his hands over your knees, down your thighs, his eyes hungry in the weird yellowy glow of the flashlight.
“Steve.” You reach for his shoulders, trying to pull him back to you. Goosebumps cover your skin, your nipples so hard they almost hurt, though you don’t know if you can blame that entirely on the cold.
“Shhh.” He strokes over you with his thumb before leaning forward, dragging his tongue up against you, and you can’t help the cry of pleasure that leaves your lips, your knees dropping open further.
He settles in, one arm wrapped around your hip with his large hand splayed out over your stomach, holding you steady. His other hand kneads over your breast as his tongue works you over, and you can’t even breathe, can’t even think it feels so good.
It comes on you fast and strong—Steve’s been paying attention these past couple of weeks, you think vaguely as you grapple for purchase at his hair. He knows just how to get you there, and you come apart under his tongue easily, shuddering and gasping and dizzy.
He presses his lips to your hip bone, squeezing your thigh with one hand, before straightening back up, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
You reach for the buckle of his belt with shaking fingers, make quick work of it, and slide one hand straight into his boxers and down over his cock, hard as nails and tight up against the zipper of his jeans. He groans and curls into you, his forehead pressing into your hair.
You try to stroke down over him, but the angle and the fit of his jeans makes it nearly impossible. His lips are on yours, his palm against your breast, but you feel suddenly desperate to feel him, all of him, every inch of his skin and muscle and bone.
“Steve?” you murmur against his lips. He goes still, his fingers pressing into your shoulder just slightly.
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna need you to get naked, like, right now.”
“Oh… oh, yeah ok.”
He jumps to his feet, and you feel the cold sharply without the heat of his body blocking you from it.
A few frantic minutes later—because he can’t fully stand up in the cramped space and barely avoids smacking his head on the rock—his clothes are on the ground, a heap of shoes, jeans, boxers, sweatshirt. He crawls back over to you with something in his hand, and it takes you a moment to realize it’s a condom. Your whole body flushes in anticipation—you’ve done a lot together but the moment’s never been right to go all the way.
He holds up the small foil square in the space between the two of you, caught loosely between his first two fingers.
“Do you wanna…?” he says, his voice low. You can barely see him, his face half cast in wobbly shadow, but the way he’s looking at you still makes your heart race and your thighs clench.
“Yes,” you say, pushing up so you can kiss him again. He sits back, grinning, and tears the packet open.
You can’t take your eyes off him as he rolls the condom down over his cock, then he scoots back a few inches, until his back is against the rock, and beckons you toward him. You climb into his lap, holding his gaze as he slides his hands up your body quick and then back down.
His thumbs press in hard against your hip bones as you sink down onto him, the hot stretch of it stealing your breath for a moment. Your fingers slip down over his shoulder, soft through the hair on his chest, and he covers your hand with his, holding it over his heart as you start to roll your hips, slow and steady.
His lips form the shape of your name, but no sound comes out of his mouth, or maybe you just can’t hear him over your own ragged breaths.
“Oh, god. Steve,” you say, desperately, as his other hand grips your ass, holding you tight against him, so much so that it makes your movements short and stuttered. But the pressure of him inside you and outside you and all around you is enough to take you over the edge.
You come with his name on your lips and your face in his hair, his heart pounding under the palm of your hand. He pushes his hips up hard into yours, once, twice, three times before he’s shuddering too, his hand clenching around yours and his panting breaths hot against your shoulder.
After a breathless minute, he helps you off his lap and pulls you down onto the blanket with him, your cheek on his chest. You lay that way for a while, catching your breath, no sense of time passing at all. You’re nearly asleep when a streak of lightning cracks the sky, immediately followed by a clap of thunder so loud you scream.
Steve’s arm tightens around your shoulders as you turn your face into his chest, both of you shaking with silent laughter. Two seconds later the skies open up and it starts pouring rain. You’re half sheltered under the rock, but the wind’s picked up enough that you’re almost instantly wet.
“Shit!” Steve says, barely, because he’s laughing so hard. He dives for his jeans, and so do you, throwing your shirt backwards over your head and cramming your feet into your shoes. There’s no time for socks or underwear; you just leave those on the ground and grab the flashlight as Steve snatches up the blanket, and you make a break for it.
He grabs your hand in the dark as you run back to the car, both of you absolutely soaked to the bone within seconds. Your ribs hurt from laughing when you finally reach the car and throw yourselves inside.
“Oh my god,” you say, still laughing and now shivering. You pull your feet up onto the seat and rest your cheek on your knees, trying to warm up as Steve cranks the heat and adjusts the vents so most of them are blowing right at you.
“Shit, sorry about that,” he says, pushing his hands through his soaked hair. His yellow sweatshirt is drenched, nearly transparent, curls of chest hair sticking out the collar, and the way he’s looking at you makes you feel like you don’t actually look like a drowned rat.
“I love you,” you hear yourself say, and you’re pretty sure you both stop breathing. Your cheeks flush; the only sound in the car is the heater blowing at full force.
You didn’t mean to say it, didn’t even think one thought about it before the words slid past your lips, but they sure don’t feel wrong. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to say. You can’t bring yourself to take it back, or even to pretend like you didn’t say it. Because it’s true , you realize, biting your lip.
Steve’s eyes slide closed.
“Don’t… please don’t say that unless you really mean it,” he says, his voice rough like a scrape of sandpaper over your bones. Your chest aches.
“Steve,” you say, softly. You reach for his hand, intertwining your fingers and holding both your hands against your breastbone, an echo of the way he held your hand not an hour earlier. “I mean it.” He opens his eyes, still wary, and you smile slowly, unable to resist. “I really really mean it.”
He blows out a breath, and then slowly his lips turn up into a smile too. He leans across the gearshift and brushes your wet hair off your forehead. You can see it in his eyes now, and when his lips meet yours, you can feel it in his kiss. You don’t know how you didn’t know it until now.
By the time he breaks away, the windows are fogged, the rain still pouring outside.
“I’m in love with you, too,” he says, his lips still close enough to brush yours as they move. He rests his forehead against yours and huffs a little laugh. “And I really mean it.”