Chapter Text
That night Eddie kisses Steve with more intent, hands wandering down his sides, pushing him down against the bed, and Steve thinks okay, we’re doing this, happily — and then suddenly, fuck, we’re doing this, less happily. And he tenses and Eddie feels him tense, and he sort of hates himself for it, because why does this feel like something he can never take back? And why does that bother him? It shouldn’t bother him, is the thing.
“Sorry,” Eddie whispers into his mouth. “We’re– we’re waiting, right?”
“Right,” Steve manages. Eddie kisses him once more and then moves away, and it feels like a loss, suddenly, and Steve nearly reaches out to bring him closer again but something stops him. Something that closes off his throat indefinably.
He doesn’t say let’s go to Indianapolis, you and me, though he wants to. Though he’s been thinking about it. Something about it here, tonight, in his bed, feels impossible to say. So he doesn’t.
And he wakes up to keys in the door.
Panic shoots through him; he looks at the clock and finds it’s after ten. Eddie stirs groggily beside him, reaching out a hand to clutch Steve’s wrist — “What is it?” he murmurs, and Steve shakes his head.
“Shit, shit, I forgot, how could I fucking forget–”
“What?” Eddie says, more awake now, sitting up beside him with his hair falling around his face in a sleep-mussed cloud. Steve wants him to stay and also needs him to leave.
“My parents. They’re coming today– I totally forgot–“ Steve drags himself out of bed and starts looking for some clothes. “You’re gonna have to– you’re gonna need to go out the window. Or something.”
“Or something,” Eddie repeats tightly, and the loose sleepiness is entirely gone from his posture. He looks tense, now, tense and scared and pissed — which, okay, maybe he’s allowed to be pissed. But Steve can’t let his parents see Eddie, put the dots together, tell him he’s turning the house into something worse than a brothel. Eddie doesn’t deserve the scorn they’ll pile on him; and Steve is afraid of the scorn they’ll give him once Eddie leaves.
Eddie finds clothes and slips them on, rumpled and creased and hanging off him because wait a second, he’s wearing Steve’s red sweatshirt, he’s bundled up in it and has it pulled over his wrists protectively, defensively, like he’s daring Steve to comment.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says instead. Eddie doesn’t look at him so he takes Eddie’s wrists and gets him to meet his eyes: “I mean it, like, I completely forgot and I know this isn’t fun and I–“
“It’s okay, Harrington, don’t hurt yourself.” Earlier words, spoken lightly, but now they feel sharp and serious, and Steve doesn’t know how to fix this, because his parents are downstairs and he can’t let them see Eddie, he can’t. So he lets Eddie go out the window, climbing carefully down the drainpipe, and Steve doesn’t stop watching until he’s disappeared down the drive.
Then Steve goes downstairs.
“Steven!” his mom greets. Her hair has been freshly dyed since he last saw her, a bright ironed blonde, and she’s in a wide-shouldered corporate pantsuit. Like she’s a businesswoman. Like she doesn’t travel with his dad just because one time she caught him with his secretary and has never been able to forget it.
He crosses his arms and stands by the counter. “Hey,” he says, nothing easy about it. He’s glad the hickey has faded.
“What, you don’t see us for a month or more and all you have to say is ‘hey’?” She opens her arms, and reluctantly, the way he always does, he allows her to pull him into her embrace. She smells like perfume and little else. Her clothes are starched and scratchy against his skin.
“He’s been busy partying, hasn’t he?”
Steve turns. It’s his dad, leaning in the doorway, also in a suit. He looks like Steve, which has always been the worst part. Shorter, restrained hair, but the same nose, the same chin. Steve doesn’t really know what to do with that. “Mainly working, more than partying,” he responds, careful to keep the edge of sarcasm out of his voice.
“Good, good. Learning a work ethic, then? Perhaps this time you’ll get into college.”
No, I won’t, he wants to say. I won’t even try. But he doesn’t say this, he just shrugs and nods and wishes they weren’t here.
“So? What else have you been doing with your time?”
“Nothing much, I guess. Hanging out with Robin, um, a few sports games, et cetera…”
His mom’s eyes light up. “Oh, Robin? You’ve mentioned her before, haven’t you? Are you and she… going steady?”
Steve winces. “No. We’re not.”
“Am I allowed to ask why not, or is that forbidden territory?” his dad says, and his tone is pretty sharp, more than teasing. For a moment Steve allows himself to think about what it would be like for a question like that to be only teasing.
Then he thinks about forbidden territory and feels something like horror creep down his spine. “We’re just friends.”
“I see. Well, Steven, I won’t have it. Girls in the house, without sealing the deal — what happened to that Wheeler girl? She knew how things ought to be done. Instead spending time with this Robin, sports games no doubt a euphemism for parties…”
His temper snaps. “Well, if you were here, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
There’s a long, painful silence. His dad straightens up in the doorway, face perfectly neutral, and that’s never a good sign, is it? Sealing the deal. Steve wants to throw up. “Your manners seem to get worse every time we see you. I won’t have it, understand? It’s completely unacceptable. I’d hoped a retail job would knock some sense into you; clearly, it’s still lacking–”
You have no idea what kind of sense I’ve gotten into, Steve wants to scream. No idea at all. He wishes Eddie were here; he wishes he could shove Eddie in his father’s face, shout Look what I’ve been up to while you’ve been away, isn’t he pretty? Yeah, that’s right, your only son has turned into a queer, too bad you weren’t ever fucking around to see it happening–
“Steven?” his mother asks, frowning, and the weight of her eyes is like a hundred tiny pricks of a cold steely pin. He’s not sure he can form the words to answer.
“Did you hear what I said? I’m expecting an explanation, Steven, this isn’t good enough–”
“Sorry,” he says.
His dad eyes him for a long moment, furious, cold, suspicious. Then he turns, and continues whatever conversation he’d been having with Steve’s mom, about a property development outside San Francisco that had fallen through, “…despicable, really, you don’t expect it and then entirely out of the blue, he’s suddenly struck down because he’s actually a poof?”
Steve feels his heart stutter in his chest. It’s not new, of course, it’s all the same sort of thing he’s been hearing from his dad for years, hearing and not really listening to — but now he’s listening. Now it matters, suddenly (and he hates that it’s sudden), in a way it didn’t before.
His mom is nodding. “It’s frightening, isn’t it? To think they can just go around like that, without telling anyone, spreading all sorts of–“
He can’t listen to any more of this, he just can’t. “I have to go,” he mumbles suddenly. “Work– I forgot, I have work.”
He doesn’t go upstairs. He doesn’t get any of his things, scarcely remembers his shoes and his keys and his wallet. He’s just– shaking, a little, his hands, they’re shaking, and his heart is racing and he doesn’t want to be here. He’s never wanted to be here, here with his parents or here in this house where Barb died, where everything began that time and everything got worse but also better and he can’t– fuck, he can’t do this with them. Not after the mute betrayal in Eddie’s eyes as he pushed him out this morning; not after the elation of last night, of the night before, of all the nights outside of this house or else just with his parents gone and he realises, now, that he wishes they were gone again.
He just gets out of the house. And he floors it, he floors it to the trailer park, and he hammers on the door and Eddie answers it with a guarded frown on his face and Steve just says– he just says, “Fuck my parents. I’m sorry. Fuck my parents. Take me to the 21 Club?”
Eddie lets him in.
They stare at each other across the room for a moment. Eddie’s still in Steve’s sweatshirt, and he’s pulled his hair out of his face in a loose knot at his nape, stray strands springing out and framing his features. He perches on the arm of the couch and lights a cigarette, crossing his arms over his chest and looking at Steve expectantly. Right. Maybe he needs more of an explanation.
“I’m sorry I kicked you out. It wasn’t– fair, I know, I just didn’t want you to– yeah. Dealing with my parents sucks at the best of times. And if they saw you–“
“I get it. I do. Just– it also sucks being, y’know, the dirty little secret. And I know I’m not, we literally told all the kids yesterday, but, like, waking up to that–“ Eddie takes an anxious puff of the cigarette. The fingers of his other hand are twitching over the loose threads in his jeans. Then his face softens. “You want to go to Indy?”
“With you? Yeah. I do.”
“We don’t have to, y’know. You’ve only been gay for two weeks.”
But Steve thinks he does. He thinks he’s tired of being told what it’s like to be gay, by everyone around him, good and bad; he thinks it’s time he started to work it out more for himself. So he says, “I want to. Like, experience it for myself. You know?”
Eddie looks at him for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Your parents really fucked you up, huh?”
Steve laughs without humor. “Didn’t yours?”
Eddie laughs too, a cold laugh, an unhappy laugh. “Yeah. They did.” Then he sighs, and moves his hands through the air with a helpless look, “Sure. We can go to Indy.”
“Tonight?”
A beat. “Yeah. Okay.” He seems to brighten, now that Steve’s given a definite arrangement, now that Steve’s actively planning on this. “You’re not going in that, though.”
Steve looks down at himself. “What’s wrong with this?”
“A polo and ironed jeans? Sorry, I didn't realise you meant the 21 Years of Lawn Cultivation convention.”
Steve flips him off, and then surrenders. He lets Eddie find him a different top, though he’s allowed to keep his jeans — something charcoal grey that clings to him in ways the polo shirts don’t, something that makes Eddie’s eyes darken as he looks at him.
“Better,” Eddie says, biting down unconsciously (but invitingly) on his lower lip. He changes too, though he puts the sweatshirt back on before Steve can see what he’s wearing underneath. Then he makes a phone call as Steve sits awkwardly on the couch, feeling suddenly stupid, like this whole thing was a mistake, though he knows it wasn’t. Eddie laughs over the phone, mentioning names Steve’s never heard of, something maybe foreign in his voice.
And Steve feels increasingly out of place. But he doesn’t renege on it; he doesn’t say let’s not do this, actually, it was a stupid idea, because it wasn’t. But he’s afraid.
And there’s no time for backing out. Because Eddie looks at him, the full force of those bright, passionate eyes on him, the question in them — “You sure you wanna go? We don’t have to. I want to, with you, but we don’t have to.”
Steve doesn’t say Let’s not. He says, “Let’s do it.”
And Eddie accepts this, with a blunt nod of his head.
Eddie drives. For the first twenty minutes, as they’re listening to something loud and full and inescapable — Judas Priest, Eddie explains in a lull, their 1984 album — Steve busies himself studying the interior of the van. Scattered items all over the place: empty cigarette packs, baggies, candy wrappers, randomly distributed cassettes. In the glovebox he finds a fifth of vodka, nearly finished, and condoms and lube, alongside the usual things you’d find in a person’s glovebox. He’s determined not to blush at his findings. So he distracts himself by looking elsewhere.
On the sun visor are attached several Post-it notes, in varying shades of sun-bleached yellow: have u brushed ur teeth, MILK, MS ODONNELLS HOMEWRK DO NOT FUCKING FORGET, dnd mondays and fridays, 5 cigs a day MAX, meet chrissy after school friday do not forget stupid.
At the Chrissy one, Steve pauses. Because, oh. That’s an old one. That’s not meant to still be there.
And he can’t not address it. “Uh, is that– the Post-it, is that…?”
Eddie’s hands tighten on the wheel, knuckles going white. “Yeah,” he says, like he breathes around the word, in a rushed sort of exhale. “Yeah, I know it’s– stupid, it’s stupid, I just– can’t bring myself to throw it out, y’know? Like– if I keep that stupid note there, then none of the shit will have happened and I’ll– and I’ll still be meeting Chrissy after school on Friday and everything will be, like, fine. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” Steve says, thinking about the way he kept (keeps) Eddie’s vest by the bed, the way he keeps the bat in the trunk at all times, the way he–
The way all of it. The way everything. None of it is stupid.
“I get it,” he says in the end, and Eddie looks at him. “I mean, I don’t know how, like, healthy it is, but it’s not– it’s pretty fucking far from stupid.”
Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, which, should he really be doing that on the freeway? But then he opens them, and his face is tortured: “I just– I can’t, Steve. I panic when I see the fucking note and I’d panic if it wasn’t there, like, everything to do with her makes me just– yeah. I don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Because Steve does know.
“Fuck,” Eddie lets out. “This is not the kind of mood we should be in for this, y’know? Why don’t we get lunch.”
So they do, they get lunch. Something greasy from a roadside diner, where Eddie steals half of Steve’s fries even though he has his own, and they cheer each other up a little, talking about nothing and poking fun at the fifties doo-wop on the jukebox. Eddie in Steve’s sweatshirt and Steve in Eddie’s t shirt. Knees knocking together under the table.
“You didn’t wanna bring Robin and Nancy?” Eddie says, when they’ve finished eating.
“Not this time,” Steve just says, and Eddie looks at him quietly and seems to get it. Like he always gets it.
In Indianapolis, Eddie pulls up outside an unassuming apartment building and offers a teasing bow as he bids Steve go ahead; they’re buzzed in and then they’re going up a faintly dingy stairwell, Eddie’s hand in his, even though it sort of makes his heart hammer in his chest. But they meet no one. And then a door, scuffed with a spatter of spraypaint on it, like graffiti was poorly cleaned off. Eddie knocks rhythmically.
“Is that your boyfriend’s sweatshirt or am I gonna have to knock some style into you again, darling?” is the first thing the man — drag queen, Steve realises — who opens the door says. He’s alarmingly tall, though when Steve looks down he realises that’s due to a pair of silver platform heels. His hair is close-shaven to his head, which shows off huge silver hoop earrings, and his dark skin is painted with makeup. Steve has to take a moment — a long moment — to stop and stare, dumbfounded.
“It’s his,” Eddie says, jabbing Steve in the shoulder with a finger. “No style advice necessary, I promise.”
“Well, ain’t that sweet,” he drawls, and Eddie pulls him into a tight hug. “You can call me Cherry, pretty boy,” he says to Steve, when Eddie steps back. “Come in, come in, welcome to the den of despair.”
“Charming,” Eddie snarks, following him in anyway. Steve hesitates on the threshold for only a moment, because isn’t this what he wanted? To be thrown in at the deep end? And he’s always been a strong swimmer.
The apartment is surprisingly neat, nothing like Eddie’s trailer. The whitewashed walls are decorated with brightly colored graphic prints, cartoonish figures interlocking, and Steve is peering curiously at a particularly (coincidentally?) penis-shaped one when Cherry speaks behind him: “I presume this is your boy, then, judging by the way he’s looking at my Keith Haring?”
“Yes, that’s him,” Eddie says, and Steve feels his cheeks flush red. When he turns, he sees Eddie has taken the sweatshirt off, revealing a dark top that’s more mesh than top, actually, and fuck. Well, fuck.
Cherry is looking between the two of them approvingly. “Good for you, darlings, because these’re not happy times to be gay and single in.”
And just like that the mood is somber, maybe more somber than Steve understands, because Eddie draws in a shaky breath and gets an unhappy smile on his face. “How, um– how are you doing, anyway?”
“You don’t gotta ask that every time, y’know. It’s been two years. He’s dead and I’m here and thank god he didn’t trust me enough to skip protection, right? I’m doing fine, my dear. Worry about your own pretty self.”
Steve doesn’t really get what’s going on. But after a moment they both seem to shake it off, and Cherry begins telling some story that has both Eddie and Steve in stitches, dramatic and flamboyant and really Steve can see on some level where Eddie gets it from, if this is the drag queen he was talking about in the car that time.
Cherry makes them each a drink, something fruity and sour he calls a golden margarita, and then waves a hand airily. “I’ll be off soon, got a show tonight, unless you’re coming?” He raises an eyebrow and speaks before they can answer, “But don’t, I think my crowd might be too kinky for pretty boy over here.”
Eddie smirks and touches Steve’s cheek, again hot with a blush. “We’re working on it.”
“I’ll be out all night, and I mean all night, you know the drill. You can sleep in my bed — feel free to fuck in it, but I’d better see a condom in the trash and no stains on the sheets.”
“No stains! Promise!” Eddie calls over his shoulder, already heading down the hallway.
Steve freezes for a moment. Cherry looks at him with a heavily edited eyebrow raised. “He’s not a drag daughter of mine but I have a sorta responsibility for him, I suppose, suppose he’s a son-in-law or something, so– if you hurt him, darling, I’m obligated to bury you. Which would be a waste of a pretty face, wouldn’t it?”
But he feels less frozen now, because he’s heard this before, hasn’t he? And it makes him happy, in some way, because it means Eddie has more than one person around him who cares that much. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It probably would.”
Cherry gives him a grin, then. “Okay. Have fun, you kids, while you still can.”
Steve is sort of used to his grim sense of humor, even though it’s only been an hour or so, so he just snorts and nods in response. And then he leaves, and Steve follows Eddie into the bedroom and finds him applying eyeliner with a practiced hand, peering at a cracked mirror as Grace Jones spins away on the record player in the corner.
Steve leans in the doorway, sipping his golden margarita and watching. There’s something unbelievably attractive about it, actually, the care with which he does it, the smirk he gets as he looks at Steve in the mirror over his shoulder.
“Did you like Cherry?“ he says.
“He’s– something. A good something? I think?”
“He certainly is something.” A beat. He raises the eyeliner pencil. “Can I?”
Steve stares at him. “You’re kidding.”
Eddie shrugs carelessly. He’s let his hair down, and it falls over his shoulders as he moves. “The offer’s on the table.”
Steve hesitates. Then he thinks about the tight t shirt he’s already wearing, the makeup on Cherry’s face, the way no one here knows his name or anything about him and if they did they wouldn’t even care — and he shrugs too. “Fuck it.”
Which is how he ends up lying back on the bed with Eddie straddling him, holding his chin still as he applies eyeliner with a touch that tickles, and fuck. Eddie’s big dark eyes are so intent on his own, so inescapable. Maybe he’s a little turned on. Such that Eddie shifts on his hips and smirks again — “Why don’t we wait until after the club, hmm?” — and Steve smirks back in return and doesn’t say anything.
And then they’re ready. And then they’re going. They finish their drinks and they’re strong, actually, strong enough to have Steve buzzing a little when they walk a few blocks and wind up in the queue to something that doesn’t look like much, from the outside, but he can tell it’s different from the vibe in the queue, guys with earrings and skimpy tops, girls with short hair and heavy boots. Eddie twists their hands together as they go in, sending him a smile, a real smile, an encouraging smile, as his face is swallowed in red lights and they emerge into a pounding crowd.
It’s like nothing Steve’s ever seen. Or, rather, felt, because it’s not about seeing, really. It’s about the pulsing energy of the music over the crowd, the flaring lights and the tall figures with masculine features and feminine make up, the women tugging other women closer, the men dancing with other men. The way they’re allowed to do that, or if they’re not they don’t give a flying fuck and they do it anyway, and how freeing that is, in a world only a few hours away from Hawkins.
Eddie gets them drinks, and they loiter by the bar for a while. Some people know Eddie, Steve notices. Two short-haired girls come over and pull him into fierce hugs — “How did the Patti Smith go over?” one of them shouts in his ear, and Eddie smiles widely, “Great!” — and several men give him nods, Nods, and Steve can recognise those from the amount of casual sex he himself has had. Which, yeah. A little bit of jealousy prickles in his gut. But only a little, because all Eddie’s attention is on him, the whole time.
Then the song changes, and it’s a song he recognises, full synths and an incredible voice and Bronski Beat, right, this is Bronski Beat. And Eddie’s face lights up and his hand on Steve’s tightens as he pulls him deeper into the crowd. He’s singing along to the words, though an octave lower at least since who the fuck has the range to match Jimmy Somerville, and he’s dancing. He dances the way a rocker dances, because of course he does, all throwing his head all over the place and sending his hair flying in the air — but it’s sexier than that, it’s swinging his hips and keeping his eyes on Steve’s the whole time he does it, tattoos showing through the mesh in his shirt, brushing up close to Steve and matching the way the other couples around them are dancing, intimate, gay. And fuck, if he isn’t pretty as he does it. Hot.
Steve lets himself be drawn into the dance. He’s not really the biggest dancer — spent too long at shitty high school parties for that, where everyone gets too drunk and feels too cool to really let loose the way they did ten years ago — but it’s not that hard to find the rhythm in his hips, following Eddie’s lead.
“Tell me whyyyy,” Eddie sings at him, and Steve smiles and sings it back, and for once he doesn’t care what he sounds like, or looks like, or anything about what’s going on around them because right now it’s just Eddie, it’s just Eddie and Steve. Their own little world. Just like everyone around them is in their own little world, like this is just a collection of universes all brought together, each to their own, each allowed to be whatever they fuck they want to be and there’s no right way to do any of it, Steve realises now, he doesn’t have to fit in here because he shouldn’t. Because no one does.
After the song Eddie pulls him outside to the alleyway and offers him a cigarette, and they smoke it standing so close they’re breathing the same air. And then the girl from earlier is coming over and Eddie introduces her as Eve, and her girlfriend as Dylan, and they talk about Bronski Beat and the local drag scene and how awful Reagan is for half an hour, and then they go back inside and dance to Sylvester until they’re breathless and sweating, and in the bathroom mirror Steve finds his eyeliner melting down the corners of his eyes and doesn’t care about the way it gives him a blurred, rocker look, likes it quite a lot, actually. He looks cool. Cool in a way that says fuck what they say. He’s never been able to say fuck what they say so completely before.
And at the swell of the next song he grabs Eddie by the collar and pulls him into a kiss; and the kiss doesn’t stop, and their dancing dissolves into making out, fierce and uncontrolled, Eddie’s tongue licking into his mouth and Steve’s hands wandering, and they’ve been here a few hours now and he thinks that’s enough to ditch and find somewhere they can do this properly, right? Here in this other world. This made-up, perfect world.
“Let’s get out of here?” he says (yells) in Eddie’s ear.
And Eddie looks at him, eyes dark even in the strobing red lights. “You sure?”
And that question is enough, because then Steve knows. He’s almost (but not entirely) forgotten his parents exist. Here everything feels safer, alien in a way that makes it okay. Is he sure? “Yes.”
So Eddie takes him back to the apartment.
Their lips collide in the doorway; Eddie kisses down Steve’s neck and then stops, some new excitement alive in his eyes: “Let me show you something cool,” he says, and doesn’t wait for a response before tugging him further up the stairwell until they emerge onto the roof.
The sky, spread out starry and dark before them. Polluted ashy purple by the lights of the city but still with the pinpoints of stars shining through, mapping out constellations that Steve doesn’t know the names of. Somehow tonight that doesn’t matter. Somehow tonight he can just look at them without caring what they’re called.
He looks at Eddie. His beautiful — beautiful — profile, lit in a soft orange glow by the streetlamps below and the taller buildings above them. His ringed hand on Steve’s, the tattoos on his pale skin that seem to make it delicate, in some way, like by contrast against the hard dark lines of the things he likes traced out in inky black.
“What happened with your parents?” Steve asks, softly.
Eddie looks at him. The alcohol’s wearing off, now, but Steve can’t regret his question. It feels like the right moment to ask it. “My mom left when I was four,” Eddie says, equally softly. “My dad was shitty. Got shittier when he knew I was gay, which, hey. Dads like that are dime a dozen. White trash is as white trash does, right?” and his voice is sardonic and bitter. “I ran away when I was fourteen.”
“Oh,” Steve says. It’s not surprising, really. None of it. But it’s awful, and he thinks about his own parents, thinks about Eddie running away instead of cowering in the corner and pretending to be something he’s not, and thinks — there’s bravery in that. Even in running away.
“Cherry, he’s– I didn’t really know him, in the start. When I first started coming here. It was his partner, who taught me things, took me under his wing and all that, actually. But he– yeah, he died of what everyone’s dying of, about a year after I met him, and Cherry feels some kinda responsibility, I guess. It’s– yeah. Unnecessary. But nice.”
“Oh,” Steve says again. He squeezes Eddie’s hand, thinks about what everyone’s dying of, feels his heart jolt in his chest. He doesn’t want to die. None of them do. “Does it– does it scare you?”
“Of course it scares me, Steve. Of course it does. But it’s– life. I can’t not live my life, as me, y’know? I can’t let them, or it, stop me.”
Steve looks at him. “You’re fucking brave, man, I’m not gonna hear a single word to deny it. Jesus. I’m– I’m scared. Of all of this. Of the big wide world, and being, like, something different in it. Different to what everyone else is.”
“Not everyone else.”
“No,” he allows. “But I’m scared anyway. But also– I like the world. And maybe– maybe yeah. I’d like to live my life as me too.”
There’s a burst of music, somewhere faint, something that sounds suspiciously like the Time Warp before it’s abruptly cut off like the person playing it is afraid of being heard. They smile at each other in the dark. Other people out there, feeling the same emotions, doing the same things. Existing. They’re all here existing.
Later, inside, Eddie takes him apart, piece by piece. They dismantle each other and learn what they’re made of. They fuck imperfectly: perfection’s not the point. Perfection’s never been the point. Steve loses himself in Eddie and at the same time feels more like himself than he’s ever been.
After, Eddie looks at him through half-lidded eyes. His voice has a gravelly breathlessness to it as he says, “Y’know, if we were a hundred or so miles further north, we’d have just committed a crime.”
“You really have corrupted me, then,” Steve responds, just as breathlessly. They grin.
They fall asleep tangled together on a drag queen’s mattress, under a Keith Haring picture, as the sun rises outside. And in the morning Cherry makes them coffee and smirks at them knowingly, looks approvingly at the used condom in the trash; Steve phones Robin and tells her all about the trip they’re gonna take next weekend to the 21 Club, You’re gonna love it, I promise, and Eddie shouts at the phone that “My second favorite dyke wants to meet you!”, and Steve can feel the force of her grin over the line. And after a lazy breakfast they begin the drive back to Hawkins.
Getting in the van, Eddie looks at the sun visor. The Post-its, scattered all over it. First he removes the Ms O’Donnell one — redundant, now he’s passed. Then he hesitates with fingers that tremble a little, though only a little, over the Chrissy one. Steve doesn’t say anything. Just watches.
Eddie rips it off and folds it neatly, pushing it into the back of the glovebox. “Can’t let go of it completely,” he says, tightly. “But– yeah. No point keeping it there forever, right?”
“Right,” Steve says. He doesn’t say, you’re amazing. He doesn’t say, I’m so fucking proud of you my heart might burst. He doesn’t say, you might be one of the bravest people I’ve ever known. He hopes Eddie knows it. And if he doesn’t — there’ll be plenty of time to tell him.
END