Archive of Our Own ^beta

March 27th

12:21 a.m.

If Dustin or Lucas ask, Mike has totally been paying attention to their conversation this entire time.

This is, obviously, a lie. His attention is currently being demanded by far more interesting things. Namely, lying sprawled across Will’s bed, peering over Will’s shoulder at his laptop screen, and listening to David Attenborough narrate the swimming patterns of a particularly captivating jellyfish.

“Remind me why we’re watching this again,” Will murmurs from next to him, shifting slightly in place. He grabs onto the laptop with one hand to keep it from falling off from where it’s currently balanced precariously on his stomach. His bed isn’t very big – it’s a standard twin XL, the bane of every college student’s existence – which means that Mike’s been forced to lie half on top of him to get this whole arrangement to work. He’s on his side, with his head resting on Will’s shoulder, his arms – and one of Will’s too – tucked somewhere under his stomach, and his legs twisted haphazardly under Will’s duvet cover.

Not that he’s complaining. The furthest from it, actually.

“Because it’s interesting,” Mike sniffs, feigning offense. “You’re telling me you don’t want to learn about the Portuguese Man O’ War?”

“Of course not,” Will says immediately. “I totally want to learn about the Portuguese Man O’ War. I mean, look at those– um.”

“Tentacles,” Mike offers, when Will pauses. “Were you not paying attention?”

He can’t see Will’s face, due to the whole lying on his side and half on top of Will thing, but he’s got his ear pressed up almost to Will’s chest, and he feels the answering laugh reverberate through his own body. “I was!” Will assures him, hitting pause. “I swear! I just– I forgot which ones are the arms and which ones are the tentacles.”

“Only true jellies have the arms,” Mike adds, in his best attempt to be helpful – which is something he’d learned while binging Blue Planet with Will over the last two weeks. “Remember?” It’s quickly become Mike’s favorite pastime, partially because he just really loves Blue Planet, but mostly – like, eighty-three percent of the reason – it’s because he’s thrilled about the excuse to be all close to Will like this, limbs tangled up on this insultingly small bed, and just laying like that for hours.

And also: David Attenborough.

It seems, however, that only one of them has been paying attention to David Attenborough’s beguiling use of narration. 

“Sorry,” Will says, sounding, to his credit, the slightest bit sheepish. He shifts again, almost imperceptibly, and adds, “Okay, can we readjust, actually, because my arm is starting to fall asleep.”

“Oh! Yeah, sorry, hang on–”

Mike grabs the laptop, lifts himself up onto the palms of his hands like the world’s most pathetic attempt at a push up, and waits for Will to readjust. It’s perilous work, seeing as Mike is pushing six feet and Will is not that far behind, so, as Will squirms and rolls over in place, Mike holds still and tries his hardest to not be the reason that Will falls off the bed and suffers permanent brain damage.

Unfortunately, holding still and no longer lying down means that he catches Lucas and Dustin’s eyes from across the room, and instantly regrets it.

“He emerges!” Dustin exclaims, glancing at where Mike’s hair is no doubt a mess from lying on this bed for the last hour or so. “I was beginning to think you guys had fallen asleep again.”

Lucas gives him a look. Mike knows this look. He gets it from one of them – mostly Lucas, but Dustin has been known to engage from time to time – any time he and Will do something that can be construed as being not entirely platonic. Mike is going to go out on a limb here and say that this – lying all tangled up with Will while he indulges Mike with another one of his requests for strangely specific nature documentaries – is being construed as not entirely platonic. He doesn’t know what the big deal here is, personally, because it’s not like he and Will are lying like this on purpose, okay? The bed is tiny! They’re two very tall young adults! Things happen!

(Is Mike complaining? No. Is he kind of, maybe, secretly very pleased about this arrangement? Um–)

Mike very pointedly keeps his gaze fixed on Dustin, and does not look at Lucas when he replies. “That was one time!” he protests. “It was literally once!”

It wasn’t. It was at least five.

“It wasn’t,” Dustin says. “It was at least seven.”

Oh.

Lucas’ look is growing more and more smug by the second, and Mike knows where he’s going with this, and he knows he’s going to get an absolute earful of it the second they head back to their own room. “Whatever,” he says instead, just as Will finishes wiggling around right on time to rescue him.

“Okay,” Will says, patting the empty spot next to him that Mike’s torso had been taking up a few minutes ago. “You can lie down again now.”

“Unbelievable,” Lucas says, except Mike is lying back down now, and Lucas’ head has disappeared from his line of sight. Thankfully. “We’ve been talking about summer break plans for half an hour, asshole, and you haven’t even noticed!”

Mike is about to shoot back a reply, something about how he had been listening – he hadn’t – and how he’s totally on board – he probably would be, once he figures out what said plans are – but his attention is immediately commandeered by something else. Again.

“Hi,” Will grins at him, and it isn’t until Mike is lying down again that it hits him, that Will is on his side, the laptop is tucked into the open V between their bodies, and they’re facing each other now.

Which is–

“Hi,” Mike says back, praying that Lucas can’t see the look on his face, because–

Okay, look. It’s different now, than it was before, because now Will is kind of curled into him, his head coming close enough to almost rest against Mike’s chest, and he feels Will’s feet sliding against his own, under the covers, the scratchy wool of his socks a weird and jarring sensation against the exposed parts of Mike’s ankles, but that’s not nearly the weirdest or most jarring part about this whole thing.

Mike suddenly really, really wishes Lucas and Dustin weren’t here.

Not that it makes a difference. The four of them hang out, like, every day, and he and Will hang out a lot even without the other two there, and Dustin and Will’s room is down the hall from his and Lucas’, which means that Mike has had plenty and plenty and plenty of opportunities to make a move.

He just– hasn’t. For some reason unbeknownst to mankind, Mike Wheeler has yet to make a move.

He thinks, sometimes, that Will might want him to. Because Mike isn’t an expert on close friendships – like, he’s friends with Lucas and Dustin, but they’re Lucas and Dustin – but this is Will, who kind of exists on another plane altogether, and the line between romantic and platonic intimacy has been kind of blurred with him, as long as Mike can remember. And he just– he does things, sometimes, that make Mike think–

Well. If he made a move and it ended horribly, he’d have plausible deniability about it at least. He’d be able to say, Hey, so very sorry that I thought you were interested in me when you did all these things that people do when they’re interested in someone. My bad.

Will reaches out and clicks play, and the vibrant red and orange jellyfish on the laptop screen starts moving around again. Mike had been totally engrossed in this not even ten minutes ago, or as engrossed as he could get anyway, while lying on Will’s chest – in a very platonic manner! Now, however, David Attenborough’s accent is the last thing on his mind.

“Do you have room?” Mike asks, kind of into the top of Will’s head where it’s tucked somewhere under his chin. “Are you going to fall off?”

“No, I think I’m okay.” Will shuffles a bit closer, which is nice – very nice – and adds, “Do you have room?”

Truthfully, Mike is feeling a bit squished up against the wall. “Um,” he says, feeling incredibly reluctant at even just the thought of Will adjusting and moving away, “my arm is a little– uh. Stuck.”

Will pauses for a moment. In front of them, the shot pans out to reveal a wide expanse of open blue ocean. Will lifts his head off the pillow and says, “Here, just– move your arm under me.”

Mike blinks. “Um. Like–”

“Like this,” Will says, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. He steadies his laptop with one hand, guides Mike’s arm under his neck with the other, then lies back down, tucking himself into the curve of Mike’s shoulder. “This okay?”

Oh, great. So they’re, like, cuddling cuddling now.

This is fine. This is so, totally, completely fine. 

Mike does not look over at Lucas and Dustin, but he feels their stares burning a hole through the side of his head anyway. His hand hangs, a bit awkwardly, over the side of the bed; he doesn’t know if he should bring it up, wrap his arm around Will’s shoulders, rest his hand on Will’s upper arm or side. He wants to, is the thing – he really, really wants to, because Will is warm and he’s got his whole face shoved into Mike’s neck, so clearly he’s on board with whatever’s happening here – but Mike doesn’t know if that would be too much. Wrapping his arms around Will, holding him like that– 

This has been a recent development, the cuddling. It’s not that they were averse to it before, but ever since spring break, for some reason, Will’s been acting strangely clingy. Initiating touch where he wasn’t nearly so eager to before. Splaying his full body weight across Mike when they hang out on his bed, watching TV or just talking to Lucas and Dustin. Curling up next to him without a second thought. Resting his head on Mike’s shoulder like he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it – which Mike is more than fine with.

The issue is, that at this rate, Mike doesn’t know if he’s going to survive to see junior year.

“Yeah,” he says faintly, “that’s cool,” even though his arm is still caught under something now – it’s just Will instead of his own clumsy body weight. 

Clearly, this is preferable.

“Cool,” Will echoes. He glances up at Mike, gives him a small, easy smile, wiggles impossibly closer, and falls silent again. 

Oh, god.

“I’ll be in Houston for the first two-thirds of the summer,” Dustin is saying, and whether it’s to all four of them or just Lucas, Mike can’t recall. “Which is kind of a bummer but I guess Houston beats Hawkins so.”

“NASA beats everything,” Lucas snorts, which is true, in Mike’s opinion, and also means they’re talking about Dustin’s upcoming internship again. It’s all he’s been talking about ever since he got the email and the call, and Mike can’t even be mad about it, because an internship with NASA is really fucking cool. “You’d be pumped about it even if it was in, like, North Dakota. No offense to North Dakota,” he adds, as if someone might be listening.

“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” Mike chimes in, and Will startles slightly at the sound. “We all know you’re so excited to ditch us for two months.”

“Well–”

“Don’t encourage him,” Will says, a little bit muffled into the fabric of Mike’s t-shirt. “He’s going to be so mean about it right up until he catches his flight.”

“True,” Mike muses, ignoring Dustin’s half-hearted noise of protest. He listens to the soft sounds of Will’s breathing, barely audible over Lucas and Dustin’s squabble picking up in volume and also the laptop screen in front of them. Mike stopped paying attention a while ago, too busy focusing on whether it would be weird to wrap his arm around Will or not.

Don’t be a coward, he chides himself. It’s not a big deal. And Will’s the one who initiated the whole thing – lying almost on top of him, guiding Mike’s arm under his neck, shoving his whole face into Mike’s shoulder and lying even more on top of him. 

They’re literally already cuddling. Mike doesn’t know why he’s getting so worked up about this.

(After all, it’s not like he’s trying to kiss–)

No. He stops that thought firmly in its tracks before it can go any further, then takes a breath, wraps his arm the rest of the way around Will’s side – until his hand is resting on the slight dip of his back – and pulls him in.

Will makes a soft, pleased sound under him, and lets himself be moved. The reaction is almost instantaneous, like he was waiting for Mike to do this.

Was he waiting for Mike to do this?

“Okay?” Mike asks quietly. “Is that–”

“Great,” Will whispers back, barely loud enough for Mike to hear, even with Will so close to him. He rests a hand on Mike’s chest, tucks his feet under Mike’s shins, and lies there in quiet complacency as Mike’s brain proceeds to leak right out of his ears.

Okay. This is fine. This is apparently just something they do now. They don’t just cuddle – in a very platonic manner, mind you – but they do it with their arms and legs all wrapped around each other and heads and hands resting on each other’s chests, and David Attenborough’s Blue Planet going sadly forgotten on the laptop between them.

“I don’t understand you two,” Lucas says, his voice sounding like it’s coming from very far away to Mike’s scrambled-egg brain – and, right. Lucas and Dustin are still here too.

Mike wishes they’d leave.

“What’s not to understand?” Will mumbles. He sounds a bit tired, but Mike might just be imagining it. It’s not that late, really, but it’s been a long week and an even longer weekend, somehow, and Mike knows Will’s had his nose to the grindstone regarding his upcoming animation project. He frowns, taps his fingers against Will’s back to get his attention.

“Hey. You tired?”

“No,” Will says resolutely. “‘M not.”

“The thing I don’t understand,” Lucas says, loud and dramatic, “is why you two do this.”

“It’s nice,” Mike says, still a bit distracted by the way Will’s fingers have curled into the fabric of his t-shirt. “You guys should try it sometime.”

“Oxytocin,” Will says, enunciating the word like he’s about to say something else, and then whatever he’d been about to say slips into a silent yawn.

“Yeah,” Dustin says, and Mike can see him now, since he’s standing up from his bed – where he and Lucas had been sitting side by side on their phones – and walking over to his desk. “Oxytocin. Sure does exist.”

“Shut up,” Will says, voice gone weirdly wobbly before it drags out into another barely muffled yawn. “Y’know what I mean.”

“You’re slurring your words again,” Mike points out, “which means you’re either totally wasted or you’re tired.”

“Wasted,” Will says automatically, wiggling his feet where they’re trapped under Mike’s legs. “I’m not tired.”

Mike knows what that means. They do this little song and dance routine every time Mike comes over (which is almost every day), every time Will comes over to Mike’s (which is every day that Mike doesn’t), and every time they end up tangled together under a pile of blankets in bed, watching something that’s really just a flimsy excuse for Mike to wrap all one hundred feet of his limbs around Will like a particularly clingy koala. Will gets tired (because they’re lying under a pile of blankets together), and then Mike has to go.

Will always protests. Mike always lets himself read into things, just a little. 

I.e.: I’m not tired, meaning please don’t go.

Mike still refuses to meet Lucas’ eye, but maybe living in close proximity has rendered them vaguely telepathic, at least in regards to each other, because he hears Lucas say, “Okay, well. I have an 8:30 tomorrow, so.”

Honestly, screw Lucas and his stupid, healthy, student-athlete-lifestyle-endorsed sleep schedule. Mike knows he has an 8:30 tomorrow, because he’s the one that gets woken up when Lucas’ 6 o’clock alarm goes off, then again at 7:30 when he gets back from his workout, and then again at 8:15 when he slams the door shut in an inhumanely loud manner to sprint across campus to the Health Sciences building for his lab.

“You could always just wake up and work out with me,” Lucas had grinned, the last time Mike had bothered saying anything, and the only thing worse than the idea of getting up at six in the morning is the idea of getting up at six in the morning and then putting his body through all that – on purpose – so he’s kept his mouth shut since and invested in some heavy-duty earplugs.

“Will,” Mike says, nudging him again. “I’ve gotta head out.”

“You say that as if you don’t live down the hall,” Will mumbles.

“Will,” Mike laughs, and Will shifts, groaning softly. The documentary stopped playing, like, ten minutes ago. Mike stares at his reflection in the black screen and wonders, briefly, just when he became this pathetic.

“Fine,” Will says, then sits up, blankets falling off his shoulders. “I’ll let you go.”

“So generous of you, Will,” Lucas says, already grabbing for his keys. “Mike has an early morning workout with me tomorrow. He’s going to start lifting weights.”

“Mike is doing no such thing,” Mike points out, as Will hops off his bed and Mike does his best to untangle himself from the mess of sheets. It’s become a bit of a running joke to them now, but they both know that Mike is not opening his eyes for good until his last alarm goes off at ten. “Mike is taking advantage of his free morning tomorrow and sleeping.”

“Then Mike can stop complaining about getting winded from going up a single flight of stairs,” Lucas replies, and Mike doesn’t know why they’re having this conversation in the third person, but he’s sure nothing good can possibly come of it.

“Fine. Whatever.”

Will is standing at the foot of the bed as Mike gets down, shaking his leg to get his bunched-up pant leg to fall down. “Got everything?”

“Uh–” Mike pats his pockets in rapid succession– “I mean. Phone. Keys. Wallet. Yeah.”

“Okay,” Will whispers. “You should go.”

“I should,” Mike agrees.

It’s true. He should. He’s got a free morning tomorrow but the rest of his day is busy busy busy, and you’d think he’d learned his lesson by now about catching his sleep where he can find it. Mike should go.

He finds himself lingering anyway, despite himself – there, at the foot of Will’s bed. The unmade duvet is crumpled up and drooping off the side of the mattress and Will looks like he might yawn again, any second now, and Lucas is waiting by the door and Dustin is shooting him a weird look and Mike needs to go.

He doesn't want to. Not at all.

“Um,” Mike says, because he’ll literally see Will tomorrow – they see each other almost every day – so it would probably be weird to, like, hug him or something. Before he can think better of it, he holds his hand out, balled into a fist. “Bye.”

Will shoots him a baffled look. “Bye?” he says, like it’s a question, then taps his knuckles gently against Mike’s. “See you tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah! Tomorrow,” Mike agrees, then tries his best not to trip over his own two feet getting to the door.

“Dude,” Lucas says, the second Will and Dustin’s room door is shut behind them. They’ve barely taken two steps into the hallway when he speaks. “Dude.”

Mike points a finger at him and glares. “Not a word out of you,” he hisses. “Not. One. Word.”

March 27th

10:06 a.m.

The earplugs were clearly a good investment, because Mike sleeps right through Lucas coming and going a million times and also his first alarm, and doesn’t open his eyes until his second alarm has been desperately beeping away for at least four minutes. He shoots a silent apology to his neighbor, who could definitely hear it through the paper-thin walls of his dorm room, and reaches a hand out blindly for his phone, which promptly topples off of his nightstand and onto the floor.

It’s still beeping. “Great,” Mike groans aloud, eyes still closed, and pitches over the side of the bed to retrieve it. The screen reads 10:06 when he does, which is a pretty solid time to wake up, Mike thinks, except clearly not solid enough because his eyes are stubbornly refusing to open all the way.

It’s a nice enough morning. Late March sunlight is streaming in through the blinds, a little crooked from that one time Mike had yanked too hard on the strings and made them go all lopsided. Mike has nowhere to be, because his Intro to Short Story Writing class doesn’t start until 1:30 and that means he has a couple hours to just lie around and–

His phone buzzes in his hand. Incoming Call: Lucas the screen reads up at him.

Okay. Scratch that. “What?” Mike says, eyes slowly opening, bit by gradual bit.

“Good morning to you too,” Lucas answers, irritatingly cheery for someone who’s been awake for four hours already. “Did you just wake up?”

“No,” Mike lies.

“Uh huh.” Lucas doesn’t sound like he believes him. He has good reason not to. “Sure.”

“Okay, maybe,” Mike concedes, then rubs at his eyes with one hand and rolls over. “What do you want?”

“So mean to me,” Lucas says, in mock hurt. “I was literally just calling to see if you wanted to have breakfast, but if you want me to fuck off I can do that too.”

“Breakfast,” Mike echoes absently, half his face shoved into his pillow. His bed is warm, and his blankets are warm, and it would be so easy to just ignore Lucas’ voice and simply go back to–

“It’s waffle bar day at the dining hall,” Lucas says in a light singsong, and then Mike’s eyes snap the rest of the way open.

“Really?”

“Would I lie to you?”

The answer is yes, sort of, but never successfully and also never about waffle bar day. College life has its ups and downs – and lately, it’s felt like there are a lot more downs than ups – but waffle bar day remains one of the highlights of Mike’s sorry, pathetic, residence-hall-occupying existence.

“You’re sure?” he asks, one last time for good measure before rolling back over and sitting up, not bothering to hide the involuntary noise of protest that comes out of his mouth. “You’re not lying to me?”

“Just get your ass down here before all the good toppings are gone,” Lucas says, then promptly hangs up.

Mike knows Lucas is going to bring it up even before he opens his mouth.

“So,” Lucas drawls, slow and way too knowing and looking about two seconds from bouncing off the walls with glee. Mike can practically hear him vibrating with barely-contained excitement. “So.”

“So,” Mike parrots, concentrating very hard on pouring an appropriate amount of maple syrup onto his mini waffles, and pointedly avoiding eye contact. “So what?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Lucas chides. His own plate is stacked high with, like, fruit and stuff. Mike thinks that’s a waste of a perfectly good waffle bar day, because strawberries and bananas are always going to be there but the mini waffles are not. “You know exactly what.”

Mike does know exactly what. He is, however, also trying to delay his imminent doom for as long as possible. Preferably long enough to at least be able to start eating first. “No idea,” he says, as they maneuver their way through the last of the breakfast crowd at the dining hall and slide into an empty table near the cereal station.

“You and Will,” Lucas says, stabbing a halved strawberry with his fork and popping it into his mouth. “You and Will.”

Mike scoops up a whipped cream dollop and does not make eye contact. “Me and Will?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Lucas says again, this time through a mouthful of berry. “It’s not a good look on you.”

“I’m not playing dumb!” Mike says, even though he totally is. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He fell asleep on you?” Lucas says, like it’s a question instead of the pathetically hilarious fact it is. “He literally fell asleep on you?”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “Platonically.”

“I,” Lucas starts, then pauses. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No?” Mike says, confused. Just because Will fell asleep on him doesn’t mean it’s like that. They’re friends! Friends do this, sometimes. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Whether Mike wants it to mean something or not is a totally different matter – he does – and it’s not the point here. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just Will.”

“Dude,” Lucas says. “Your big fat crazy giant crush on him says otherwise.”

“I don’t have a–!” Mike starts to protest, then immediately realizes this is totally and completely useless because Lucas was the first one he told about his– his big fat crazy giant crush, and has proceeded to tell him about every update and addition to his big fat crazy giant crush since it first popped into existence years ago. “Okay, but, like– just because I have a– a big fat crazy giant crush doesn’t mean he has one back.”

Lucas looks at him like he’s just grown a second head. “Dude,” Lucas says, with more emotion and stress than one person should logically be able to put on a single syllable. “He. Fell. Asleep. On. You.”

“Yeah,” Mike says again, with emphasis this time, because it clearly hadn’t sunk in the first time. “Platonically.”

“Mike,” Lucas sighs, with the air of someone much older and wiser and generally more troubled than Lucas Sinclair – pre-med student to the stars and possibly the best basketball player the University of Connecticut has to offer – usually comes off. “I’m going to lay this out for you as bluntly as I possibly can.”

Mike nods, albeit warily. “I’m listening.”

Lucas holds up one finger. “Will watches those stupid deep sea documentaries with you even though he could be doing literally anything else. And he probably wants to be doing literally anything else. And he would be, if it wasn’t you.”

“They’re interesting!” Mike exclaims, because they are. “Maybe he just likes them!”

Lucas ignores him.

“Two,” he holds up another finger, “you guys cuddle.”

“Platonically,” Mike tries, but it comes out a bit weaker this time. “It’s–”

“Three,” Lucas interrupts, holding up a third finger. “When you guys cuddle, it’s intense. And it’s weird. And it makes the rest of us poor single schmucks – or poor schmucks who are so tragically and bravely enduring long distance – feel bad.”

Mike doesn’t have anything to say to that. It’s true. The arms and the legs and the whole– the whole head on Mike’s chest thing – yeah. “Platonically?” he tries again.

“Mike.” Lucas gives him a look. “You love me, right?”

“You’re okay,” Mike responds, and then, at Lucas’ answering kick at his shin under the table – “Ow! Ow, okay, yes, I love you– stop that!”

“Would you cuddle with me?” Lucas asks.

“Um,” Mike says, going for as truthful as he possibly can without hurting Lucas’ feelings. “Like, a little, maybe.”

Lucas raises an eyebrow. “Define ‘a little, maybe.”

“Like,” Mike tries, “um.”

The bottom line here is pretty obvious. He wouldn’t want to hug Lucas like that, or let Lucas stick his head on his chest or wrap his arms around Lucas’ back and, like–

Ew.

“Exactly,” Lucas says, evidently privy to whatever is going on in Mike’s head as he triumphantly shovels banana slices into his mouth. Mike wishes he’d look a little less pleased with himself. It’s kind of unsettling. “Exactly.”

“Yeah, but that’s just me,” Mike sighs, trying his hardest to not sound like this has been eating him up for the better part of the last two years – and probably longer than that too. It is, of course, unsuccessful, because he’s Mike, and he probably hasn’t ever managed to be subtle where Will is concerned. “I just– I don’t know. Maybe that’s not what it’s like for him.”

“Explain.”

“You know,” Mike flails, waving one hand in the air. “He’s– I mean, I wouldn’t want to do that with anyone else. But maybe Will isn’t like that, you know? Maybe he’s just like this with everyone. For me it’s just him. But for him–” Mike stares dejectedly down at his pile of mini waffles. He stabs into one, lifts it to his mouth, and takes a sorrowful bite. “Maybe it’s not just me,” he adds, chewing. “For him, I mean. Obviously.”

Lucas stares. “Are you kidding? Dude. It’s Will. He’s literally obsessed with you. Who else would he be doing this with?”

Mike looks down at his plate and suppresses a smile. He’s probably not successful at this either, because he can feel one spreading across his face without his permission, cheeks burning in an awful, traitorous way. Whether or not it’s true – that Will is, like, obsessed with him – it’s a nice thought to have. “I don’t know,” he says, then quickly shoves the rest of his mini waffle into his mouth before he starts grinning like a complete idiot. “Maybe he’s like this with everyone,” Mike says, muffled around his mouthful. “He’s just– I don’t know.”

The thing Mike was trying to convey, before the involuntary smiling and blushing got the better of him, is that Will is just so good. He’s kind and sweet and smart and probably the most emotionally aware person Mike knows, meaning that if anyone were to go around cuddling all of their friends and putting up with tendencies to binge-watch documentaries and just lie around in bed for hours at a time, it would be Will.

Lucas gives him another long look, like he’s waiting for Mike to say something else. “Okay,” he says at last, with no small amount of exasperation. “I mean, if it helps you get your head out of your ass – he’s never cuddled like that with me.”

Despite himself, Mike perks up. “Really?”

“Unfortunately,” Lucas sighs, gazing off into the distance. “My girlfriend is far, far away. Do the words touch starved mean nothing to you?”

One – not really. Because Will– you know.

Second, Mike literally gave Lucas a hug two days ago after his last basketball game, so that’s got to count for something. “You’re being dramatic,” Mike scoffs. “First, Max and El are literally, like, two states away–”

“Two whole states–”

“And this is New England,” Mike says, louder, “so that equates to, like, fifty miles at most. At most.”

“Whatever,” Lucas sniffs, as Mike scrapes the last of the maple syrup off his plate. “All I’m saying is that if you guys pull that shit in front of me again, I’ll kill you. I don’t need to be seeing that.”

“We’re not even doing anything–”

“Plus,” Lucas adds, standing up. “Maybe if we’re not there, you’ll finally grow a pair and kiss him.”

“I–!” Mike starts, because of course he’d thought about that before – kissing Will, if Lucas and Dustin weren’t there – but until now, it had been in a very vague, abstract sense. Like, hey, there’s a pretty boy lying on you in what’s maybe not a very platonic way. Maybe you should make a move! 

Except now, with Lucas’ stupid interference, Mike’s train of thought has shifted course entirely, and it’s more like, hey, the pretty boy is obsessed with you. And also, he’s never cuddled with Lucas before! Maybe you should make a move!

“Yup,” Lucas says, with that ridiculously smug look back on his face. “I’m telling you, man–”

“Let’s stop talking about this now,” Mike decides, because it would be a real shame if he died on the spot of embarrassment before his class in an hour, and never got to turn in that assignment he’d spent all of last week working on.

“I’m just saying! Next time you two are alone in our room feel free to text me and give me a heads up so I don’t barge in on you two–”

“Lucas! Please stop talking. ”

March 27th

12:28 p.m.

The speaker connects to Mike’s phone with a quiet ding! just as Mike is reaching for the box of Clorox wipes in the closet. He isn’t really sure what’s about to start playing, because his phone is on the other side of the room and his hands are currently, as he pulls a new wipe out of the box, too soapy to really go swiping across his screen, but whatever. The fun is in the mystery.

Lucas had another class at noon, which means that Mike has the dorm to himself for the next forty five minutes. The English building that his class is located in is just a couple blocks down from the residence halls, meaning he can afford to leave a bit later than he would for his classes across campus. This usually comes in handy, because Mike is a firm believer in leaving your homework until the morning of, but for once, he’s gotten it all done ahead of time, leaving him with a precious hour of spare time and nothing to do.

He might as well clean. His side of the room had been accumulating a small mess over the course of midterm season, which ended a couple weeks ago, but Mike has yet to really clean up. His sheets need washing, and he makes a mental note to start a load of laundry later – he doesn’t have time for it now – but in the spare hour he has, he can easily wipe the gunk off his desk and windowsill, take out the trash, and maybe even do a bit of organizing, if he’s feeling ambitious.

Plus, Lucas isn’t here, which means that he can play his music out loud, through the speaker, and not get bitched at. Why Lucas got the speaker if he was going to complain every time Mike used it, Mike has no idea. He supposes that physiology coursework generally requires a certain amount of concentration, which Lucas is probably unable to provide with Mike blasting stuff at top volume all the time.

But Lucas isn’t here, so. Top volume it is

“Your boy, boy, b-b-boy, b-b-boyfriend,” the speaker blares, crackling to life so loudly that Mike startles, slightly, where he’d been standing right next to it. His next instinct is to laugh, just a little, because he forgot he’d been listening to this – aka, what Will would call his cheesy boyband obsession playlist, even though maybe only a quarter of it – at most! – consists of boyband music, so this judgment is both unfair and extremely inaccurate.

It’s just– he’s just been in a mood lately, okay? He feels– he feels, like, giggly, kind of, which is a weird feeling to have and also maybe a stupid way to put it. Energized, maybe, a bit effervescent in the most ridiculous way, like bubbles floating up inside him just under his skin, some inane itch that can only be scratched by listening to early 2010s heartthrobs professing their love for girls with the most catchy backing tracks known to mankind.

“Have you ever had the feeling you’re drawn to someone,” Kendall croons. “And it isn’t anything they could’ve said or done?”

Mike scoffs. “Oh yeah,” he says aloud, swiping along the windowsill and watching the wipe come away dirty and gray and gross, even though the room is empty and having a one-sided conversation with some poor schmuck from 2010 itself is probably on the more pathetic end of things he’s done lately. “Tell me about it.”

The whole thing has been getting to him lately, is the problem – this weird gray area that he and Will have been inhabiting for some time, kind of hovering between friends and something else entirely. The silent thrill of it, of knowing that statistically, logically speaking, there’s, like, an 85% chance the person you like is into you too. The way that it’s felt more intense than it used to, with the touches and the looks and the implications of it all.

Are there implications? Or is Mike just making it all up in his head?

Mike thinks he might be going crazy.

He scrubs harder.

“But I overheard your girls and this is what they said,” he mutters under his breath. “That you’re looking for a boyfriend, I see that–”

Is Will looking for a boyfriend? Does Will even want to date? Maybe he’s gotten pathetically jaded about the whole thing already and he’s sworn himself into a life of single-hood forever. Even though he’d just turned twenty last week, which would make it even more tragic for humanity – having Will Byers be taken out of the dating pool altogether – but mostly just very tragic for Mike, because his own self is the only one Mike is really concerned about in the context of Will and dating together.

Maybe Will doesn’t want a boyfriend at all. Maybe he’s, like, coasting through college and living it up as a bachelor.

Mike frowns to himself. As far as he knows, Will hasn’t really been big on the dating scene since they’d come here. He’d told Mike about a couple people – guys who had asked him out for a coffee after a group study date or whatever – but weirdly enough, the jealousy had been tamped down almost as quickly as it came by the fact that Will had always been so flippant about the whole thing. Like, he’d come up and tell Mike about it like it was another mundane part of his day – “Oh, yeah, I don’t know, this guy from my animation class asked if I wanted to get coffee earlier. Where did you want to get dinner?” – and it’s like, okay. Clearly it’s not a big deal. Clearly the other guys don’t mean anything to Will, so it’s cool.

(But does that mean Mike doesn’t mean anything to Will either?)

“I don’t know what kind of guy that you prefer,” Mike sings aloud, sweeping the trash on his desk neatly into a garbage bag and wiping the empty surface clean with a flourish, “but I know I gotta put myself forwards–”

Whatever. Maybe Will doesn’t want a boyfriend. Maybe Will doesn’t want a boyfriend that’s Mike. Maybe the type of guy Will prefers is everything that Mike isn’t – coordinated and totally jacked and possessing both perfect vision and also the ability to walk from the ground floor up to his room without feeling like he’s been run over by a campus bus. Mike sighs, slapping a damp, soapy hand to his forehead. “Knock me down, you know I’m coming right back–”

“No need to look so sad,” comes a voice from the doorway. Mike just about jumps a foot into the air.

“I– Will?”

Will is standing in front of the open door, leaned slightly against the wall by Mike’s closet, hands tucked into his pockets. He looks like he’s been there a while. “Please,” he grins. “Don’t stop on my account. Is that Big Time Rush?”

“No,” Mike lies.

“Your boy, boy, b-b-boy, b-b-boyfriend–”

Will raises his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Mike admits, lowering his hand from his face, and immediately wishing he could dive back under the covers of his freshly made bed. “Maybe. A little.”

Will grins even wider, like he’s a shark that’s just scented Mike’s poor, lovestruck, hopelessly smitten blood. “Typical.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting this attitude from,” Mike huffs. “You recognized the song. And how long have you been standing there?”

Will ignores him. “You have a lovely voice,” he teases.

“I–” Mike stares, for a second, then throws the dirty Clorox wipe at him. “Shut up!”

Will dodges it easily, laughing, then takes another step into the room. It’s graceful, even such a simple movement. Casual, carefree. Mike watches Will move, watches him hoist himself up into Mike’s bed like he’s done a million times before, the navy duvet wrinkling up under him. “Come on,” Will says, crossing his legs and watching Mike intently, like he’s doing something a lot more interesting than cleaning. “Why haven’t I heard you sing before?”

“You have,” Mike points out, then picks up the dirty wet wipe from where it had fluttered pathetically to the floor. “Lots of times.”

“That doesn’t count,” Will says, then uncrosses his legs and stretches out over the sheets. His socks, Mike notices, are yellow with pink polka dots. It’s strangely endearing. He smiles to himself, then ties the garbage bag up with a tight knot. “I can’t believe you let me live fifteen years of my life thinking you can’t sing.”

Mike doesn’t think so. If he absolutely had to think about it, then he’d rate his voice, like, average. He’s not awful, sure. But he won’t be selling out arenas any time soon. “I think you’re biased,” he decides. “And how did you get in here anyway?”

“You left the door unlocked,” Will says easily, arms crossed under his head like the pinnacle of nonchalance. “I’m telling the RA on you. I think you could use another lecture on dorm safety.”

“You are doing no such thing,” Mike says, pointing a finger at him. “Isaac has been out to get me ever since Halloween.”

“To be fair,” Will says, then pats the open spot next to him on the bed like this is not Mike’s own room and Mike’s own bed, “the vomit puddle outside your door was a little suspicious.”

“You know it wasn’t me,” Mike huffs. “I was with you all night. I have an alibi.”

Will laughs. “Yeah, well, Isaac doesn’t know that.”

Unfortunately, this is true. Mike sighs, then hauls himself up onto the bed too, splaying his legs out perpendicular to Will’s, his knees just over Will’s thighs. “Okay, fine. Whatever. What are you doing here?”

Will pouts, feigning hurt. “Ouch,” he says. “You say this as if you aren’t delighted to see me.”

“I said no such thing.” Mike shuffles around a bit, shifts closer so that half his legs are dangling off the bed. He rests a hand on Will’s calf and hopes he doesn’t notice. Or maybe that he does. Maybe that’s the point here – that he wants Will to notice.

If he does, he makes no move to acknowledge it. “You’re always happy to see me,” Will says easily, like this simple phrase has not proceeded to shift Mike’s entire world halfway on its axis. He says it like it’s such a simple thing, that it’s no big deal that the best part of Mike’s day is usually Will, and that the first thing he usually thinks about when he wakes up is Will, and the last person he thinks about when he falls asleep is Will. Mike wonders if he knows, or if he’s just fucking around.

Will drops his arms down from where they’re raised over his head, the fingertips of his right hand just mere centimeters away from Mike’s thigh. “Whatever,” Mike says again, leaning bodily back into the wall. “Seriously. What’s up?”

Will gives him a contemplative once-over, then bites his lower lip. It’s his thinking face – the set of his jaw, the way his eyes start darting around. “Okay,” he says at last, reaching out and tapping Mike’s leg with one finger, absentminded. “I was just wondering– and you can say no, by the way–”

Consider Mike’s interest well and thoroughly piqued. He runs a hand down Will’s ankle, right over the hem of his stupid polka dot socks, and asks, “What is it?”

“You know that short story you submitted for your midterm?”

“Only vaguely,” Mike admits. “To be honest, I think I blacked out for most of that week and came to after I submitted my last paper. Why?”

Will laughs lightly. “The one about the knight,” he says, running his fingernail down the seam of Mike’s jeans. “And the wizard.”

“Oh,” Mike says, realization dawning faintly upon him. “Yeah, I remember. It was cheesy as hell, but I remember. What about it?”

“I wanted to ask,” Will says, and Mike doesn’t know what he’s so nervous about, if they’re talking about his Intro to Short Story Writing midterm – which he’d written over the course of, like, one day with the corniest premise he could potentially think of – “if I could make an animation of it? For my final?”

Mike blinks. “Oh. Oh!” Then, “Really?” he frowns, as it hits him, just what Will is asking. “For your final? You’d want to?”

For some reason, Will looks a little embarrassed. “It was really good,” Will shrugs. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it in weeks.”

Oh.

Don’t blush, Mike thinks desperately, even as he feels his cheeks start to warm. Please don’t blush. 

He’s totally blushing. “Really?” he says again.

“Yeah,” Will says, eyes wide like this is a totally obvious thing. “Are you kidding? The imagery– it was so good, Mike. I read it and I was like wow, I have to draw this– and then I realized I don’t really have the skills to really carry out the vision I had for it in my head, because we haven’t done too much past, like, the bouncing ball thing and character design and basic movements and stuff, so don’t, like, get too excited. But I don’t know. I figured I’d ask anyway. ”

“You are so,” Mike starts, and then stops before he can finish that sentence, before he faux pax-s himself into saying, totally unbidden, cute, or pretty, or unfairly kissable – and those are all true, but just because Mike had been thinking about how he should probably make a move at some point doesn’t mean he wants to do it now. 

Will keeps looking at him. “I’m so what?”

“Ridiculous,” Mike settles on, because that seems like an inconspicuous enough choice of word. “You’re ridiculous. You want to– my story? My story? You came all the way here to ask me that? You could have just texted, you know.”

Will’s embarrassed expression grows, ever so slightly. “I mean,” he says, hand stilling where it had been tapping absentminded morse code on Mike’s thigh, “I wanted to see you too.”

Oh. “Oh,” Mike says. “Really?”

“You’re saying that a lot,” Will notes. “And I live down the hall. It’s not the most perilous journey.”

“Still,” Mike says, grinning. He smooths a hand over the denim of Will’s jeans, flattening out a crease near his ankle, just to have somewhere to channel the nervous energy crackling under his skin. “You’re so– you wanted to see me? You see me every day.”

“Fine!” Will laughs, tossing his head back on Mike’s pillow and staring up at the ceiling. “I take it back, are you happy? I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to use your stupid story for my project and I don’t want to– Mike!”

Nervous energy indeed. Mike doesn’t know where it’s coming from, where this is coming from, but he’s pitching forward, running a giddy palm down Will’s side, digging his fingers into the soft knit fabric of Will’s sweater. Not enough to hurt – never enough to hurt – but just enough to have Will curling over into himself and a laugh bursting from his lips. Bright and startled, eyes wide and smiling even wider.

“You don’t think my story is stupid,” Mike says, caught somewhere between gleeful and wholly entranced by the look on Will’s face. He prods Will in the stomach and Will shrieks, twitching sharply away from the touch. “You like my story. And you like me too.”

“No,” Will gasps between breaths, trying futilely to swat Mike’s hands away. “No I don’t, Mike – go away!”

“You do,” Mike laughs, pressing in further. “You like me.”

Mike doesn’t know where the urgency is coming from either – like maybe if he jokes about it hard enough, he can catch Will off guard, trick him into confessing something he would otherwise never admit to. You like me, Mike thinks, a little desperate and a little breathless, watching Will’s face contort with laughter. You like me, you like me, you like me. I know you do.

Maybe if he says it emphatically enough, maybe if he goads and teases and leans in even closer, Will might respond – Yeah. Yeah, I like you.

Will kicks uselessly at Mike’s knees, then finally catches his wrist with one hand and pulls it away. “Fuck off,” he responds, sounding just about as out of breath as Mike feels. He bats a halfhearted hand at Mike’s cheek, pushes Mike’s face away with minimal force, and rolls his eyes fondly. “You’re just okay.”

“You say that,” Mike breathes out, as Will’s hand falls limply to his side, “but you’re the one who said you couldn’t bear to live through another morning without gazing upon my face.”

“Now you’re just lying,” Will says. “Gazing upon? You’re lying and talking weird.”

Personally, Mike thinks it’s a pretty big deal that he’s able to speak in coherent phrases at all, with his and Will’s faces so close together. Will’s still got his other wrist in a loose grip, Mike’s hand planted firmly down onto the pillow by his head.

“I’m talking fine,” Mike says. “You understand me fine anyway.”

Will just blinks up at him. “You’re so strange, Mike.”

“You’ve put up with me for this long,” Mike points out. “What does that say about you?”

“Clearly,” Will murmurs. Mike feels fingers brush lightly against the side of his shirt, where the fabric is hanging loose around him. “It means that I’m just really fucking insane.”

“That must be it,” Mike whispers in return. He isn’t sure when he lowered his voice into something this quiet, this hushed, and he isn’t sure when Will’s eyes stopped meeting his, and he isn’t sure when Will’s gaze dropped down, down–

“You,” Will starts, still staring somewhere below Mike’s nose, and Mike’s heart stops beating, right there in his chest.

Christ. Christ. 

Will’s fingers are tugging at his shirt, ever so lightly, hands just a few inches away from his waist. Mike wishes he’d grip harder. Mike wishes he’d commit to the touch. Mike wishes he’d–

“You,” Will says again, and Mike’s stomach flips, because it looks like Will might–

Will might–

“–have class in ten minutes,” Will finishes on an exhale, eyes snapping up to meet Mike’s.

Mike blinks. “I– what?”

Will’s lips twitch, and his eyes leave Mike’s to flick to the clock on the far wall. “You should leave,” Will says quietly, and then – because everything Mike ever thinks or says comes back to bite him in the ass eventually – pats Mike firmly on the side. Get off of me.

“Yeah,” Mike says, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice, and scrambling off the bed. “Yeah– good call. Thanks.”

Will pushes himself up onto his elbows. “Yeah,” he echoes. “‘Course.” 

His voice sounds a little hoarse.

Mike must be imagining it.

“Are you busy later?” he finds himself asking, digging under his desk for his backpack. He knows the answer to this too – knows Will’s schedule like it’s his own – but he asks anyway.

“Class until three-thirty,” Will answers, just like Mike knew he would. “But– if you wanted to grab a late lunch after…?”

Just like Mike knew he would. He smiles to himself, then turns back around. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.”

March 31st

9:17 p.m.

Mike leans back in his desk chair, rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, and groans, long and bereaved. He’s been working on this essay for what seems like the whole day – it’s due in two days and he’s made decent progress but it’s been dark for a couple hours now and his eyes feel like they honest-to-God might be melting right out of his skull.

“You’re going to crack your head open if you keep doing that,” Lucas calls to him from the other side of the room.

“Good,” Mike huffs out, leaning back even further in his chair for good measure, catching himself lightly with one hand on the desk and a foot on the ground as he feels the chair start to teeter on its hind legs and pitch dangerously backwards. “Maybe if I get brain damage I won’t have to turn this in.”

“Please don’t,” Lucas says, sounding a little strained. Mike cranes his neck to look at him. “I would have to fill out a new roommate application for next year and I would really hate that.”

“Aw,” Mike grins. “You like living with me.”

“And,” Lucas corrects him, “having to fill out a new roommate form would be a real big inconvenience.” He finally turns around, and Mike hears a soft popping noise as Lucas stretches out with a quiet groan. “Are you still working on that essay?”

Mike nods woefully. “Wish I’d known before I chose a major that English would involve this much writing.”

“Dude,” Lucas says. “Are you for real?”

Mike waves a dismissive hand in the air. “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“You should get some fresh air,” Lucas advises him. “Go for a walk or something. And if you’re looking for places to walk to, I’ve heard the student store is lovely at this time of night. And maybe if you happened to pass the little freezer where they keep those ice cream bars you could grab me one. While you’re out anyway. At the student store.”

“Lucas,” Mike says.

“I’m just saying!” Lucas throws his hands up. “If you’re going to be out!”

Mike sighs, rolls his neck until some of the pressure that’s been building up at the base of his skull eases with a quiet series of alarmingly sharp clicks. Student store or not – not, because it closed twenty minutes ago – maybe a walk would do him some good. “Good call,” he says at last, then reaches for his phone. “I should ask Will if he wants to come.”

“Wow,” he hears Lucas say, “okay, let the record show that literally zero times did Will come up in this conversation until now.”

Mike ignores him in favor of tapping out a text.

hi

are you busy rn?

Will, like a complete loser, currently has Do Not Disturb on, so Mike figures it’s maybe a bit of a long shot that he responds within the next hour anyway. A slow minute ticks by, and then another, where the room is occupied solely by the quiet sounds of Lucas tearing his way through his third granola bar of the night, and the not-so-quiet sounds of him swearing violently at whatever assignment is currently open on his laptop screen. Mike is in half a mind to march down the hall and hammer on Will’s door to get him to respond when three little dots appear at the bottom of the screen, and Will’s answering message pops up a moment later.

dustin burned popcorn in the microwave again

trying to do damage control

what’s up?

Mike lets out a quiet huff of laughter. Dustin’s already set off their building’s fire alarm twice this semester, and both times were, allegedly, entirely the fault of Will and Dustin’s hilariously dysfunctional microwave.

i swear that thing is cursed

oh absolutely

i think it’s still getting revenge for that time i tried boiling an egg in it

“Has anyone ever told you,” Lucas cuts in, “that you always get the most annoying look on your face when you text him?”

A small noise of affront makes its way out of Mike’s mouth. “You’re not even looking at me right now! How would you know?”

“Don’t have to,” Lucas says simply, shrugging. He’s still facing his laptop, back to Mike. Asshole.

Mike’s phone chimes softly and he looks back down.

helloo

what’s up??

do you wanna go for a walk maybe

it’s a nice night

and also i think my eyeballs are melting

lol

essay day?

essay day.

a walk sounds nice!

come get me in 5?

okay :)

“He said he’s down,” Mike announces, and this time Lucas does spin around to look at him.

“Of course he did,” Lucas says, “because you’re you and Will is Will and I don’t pretend to understand this weird thing you guys have going on, but I do know that you’re the only two people on the face of this planet who are into each other and go on long romantic walks around campus alone at night and talk for hours and you come back all giggly and red and both of you still haven’t made a fucking move.”

Unfortunately, Lucas is, as usual, extremely correct. Mike can’t remember when the walk thing started, but Lucas and Dustin never fail to give him copious amounts of grief for it – that he and Will go on these supposed romantic strolls a few times a week and have never yet caught onto the fact that this is, apparently, not something that is strictly platonic.

Which is bullshit, in Mike’s humble opinion. Plenty of friends go on walks! There’s nothing inherently romantic about this activity at all.

Except–

You know, if he’s being honest, then yes, Mike has potentially daydreamed – once or twice or constantly, every day – about passing by a particularly nice spot on campus and saying hey, you wanna sit for a second? and leading them to a bench and Will reaching over across the halfway rotted wood to take his hand, or maybe rest his head on Mike’s shoulder, or, if where they’re sitting is secluded enough, maybe Will would even lean in and–

“Hey,” Will is saying, throwing the door to his room open and shooting a panicked look behind him. The hallway is rapidly filling with the scent of something acrid and burnt, and Will quickly closes the door behind him. “Sorry. Trying to contain the smoke.”

“Hey, Mike,” he hears Dustin call through the door, and then a panicked sort of shuffling noise.

“Nice one,” Mike says back to him, and then, turning his attention back to Will, “popcorn, huh?”

Will gives him a sheepish sort of smile and shrugs. “So I might have lied a little,” he says, as they set off down the hall. He’s wearing his jacket again, the puffy green one he’s always got on when it’s even close to cold out, and a matching knitted hat, pulled down low over his ears and making tufts of brown hair stick out in every which direction. Mike barely resists the urge to pull on one.

“Oh,” he says, staring intently at the way a particularly curly tuft of hair has wound its way around Will’s ear, down the base of his neck, “this really can’t be good.”

“Mike,” Will laughs, and pushes lightly against Mike’s shoulder with his own. “I just meant that I might have fibbed a little about Dustin being the one to burn the popcorn.”

“Will,” Mike gasps. “You didn’t.”

“I got hungry,” Will says, shrugging again. Mike gives the front door one last push and it swings open, hitting them with a blast of chilly late-March air. “Sue me.”

“I can’t believe you left him there to deal with it,” Mike says, immediately fighting back a shiver and, subsequently, immediately wishing he’d brought a jacket thicker than the meager sweatshirt he has on. For a day in the pleasant low-sixties, their campus gets fucking cold at night. Mike supposed that’s maybe half of why their tradition had started: it was simply too cold to exist outside at night without moving to keep warm.

Will gives him a curious look. The area immediately surrounding their dorm is quiet, nearly abandoned save for the occasional student wandering about or a stray flash of headlight from a passing car. “Dustin said not to worry about it,” Will says, kicking gently at a pebble on the sidewalk. It scrapes horrendously against the cement as he adds, “Given that I had plans and all.”

Mike watches as the pebble bounces once, twice, then gets lost to the thick patch of foliage surrounding the walkway. “Plans? It’s just me,” Mike points out, “and we go on walks all the time, so I have a hard time believing Dustin would willingly take the fire alarm blame for you.”

Will shrugs again – Mike really wishes he would stop doing that – and shoves his hands deep into his jacket pockets. “I can’t pretend to know what goes on in his head.”

That’s true enough. Dustin Henderson’s mind is a mystery unbeknownst to man. The study of his brain might be a science all on its own. Mike wonders if they’ll ever offer that as a major here. “Fair,” Mike relents, picking up his pace to rush through the upcoming crosswalk before the signal turns red. Behind him, Will lets out a noise of indignance as he races to catch up.

“Mike! Jesus, wait up!”

Mike grins.

As far as walks go, this one is, objectively, pretty ordinary. Or at least it would be, if Will weren’t in the picture, because subjectively – and this is pretty pathetic of him, Mike knows, but subjectively – every second he spends with Will feels like something extraordinary. That, coupled with the way Will’s arms are consistently bumping against his as they walk – Will’s fingers constantly brushing against the back of Mike’s hand, more than close enough to reach out and hold, maybe, if Mike could suck it up and grow a pair sometime in the next ten years – is starting to wind him up even more than the essay he’d been working on.

“And then,” Will is saying, walking slowly backwards as they make their way through the quad, waving his hands animatedly in the air, “and then this guy on our floor ran into me in the laundry room and he was all hey, do you know how to use these things? And at first I thought he meant the vending machine or something, you know? So I was trying to tell him that it’s cash only, because the card reader never works anymore, but then he says no, I meant this, and slaps a hand on the top of the washing machine, and in my head I’m thinking oh my god, how does a sophomore in college not know how to do their own laundry?”

Mike matches his stride easily, even though it’s looking more and more like Will might trip on a stray crack in the walkway and eat total shit by the second. “You sure he isn’t a freshman?” he asks anyway. “Because that’s pathetic.”

Will gives him a look. “Even if he were, I mean, it’s almost April. How do you make it to April without figuring out how to do–”

Mike’s earlier prediction immediately comes true when Will’s heel snags on a brick that’s sticking up and out of the paved ground, nearly invisible where they’re just barely out of range of the nearest streetlamp. “Whoa,” Mike says, as Will careens dangerously backwards, and, without thinking, grabs him by the arm and pulls.

He might have overcompensated, because the sudden change in momentum sends Will stumbling forward, colliding sharply with Mike’s chest. “Ow,” Will mutters, righting himself. His hat has gone a little lopsided on his head. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Mike says softly, one hand still wrapped around Will’s bicep over that ridiculously stupid puffer jacket. “This is why you face forward when you walk.”

Will lets out an indignant little huff. “Sue me for wanting to look at you while I talk,” he says, reaching up to fix his hat. Mike lets his hand fall away, watching the little tufts of hair get flattened and bounce back to life again. It’s oddly mesmerizing.

“Yeah, that one’s on you,” Mike laughs. Despite himself, despite the chill and the breeze and the way he’s still definitely shivering under his thin layers of cotton and fleece, he finds himself growing warm at the words. Who says that? Who just says stuff like that?

(Will. Will says stuff like that.)

Mike thinks he might scream.

“Can’t believe I almost died while complaining about Scott from down the hall,” Will says, grinning. The few steps they took after Will almost died – while complaining about Scott from down the hall – have pushed them just barely back into the radius of the nearest lamp fixture, the outskirts of a warm orange glow that’s catching Will along the slope of his nose, his eyes, his lips.

“Lame,” Mike manages, because suddenly, the mild tension headache he’d been experiencing all day has nothing on this – what it feels like to be suddenly, entirely, completely overwhelmed by someone. In all his fantasies regarding their late-night walks, and all the times Lucas has told him to suck it up and kiss Will tonight, a scenario like this always sort of came to mind as the hypothetically perfect time to do it: there’s mood lighting, there’s ambiance, there’s a deserted path along a very scenic part of campus, and there’s Will, cheeks flushed a little from cold, nose turning pink at the tip; and, potentially more pressing than any of these things, is the want. Mike wants to kiss him so bad that he is, quite literally, hurting with it.

The want isn’t a new thing, and he feels like maybe he has it under control sometimes, and then Will goes and does stuff like this – looking up at Mike like this, standing this close to him, smiling softly like he’s waiting for Mike to say something else, or do something else, or–

Suddenly, it’s way, way too much. “Do you want to sit for a few?” Mike asks, just like he always does.

“Of course,” Will replies, just like he always does, and leads them over to a bench.

The few inches of height difference means that Mike’s neck twinges something awful when he leans over to put his head on Will’s shoulder, but it’s fine. It’s fine, and it’s immediately made worth it when Will leans into the touch, shifts to accommodate him, and lifts a hand to Mike’s head, running soothing fingers through his hair. “That’s nice,” Mike says, a little muffled by the obnoxious material of Will’s jacket as he turns his head. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Will says again, and then, sympathetically, “long day?”

“Oh, you don’t even know,” Mike groans, relaxing as Will’s fingers pass over the base of his neck, fingernails scraping softly against the skin there. “I’ve been staring at a screen so long I think my eyes might fall out of my head.”

He hears Will laugh softly above him, his fingers gently digging into the skin near his temples. “I can tell,” Will murmurs. Mike fights back a shiver as Will rubs gentle circles there, only partially because of the cold. “You seemed a little quiet.”

“Did I?” Mike asks, because Will’s right, just like he always is about these things, but he didn’t think he was being that obvious about it. It’s been a hectic day, a little frantic, a little overwhelming, and it already feels like Mike’s brain is doing eighty in a twenty-five on an average day. Today, it feels like his brain is an F1 driver, and Mike is the sorry, sorry excuse for a car. “Sorry,” he whispers, even as the perpetual white noise starts to quiet down with every pass of Will’s hand. 

“Don’t apologize,” Will says immediately. Mike hears a frown in his voice. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t want to bring the mood down,” Mike says. Will leans in closer, pressing his cheek to the top of Mike’s head. “I know I’m kind of low-energy today.”

Another breathy huff of laughter. “I don’t care. Low-energy Mike is nice. Any Mike is nice. I just like spending time with you.”

This is Mike’s problem, right here: that he’s trying to be normal about Will, and trying to be reasonable about these things, and Will just goes and says stuff like this, and all of Mike’s efforts become increasingly moot. He turns his face even further into Will’s shoulder, a desperate attempt to hide the red that’s surely creeping all the way down his neck and across to his ears, and, on a whim, wraps his arms around Will’s torso, because fuck it; it’s dark, and it’s quiet, and there’s no one around to witness Mike Wheeler’s pathetic attempt at making a move. Sort of.

“That’s nice of you to say,” Mike whispers. “You’re nice. Thank you.”

Will’s hand pauses, briefly, in its rhythmic movements through Mike’s hair. “Yeah,” he says, and it sounds a little quieter than before. “Yeah, anytime, Mike.”

“We should do this more,” Mike decides.

“What, go on walks? I think we do a lot of that already.”

“No,” Mike says, and then, “well, yes, even though we’re not even walking right now – I meant this,” he adds, punctuating the sentence with a light squeeze of his arms where they’re still wrapped around Will.

“What,” Will says again, laughing a little incredulously, “cuddle?”

“We’re not– I mean, this isn’t really cuddling,” Mike points out, because he would know, because he and Will do plenty of that for real. “It’s nice, is my point, but if you’re going to be difficult about it–”

“Hey, no need to be like that,” Will chides, then tugs sharply at a lock of Mike’s hair. Mike lets out a soft yelp in response, lifting his head off Will’s shoulder and shooting him a betrayed look. Will’s smug grin softens around the edges when he meets Mike’s eyes, and he adds, “I like this too. Platonic touch is underrated, I think.”

Oh.

“Oh,” Mike says, disappointment settling rapidly into his gut. It’s a ridiculous thing to feel disappointed about, he knows, because there had been no expectations here, and as obvious as Mike had thought he was being, it’s unfair to expect someone to be able to read into it anyway, without him spelling it out for them. But still– he pulls his arms back, sitting up straighter next to Will, who lets his hand fall away and back to his side without question. “Yeah, no, you’re right. It is.”

He’s never done that with me, Lucas had said, or something along those lines, and because Mike is Mike – that is to say, a little petty and a little confused and far too easily bruised – he almost tells Will, hey, as long as you’re looking for platonic cuddle buddies, I hear Lucas is in the market for one.

And because Will is Will – that is to say, someone who sees through Mike’s bullshit far too easily for his own good – he doesn’t. And maybe a little out of fear that Will might actually take him up on the offer. “I’m just saying,” Will is, indeed, saying, giving him a bit of a weird look, “I feel like there are expectations, you know? For things to be, like, strictly romantic all the time even if they don’t have to be, or that there are things you can only do with people you’re super romantically interested in but you can’t do with your friends.”

“Yeah,” Mike agrees, albeit a little hollowly, as he scoots further away for good measure. Because Will’s right, he knows, and there’s a whole weird thing about not being able to do things with your friends without it being misconstrued, but the issue here – the big, glaring, obvious issue here – is that maybe Mike has been the one misconstruing things all along, and maybe Lucas and Dustin are just full of shit, and maybe Will has a much more progressive mindset regarding all of this than Mike does, who had been kind of operating under the assumption that extended periods of cuddling and falling asleep on someone and staying up until two in the morning texting them – even when they live down the hall – usually means that they’re, like, into you. “Yeah, no, I get you.”

Maybe he was wrong.

Plus, Mike can think of some things he’d like to do with people he’s super romantically interested in that he would not ever – ever – want to do with his friends. For the record.

“No, I’m just saying,” Will is, indeed, saying – again – “I just meant it like– I’m glad I can do that with you, you know? Like I’m glad it doesn’t have to be weird. Like, you get it.”

Mike wonders, briefly, just how quickly he might be able to jump into the campus pond and drown himself. “Definitely not weird,” he coughs. “So– so very platonic and normal and not weird. Yeah. You’re welcome.”

“Okay, now it’s a little weird,” Will says, peering over at him. “Are you alright?”

Mike coughs again. “Fine,” he says, and if it comes out a little high pitched, well. There’s only so much he can do. “Great. Peachy, even.”

Will, understandably, does not look convinced. “I think all that blue light you absorbed from your laptop screen really got to you,” he sighs.

“Fuck you,” Mike says immediately. “I have the– you know, the glasses.”

“Okay, but do you use them?”

“Fuck you,” Mike says again, and Will throws his head back and laughs. Mike tries his hardest not to think about how good laughter looks on him, or how his hat is going askew on his head again, or how his eyes are all scrunched up at the corners, and how illegal it should be for Will to do all these things when Mike wants to kiss him as bad as he does. And then, because Mike is a weak man, because he has a finite supply of self control in his body and most of it has been used up by not kissing Will, he reaches out, tugs the hem of Will’s stupid knitted hat down over his ears, and says, “There.”

“Thanks,” Will says, eyes sparkling with amusement in the dim light. Mike lets his hands linger there for a moment, somewhere between where the soft fabric of the hat ends and where the equally soft curls of Will’s hair begin. This is fine. This is a thing friends do. Friends – strictly platonic friends – adjust each other's clothing if it gets knocked out of place.

“Yeah,” Mike says, a little hoarsely, then lets his hands fall. The contact, minute as it might have been, has him feeling a bit like a heroine from a Jane Austen novel, thrown into a tizzy from a simple brush of – potentially platonic, as it turns out – skin against skin. He wipes his suddenly very clammy hands on his jeans, tries to ignore the sour churning in his stomach, and says, “Do you want to head back? I know you’ve got an early class tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Will blinks, looking a little caught off-guard. “Yeah, I mean, if you want to. It’s not until nine so I should be okay.”

“You’re terrible at waking up before nine thirty,” Mike points out, which is still earlier than he usually gets up, so it still comes out sounding a bit impressed. “Come on. Let’s get you to bed, old man.”

“It’s barely eleven!” Will protests, but he lets Mike take his hand and pull him forcibly up from the bench. “And I’m only two weeks older than you!”

“Sorry,” Mike says, frowning and cupping his ear, “I couldn’t hear anything you said over the sound of your joints popping.”

“Oh, I hate you,” Will sighs, as they turn back down the pathway they’d been walking along before – all brick buildings and gentle shrubbery and quiet, quiet, quiet. Mike lets his shoulder bump clumsily against Will’s, gait uneven and a little unsteady, and wraps his arms around himself. The wind is picking up, the chill turning more biting as the night goes on, and as ridiculous as Mike thinks Will’s giant puffy jacket is – and as not-so-secretly endeared as he might be about it – he’s starting to wish he had one of his own after all. He wonders if Will would share, if he asked, if Will would somehow find a way to squeeze them both into his coat and zip it up around them, and just walk back to their dorms that way.

And then, Mike gets an idea.

Historically, this has had about a 50-50 success rate. He’s had some really high highs, and some really low lows, and Mike knows for a fact that this thing he’s about to do is going to fall into one of these categories, with absolutely zero gray area. It’s because of everything Will had said about, like, friends, and platonic versus romantic, which had kind of put a funny taste in Mike’s mouth, thinking about whether he’d been misreading everything, or maybe even making Will uncomfortable by just, like, assuming his feelings were totally reciprocated. Maybe this will afford both of them a little bit of plausible deniability, is the point.

Jesus, Mike’s palms are sweaty. Again. And for this thing he’s about to do, he really, really needs them to not be.

“Hey,” he manages, as evenly as possible with the way he’s shivering. Will looks over at him and pauses in place.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Mike says, and then, “it’s just, uh– my hands. They’re freezing.”

The logical course of action here would be, if Mike’s prior suspicions were correct, if Will really is into him, for Will to say something like oh, let me warm them up for you and then lace their fingers together. At least, this is how Mike is rationalizing it, because if Will said that – if it were Will who had cold hands – this absolutely is the first thing Mike would say.

Maybe he’s biased. Maybe not. Either way, there’s plausible deniability here for both of them, is the point. Mike might just have cold hands. Will could just shrug him off and say they’ll be back inside soon. Will could take his hand – Will could take his hand – and it could still be a friend thing, maybe. All that shit he’d said about how you should be able to do supposedly romantic things with your friends; Mike doesn’t really know where he’d been going with it, but he does know that if Will is okay with platonically cuddling him, then he should be okay with a hand hold between good pals.

Right?

The point here – despite how badly Mike wants it to go a certain way, despite him thinking, desperately, hold my hand, hold my hand – is that if Will takes his hand, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But if he doesn’t–

Well. If he doesn't, then that, coupled with the other thing, is probably as explicit of a rejection as Mike is going to get without ever having had confessed in the first place.

There’s another moment where Will just looks at him, another long moment where Mike’s heart is probably beating hard enough to burst right out of his chest, probably audible in the quiet of the night around them. He feels his hand twitch where it’s hanging by his side – take it, he thinks, pleading, like maybe if he thinks it hard enough, Will might just read his mind. Please.

Will opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, closes it again, and then his eyes widen. “Oh!” he says, then reaches into the pockets of his jacket. “Here, do you want to borrow these?”

Oh, fuck him. Fuck this.

Mike stares. “Are those– do you have gloves in your pocket?”

Will shrugs. “I get cold,” he says simply, gesturing to his giant puffer jacket and his hat. And then, clearly very pleased with himself, he waves the gloves in front of Mike’s face. “You should borrow them if you’re cold. Why didn’t you ask before?”

Okay, okay, this is fine. Mike can work with this. Running through all possible scenarios: Will takes his hand romantically, Will takes his hand platonically, or Will does not take his hand and rejects him in the most brutally gentle way that anyone has ever been rejected for all of human history.

What the fuck?

Being offered gloves – gloves that Will had just happened to be carrying in his pocket – is not on the list.

Mike’s brain promptly short-circuits.

“Uh,” he hears himself say, and Will frowns in mild confusion, “no, it’s fine, actually.”

“You sure?” Will thrusts them further out, and Mike takes a hasty step back. “It’s still a few minutes back. No point in having cold hands all that time.”

God, maybe Mike is just an idiot. Maybe that’s the limiting factor here, the thing he hadn’t accounted for. Maybe everything went according to plan, except for the part of the plan that assumed Mike still had a couple of working brain cells left in his head. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah! No, it’s fine, really, I wasn’t trying to get you to offer–”

Will doesn’t look convinced. “Okay,” he says slowly, tucking the offending gloves – Mike’s new mortal enemy – back into pocket and blessedly out of sight. “If you’re sure.”

“Yeah,” Mike says weakly. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

God. Okay. This is fine. Mike can work with this.

Somehow.

The second Mike finishes boiling himself alive in the communal showers, he slinks back to his room, slathers his poor, dry, frozen-then-boiled face in moisturizer, then dives under the covers of his bed. Lucas still has his desk lamp on, hunched over his laptop and looking vaguely on the verge of imminent suicide.

“Lucas,” Mike sighs, and then, when Lucas does not grace him with a response: “Lucas.”

“Yes,” Lucas says, not looking away from the screen. His eye looks like it might be twitching.

“Pay attention to me,” Mike demands, which is pretty fucking bold of him, considering that Lucas already does devote every last ounce of attention that isn’t directed to school, basketball, or his girlfriend to Mike’s theatrics.

“Paying,” Lucas mutters absentmindedly, squinting at the screen, then scribbling something down on a sheet of paper.

Mike sighs again. Whatever. It’s fine. He’ll make do with what he has. He flops back down onto his pillow, the wood of the bedframe letting out an alarming groaning noise, and says, “Do you think I’m delusional?”

Lucas taps his pencil thoughtfully against his lower lip. “Hm. I mean yes, that’s my answer, but I need to know the context in which you’re asking.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Mike huffs. “I mean, like–” He stares up at the barely-visible ceiling, the room entirely dark save for the artificially bright lights of Lucas’ lamp and laptop screen. “Like, I don’t know. Will was saying some stuff today that made me think– I don’t know. I think I might be reading into stuff too much. Like, seeing things that aren’t there.”

At this, Lucas finally looks up. He swivels around ninety degrees to face Mike, puts his pencil down, and frowns. “What? What happened?”

“He said,” Mike swallows tightly, throat feeling strangely hot. Don’t cry, he thinks. Please don’t cry. “He said that he was glad I feel comfortable enough to, like, be so open with touch and stuff. And the– the fucking cuddling, I don’t know. He said something about how he was glad we could do it platonically, without it being weird.”

“Mike,” Lucas says softly, and then there’s a soft rustling noise as he moves around in his chair. “He said that? Verbatim?”

“No, not verbatim,” Mike admits, blinking rapidly. “But, like– and then after that, I tried making a move, sort of–”

“You what?”

“No, not like that,'' Mike backtracks, still looking straight upwards. “It was my version of making a move, and he probably just didn’t pick up on it, and it was dumb, whatever, it’s fine, but–” he rolls onto his side, tucks the blanket around his arms, and shoots Lucas a miserable look. “Do you think I’m delusional? Do you think he really– do you think it was platonic this whole time?”

There’s a long pause, filled only by the desperate whirring of the laptop fan, and the quiet buzzing of the ancient light fixture. “I think,” Lucas says, finally, looking very deep in thought indeed, “that you’re Will’s best friend, and he’d rather yearn from afar and wither away into nothing than let something risk that.”

“That’s a lame answer,” Mike scoffs, even as the tight feeling around his throat loosens some. “That’s such a copout.”

“Hey, man, you asked me,” Lucas laughs. “No, but I’m serious. You know him, Mike, you know he’s not– you know how much your friendship means to him.”

“Yeah,” Mike whispers, fiddling aimlessly with the duvet cover. “Yeah, I guess.”

“I guess a better question would be,” Lucas starts, “you know. Why haven’t you made a move?”

“I don’t know,” Mike whines. “I swear I was, like, ninety-eight percent sure how he felt, and I know if I’d told him – before he started being all weird and confusing about it – and he didn’t feel that way, he would be so annoyingly nice about it. And it would suck, but it would be fine, I think, so I don’t know why he doesn’t just–”

“Well, maybe he’s not at ninety-eight percent,” Lucas says simply. “Maybe he’s at, like, eighty-two, or seventy-five, or wherever this arbitrary threshold is, and maybe he’s just worried he’s being too obvious and he’s trying to cover his ass about it.”

“Maybe,” Mike ponders, even though this seems like too simple of an explanation to be true, too convenient. And then– “Lucas?”

“Yes, Mike?”

“Do you think I’m dateable?”

A pause. “Mike,” Lucas starts, “I’m flattered, but you know I’m taken.”

“No, you asshole,” Mike groans, as Lucas laughs, “no offense, but like– no way. Absolutely not.”

“Okay,” Lucas says, in between breaths, “I’m taking a little offense–”

“Shut up,” Mike snaps, and Lucas laughs harder, “I mean, like– objectively. Do you think I’m a dateable person?”

“Hm,” Lucas says again, then gives Mike a long, searching once-over – as much as he can with all but Mike’s head buried under his blankets, anyway. “Yeah,” he says at last, surprisingly earnest. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

Mike doesn’t really know what constitutes objective dateability, even though he’d been the one to ask, but if there’s some arbitrary checklist of requirements that he’s apparently and satisfactorily met, then he’ll take Lucas’ word for it. “Okay,” he says at last, then rolls over. The bed makes a noise so alarming that Mike is worried, for a split second, that he’s going to fall right through the frame and onto the floor. “Goodnight, Lucas. Good luck with your homework.”

“Please kill me now,” Lucas replies cheerfully, then immediately sighs, long and bereaved. Mike stares at the wall and thinks to himself, privately, silently, that this whole Will thing sucks, and he kind of also wants to die about it, but at least it’s not Biochemistry II.

April 2nd

6:34 p.m.

“He did what?”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Mike throws his hands in the air, nearly knocking over the pieces on the chessboard in front of them. Dustin lets out a small noise of affront as the board rattles, and his queen teeters precariously before righting itself.

“No fucking way,” Dustin says, moving a pawn one square forward. “There’s no fucking way. Tell me what you said again, exactly like you said it.”

“I said,'' Mike repeats, for what seems like the millionth time in an hour, “I said, hey, and then Will stopped walking and looked at me – and this was after a whole spiel he gave about, like, doing things platonically versus romantically, by the way – I said, my hands are freezing. And then he just looks at me some more – and he just keeps looking, and at this point I’m convinced he’s going to straight-up say it, you know, like, Mike, I’m flattered, but I don’t think of you like that, and then I’d be left to spend the rest of my college years scouring Hinge for the future love of my life.”

“Okay, first of all,” Dustin says, “you’re being so dramatic right now. No one finds the love of their life on Hinge, so please get that out of your head. At most, you’ll end up with, like, a mediocre hookup. Which is fine! Sometimes a mediocre hookup serves its purpose, you know. For when you just gotta,” Dustin waves a noncommittal hand at him, then makes a gesture that may or may not be very lewd, depending on if Mike’s interpreting it correctly, “get it out of your system.”

Oh, kill him. Kill him now. “Please never say that to me again,” Mike says, pulling a face. “And I’ve gotta say, I’m not feeling too enthusiastic about whatever’s about to follow this.”

“Second,” Dustin continues, ignoring him, “of course Will wasn’t going to reject you. He’s literally obsessed with you.”

“See, I thought that,” Mike says, and, at Dustin’s raised eyebrow – “Presumptuous” – adds, “okay, no, not actually, but– I was starting to pick up on something, I think? And then he whips out this line about, like– about how he’s glad he can do this stuff with me and not have it be weird, and how there are, like, expectations that some things aren’t okay to do with friends and you can only do them with, like, people you’re dating and stuff.”

Dustin leans back on his hands and gives Mike a curious look. They’re sitting on the floor of Mike and Lucas’ room, an old chess kit unearthed and splayed out in front of them. It might have been Mike’s, or it might actually have been Dustin’s before that, but in the end, it wound up in Mike’s stuff anyway, and he’s been on a bit of a kick lately, much to Will and Lucas’ chagrin. Lucas doesn’t ever feel like playing, but on the rare occasion he does, he’s a ferocious enough opponent that Mike can appreciate a game with him. It usually ends badly though, because Mike is a bad sport but Lucas is an even worse sport – which Mike thinks is both hilarious and also extremely unbecoming of him, as a star athlete on the University of Connecticut’s world-class basketball team. Will, however, can never even make himself sit through a full game without getting distracted, or antsy, or goading Mike into taking a nap on his twin XL that’s got the mattress topper sliding halfway off of it. And because Mike is, as previously established, a very weak man, the game always goes unfinished.

Dustin does none of these things, which Mike can respect. With Dustin, there’s no complaining or ribbing or cuddle piles under one million blankets – thankfully. There’s only fire, fury, and the rightful decimation of Dustin Henderson’s chess kingdom.

Usually. Today, as it turns out, is not one of Mike’s better days. Dustin swoops in and steals one of his bishops with a gleeful whoop, and then, ignoring Mike’s indignant squawks, continues, “Okay, well, what kind of expectations?”

“I don’t know,” Mike huffs, studying his board intently. They’ve only been playing for about twenty minutes – ten of which have been taken up by Will talk – but Mike’s king is already left open, and he can basically see Dustin’s fingers itching to get ahold of his rook. He castles his king in one swift motion, and adds, “He was saying something about how platonic touch is underrated? And he was glad it wasn’t weird with me.”

Dustin stares at him. “Platonic. Platonic? You’re kidding. You’re fucking with me right now.”

“Um. No?”

“No way what you guys are doing is platonic,” Dustin says, a little incredulously. “And that brings me to my third point. Will does not ever act like this around anyone else. Ever.”

“I don’t know,” Mike says again, trying – and failing – to keep from sounding as miserable as he feels. “What if I, like, classically conditioned him or something? Like what if I’ve trained him to associate me with all these things because I’m an idiot who’s too busy pining over him to even appreciate being his friend, and maybe that’s all he ever wanted, and maybe he was just glad he had a friend who was this open about stuff, and maybe I’m crossing a million boundaries and weirding him out and maybe–”

“Mike,” Dustin interjects with a sharp laugh. “Oh my god, please breathe.”

Mike breathes. It doesn’t really help. “Okay,” he says, knocking Dustin’s pawn off the board. “Breathing.”

“Good,” Dustin says encouragingly. “There you go. Kill some innocent pawns. Not too many, though. Feel any better now?”

“Yes,” Mike admits, eyeing the knight flanking Dustin’s king on the far side. “I think I might be spiraling.”

“You don’t say,” Dustin snorts. “And the fourth thing, by the way–”

Whatever Dustin had been about to say is immediately cut off by Mike’s phone letting out a soft ding! next to him, because, unlike Will, he’s not a loser who keeps his phone on Do Not Disturb all day long. And speak of the devil, too–

just saw the fattest ducks at the pond

you should’ve been there

you would have enjoyed them i think

Mike bites back a smile. 

please tell me you took a pic

no :/ got too caught up in their rotund beauty

“Dude,” Dustin is saying, eyebrows furrowed. “I get that your boyfriend is texting and he takes priority or whatever, but hello?”

“Sorry,” Mike says immediately. “Will just saw a really fat duck.”

“Good for him,” Dustin deadpans, clambering to his feet. “Really, I’m thrilled. I’m going to take a bathroom break while you flirt badly over text. Okay?”

“Great,” Mike replies, probably too absentmindedly for his own good, because there’s a wide plethora of things Dustin could get him to accidentally agree to once his attention is elsewhere. “Cool. Have fun.”

rotund?

weirdass

whatever

you love it

what are you up to?

chess with dustin

he’s in the bathroom rn but i might take a dinner break soon

good idea

i’m getting pretty hungry too

tell me about it

i’m craving thai so bad but i’m trying to save money

you’re telling me the dining hall isn’t the most appetizing restaurant on campus?

shut up

i’m so serious

the next person to bring me food is getting kissed on the lips

i’m actually starving

The typing bubble appears, then disappears, and appears, then disappears again, and this is around the time when Mike starts getting a little fidgety. This is probably more bold than he would usually be, and it’s not even all that bold, because Mike hadn’t said anything about wanting to kiss Will on the lips. And, for the record, he is really fucking hungry. If Lucas came back from the dining hall with a plate of waffle fries – one of the only redeemable foods offered on campus, bar mini waffle day – he would kiss Lucas about it too. He’s being serious. But again, maybe he’s just had his head in the clouds about the whole damn thing for so long, and maybe he’s just starting to pick up on discomfort that was there the whole time. Maybe–

mike please don’t make out with the ubereats delivery guy

who’s gonna stop me?

“I hate you guys,” Dustin announces, after pushing the unlocked door open and catching sight of Mike mid-laugh. He plops back down on the floor, surveys the board, probably to make sure Mike didn’t move any of the pieces in his absence – which only happened one time – and sighs. “Did I ever tell you that? How much I hate you two?”

“Multiple times,” Mike says happily, watching the typing bubble pop up again. It disappears after a moment, meaning that Will is either morally offended by whatever Mike said, or he put his phone down to go do something and will inevitably forget to respond for another hour. “Anyway. What was the fourth thing you were saying? Before you left?”

“Oh!” Dustin’s face lights up, and then, grinning from ear to ear, he moves his rook across the board. “The fourth thing: check.”

“Oh, fuck you, Dustin.”

“No thanks,” Dustin chirps. “That’s what Hinge is for, actually, didn’t we just have this discussion?”

“I hate you.”

Mike manages to rescue his king from Dustin’s relentless barrage another two times before Will finally texts him back fifteen minutes later, with a turnover period approximately seventy five percent shorter than Mike was expecting, so maybe miracles do happen after all. Mike picks up his phone while Dustin contemplates his queen, and, upon reading Will’s text, nearly drops it again.

“Dustin,” he hisses. “Dustin.”

Dustin scowls. “What?”

“Look.” Mike turns the phone around, waving it a bit frantically in Dustin’s face. “Look what he said!”

“I can’t see anything when you’re moving your phone around like that,” Dustin huffs, snatching it out of Mike’s hand. And then, pausing and squinting at the screen, “Okay, maybe I’m missing something here, but– is this not a normal thing to say to someone?”

Mike grabs his phone back and stares at the offending messages on the screen:

hey do you want me to bring you something

thai place is on the way back from animation workshop

“You don’t get it,” Mike says, because what the fuck – what the fuck – “you don’t get it, because I just said–” he scrolls up a few messages, and hands the phone back to Dustin– “that. I just said that.”

Dustin’s eyebrows shoot upwards. “Oh,” he says, and then, immediately sounding far too gleeful for Mike’s own good, “oh.”

“What do I do,” Mike pleads, because there’s no way Will meant it like that, not after everything, and it’s just a freaky coincidence, because Will is the sort of person who does this – the sort of sweet, considerate person who offers to buy his best friend dinner after his best friend complained about wanting the dinner and not being able to get it – and it’s just who Will is. “Because I know he didn’t mean it like that.”

“At this point,” Dustin sighs, “there’s nothing I can do to help. You’re a lost cause. Also, check. Again. Are you even paying attention?”

The answer is clearly no, but it’s fine. Mike has bigger fish to fry right now.

…

you don’t have to do that

but what if i want to

i would feel bad

mike

it’s literally on the way

and i was going to get myself something anyway

will.

mike.

i don’t want you to feel obligated

okay good

because i don’t

will .

mike !!!

One thing about Will Byers is that he’s a stubborn son of a bitch, which is why Mike is in no way surprised to see Incoming Call: Will pop up on his screen a second later.

“So I’m buying you dinner,” is the first thing Will says to him upon picking up. There’s a rustling noise on the end of the line and Will’s breathing a touch heavier than normal, meaning he’s definitely walking uphill across campus, and the simple fact that he couldn’t be bothered to stop walking before calling Mike shouldn’t be as endearing as it is.

“You’re crazy,” Mike tells him. Dustin’s eyebrows raise even further and he mouths something at him from across the board – probably your move or you idiot or something along those lines. Mike waves him off. “You’re actually crazy.”

“Maybe,” Will says simply, through a barely-stifled huff. “So here’s the thing,” he starts, which is more than a little ominous. “I might have ulterior motives.”

Oh, what the fuck?

“Okay,” Mike says slowly, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. His heart rate is picking up embarrassingly quickly. The next person to bring me food is getting– “How ulterior are we talking?”

“Dude,” Dustin is saying. “Your move.”

“Pretty ulterior,” Will says, and then, before Mike can do anything too drastic – like jump out the window, yell, shriek, or throw his phone across the room – he adds, “so I was wondering if I could come over and get your opinion on some stuff I’m working on.”

Oh. What the fuck?

“Oh,” Mike says, pulse still rushing through his ears hard enough that maybe Will can hear it on the other end of the call. “Yeah, I mean– I don’t know what I could possibly help with, but– you don’t have to bribe me with dinner for that.”

“It’s not really bribing,” Will says, “because I know your order and I would’ve gotten it for you anyway.”

Mike picks at a loose thread sticking out of his t-shirt and thinks maybe it would be cathartic to throw his phone at the wall after all, if Will is going to go around saying stuff like this, and being kind and considerate like this, and just generally being the all-reigning king of mixed fucking messages. Even if his ulterior motives aren’t exactly the sort Mike had been hoping for, something flutters nervously in Mike’s stomach at the thought, because maybe, maybe, maybe–

“I hate you,” he says, instead of any of this.

“No you don’t,” Will replies easily, and Mike huffs in response. “And it’s not– the thing I needed help with, I mean– my animation final? That I asked you about? We have a character design assignment and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it.”

“Oh,” Mike breathes out, “oh, yeah, you– really? You want my opinion?”

“It’s your story,” Will says, “and your characters, so, I don’t know, I just wanted to draw them like how you were imagining. The final itself isn’t too crazy, I mean, we’re doing super basic stuff, but it’s mostly the character design I’m taking inspiration from, so– if that’s okay. If you aren’t super busy.”

Mike looks down at the chessboard. Dustin has, indeed, cornered him into his third check of the evening, and Mike can see that he’s about one and a half wrong moves away from a checkmate. He sighs. “Dustin is currently beating my ass into the ground at chess so I don’t think this game is going to last much longer.”

“Damn right it isn’t,” Dustin mutters, looking up from his own phone, watching Mike move his king over one space. “You’ve been distracted the whole time and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why–”

“Okay!” Mike says loudly, shooting him a glare. And then, into the phone, “You didn’t hear that. I’ve been playing fine. I’ve been going easy on him, actually.”

Will does not sound impressed when he responds, “Sure.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“That’s not the point,” Will says, and Mike rolls his eyes. “Anyway, I’m about to order so I’ll be there in, like, thirty minutes? And,” he adds, just as Mike is opening his mouth to say something, “don’t even bother trying to reimburse me, because I’ll just Venmo the money right back to you.”

“I hate you,” Mike says again, so fondly that he’s sure the affection is leaking right out of his voice and through the phone, sickly sweet and overdone and hopelessly, hopelessly in love.

“No you don’t,” Will says again, cheerful and smug and smiling so wide Mike can practically hear it, and then he hangs up.

“So,” Dustin says, the second Mike looks back at him. “Checkmate, bitch.”

Lucas comes back about twenty minutes later, looking rather worse for wear and holding about ten million things in his arms all at once. Mike is sort of impressed that he managed to open the door on his own, because the second it slams shut behind him, Lucas stumbles past the closet and falls face-first onto the bed, dropping his bag, his jacket, and approximately nine point five million sheets of paper onto the floor.

“Jesus,” Mike exhales, as Dustin swivels around. “What the fuck are all of those?”

Lucas still has his face buried in his duvet when he responds, so muffed that Mike can barely make out what he’s saying, “I had my anatomy study group today.”

“Ah.” Mike makes as sympathetic of a noise as he can muster, considering that he’s never had to go to a study group meeting for anything in his life. “So sorry that happened to you.”

“Me too,” Lucas responds, feet still planted on the ground as he groans and shimmies his way further up the bed. It’s not until he’s most of the way there, just his feet hanging off the edge of the mattress, that he finally kicks his shoes off. Mike watches them bounce across the floor, past the desk and closet, until one of them ends up at the head of Mike’s bed, and the other by the door. “I never want to look at a diagram of the human body ever again.”

“Aren’t you planning on going to med school?” Dustin asks, rather preoccupied with scouring the floor for a runaway pawn – which may or may not have rolled away while Mike had – possibly – been freaking out a few minutes ago. Mike shoots him a glare, his best attempt at conveying the words shut up right now without saying them outright. As Lucas’ roommate, Mike has gotten pretty used to his theatrics – even though, to be fair, theatrics might be an unfair jab at what is probably a very reasonable reaction to Lucas’ increasingly insane course load.

“Yeah,” Lucas mutters, “and I better get so fucking rich to make up for all of this.”

“There, there,” Mike coos, watching Lucas burrow miserably under the blankets. “It’ll be okay. You’ll get so rich and you’ll save so many lives and you can buy a house with an extra room in it for me and we can be roommates forever.”

“Dear God,” Lucas says, sounding a little horrified, “maybe I should just drop out now, then–” and, when Mike reaches up to his desk and tosses a pencil at his head– “ow! Jesus!”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Dustin says, closing the chess set box with a soft click, “Will said he wants Mike to kiss him.”

“What?” Lucas says, lifting his head up from his pillow and staring them down in acute shock, just as Mike hisses, “Dustin, shut the fuck up,” and then, frantically, “he did not say that.”

“What?” Lucas says again, eyes darting between Mike and Dustin and then back to Mike. “He said what?”

“Mike said he’d kiss the next person who brought him food,” Dustin says, ignoring Mike as per usual, “and Will immediately offered to bring him dinner.”

“He didn’t mean it like that,” Mike says weakly, because as much as he’d have liked Will to – as much as he’s completely, pathetically, desperately hoping he did – it seems a little too on the nose to be true. “He was just being nice.”

“Mike,” Lucas says, after a long, heavy pause filled with a lot of Dustin-Lucas eye contact and probably some very unspoken communication between them, “disrespectfully, you’re an idiot.”

“I was just kidding,” Mike tries, “and he knew that–”

“Disrespectfully,” Dustin parrots, “no you weren’t, and no he didn’t.”

“You come into my home,” Mike mutters, “and disrespect me–”

“I gave him permission,” Lucas chirps. “And you’re right, actually, I do feel better. Thanks, man.”

“You’re welcome. Also, shut up.”

A knock sounds at the door just as Mike is contemplating the ethics of double murder-suicide in a situation like this – the murders, of course, being his two traitorous best friends – so unfortunately, Dustin and Lucas are going to live to see another day. “It’s open,” they all chorus, and Will pushes the door open with an unamused look on his face.

“You really need to stop leaving this unlocked,” he says, dropping his backpack onto the floor by Mike’s bed and scanning the room. “It’s very unsafe.” He’s holding a white plastic takeout bag, receipt taped neatly to the outside, the inside already covered in a healthy layer of condensation. Mike’s stomach rumbles as the scent of lemongrass and curry powder rapidly fills the room. 

“Nah,” Mike says. “And I know you won’t tell Isaac because you might be a menace, but you’re not a snitch.”

Will’s eyes coast over the pile of items discarded haphazardly by Lucas’ desk, the Lucas-shaped lump on the bed, Dustin clutching the chess set to his chest like some sort of lifeline, and then, finally, they land on Mike. He smiles, automatic, easy, and something in his posture relaxes. Will looks nice today – unfairly, ridiculously nice, Mike thinks. His hair is a bit rumpled from the walk, headphones lowered carelessly around his neck, sweater bunched up a little against the denim of his jacket, and his pants are riding up at the ankles just enough for Mike to make out the stripes of the socks he’s wearing underneath.

God, Mike wants him.

“You don’t know that,” Will says, reaching down to undo his laces and setting his shoes off to the side. The plastic of the bag crinkles as he sits down next to Mike and he maneuvers it between them, pulling out a pair of chopsticks, a plastic fork, and two white takeout containers. “I might be reinventing myself.”

“Sure,” Mike relents, gratefully accepting the proffered box. “You brought me dinner, so I guess I can’t say anything.”

“I guess not,” Will says, quietly, pleased. He passes over the fork too, and adds, “Because watching you try to eat rice with chopsticks is just gonna be embarrassing for everyone involved.”

Mike doesn’t protest. He knows it’s true.

“And nothing for us,” Dustin laments. “Wow.”

Will shrugs, grinning a little lopsidedly as he splits his chopsticks cleanly in half. “You guys didn’t ask.”

“Mike didn’t ask either,” Lucas points out, raising an eyebrow, “you just–”

“Okay!” Mike yelps, before this conversation veers into any more incriminating territory than it’s already in. “Okay, okay, he gets it.”

Will looks a bit lost, but he must figure it’s not worth getting into a whole thing about, because he shrugs, then says, “Oh! I almost forgot, Mike,” and rustles around in the bag, “here, I got you this too, because you’re weird about needing a drink with every meal.”

“Oh,” Mike says, staring at the cup of bright orange iced tea Will is handing to him. “You really didn’t have to do that.”

Will shrugs again, digging around in his container and coming up with a remarkably large piece of baby corn. “They were having a special. It was only two dollars for a medium.”

“Oh,” Mike says again, and then, suddenly too aware of Dustin’s eyes on him, and Lucas’, and the way the temperature in the room feels like it’s suddenly skyrocketed into somewhere in the high nineties, quickly takes a sip before he can open his mouth and embarrass himself any further. He bumps his knee wordlessly against Will’s, a silent thank you. Will catches his eye and smiles around a mouthful of noodles and sauce.

“I can’t believe this,” Lucas says, rubbing his hands over his eyes and groaning. “First, I have the longest day ever. Second, I have so much homework. And third, I have to sit here and watch this. Fuck you both. I just wanted to writhe in peace.”

“You can come writhe in our room, Lucas,” Dustin says, clambering to his feet. “I have a physics assignment due tomorrow morning that’s about to screw me over tonight.”

“Oh, god,” Lucas says, wincing, but he peels himself slowly out of the covers. “You’re so strong, Dustin. So brave.”

“I know,” Dustin sighs. “If it weren’t for the NASA internship, I’d already be changing my major.”

The issue, once Lucas and Dustin both leave – with a copious serving of rightfully earned grumbling and cribbing and complaining – is that it means Mike is now left alone in a room with Will.

The issue, to be more specific, is that Mike is now left alone in a room with Will – who looks unfairly good today – as he leans all the way into Mike’s personal space in order to show him what he has open on the screen of his tablet. Will, who looks really, really good today; Will, who smells like the cologne Jonathan got him for his birthday, something sharp and clean and very grown-up; Will, who has a hand planted on Mike’s thigh for balance, whose hair is tickling the side of Mike’s cheek, who looks really, really good, and all of a sudden, Mike isn’t sure whether Lucas and Dustin’s absence is making things better, or so, so much worse.

“So here’s what I was thinking,” Will says, half-empty takeout container set down in front of him. Mike holds his in one hand, shovels fried rice into his mouth with the other, and tries his hardest not to die. “You had this whole, like, high fantasy idea going on, so I was thinking,” he pauses, swiping across the screen, “of outfits like this? Sort of?”

Mike studies the screen carefully, and he doesn’t know the first thing about art – or at least, anything beyond  aimless doodles in the margins of his notebooks – but it’s clear that Will has put some serious time into this. The lines of the figures on the screen are sketchy but intentional, clearly a halfway stage, nowhere close to finished, and filled in with a few sparse choices of colors.   Mike recognizes the figures well enough – he’d been the one to come up with them after all: shiny silver knight’s armor, a wizard’s staff and robes. Will looks back at him and flashes him a small, hopeful smile. “Well?”

Mike swallows, puts his box down, and says, “Will, I mean– these are great, you know that, but– I don’t know shit about design,” Mike laughs, and Will rolls his eyes. “Like, visually, I mean.”

“I don’t need you to be an expert,” Will scoffs, scribbling away at the screen. A few stray lines disappear under the tip of his stylus. “I just wanted your opinion.”

“Okay,” Mike says, and hooks his chin onto the curve of Will’s shoulder. Will shifts easily to accommodate him, holding the tablet up at an angle and moving his head a little to the side. Mike tries – and fails, spectacularly, miserably – to not think about how warm Will is, or how easy it would be to tilt his face a little to the right and just, like, brush his lips over–

“Okay what?” Will is saying, and Mike blinks sharply, abruptly snapping himself out of a pleasant, hazy reverie.

“Okay,” Mike repeats, feeling increasingly dazed by the second, “as in– you can have my opinion.”

“Okay,” Will echoes, sounding a little amused. His eyes are gleaming. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”

Mike swallows, hard. “Good,” he manages, hoarse. “They’re good.”

“Mike,” Will says. “Is something wrong?”

Do you want me to kiss you? Mike wants to ask. Is that what this is about? Are we playing the world’s lamest game of chicken right now? “Thanks for dinner,” he hears himself say instead, and Will’s hands go a little slack on his tablet.

“Yeah,” he says, surprised. “Yeah, of course– you don’t have to thank me for that.”

Mike readjusts, leaning away and pulling his knees to his chest. Will follows the movements with his eyes, still cross-legged in the middle of the room. “I mean it,” he says. “That was nice.”

Will’s lips twitch, just slightly. “I know you mean it. And I’m serious, Mike, it was nothing.”

“I’m just saying,” Mike presses, because he feels so close to something that he’s starting to ache with it, just waiting for the last piece to give, “that you didn’t have to.”

“I know,” Will says again, and it’s a mark of how incredible of a person he is that he hasn’t gotten frustrated with Mike yet, even when he’s being like this. He stretches his legs out, leans back against his hands, and taps one foot against Mike’s ankle. “But I wanted to.”

“You wanted to, as in…” Mike trails off, faltering. Suddenly, the words seem too daunting to say.

“I wanted to,” Will says quietly, “as in– I told you. I had ulterior motives.”

Mike’s throat is suddenly very, very dry. “Right,” he says. “Your assignment.”

“Exactly,” Will says. His voice has dropped into a whisper, sometime in the last twenty seconds. “My assignment.”

Oh, kill him now. Mike contemplates throwing himself out of the window, but they only live on the third floor, meaning that it would probably be more embarrassing than fatal, and he wouldn’t even be injured enough to be excused from finals week anyway. “Well,” he manages, “I don’t know what help I could possibly offer, I mean, you seem to be doing just fine on your own.”

Will holds his gaze for one, two, three seconds, before dropping his head into his hands and letting out a soft groan. “You’re so insufferable,” he says, “it’s– if you really want to know, I’ve been, like, playing around with the animation software, and we haven’t done much for class but I wanted to, like, polish it up and show you, if I ever finished. After, I mean, and– I don’t care if you’re not an artist or whatever, Mike, you’re still– you’re creative, and you come up with such good concepts, and– and I care what you think, and I like spending time with you, so. Yeah.”

“Oh,” Mike says, feeling a little dazed. “You– okay.”

Will just shrugs. His ears, Mike notices, in a vaguely delighted way, are rapidly turning a violent crimson. “I said what I said,” he says, even as the red creeps down his cheeks, across the bridge of his nose. Mike watches, entranced, as Will worries at his lower lip and looks away.

“Well,” Mike clears his throat, “in that case–” he leans over, pokes at the screen with one of the plastic tines on his fork– “I think it would be cool if these robes were, like, swooshier?”

“Swooshier,” Will echoes, a smile spreading across his face. He scribbles rapidly on the screen. “I like how you think.”

They move onto the bed eventually, just like they always do, because Will has an agenda – to constantly, obnoxiously, usurp Mike’s bed – and Mike is, as it turns out, perfectly fine being compliant in this. He stretches out, legs tossed carelessly over Will’s lap, and watches Will draw for a while in silence: sat leaning against the wall at the foot of Mike’s bed, tablet propped up against Mike’s ankles, headphones and jacket taken off and set down on the floor by his backpack. His brows are furrowed in concentration, lips pursed slightly as he works.

Mike, who has a grand total of zero side projects and zero homework left to do, is currently watching Disneynature’s Wings of Life on his laptop.

“I wanna see the butterfly migration someday,” he announces. 

Will looks up and over at him, pushing the sleeve of his sweater up his forearm from where it had started to droop down over his wrist. “I’ll take you,” he says easily. “Um. Where might they be migrating, exactly?”

“Like, Mexico, I think,” Mike says, turning the paused screen around so Will can see. “And apparently they come up and down the east coast too but I think it would be more fun to see them in California or something. We should do a road trip.”

“Yeah? Across the whole country?” Will raises his eyebrows. “You think you could put up with being in a car with me for that long?”

“Oh,” Mike says, feigning discontent, “yeah, never mind, actually. I forgot who I was talking to, mister backseat driver–”

Will rolls his eyes and says, emphatically, “Just because you’re a danger to pedestrians and curbs everywhere doesn’t mean I have to sit back and be okay with it.”

Mike rolls out his ankle for good measure, hears it pop more than he feels it. “Get your own car and stop making me ferry you everywhere then,” he says, nudging at Will’s thigh with his foot. 

“Mm,” Will hums, grinning, “no thanks. I like having my own free Uber service.”

“Worth a shot,” Mike sighs, and then, “are you done? Can you watch Wings of Life with me now?”

“Is it just about butterflies?”

“No,” Mike says pointedly, “there’s hummingbirds and stuff too. Also I’m, like, ninety percent sure it’s Meryl Streep doing the narration.”

“Well then,” Will smiles, and leans off the bed to toss his tablet neatly onto the soft pile his jacket has made on the floor, “how can I say no to Meryl Streep?”

“Exactly,” Mike beams, then reaches up to tug Will down. Will collapses onto the mattress next to him with a soft grunt. The bedframe, already on its last legs – along with the rest of the furniture in this ancient, Godforsaken building – rattles ominously beneath them. “Come on,” Mike says, as Will shuffles his way onto Mike’s pillow, “get comfy.”

“I’m trying,” Will sighs, “but you keep jabbing me in the ribs with your stupid pointy elbows.”

“Sorry,” Mike concedes, because he’s stubborn, but not too stubborn to admit that all one million miles of his post-pubescent limbs are probably not the most comfortable of bedfellows.

Will, for all his griping, seems to be doing just fine, actually, if the ease with which he maneuvers himself around Mike’s stupid pointy elbows has anything to say about it. He wraps both arms around one of Mike’s, sticks his striped sock-clad feet under Mike’s calves, and blinks expectantly at the screen. “You can play it now.”

Mike, on the other hand, is trying his hardest to keep his heart beating in a somewhat normal, healthy range. Maybe he should have stayed on the floor. Maybe he should have accepted the fried rice and kicked Will out two hours ago. Maybe he should’ve committed to UChicago after all.

“Cool,” he says, as evenly as possible, and hits play. “You better not fall asleep.”

“Never,” Will says, like a liar.

“If you do, I’m letting you fall off the bed,” says Mike, also like a liar.

“Okay,” Will says, clearly, and for good reason, not believing him one bit.

Meryl Streep is no David Attenborough – which is fine, and Mike isn’t complaining, because the charm of David Attenborough is that he’s one of a kind, untouchable, and wholly irreplaceable – but Mike has to hand it to her, because personally, he’s having a fantastic time. Will’s been chiming in every few minutes with mild commentary – “Oh, that’s pretty,” or “How is it hovering like that?” – but over the past twenty minutes, the intervals between his interjections have stretched out longer and longer, and his breathing has evened out, soft and gentle and quiet against Mike’s neck, and by the time the end credits roll, it’s a surprise to absolutely no one what’s happened.

“Will?”

Will, predictably, does not budge. Mike supposes that it had kind of been his fault for stuffing Will full of carbs and then getting him horizontal, especially at – he pulls his phone out, checks the screen as discreetly as he can manage without jostling Will around too much – eleven-thirty, Jesus, has it really been that long? Time has a funny way of losing all meaning whenever Will is around, so Mike should, in all actuality, be a lot less taken aback by this fact than he is.

“Will,” he whispers again, turning his head to the side just enough to catch Will’s profile in the corner of his eye: hair tousled, falling over his forehead and eyebrows, face tucked most of the way into Mike’s shoulder, mouth a little slack with sleep. One arm is still tucked under him, the other hand resting gently on Mike’s bicep, legs sandwiching one of Mike’s between his own. And then again, for good measure– “Will?”

It’s no use. Mike lets out a long, slow breath, and wonders, briefly, just when his life got this complicated. The least he could do is probably set his laptop down, so that it doesn’t fall off the bed and break and die and cost Mike an arm and a leg to replace – an arm and a leg that Will currently has trapped under his own limbs, rendering Mike entirely unable to move.

Great. This is– this is fine, this is great. Mike can work with this. It’s fine.

He shifts slightly onto his other side, just enough to reach off the bed and lower his laptop gently to the ground. It’s at this exact moment when Will lets out a small noise behind him, muffled and soft, something akin to a whine, and rolls with him; the hand on Mike’s arm moves, automatically, unconsciously, to wrap around his waist. Mike feels him wriggle impossibly closer and suddenly, they’re flush against each other, top to toe. Will presses his face to the divot between Mike’s shoulder blades, lets out one last, breathy sigh, warm air ghosting all down the nape of Mike’s neck, and goes still again.

Mike freezes.

Great. So this is– so Will is, like–

This is fine. This is–

This is so, totally, completely–

–not fine. Will makes another small noise, which Mike definitely wouldn’t have caught if Will’s face hadn’t been so close to him, and Jesus fucking Christ, is he snoring?

This, Mike thinks weakly, staring at the far wall in a mildly horrified, unblinking way, is both the best and the worst thing that has ever happened to him.

Mike’s first thought is that Lucas is going to kill him. His second and third thoughts are, in no particular order, that he’s going to kill Will, and then maybe himself for good measure. Who the fuck does this, is the point – Mike reaches, a little frantically, for his phone, before realizing it’s trapped under him from before he tried rolling over – like, if you’re talking about mixed signals, then here’s Will, the gold star-certified champion of them; because after all of this, after all the maybes and the maybe-nots, after ulterior motives and whatever he’d been going on earlier, Will has the nerve to– to fall asleep in Mike’s bed. Spooning him. There had been some plausible deniability before, Mike thinks, but this feels– like, spooning is crossing a line! You don’t just do that!

Will, however, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. 

Mike pulls his phone out from under him and Will lets out another quiet, displeased little noise from behind him, arm tightening around his waist. Mike’s stomach flutters thrillingly as it starts to dawn on him that despite all his talk of letting Will fall out of his bed – which wouldn’t even work, because Will is on the inside, closer to the wall – he doesn’t have the heart to wake Will up. Not when Will is so warm behind him, not when the sleeve of Will’s sweater has fallen back down over his wrist and hand, not when Will is snoring, which he would never, ever admit to upon waking, and would most definitely protest with a violent sort of fervor.

And Will isn’t usually a heavy sleeper – he’s often the opposite, actually – and it’s this last thing, the ease with which he’s slipped into a sleep that’s clearly deep enough for him to quite literally start snoring about it, that makes Mike realize that there’s probably nothing he can do except let it happen. He exhales slowly, and, on a whim, reaches down, and laces the fingers of one hand through Will’s, splayed out between his stomach and his ribs. Will’s hand twitches once, lightly, in his his, then stills again. What the fuck, Mike thinks, frantically, helplessly, and so full of want that he’s starting to burn up with it, flushed warm from his ears down to the tips of his toes, all the places where they’re touching. What the fuck.

There’s not really much else to do but scroll through his phone for a while, given that most of his body and one arm are all occupied, and even this is proven kind of difficult by the weird angle he’s lying at – halfway between his back and his side, other arm still kind of stuck under him. The room is quiet, quiet, quiet, save for the quiet snuffling noises Will is making behind him. The caustic warmth of it doesn’t let up as the minutes tick by; if anything, it only gets worse, driven by a sudden, thrilling fear that Will is going to wake up and catch him in the act, like Mike holding his hand is what’s going to push this whole thing over the line, as if the rest of it isn’t already insane enough. Will doesn’t move, though, and Mike lets himself have this – he lets himself press his palm more firmly to the back of Will’s hand, lets himself lean into the touch, into the solid weight of Will’s body bracketing his, and wants, wants, wants.

It goes pretty well for about half an hour, all things considered, until Mike’s awkward, contorted position comes back to bite him in the ass when a sharp, cramping pain shoots down his thigh. He winces, drops his phone onto the mattress – facedown, halfway into a Wikipedia deep dive on the Hubble Space Telescope – and tries very hard to take deep breaths. That makes sense, right? Like, if you have a cramp, you’d logically want to get more oxygen into your system or something, because that intuitively kind of makes sense – and Lucas is the one getting a physiology degree here, so he would know, probably; Mike hasn’t taken a life science class since high school biology, unless the Discovery channel counts – and it works for about half a blessed second until, suddenly, it doesn’t, and Mike’s leg is on fire, and he needs to move, now.

“Come on,” Mike mutters to himself, trying to twist his leg free from where Will’s have got an absolute vice grip on it. He shifts slightly, winces again at the way Will’s leg gets jostled with the motion, even as he’s trying to move in the smallest increments possible so as to avoid–

“Hm?” Will mumbles, stirring, and Mike freezes. “Mike?”

“Oh,” Mike whispers, “hey. Good morning.”

Will raises his head a few inches and blinks blearily. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry,” Mike adds, taking advantage of the pause to roll the rest of the way onto his back. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“‘S okay,” Will says through a barely muffled yawn. He’s slurring his words a little, eyes still most of the way closed. “I wasn’t even asleep.”

“Yeah you were,” Mike points out, laughing softly. “You were snoring and everything.”

“I was not,” Will immediately protests, just like Mike knew he would. He shoots Mike something that might have been a glare, in another life, but it’s entirely undercut by the tired pink flush overcoming him, the faint lines along his cheek where he’d had it pressed into Mike’s shirt, the way his eyelids are fluttering wildly every time he tries to open them.  He yawns again and says, hardly even decipherable, “I can’t snore if I’m not asleep.”

“No shame,” Mike adds, “I thought it was cute.”

It hits him, about a half second later, what he’s just said; he’d panic if everything weren’t so warm and hazy, too comfortable for any meaningful anxiety to set in. Will just blinks slowly at him. “Oh,” he says, eyes slipping closed again. “Okay.”

“Sorry,” Mike whispers, just in case. “Not in a weird way.”

“Okay,” Will says again, then tugs lightly at the front of Mike’s shirt. “Come here.”

“Uh,” Mike says, but lets himself be moved onto his other side. Will promptly tucks his face into Mike’s chest, nose pressed up against his throat, wraps an arm around his waist again, and falls silent.

Great.

“Will,” Mike whispers, even as his arm moves, seemingly of its own accord, to return the embrace, palm resting flat against Will’s back. “Come on,” he says anyway. “You’ve got a morning class tomorrow.”

“Don’t care,” Will mumbles. His lips brush, just slightly, along the patch of skin just above the hem of Mike’s t-shirt. He fights back a shiver, even as his hand twitches against Will’s shoulder. “I’ll just sleep here.”

“You know I’m not opposed,” Mike says, because he’s not, because it sounds wonderful, actually, to fall asleep with Will in his arms like this, and wake up the same way. In theory, of course, because this is a twin bed and Mike is pushing six feet and Will is just barely behind, and it’s going to end, inevitably, with one or both of them either concussed on the floor or waking up with the stiffest neck of all time. “But wouldn’t you rather sleep in a whole bed? To yourself?”

“Not really,” comes the reply, muffled. Will’s arm tightens around Mike’s back, like he’s afraid he might pull away. “Five minutes.”

“Will,” Mike tries, speaking more into Will’s hair than to him, really, “come on, you’re– you have a morning class,” he tries, weakly, pathetically. Mike is a lot of things, but he’s also only human, and his finite supply of self control has long since been depleted. It would be easy – too, too easy – to tilt Will’s face back, to brush the hair out of his eyes, to lean in and kiss the taste of sleep off his lips, to watch his eyes flutter the rest of the way closed again, to hear him sigh, soft and pleased against Mike’s mouth. It would be easy – so, so easy –

–and then Will lets out a frustrated noise and pulls away. “Do you hate me,” he mumbles, and the arm around Mike’s waist retracts slowly. It’s Mike’s own fault, he knows, but that doesn’t make him regret this any less. “Do you actually hate me?”

“Sorry for caring about your education,” Mike huffs, as Will lets out a final, melodramatic sigh, and sits up. “Sorry for dragging you to the classes you are literally paying to attend.”

“I know,” Will mutters, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “So mean.”

“C’mon,” Mike coaxes, gathering every ounce of willpower in his body and rolling off the bed. Pins and needles shoot their way up his calves as he straightens up, leans over to tug at Will’s wrist where he’s still sitting on the bed, curled into himself. “Up you get.”

“Mean,” Will echoes, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and hopping off. He grabs for his backpack and says, “Mean, mean, mean.”

“Very sorry,” Mike agrees.

Will looks at him for a long moment, jacket slung over one arm, headphones clutched in hand. “I had fun today,” he says at last, surprisingly earnest despite the sleepy lilt to the way he blinks, entirely disoriented in a soft, endearingly malleable way. His cheeks are, Mike notices, still very, very pink.

“Oh,” Mike says, still looking at the flush there, the way it’s spread down Will’s neck, disappearing behind the collar of his sweater. “Yeah, me too. Obviously. Thanks, um. Thank you for dinner.”

The corner of Will’s mouth twitches upwards. “Anytime,” he says softly. “Sorry I fell asleep.”

“It was only for, like, thirty minutes,” Mike replies. “Um. Do you want me to walk you back?”

Will’s lips twitch again. “I live, like, six doors down.”

“You never know,” Mike says, “I don’t want you passing out on the way there.

“I think I’ll be okay,” Will says, smiling for real now. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, thinking about how, if he were a little less of a coward, he’d go in for a thank you kiss, or at least inquire about a thank you kiss, or say, maybe, hey, were you making a move? Am I just dumb? He doesn’t, however, say any of these things.

“Bye,” Will says, lingering at the closet, then the door, then again in the hall. “See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Mike calls back, feeling rather like an idiot with nerves of marshmallow fluff, “see you tomorrow,” and then the door slips shut, and Will is gone.

April 6th

8:14 a.m

As far as birthdays go, 20 is probably a little underwhelming.

Like, the concept of it is exciting enough, Mike supposes, what with the start of his twenties and all, but it’s not like eighteen, where he turned legal, and twenty one, where he’ll turn a different, more fun kind of legal. Twenty is just kind of– well, it’s there, and it’s a little too existential to get all that excited about.

Will, however, does not seem to share these qualms.

Mike’s phone dings softly as he tugs on his shoes, because Thursdays are a hellish, hellish day – i.e: morning classes – and he’s already running late.

happy one day until your birthday

you’re more excited about it than i am

maybe

on an unrelated note

are you free this evening?

…

why

asking for a friend.

that’s suspicious

mike

just answer the question

i should be free after like 6 yeah

a little hw nothing crazy

but why

:)

what are you up to

:)

please

have a nice day!

will

please.

just trust me

it’s a surprise

will

come on

please

(read 8:18 a.m.)

This, of course, is what Mike is thinking about all throughout his science fiction literature class’s discussion on Le Guin’s Nine Lives, which goes something like identity, something, something, and the concept of self, something, something. Mike is usually very engaged in this sort of thing, and clones are, objectively, badass and cool, but one thing about Will is that he’s sneaky, and he’s nefarious, and he already occupies an embarrassing portion of Mike’s waking thoughts as is, meaning that Mike has just enough brainpower remaining to scrape together a decent participation grade, and bolt the second his professor dismisses them. He texts Lucas immediately, who responds alarmingly fast for someone who’s supposed to be in class right now.

are you guys planning something tonight?

uh not that i know of

if dustin moved up your bday plans from tomorrow i’m gonna kill him

like your bday is already on a friday why would he want to do something on a thursday night instead

hm ok weird

because will said he had something planned

OH

that’s so weird

lucas

what do you know

nothing!

you’re a terrible liar

even over text

sorry man

my lips are sealed

lucas.

(read 10:02 a.m.)

So all of Mike’s friends hate him, apparently, which is not exactly new knowledge. Dustin hasn’t done anything mean (yet) today, but the day is still young, and Will Byers is still Will Byers, which is why Mike rushes to the library after his second class of the day, cranks out an admittedly subpar discussion post, thoroughly under-analyzes the short story they’ve been assigned for their next discussion, and is racing home when Will texts him again.

hi

are you back yet

depends

on why you wanna know

so that’s a no

hurry up asshole it’s gonna get dark soon

hm

interesting

i’ll be home in five but give me like 30 minutes to shower

you get 20

will

come on

see you in 20 minutes :)

6:46 p.m.

“Hi,” Will says, even before Mike finishes pulling the door to his room all the way open.

“Hi,” Mike echoes, trying to convey as much intrigued apprehension as he possibly can with the singular syllable, and then, immediately, “oh, wow, you look–”

Will, who was already smiling up at him, positively beams. “Thank you,” he says, even though Mike hadn’t finished his sentence – and he’s not sure where he was going with it, but he’s sure anything that came out of his mouth wouldn’t have been good or eloquent in any way. What Mike is trying to portray here is that he looks good, which he always does, in a very unbiased manner, but he looks even more so today, like he put more effort into his outfit than usual. Colorblocked button-down tucked loosely into his pants, a belt that Mike doesn’t think he’s ever seen Will wear before, and a flash of heart-patterned socks peeking through where his pants are rolled up at the ankles. Will’s hair is tousled, gently, carefully, and the top button of his shirt is undone, and he looks good. Perfectly reminiscent of the beautiful spring week they’ve been enjoying: warm and radiant and bright, and so, so good. 

Mike thinks he might not be breathing.

“I, uh,” he starts, gesturing down at himself, “I wasn’t sure what you had in mind so– I feel a little underdressed,” he laughs.

Will looks him up and down, gaze lingering just long enough for Mike to feel himself grow a little warm – is Will checking him out? – and then Will adjusts the giant tote bag he’s got slung over one shoulder, filled to the brim and looking like it’s about to burst, and shrugs.

“I think you look great,” he says earnestly, which is maybe more than Mike would have afforded himself, because he’s wearing the same jeans and crewneck combo he’s had on for most of the year.

“Oh,” he says anyway, most definitely turning warm now, actually, and reaching over to grab his jacket from the bed. “Thank you. Um– do you want to head out? To– I don’t know where, actually, because you wouldn’t tell me–”

Will stops him with a hand to the chest. “So about that,” he says, which never ever leads to something good, “you might need to drive?”

Mike blinks. “Really? Where are we going?”

“Can’t tell you,” Will says simply, as Mike steps back into his room and digs around his desk for his car keys. He doesn’t drive on campus nearly as much as he thought he might, given that parking is both a pain in the ass and expensive as hell anywhere else in the city, but his car – his dear, beloved G5, a product of a year and a half’s worth of slaving away in minimum wage hell – carried him through senior year of high school. It’s quite possibly his most prized possession, and is definitely more than worth the twelve hour trip to drive it to and from campus every summer.

“You can’t make me drive and not tell me,” Mike huffs, tucking his keys into his pocket. He does a quick check, patting himself down – wallet, phone, room keys, car keys – then gives Will as withering of a look as he can muster. “How am I supposed to know where to go?”

Will grins wider. “I’ll direct you,” he says, as the door falls shut behind them with a soft click. Mike jiggles the doorknob once, then twice, making sure it’s properly locked, before they set off.

The Pontiac is waiting for them in the lower level parking garage, and Mike can feel its displeasure the second they walk in. “I’m sorry I neglected you,” he says, opening the driver’s side door. “I’ve just barely left my room in a week.”

“Are you talking to the car?” Will asks in mild disbelief, as if this isn’t something Mike has done the entire time he’s had one – as if this isn’t something Will has seen him do a million and one times.

Mike runs a soothing hand along the dashboard and coos, “Don’t listen to him.”

“You are so,” Will sighs, hoisting the suspiciously full tote gently over the console and into the backseat.

“I’m so what?” he asks, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever’s inside. “And what do you have in there?”

“None of your business,” Will responds primly, even though it is, because he’s being weird and cryptic about everything, and making Mike drive them somewhere without even telling him where, and he looks so, so good, Mike is slowly but surely losing his mind.

“It– whatever,” Mike sighs, because if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that Will is a determined motherfucker, and Mike is slowly accepting that Will might be directing him right into oncoming traffic and into his own doom, and there’s really nothing he can do about it. “Okay, fine,” he says, as the bluetooth finally, finally connects. “Don’t tell me. Keep being mean.”

“Thank you,” Will says, “I will.” And then, with a slightly incredulous noise, “Mike, is this the–”

“Don’t you dare say boyband playlist–”

“–boyband playlist.”

“No,” Mike says emphatically, peeling slowly out of the claustrophobically liminal catastrophe that is the student garage, “because it’s not, because only, like, a fourth of these songs are sung by boybands, and I’d really appreciate it if you stopped giving me grief over songs I know you also enjoy.”

“That is not an insignificant percentage,” Will says, ignoring the thing about him also enjoying the songs, even though Mike has seen him smile when they play, even though Mike has heard him singing along. Instead, Will leans back in the seat as Mike pulls up at a stop sign, whole body relaxing as the sun streams in through the windows, golden and syrupy-thick. For all intents and purposes, it really has been a gorgeous week on campus, marked by both an influx of students out on the quad, and the sudden reappearance of Mike’s will to live.

“Shut up,” Mike huffs, turning to watch the light catch on the strip of skin right below Will’s collarbone, where his shirt has flapped open, just a little.

“Eyes on the road,” Will chirps, like the horrible little backseat driver he is, and Mike snaps his gaze back ahead. Will sounds like he might be smiling when he adds, “You’ll want to take a left on tenth, by the way.”

“Backseat driver,” Mike mutters anyway, which is only exacerbated by the sound Will makes as he overshoots the left turn, and sharply pulls in to avoid grazing the curb. “Okay, don’t even–”

“It’s a left turn, Mike,” Will says, pointedly staring down at where Google Maps is open on his phone, “how do you not even–”

“I said not a word!”

Will mimes zipping his lips shut. “I’m just saying,” he says anyway, like a liar, and Mike sighs, “if you want to live to see twenty-one–”

“In the wise words of Big Time Rush,” Mike says, cutting Will off halfway, ignoring the fact that he’s a very safe driver, okay, the occasional tapped curb aside, “pedal to the metal, baby.”

Will makes a face at him, gesturing at him to turn right. “Is that who’s playing?”

“Oh, you asshole, you know it’s not,” Mike says, and cranks the volume up higher. The car’s speakers are kind of shot, both by virtue of this car being manufactured in 2009, and the fact that it was already used when Mike bought it, so it goes a little pitchy as he starts to sing: “Baby just shout it out, shout it out, baby just shout it out, yeah–”

Will, despite his griping, is laughing as he directs Mike through the outskirts of the university district. This area is vaguely familiar; Mike is sure he’s driven here before, on anxious, overthinking nights, or even driving aimlessly around with Will on better days like this. The large apartment complexes give way to smaller houses, trees, and paved trails. Mike winds his way through a row of trees in full spring bloom as Will says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Liar,” Mike says smugly, “I know you like this song because I saw you listening to it on Spotify the other day.”

Will, to his credit, has the good grace to look a little embarrassed about it. “Shut up,” he mutters, “it’s– it’s fine, I guess, but that doesn’t mean–”

“It means,” Mike presses, because Will can act as hoity-toity as he wants, but Mike knows him well enough to also know that’s exactly what it is – an act. “It means, you’re a closet One Direction fan, because their songs are romantic and cute and fun and you’re a sucker for anything that’s romantic and cute and fun.”

Will huffs softly and slumps down in his seat. “Baby, be mine tonight, mine tonight,” he relents – finally, finally, finally – “baby be mine tonight, yeah–” and it’s sort of deadpan, and he’s biting back a smile and rolling his eyes, but Mike will take his small victories where he can get them.

“There you go,” Mike crows in exuberant triumph, and then Will is directing him into a small parking lot, past a few stray groups of students their age, a couple families with kids, and it hits Mike, suddenly, where they are. He pulls smoothly into the last empty spot in the row, puts the car in park, and turns to Will. “The park? You brought me to the park?”

“I told you I had something planned.” There’s a gentle lilt to Will’s voice when he speaks, gently pleased with himself. Mike supposes the bulging tote makes more sense now, which Will hoists over one shoulder with a small noise of exertion as Mike locks the car. They’ve parked in a shadier portion of the lot, but the sun is just about to start dipping over the horizon, so Mike figures it doesn’t really matter anyway.

“You,” Mike starts, when Will pulls a picnic blanket out of his bag – or what appears to be a very large sheet – and drapes it over a dry patch of grass. “You– you were planning this?”

Will hums his assent and smoothes the blanket out over the uneven ground. “Maybe,” he admits, the pleased edge overtaking his voice until that’s all there is to it – affection and cloying, saccharine endearment – and smiles up at Mike, kneeling on the edge of the sheet and rummaging around in his bag. He’s got his shoes taken off and placed carefully on the grass, socks exposed to the world in all their heart-patterned glory. “I thought– well, I know we’re doing stuff with the guys tomorrow, but– I don’t know. I kind of wanted to celebrate with you first, just us two.”

Mike’s throat feels so, so dry. “Really?” he asks, and that same fondness has carried over to his voice too, now, sickly sweet and overdone and entirely disproportionate to the occasion, but Will has had this effect on him for long enough that it doesn’t really seem jarring anymore. He takes his shoes off too, lowers himself, cross-legged, onto the blanket. Will produces, in quick succession, a couple bottles of soda – he passes the root beer to Mike and keeps the orange for himself – various brightly colored bags of snacks, a couple of brown paper takeout boxes, and a white one, sealed neatly shut with a circular gold sticker. Mike eyes that one with a keen interest, but when he reaches for it, Will slaps his hand away. “Ow,” Mike mutters, rubbing at his hand, “what was that for?”

“All in due time,” Will chirps, and then, “okay, I know it’s not, like, the most impressive spread, but I got all the snacks you like, I think, and– yeah, that’s kind of it, so– sorry it’s not, like, more exciting or whatever–”

“Will,” Mike interjects, still a little in awe of the scene laid out in front of him: Will, catching the remnants of the evening sun all along the soft angles of his face, eyes lighting up into a brilliant gold. This section of the park is fairly deserted, save for the occasional brave soul jogging along the trail, and the shadows of the trees around them are turning long and slanted with impending dusk. It’s a hallmark of how well Will knows him, too, that he’s selected all of Mike’s favorite foods without once having to ask. “Shut up, you– I can’t believe you did this for me.”

“Yeah, well,” Will sighs, looking a little embarrassed, “I wanted to.”

Mike wishes Will would understand that he can’t just say things like this. “So you told Lucas?” he asks instead, biting down into a strawberry. It’s warm enough out that he sheds his jacket, folds it into a pile next to his shoes, tosses his wallet and keys on top. “Which was a poor decision, by the way, he’s a terrible liar.”

“Clearly he managed it well enough,” Will retorts, which is true, technically, and then, “I didn’t mean to, really, I was just asking him when you usually come back to your guys’ dorm after class, because I was thinking at first that we could have like a movie night or something, and Dustin’s shut himself up in our place studying for his test tomorrow, but–” Will picks at the leaves of his own strawberry for a moment, before ripping them off and popping the whole thing in his mouth. “But we always do that sort of thing,” he continues after swallowing, “and, I don’t know, I kind of wanted to do something special.”

“Special,” Mike echoes weakly. He draws his knees up to his chest. “Yeah,” he says, as Will rearranges everything to fit neatly in front of them. “Yeah, I’d say this is pretty special.”

No one’s ever taken Mike out for a picnic before, unless family lunches on the Fourth of July count. Mike has a sneaking suspicion, however, as he watches Will produce a couple of paper plates and plastic utensils and peel the gold sticker off the white box with a soft ripping noise, that watching Holly spill lemonade on herself and shriek when the ants swarm her is nowhere near the same thing as this.

“Surprise,” Will announces, and Mike peers inside to catch a glimpse of rich chocolate frosting, happy birthday! stenciled on top in thin white lettering. “I can sing to you, if you’d like, but it won’t be good.”

“That’s okay,” Mike says quickly, because his own personal hell definitely includes being forced to stand there while people sing the happy birthday song to him. “That’s fine, we don’t have to do that.”

“Your loss,” Will chirps, then makes quick work of cutting it up. Mike does a double take when he sees the inside – the cake is a soft pink.

“You asshole,” he says, and Will grins. “That’s– no one ever has strawberry cake, and it’s my favorite, how did you–”

“I looked around,” Will says simply, and it’s this, the simple act of Will looking around for Mike’s favorite cake combination, that immediately bowls him over. “I think it’s very fitting that this would be your favorite, though.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You like unconventional food combinations,” Will shrugs. “Eggs and syrup, remember?”

“It’s good!” Mike insists, taking the proffered plate. “I swear, it’s so good.”

“I know,” Will sighs, cutting himself a slice in quiet resignation. “Unfortunately, I’ve been converted.”

It’s a few minutes later, a comfortable silence having settled over them, that Will’s phone lights up three times in quick succession. Mike doesn’t notice at first, too busy watching a dog catch a frisbee in its mouth, and then, noticing the quick flash out of the corner of his eye, nods to Will and says, “Do you want to get that?”

Will glances noncommittally down at his phone and waves a hand in the air. “Not really. I’ll get it later,” he says, just as another two texts immediately come in, and he sighs, setting his plate down. “One second,” Will says, “so sorry,” and then, upon glancing at his phone, immediately turns a vivid shade of pink.

Mike catches the edge of the flush out of the corner of his eye, still mostly occupied with scraping some frosting off his fork with his teeth. “What?”

“Oh,” Will says, “it’s– nothing, it’s just Lucas.”

“Oh?” Mike echoes, vaguely interested now, but still not as interested as he could be – because given the choice between Lucas and the best cake he’s ever eaten in his life, it’s not really a choice at all.

“Yeah,” Will says, then clears his throat, still a violent shade of crimson. “He said–” he clears his throat again, and this is when Mike looks up, because Will doesn’t ever get flustered like this – not in an overt, blushing-like-a-Victorian-maiden way, and this is, admittedly, marginally more interesting than his cake – “he said, ‘How’s the date going?”

“Oh,” Mike says, more reflexively than anything else, and then, a moment later – dropping his fork unceremoniously onto the blanket – “oh. He– uh– sorry?”

“He was kidding,” Will says quickly, shoulders creeping steadily towards his ears. And it’s this, more than anything else, that clues Mike into the fact that something is amiss, because he prides himself on knowing Will’s tells, maybe better than anyone else, if he’s allowing himself to get cocky about it, and this – the fidgeting, the shrinking into himself like a turtle retreating into its shell – is definitely one of them. “He was– it was a bad joke. Sorry.”

“Oh,” Mike says again, which is intelligent, he knows, but– “he– sorry?”

“I said forget it.” Will waves a hand at him, tapping furiously away at his phone. His own empty plate is abandoned next to him, frosting scraped off in neat, chocolate-scented rows. “I just– I shouldn’t have said anything, and he shouldn’t have said anything either–”

“You told him this is a date?” Mike blurts out.

Will’s fingers freeze on the screen, halfway through their rapid-fire tirade. “Um,” he says, “no– not really, I just said– I told him what the plans were and he just– I guess he assumed–”

“Oh,” Mike says weakly. Oh seems to have made up a large portion of his vocabulary for the majority of the time they’ve been sitting here, but it seems fitting enough, because the rest of Mike’s mental dictionary seems to have dissipated straight out of his ears and into the open air. “Okay. That’s, uh– that’s cool. That’s fine, I mean. It’s cool.”

Will gives him a long, searching look, the phone going a bit slack in his hand. He’s evidently done texting Lucas back – stupid, traitorous Lucas; Mike makes a mental note to squeeze all of his toothpaste down the sink when he gets back – and this, of course, means his full attention is now focused on Mike. “It’s not– he was kidding,” Will says again.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “Got it.”

“And,” Will continues, because he has more to say, apparently, as if he hasn’t done enough damage already, “it doesn’t even– I haven’t even– it’s not like, I mean, I haven’t– Lucas doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Will finishes, all in one big rush, like the words were hurting him to keep inside, like he had to get them out all at once. 

Maybe Will doth protest too much. Maybe Mike doth read into things too much. He focuses very hard on collecting the last little flecks of frosting off his plate – barely even enough to fit on one tine of the fork – and says, as evenly as he can manage, “You haven’t even what?”

“You know,” Will waves a noncommittal hand in the air, “gone on a date.”

Mike nearly drops his utensils again. “What, like ever?”

“No,” Will sputters, and then– “In high school, yeah, you know there were a few, here and there, but after, in college– I don’t know, maybe? Like, technically? I don’t know?”

This is fine. This is so totally, totally–

“How,” Mike hears himself say, “do you not know?”

“I mean,” Will says, looking a bit like he wants to sink through the grass-covered ground and die, “like, I’ve hung out with some guys, like after class and stuff, or we’ve grabbed a coffee or something, but– I don’t know, it seemed a little presumptuous to assume, and they never said anything obvious enough for me to ask outright– I’m just not good with filling in the blanks, I guess.”

“Guys asked you out for coffee,” Mike starts, “guys in your class– they asked you out for coffee– and you didn’t ever know if it was a date?”

“I’m not– this isn’t my thing!” Will exclaims, waving his hands around a little. “I’m not cut out for casual dating, okay, like– I’m going to need someone to write hey, I’m into you, romantically down on a piece of paper and hand it to me in order for me to really do something about it, because what if they didn’t mean it that way, you know? What if I just mess things up?”

“Well,” Mike manages, wondering – for the briefest of instances, and largely more for commitment to the bit than anything else – if he has a pen and paper on him, “you know, if it’s casual dating, if it’s just some guy in your class, then– it’s not too big a loss, right? How much is there even to mess up?”

Will picks aimlessly at a loose thread protruding from his socks. One of the red hearts near his ankle has gone a little lopsided from the disruption. “Right,” he says after a moment, and then shakes his head a little, like he’s trying to jolt himself back into awareness, “yeah, no, you’re right, I just– I just get in my head about things a little bit.”

“No shame.” Mike taps one outstretched foot against Will’s leg. “Me too,” he adds, and Will shoots him a small smile, which is kind of hilarious, because Will is the thing Mike has been getting in his head about the most, lately. Hey, Mike screams in his head, because he doesn’t, sadly, have any pen or paper on him, but Will’s always been able to read his mind a little better than everyone else anyway, I’m into you! Romantically!

“For the record,” Mike says instead, coughing slightly, “I think, um– the next person you’re, I don’t know, considering– or if there’s, uh, someone in mind, then–” oh, god. Okay, this is fine. This is fine. “Then you should just go for it,” Mike says, and Will’s eyebrows shoot up.

“What, really?”

Oh, god. This is fine. “Yeah,” Mike barrels on anyway, “yeah, I mean– next time, just go for it. I have a feeling they’d be more into you than you think.”

Will’s shy smile gives way to something brighter, more blinding, more real. “Yeah?” he says, quiet enough that Mike has to strain a little to hear it with all the ambient noise of the park. “You really think so?”

If Mike were a braver man, he would do it now. He would kiss Will right here; he would crawl over the thin sheet, bunched up and rapidly accumulating grass stains where their hands and knees have been pressing it into the dirt, and he would thread a careful hand through Will’s hair and kiss him, and it would be wholly, entirely, completely perfect. Mike can almost feel it, how kissing Will would be strawberry and chocolate and lazy April sun, and how Will might kiss him back – he might kiss Mike back, as in he really, really might kiss Mike back – and it could be so, so good–

What gives him pause, however, is the simple fact that doing so would mean maneuvering his way past paper plates and empty plastic containers, and he’d probably knock orange soda right onto Will’s lap, or Will might realize what’s happening halfway and, like, start laughing or something. And he’s like, ninety-eight percent there – he’s kind of been at ninety-eight percent for a while, fluctuations aside – but it’s that last hurdle, the last two percent, that seems somehow more daunting than when he thought Will maybe wasn’t interested at all.

“Yeah,” Mike says at last, keeping his leg pressed up against Will’s. Maintaining eye contact in a situation like this is maybe the scariest thing he’s ever done, ever, but it’s worth it, to see the way Will’s own eyes widen, just a little, in response, to see the way he fidgets slightly in place, but doesn’t move his leg away either. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Like, ninety-eight percent.”

“Wow,” Will breathes out, just on this edge of teasing. “You sound very confident about this.”

“Well,” Mike shrugs, swallowing hard in a desperate attempt to soothe his very, very dry mouth, “I don’t know why someone wouldn’t be interested in you.”

“Oh?” Will says, and it’s definitely teasing now, enough for Mike to feel himself turning warm, all down his neck and to the tips of his own – sadly unpatterned – socks. “Someone?”

“Yeah.” Mike nods. Oh, god. This is fine. “In a very arbitrary sense of the word. Just– people. Someone.”

This is fine.

“O-kay,” Will says, tone dripping in barely concealed amusement. “Someone. Got it.”

“Good,” Mike says faintly. “Um. And I’ve been told that making the first move is very attractive, so– they’ll probably appreciate it, when you go for it.”

“Right,” Will says, opening his mouth like he wants to add something, then letting it fall shut again.

“Right,” Mike echoes.

Sometime in the last few minutes, the final rays of sun have slipped below the horizon, coating the entirety of the park in a cool, blue light. Mike shivers, even through the fleece lining his university sweatshirt, drawing his knees up to his chest in a mirror image of how Will’s sitting. Will follows the movement with his eyes, takes in the soft orange glow of the streetlamp next to them, the straggling fellow picnickers making their way back out through the park entrance, then says, “We should probably head back, yeah? I feel like we could get murdered out here pretty quick, or something.”

“Oh,” Mike says, strangely, hollowly disappointed. It feels, somehow, like this might be it, like once he gets back to his own room and Will to his, once the doors lock behind them, like he might be out of chances. Will is already gathering everything back into his tote – back to a much more normal size, now, when Mike adds, “Do you maybe want to drive around for a bit? If you don’t need to get back right away?”

Clearly this was the right move, because Will smiles, pleased. “Yeah, of course,” he says, as earnest as ever, and the turbulence in Mike’s stomach eases, just a little. “Anywhere in particular?”

“Uh,” Mike says, dusting a clod of dirt off of the sheet and starting to fold it back up, “yeah, I think I might have something in mind, maybe.”

Mike hasn’t even turned the engine off by the time Will starts laughing. “Mike,” he says, “where the fuck are we?”

“It’s the beaver pond,” Mike huffs in mock offense, “obviously. I’m hurt you don’t remember.”

Truth be told, it’s hard to make out much of anything here, because in the half hour Mike spent driving them in lazy circles through campus, the last vestiges of light finally vanished from the sky, and now all Mike can really see is the clearing in front of them, the arts building a block and a half away, the faint outline of a small body of water and the benches and steps leading down to it. Strictly speaking, Mike technically isn’t supposed to be parked here, but he’s done it before – once or twice or ten times – and what he’s deduced is that no one ever really comes across this part of campus at this part of night. No one with the authority to do anything about Mike and his car, anyway, so it should be fine.

“It wasn’t even a beaver,” Will is saying, fiddling with the volume knobs on the dashboard. Mike’s playlist is still going, a lot quieter now than it was before, just barely loud enough to tell what song is playing, and maybe Will was onto something after all, regarding Mike’s proclivity for boyband music, but whatever. It’s whatever. “I don’t know what you saw that day, but I swear it wasn’t a beaver, Mike.”

“It was!” Mike exclaims, and Will rolls his eyes, smiling. “It was, I’m telling you, I saw its tail, and it was all flat, and– and it was eating something in the bushes, and then it got back in the water–”

“What would beavers even be doing in the campus pond,” Will cuts in, “and do they even have beavers in Connecticut–”

“Yes,” Mike says primly, “because I saw one, and then after we got back I looked it up and it says we do, and you’re the one who thought it was a fucking– what was it, a bear cub? You thought it was a bear cub in the bushes?”

Will lets out a little huff, like he always does when he knows he’s wrong but doesn’t want to admit it. “Whatever,” he says. “Whatever, fine. We were both wrong.”

“Yeah, except for me.”

“Mike.”

 Mike bites back a smile. “So,” he starts, turning ninety degrees to face Will and leaning his cheek against the seat. “I had a really nice time tonight. Thank you for doing that.”

Will turns, crossing one leg under the other, and smiles. Most of his face is hidden in shadow but it’s still easy enough to tell. “Yeah,” he says, “of course. Happy birthday, Mike.”

“Not for another,” Mike glances at the dashboard display, “three hours, actually.”

“Fine,” Will says. “I’ll wish you for real at midnight then.”

“At the risk of sounding so super cheesy,” Mike says, and Will raises his eyebrows in mild interest, “since we’re doing the sentimental thing today, um– I don’t know if you remember, but the beaver incident was, uh– the first time I asked you to go on a walk with me. Around campus, I mean, like at night, and then– and then we just started doing it more, and Lucas gave me so much shit for it, by the way, but I kind of liked that we had our own thing. So that’s why we’re here.”

Will exhales, long and slow, a little shaky. “Lucas gave you shit for going on walks with me?”

Ah. “Yeah,” Mike admits, stomach erupting into an acute case of the butterflies, because he’s feeling a lot braver than he was back in the middle of the park, now that they’re somewhere small and enclosed, and it feels like his feelings are more contained here, like they’re being forced to settle down and be small enough to fit into the car. As opposed to outside, where it’s like sometimes, Mike’s feelings are so big they might just keep getting bigger and bigger with nothing to hold them in check. It’s mostly very dark in here, and there’s no orange soda to knock over onto Will’s lap, and both of these facts spur him on to add– “Yeah, he, uh– he gave me shit for a lot of other things too, if I’m being honest.”

Will hums softly. “Like what?”

Teasing. He’s teasing, Mike realizes. “Just, you know,” Mike stammers, because apparently bravery can only get you so far, “with the– the documentaries, and the, um. The cuddling.”

Will is smiling so wide that Mike can almost hear it. “Yeah? What about it?”

“It seems,” Mike says, leaning further into the seat and resisting the urge to hide his face, “that he was under the impression that those were not– um. Entirely platonic things to do.”

A second passes, then two, then what’s closer to seven or eight or nine, with Mike staring resolutely out the back window of the car so as to avoid eye contact. “Okay,” Will says at last, and he doesn’t sound grossed out or uncomfortable or anything by it – certainly not as if Mike had spent the last few months crossing every one of his platonic boundaries, which is reassuring. “Did you want them to be?”

Oh, shit.

This is fine. Mike can work with this.

“Um,” he says, biting at the inside of his cheek. “Not particularly, no.”

“Okay,” Will says again – still not sounding angry or grossed out or miffed about his boundaries being totally bulldozed – “and,” Will continues, shifting a little in place, “for the record– Dustin gave me a lot of shit too.”

“I–” Mike’s brain, all of a sudden, stops dead in its tracks. “He– why?”

“Because,” Will goes on, voice picking up pace a little, “because– there was this one time he asked if I wanted to watch a Blue Planet feature with him and I said no, not really, sorry, I’d rather watch Scrubs, because it’s been a tiring weekend and I just need to lie in bed and watch my cheesy hospital sitcom and I don’t really want to learn about jellyfish right now, and then you and Lucas came over that same night and you and I ended up watching the same one together and he got so, so mad at me after.”

“One,” Mike says, mind still racing to catch up with everything Will just word vomited out to him, “Scrubs? Really?”

Will swats him in the arm. “You already knew this about me,” he says, “and focus, Mike–”

“Right,” Mike says hastily, “sorry,” and then– “he, uh– you watched it with me?”

“Yes,” Will says, like this should be obvious, because it definitely is, “you were there.”

“Right,” Mike says again. “So, um–”

“Follow up question,” Will says, and Mike might be imagining it, but it looks like Will scoots forward a little, leans in just slightly over the console.

“Um. Yeah, shoot.”

“You really think I should go for it? With the next guy?”

“Yeah,” Mike says, maybe a little too fast, “yes, absolutely,” and it’s not until after it leaves his mouth that it hits him, that there’s maybe a two percent chance that Will could be talking about someone else – and maybe whoever he could be talking about is the nicest person on the face of the planet, but it wouldn’t matter, because it wouldn’t be Mike – and it’s a small chance, but any nonzero number is, by definition, already too large for Mike’s liking. “Um,” he says, then clears his throat, “do you have someone in mind?”

“Maybe,” Will admits, and he’s definitely moving closer now – Mike sees him turn, a little, enough for his knee to bump into the center console – “I might be thinking of someone, yeah.”

“Oh,” Mike says, a little hoarsely. Please be me. Please be– “Okay, that’s– good, that’s good. Yeah, go for it. Totally.”

“Sometimes,” Will says, slow, a little bit uncertain, leaning his head further sideways into the seat, “I think– sometimes I’m super confident about it, and I think I’ve got him figured out, and other times I’m terrified I’ve got it wrong, or that I’m reading into things that aren’t there, and– I don’t want to mess everything up. I like what we have.”

Oh, god. Mike swallows once, hard, and says, “You think he might be into you, then?”

“I’ve had my suspicions,” Will replies, smiling. Mike might really, truly, seriously not be breathing. “I’m about ninety-nine percent convinced.”

Ninety-nine percent is a good number. It could, however, be higher. “Okay,” Mike says, moving forward until one leg is smushed up against the center console too, the other bumping against the bottom of the steering wheel. “I think,” he starts, and Will blinks expectantly at him, all tousled hair and soft, wide hazel eyes, indiscernible from a deep brown in the low lighting, “you should make that a hundred.”

Will’s eyes widen impossibly further. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Mike whispers.

A beat. “Mike,” Will says at last, sounding at least as hoarse as Mike’s own voice feels when it comes out, and it lights a spark in Mike’s chest, that Will is feeling like this – affected, nervous, like he has something to lose – “I’m just making sure– we’re on the same page here, right? You know I–”

Mike Wheeler loves his car. It’s an indisputable fact of the universe, and he’s sure this one thing will remain constant in any other universe in which a Mike Wheeler exists. He really, really loves his car. It’s in this instant, however, with the center console putting an excruciating nine inches of space between them that Mike can’t seem to bridge, with his knee already bumping against the steering wheel, with the glove compartment and the low roof and the parking brake that’s threatening to impale him if he moves any closer, that he is entirely ready to throw his car into a trash compactor if it means getting to Will injury-free. “Yeah,” Mike gets out, which is certainly not the most eloquent response he’s ever come up with, but it seems to do the trick, because Will’s lips part in quiet, immediate understanding, and suddenly, the threat of bodily injury doesn’t seem to matter anymore, because Will is so, so close, a measly nine inches away. Mike pushes himself up and over – bruises and bumps be damned, rogue parking brake forgotten – and kisses him.

Immediately, Mike knows that this is still better than it would have been on a picnic blanket, sprawled out on a grassy park lawn with a thousand people watching, because here, he can capture Will’s answering exhale with his own mouth before it escapes into the open air and is lost forever. Here, he can press himself into the warmth of Will’s body, propelled forward a little bit by the comfortable shroud of darkness enveloping them, propelled even more so by the way Will responds so instantaneously – eager and insistent and so, so immediately that it vanquishes any semblance of doubt left in Mike’s mind. It’s clear, all at once, that Will has wanted this just as long as Mike has, if the hand in his hair is any indication, or the way Will has met him halfway, hovering over the stupid, stupid console; any hesitancy is short-lived, quickly giving way to a second hand clutching at the collar of Mike’s sweatshirt, right over where UConn is stenciled in careful, blocky stitching, a shaky inhale, fingers brushing against his collarbone and Will has wanted this.

The realization is heady, wholly overpowering – I was right, Mike thinks, sweet relief flooding his veins, so fast that he almost feels sick on it. I was right. He tries to commit this feeling to memory, his first kiss with Will Byers, because he’s kissing him, and he’s kissing him, and he’s kissing him , and he knows, a little far off, absently, that this is a moment he’ll want to remember. He fails, almost instantly, because the sensation is so jarring that it leaves no room for memory, no room for coherent thought, no room for anything except what is happening at that exact moment in time.

(What’s happening at that exact moment in time: Will’s knee making sharp contact against the glove compartment, the shocked gasp that escapes his lips, a second one following as Mike leans in to chase it, a hand in Will’s hair, the back of his neck, around his shoulders.

What’s happening at that exact moment in time: Mike is kissing Will Byers, and Will Byers is kissing him back.)

Will’s hand flexes, still grabbing onto Mike’s sweatshirt, and Mike lets himself be moved. Will makes a sound in the back of his throat as Mike pitches forward, something cut-off and sharp and desperate, and all of a sudden, the spark from earlier bursts into caustic, desperate flame. The singular thing on Mike’s mind is that this is nowhere close to enough. Mike needs to be closer, he needs touch, he needs contact; he needs to kiss the lingering taste of orange soda off of Will’s mouth, strawberry and chocolate and lazy April sun and even lazier April evenings, he needs to slip his hands under where Will’s shirt is – infuriatingly – still tucked into his pants, and he’s becoming rapidly more aware of the fact that none of these things are possible when you’re bordering on six feet in the cramped driver’s seat of a car.

“Wait,” Mike gasps, pulling away; the air that rushes between them is cold, too cold, and Will is flushed, too flushed, and Mike needs to kiss him– 

“Everything okay?” Will whispers, blinking, voice just on this side of wrecked – already, just a few kisses in – and Mike’s dawdling supply of willpower is efficiently maxed out, has hit zero long ago, so he can’t be blamed for the way he leans in, presses another quick kiss to the alluring red blooming across Will’s lips. 

“Yeah,” Mike manages, his own voice hoarse and embarrassingly affected for how long it’s been, and promptly scrambles backwards over the console and topples, without grace or fanfare, into the backseat. It’s a messy affair: his heel gets caught in the cupholder, and his toe bumps against the volume knob as he falls and  the sudden increase in noise makes Will startle where he’s sitting next to the speaker – “To be loved and to be in love, and all I can do is say that these arms were made for holding you” – “Jesus,” Mike says, a little out of breath, tipping his head back onto the seat, “pretend that didn’t happen, just– don’t laugh!”

“Sorry,” Will laughs, turning the volume back down to a more normal level, but he actually doesn’t seem sorry about it at all. On the contrary, his eyes are sparkling, and his cheeks are flushed, and he’s smiling wide enough for his eyes to crinkle up at the corners, even though he’s clearly trying to hold himself back, and he’s so, so beautiful, and so far away. Mike reaches out, tugs him forward, and Will lets out a soft yelp. “Mike!”

“Sorry,” Mike echoes, grinning, as Will follows him, climbing over the center console with marginally more composure than Mike had managed, which he’s chalking up to the height difference and also just the Will of it all. “Hey,” he adds for good measure, once Will has gotten himself somewhat situated, kneeling, albeit a bit awkwardly, on the driver’s side of the backseat. Mike is still mostly on the floor, if he’s being honest, because trying to get upright while Will was also climbing back here would have been a surefire recipe for disaster – and what they have here isn’t a disaster, per se, but it’s not not one either. 

What it is is charming, and it’s clumsy, and it’s painfully endearing, and it’s a reminder that it’s not, in Dustin’s words, probably, a Hinge date that Mike’s managed to entice into his backseat, but it’s Will: Will, his best friend, who’s seen him all gross when he’s woken up in the morning and even grosser when he’s gone to bed, and he’s seen Mike cry over his college applications and cry again, even harder, when he actually got in, and he entertains all of Mike’s stupid little fascinations with genuine ease and stays up texting him until two in the morning even though he lives down the hall. He’s Mike’s favorite person to spend time with, ever, and he’s smart and funny and talented, and he’s kind of a bitch and he’s kind of even more so a total fucking disaster, even though you’d be hard pressed to catch wise to it if you didn’t know him. Mike hadn’t been kidding when he said that anyone would be crazy to not be interested in Will, because Will is the best person he knows, and anyone should be so lucky – but it’s not anyone after all, because he’s sitting in the backseat of Mike’s car, and he just had his hands in Mike’s hair, and he looks so, so good that Mike thinks right here, on the meticulously vacuumed floor of his 2010 Pontiac G5, is where he’s going to die.

“Hey yourself,” Will grins down at him, with more composure than Mike thinks he’d like for Will to have in a situation like this, if he’s able to effectively grin and smirk and flirt like this, so he should probably get on that, actually.

“Shut up,” Mike mumbles, getting himself upright on the seat and tugging at the collar of Will’s shirt, where it’s still gloriously, maddeningly unbuttoned at the top, “and come here.”

It’s infinitely better this time, now that there’s nothing in the way, and Will capitalizes on this opportunity in the blink of an eye, faster than Mike’s processing power would ever have allowed him to. He leans forward – eager, eager, eager – until Mike is pressed up against the passenger side door, head resting against the cool glass of the window. He reaches blindly behind him, gives the handle a cursory jiggle to make sure everything is well and truly locked – so that no one goes tumbling out of an accidentally unlocked door – and when it doesn’t give, Mike decides that’s good enough for him, and he doesn’t know why, actually, he spent so much brainpower thinking about the door of his car when Will is on top of him, and he’s kissing him, and Mike is definitely, actually, really and truly dying.

Will is smiling against his mouth, just enough for Mike to feel it; he traces the shape of it, gets his hands in Will’s hair like he’s been wanting to all evening, then slips his hands down to Will’s back, tugs his shirt free like he’s been wanting to do for even longer, and presses his fingers to the warm skin there. Will shivers above him, hums low and deep, unmistakably pleased, and pulls away just enough to whisper, lips brushing against Mike’s, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a really long time.”

It comes out shy, almost, hesitant and a bit shaky, even after everything, even after receiving confirmation of Mike’s feelings and then some, like Will thinks that maybe this is the thought that’s too much, the thing that’ll finally scare Mike away. The admission makes something turn over in his gut, mellow and unabashedly proud of himself; it makes him want to say something like me too, or how long? or I’m glad you did – I’m really, really glad.

What comes out of Mike’s mouth in the end, instead of any of these things is: “Yeah, I bet you did.”

A pause. Will’s eyes widen in mild surprise. Mike, slightly horrified with himself, claps a hand over his mouth. “I,” he starts, “I didn’t even mean to say that, I swear–”

And then Will is laughing, dropping his head to Mike’s shoulder. “Oh, you asshole,” he says, muffled, and Mike presses a smile to the side of his head. “Oh, you– I can’t believe you, Mike, I– I kiss you and that’s the first thing you say to me?”

“I believe the first thing I said was wait,” Mike points out, “and then I fell over into the backseat.”

“I hate you,” Will says, sweet enough to start rotting away at every last one of Mike’s teeth.

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I–”

Will stops, turns his head to the front of the car for a moment. Mike isn’t sure exactly what it is he’s looking for – or listening for – but Will must evidently find it because, a minute later, he squints down at Mike, sighs, and says, “Look, this has been really fun, but I can’t in good conscience kiss you while All Time Low is playing over your speakers.”

“Wh–” Mike strains to listen, and then he hears it – the faint sound of drums cutting through the silence of the car. “Really? That’s where you draw the line?”

“It’s unromantic,” Will huffs, “not to mention they totally stole Blink-182’s sound.”

“That’s not even a thing,” Mike insists, as Will bites back a smile, “you’re being difficult on purpose.” And then, a moment later, when it hits him– “Will,” he grins, “come on, let it go just this once. I mean, the song is literally called Backseat–”

The speed with with Will launches himself over the console to slam the audio off button is, frankly, really fucking hilarious. Mike can’t be blamed for laughing about it, is the point here – he can’t be blamed for a lot of the ways Will makes him feel, and the even more ridiculous ways Will makes him act. Above all else though, he cannot be blamed for pulling Will back in, and he cannot be blamed for wrapping an arm around his waist, and he especially cannot be blamed for sliding a hand around to the nape of Will’s neck and kissing the smugly disgruntled look right off his face.

“Hey,” Lucas says, not looking up from his notebook. He’s chewing absentmindedly on the end of his pencil, sprawled on top of his bed. “How was your date?”

“Well,” Mike says, letting the door fall shut behind him. Will had kissed him goodbye, not even one full minute ago, when Mike had walked him to the door, so he’s kind of lagging, just a little bit. And yeah Will had been the one to ask him out, technically, and Mike’s no subscriber to traditional gender roles or whatever, but it had made sense for him to walk Will back, because he’d driven, and when you drive a date home, you walk them to their door and kiss them goodnight. It’s just manners. “There were snacks, and cake, and we made out in my car for a bit, and then I drove us home, so– good, I would say.”

“Good,” Lucas echoes, “that’s great, that– wait, what?”

“Snacks,” Mike repeats, as Lucas spins around, eyes growing wider and wider – no doubt taking in his hair, the flush to his cheeks, the bitten red tinge to his lips that had yet to go away when Mike had caught a glimpse of himself in his phone camera a few minutes ago. “Cake, making out in my car, driving us home.”

“You’re kidding.” Lucas sits straight upright in bed. “You’re fucking with me right now,” he says, and then, gaze dropping to Mike’s neck, his eyes widen even further. “Oh. Oh, no you’re not.”

“No I’m not,” Mike agrees, throwing his jacket onto the floor by his bed and falling backwards onto the mattress.

“Um,” Lucas clears his throat, “well. Happy for you, man, really. About time, and all that. But Jesus–”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Mike says weakly, “I’m just really fucking pale.”

“Yeah,” Lucas snorts, “yeah, clearly.”

“He’s a good kisser,” Mike sighs.

“Oh,” Lucas says, “oh, dude, gross. I don’t need to know that. I love you, and I love Will, but trust me, I really, really don’t need to know that.”

July 21st

11:47 a.m.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Mike says, as he hears the door to his room get pushed open.

“One,” Will says from the doorway, “that could be dangerous, so please don’t hurt yourself. And two– how did you know it was me?”

“Magic,” Mike says simply, very kindly ignoring Will’s attempt at humor, and then, at Will’s raised eyebrows, “I heard you say hi to my mom when she let you in.”

“Oh,” Will says, grinning, then gesturing at Mike to scoot over on his bed. He climbs in rather unceremoniously, because it’s the dead of summer break and Mike has nothing to do but waste away in bed all day, in his rattiest sweats and his oldest, most questionable t-shirt. He has no one to see anyway, no plans other than Will, who’s sort of always on his agenda, and he figures that by agreeing to date Mike, Will has subsequently agreed to see him in his most shameful wardrobe choices and keep his mouth shut about it. “What are you watching?”

Mike turns the laptop screen towards him. On it, in perfect 1080p resolution, a humpback whale breaches the surface of otherwise still, pristine blue waters. “I don’t know,” Mike admits. “I found this documentary on YouTube and it’s pretty good.”

Will smiles, kisses the top of Mike’s head, and says, “Of course you did.”

“That brings me to my second point,” Mike says, stretching his arms above his head with a long, bereaved sigh. “Do you think it would be stupid of me to declare a minor in marine biology?”

Will blinks – clearly this hadn’t been anywhere close to where he’d thought Mike had been going with this – but after a second, the confusion clears from his face and his smile widens impossibly further. It’s like watching the sun come out on a cloudy day, which is maybe the most cliché and disgusting thing Mike has ever thought, but being with Will has sort of turned him into someone who’s both of those things: cliché and also disgusting. “Not at all,” Will says, so earnestly that there’s not a chance he’s telling anything less than the truth. “I think you would enjoy that.”

“Because I was thinking,” Mike goes on – because Will hadn’t asked for a justification, or an explanation, but Mike feels like he needs to give one anyway, even if just to prove that he’s not wasting tuition money on useless credits – “like, my major is pretty straightforward, but I don’t want to double major, and there are always a bunch of blank spots in my schedule when the classes I need aren’t offered, so I figured instead of loading it up with general education electives I don’t need, I might as well minor in something. Right? Get a secondary degree out of it? And– I don’t know, I really like these,” he adds, nodding to the screen, “and David Attenborough and the jellyfish, and the one we watched on sharks, and– maybe that’s stupid, actually.”

“I think you’d really enjoy it,” Will repeats, ever so patient with Mike, just like always. “And I don’t think it’s stupid.” He wiggles his way down the bed, until his head is level with Mike’s shoulder, and snakes an arm around his waist. It’s a gorgeous morning out; Will smells faintly of sunscreen, and he’s dressed in shorts and a t-shirt that absolutely used to be Mike’s, at some point in time, but has long since given up on ever returning home. And if Mike is being totally honest about it, he’s not really all that pressed. 

“Okay,” Mike says, biting a little nervously at the skin around his thumb. “Because my parents were telling me that if I’m minoring in something, then I should at least choose something to, like, supplement my major, and I said that defeats the whole point, because it wouldn’t be something I did for fun, something I want to explore but not study for real. I’d be spending tuition on those credits anyway, they just wouldn’t add up to anything, and, I don’t know, they said it was up to me, but it sort of turned into a whole thing after that.”

“I think it would work out just fine,” Will says, seemingly uncaring about the one million old stains on Mike’s shirt – the ones no number of wash cycles could get out – as he dips a hand under the hem of it, rubbing soothing circles into Mike’s hip. “Maybe you could write for Nat Geo or something. Follow in Nancy’s footsteps, maybe.”

Mike doesn’t know about all that, because his go-getter older sister with her investigative journalism has the blood pressure of a hummingbird and approximately two and a half friends, but Nat Geo doesn’t sound bad. Mike can work with Nat Geo. “Maybe,” he echoes, even as the rolling sensation in his stomach starts to settle. It’s insane, the way his whole body seems to relax whenever Will is around. “Thank you.”

Will hums, “Of course,” squeezing once around his waist then letting go. His unyielding support of Mike’s whims is maybe one of Mike’s favorite things about him – but not his actual favorite, because it seems a bit diminutive to have your favorite thing about someone be something they can do for you – and Mike’s had the opportunity, over the years, to come up with a mile-long list of his favorite things about Will Byers. In the past three and a half months, however, the list has grown in a frankly exponential manner.

He loves the way Will gestures with his hands when he’s excited, the way he’s the perfect height for Mike to kiss on the forehead without having to bend down. He loves Will’s grumpy morning attitude and his even grumpier late-night attitude; he loves the way Will can’t ever be horizontal with him for more than ten minutes without getting sleepy, and sometimes he does it sitting up too. He loves the way Will had driven his car back with him so Mike wouldn’t have to do it alone, twelve hours across innumerable state lines, and it’s no cross-country trip to California, and there had been no monarch butterflies in sight, but there had been more than enough in Mike’s stomach to make up for it. He loves the way Will lets him hold his hand over the console as he drives, the way he pretends to hate Mike’s boyband – he’ll admit it, sort of – playlist, but Mike always catches him singing along under his breath anyway. 

He loves the way Will loves, quiet and steady and bright, Mike’s own personal Polaris. He loves–

He loves–

“So I’ve got to be honest,” Will says, a little bit muffled as he speaks, “and say that I’ve been sent here on a mission.”

“Yeah?” Mike isn’t particularly bothered, because the last mission Will had been sent on involved El’s newfound love for baking and an avalanche of cookies in the Byers’ kitchen and Will, with multiple tupperwares in his arms, which was just an added bonus. “What’s up?”

“Dustin’s flight gets back in from Houston at three,” Will says, tugging on Mike’s arm, “and we’re planning an impromptu welcome back party at the lake.”

This, at least, explains the sunscreen. Or maybe it’s just that Will is very conscious about these things (i.e: skin cancer). “A ha,” Mike hums, slamming his laptop shut and rolling onto his side, tangling their legs together. “So they sent you to do their dirty work?”

“Max said you’d never leave your house if I didn’t come here and drag you out myself,” Will murmurs, which is mostly true, Mike will give her that. “And she said not to text you because it’s best to catch you off guard.”

This is also true. Doesn’t mean Mike can’t act disgruntled about it. “It’s Dustin,” he says, yawning despite the late morning hour. “He’s coming back from NASA, of course I’m going to be there.”

“Good,” Will smiles. “And if the swimming and Dustin weren’t incentive enough, El said she’s bringing–”

Mike doesn’t wait long enough to hear what it is El’s bringing, and he doesn’t really care, because he knows it’s going to be good. “Okay,” he says, springing up and out of bed. “I’m up, I’m up!”

Will looks up at him, faintly amused, and crosses his arms under his head as Mike digs around in his dresser for something marginally more suitable to wear in public than this abomination he has on. He looks good, sunlight streaming in through the slats of Mike’s room and lighting up the high points of his face. His socks have little fish on them today, a cartoon rainbow array, and it’s times like these when things that seem big and scary when Mike is alone – certain words regarding certain feelings – seem a lot less so in actuality.

“One more thing,” Will says, as Mike tugs on a different, blessedly stain-free shirt. It reads I’ve Niagara Fall-en for you in big, bubble letters – a gift from El after one of her and Max’s weekend trips, because this is precisely the sort of thing she finds funny – and he doesn’t have it in him to put any more energy than this into his outfit today.

“Oh,” Mike says, trying to locate a decent pair of pants. “Which might be?”

“Come here,” Will says, and then he’s behind him, apparently having gotten out of bed at some point while Mike was attempting to dig a pair of shorts out from under all his other clothing. Mike sets them down on top of his dresser and trails Will to where he’s rummaging around in the tote bag he dropped on the floor on the way in. “I’ve got something to show you.”

“Yeah?” Mike perches on the end of his bed, watches Will emerge with his tablet clutched in hand. “What’s up?”

“So this is cheesy,” Will starts, “and gross, and you probably don’t even remember, but– I submitted my final a million years ago, but I’ve been playing around with animation software on my own, ever since the semester ended, and– here,” he says, turning the screen around with a flourish. He fidgets slightly in place and adds, “Thoughts?”

“Oh,” Mike says, and then again, “oh,” and then, for good measure– “oh, Will, they’re moving.”

On the screen, a knight kneels in clunky metal armor, then kisses the hand of a figure in bright purple robes, the both of them blushing furiously. “Yeah,” Will laughs, a little incredulously if anything, “that’s kind of the point of animation,” and it occurs to Mike that the magic of this has probably worn off for him, at least to some degree – because he does this all day, every day, for a degree and for fun and then for a job, somewhere down the line – but it will never, ever get lost on Mike.

He watches the purple hat get knocked astray, and then, realization dawning upon him– “Wait,” he says, and Will looks up, frowning slightly. “You wrote this based on my story?”

“Yeah,” Will says, a little slowly, because this is a very obvious thing that Mike already knew. “You knew that.”

“My story wasn’t a romance,” Mike says, a little confused, “but I mean, I guess creative liberty exists, and also it was a short story assignment for class, so it doesn’t even really matter, because this is so good, and I’m going to make it into my phone wallpaper forever, and–”

“It wasn’t?” Will interjects, frowning, like this hadn’t occurred to him before. “Really?”

“Um,” Mike says, shifting his weight from one foot to another. “No, it was– the assignment was just, like, adventure storytelling, or something. I think.”

“Huh,” Will says, looking largely unbothered by this revelation but a little intrigued nonetheless. “Well, it read like a romance to me. Did no one else tell you that?”

To be fair, Mike had gotten a couple strange looks when they’d peer reviewed in class, and his professor had left a comment along the lines of Excellent work stepping out of your comfort zone! which Mike had thought was strange, because adventure and fantasy were both largely in his comfort zone, thank you very much. “Oh,” he says again, in acute understanding, “oh. Oh no. That explains why that one girl was side-eyeing me in class, I think.”

Will laughs, throwing his head back a little with the force of it, and suddenly, all thoughts of maybe-Elise from Intro to Short Story Writing promptly fly out of Mike’s head. “I can’t believe you accidentally wrote romance,” Will grins, tucking his tablet back into his bag. “That’s so fucking funny, Mike. You do see how this is so fucking funny, yes?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mike grumbles, and then, dropping his hands to Will’s waist, “doesn’t matter, because I’m still making it my phone wallpaper for ever and ever.”

“How are you even going to–”

“I’ll download a million apps and convert it back and forth between a million formats and it’ll eat up all my storage,” Mike says happily, and Will smiles, fondly exasperated, up at him. “I’ll figure it out. You’re incredible, by the way.”

“Shut up,” Will says, all soft affection and no bite. “We’re going to be late,” he adds, even though it’s barely past noon and Dustin won’t even be back in Hawkins from the Indianapolis airport until, like, four. “Lucas wants to get lunch first, so put on your pants and hurry up.”

“So you’ve tricked me into two plans today,” Mike huffs, making quick work of exactly what Will said to do anyway. “Unbelievable.”

Will just smiles, leaning up on his tiptoes and pressing a quick kiss to Mike’s mouth. “You love me,” he murmurs, a soft brush of lips against lips, and the gentle, fluttering warmth in Mike’s chest erupts into something else entirely. Suddenly, he feels hotter than the sun on an eighty-seven degree day, and he makes a mental reminder to shove Will into the lake by means of retaliation for getting him this flustered.

“Yeah,” Mike swallows, “of course I do,” and Will’s answering grin could probably singlehandedly power the east coast for the rest of the year.

“Good,” Will whispers, then pulls on Mike’s t-shirt, right over the F in Fall-en, and kisses him again.

It’s really not a surprise the way Mike’s legs immediately turn to jelly under him. Out of all the people he could have possibly Niagara Fall-en for, Will Byers has been the only real contender for a very, very long time.