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coffeeandchemicals · 2 years ago

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–

“We could go out next Friday,” Billy says, expecting to be told no.

As if there’s any planet, any alternative timeline, any moment in Steve’s life where he would reject the chance to sunbathe in Billy’s light.

“We,” Steve tries, not really believing the mirage, “We could go–”

“You don’t have to make a big deal about it,” Billy snaps.

And if Steve were new to this. To pleasure and pain and Billy, his favorite bad idea, it might turn him off. Away.

But he’s wanted this forever. Billy, saying those words to him forever, so.

It gets Steve dreaming. Turns him into even more of a pathetic, sniveling mess of unrequited love. He leans a little into Billy’s touch, feeling the brand-like scrape of silver rings against his nipple. “Sorry,” Steve says, as breathless as he feels. Pennies, compared to the way Billy’s eyes turn balmy.

It’s a big deal. The biggest deal.

It’s Earthmoving.

“It could be fun,” Billy mutters. Like, I forgive you, like, I’ll forgive you now and tomorrow and forever, for loving me in ways I could never love you. Billy nods once. Sharp and direct. “We could go to the diner. And. To the movies, or something. If you’re not too good for that.”

There’s buried meaning in his words.

A rip-tide churning beneath the soft, open wonder on Billy’s face, clues Steve into what always tugs like phantom fingers in his hair.

It’s a time bomb. A setup.

If you’re not too good for me.

Steve’s got thirty seconds to make Billy feel wanted. To prove this wasn’t a mistake, baring his heart and asking Steve to go out in public with him, and every seed of reassurance that’s planted between Steve’s yes and what did you have in mind will struggle through the lashing winds of Billy’s self-doubt.

Steve gotta play his cards right. So careful and calculated that when landmines pulse deep underground, rumbling through the spaces in their understanding, Billy won’t explode.

“Or something,” Steve tries, the words crumbling like garden mulch on his tongue.

It’s clunky and awkward and so unlike Billy that it almost startles a laugh out of him. Would, if Billy could do anything but react. He’d take it as a rejection. A slap to the face.

It would snatch the love of Steve’s life from his hands.

“Would ya look at that, princess has got a brain in him after all,” Billy says. Pissy and irritable and it’s a great cover. He rolls his eyes, and says, “You wanna go out with me or not, Harrington?”

And it’s not the best invitation to a date Steve’s ever heard, but it doesn’t matter.

Steve sees through it.

Billy’s mirth pales in comparison to the hand suddenly stripping Steve’s dick, feverish, as Billy wonders, “You’ll go with me?” so soft and sweet that Steve almost shakes apart. He twists his fingers around Steve’s cockhead, catching precum and expertly smoothing the path, “Say you’ll go with me, baby, please.”

It’s perfect.

It’s too good to be true and with one calloused, wonderful pinch of his fingers on Steve’s nipple, and the sting of Billy’s teeth on his throat–

“‘Kay,” Steve says. He comes undone.

Doesn’t even notice the lackluster response he gave to his darkest, most twisted fantasy coming true. It’s an answer fitting the proposal, especially when Billy rubs Steve’s own come into his hair and laughs the whole way home.

–

For someone who bares his teeth and digs his nails into all the fleshiest parts of Steve for something as simple as trying to love Billy as he deserves–

Billy’s fucked half the guys in town.

Robin acts like that doesn’t mean anything. It’s not fair to judge what Billy was doing before he met Steve, and somehow, that makes it worse.

Before Billy met you.

Like Steve is the key that opens a world of possibilities.

And, anyway, Steve’s fucked half the girls in town. More than half, probably. “How would you feel if he held that against you,” Robin asks, a broken record that screeches reality whenever Steve gets too drunk and has snot running down his chin because that’s easier than admitting how he feels.

The truth is that Billy does hold it against him.

Disdain drips from his tongue like venom whenever a girl bats her eyelashes in Steve’s direction. Billy sneers and spits fire and makes it achingly evident that, regardless of what Steve says, this isn’t a sure thing.

Billy is praying they won’t last. When you go back to chicks. When you decide you’re done with me. When my cock doesn’t do it anymore so you buy Nancy Wheeler a strap-on to celebrate the anniversary of your breakup–

Steve doesn’t say that there is no when. No future where this isn’t everything he wants. Sloppy handjobs and poorly rolled joints and Billy, rubbing come into Steve’s hair while he calls him beautiful. So pretty it hurts.

–

One of the guys Billy fucked before he met Steve is always trying to start shit.

He’s obsessed. The one shadow that won’t cower and dissolve, and as much Steve’s consumed with thoughts of tearing this asshole’s flesh off the bone if it means he’ll drop it, he can’t really blame the guy.

Billy’s Billy. He’s the stuff of dreams.

Still, the guy’s got a mouth on him. Full of malevolence and fury, and the only person in the world who knows better than Steve the damage that mouth can inflict is Carol Perkins.

Steve tells her about it.

Drunk at a party with fruit punch stains on his polo, it slurs out of Steve’s mouth like the lazy drone of cough syrup.

“You know your boyfriend’s sucking dick in the locker room,” Steve tells her. The truth.

And he can hear Billy laughing through the walls. His golden voice rising and falling with the crowd that hangs on his every word. Steve sways a little on his feet and thinks, knows, that Tommy can’t be too far off. Leering, closing in like a slinking wolf.

The image makes him sick. Lights a fire. Righteous fury edging him toward destruction.

“What do you mean,” Carol says.

Not asks. Says. Like it’s old news. Like she was waiting for someone to figure it out and she’s hoping that someone is Steve. She’s looking at him with this weird, hazy glint in her eyes, and.

There’s a word, rolling tootsie on his tongue.

A bad word.

Not one he’s ever said before because when someone else does he gets these flashes of hospital rooms and men who waste away to bones in front of the people who love them most in the world. He thinks of how his mom still talks about Uncle Johnny with tears sparkling in her eyes.

“Your boyfriend’s a cocksucker,” Steve sips on his beer and feels bad about it. Mean, because. He can beg for forgiveness, later. In this moment, he’s powerful. He’s fighting for love. He’s bringing the dead back to life.

When Carol blinks her stupid, big, empty eyes at him, Steve knows he’s gotta roll out the big guns. He opens his mouth to say it, a single syllable pointing to the edge of a cliff he hopes she’ll tumble off of and arrive at the feet of his point–

She’s gotta stop this. Hagan’s obsession with Billy. She’s the only one in the world who can help him.

But Carol frowns and says, “You’re one to talk,” and it startles a laugh out of him.

Carol doesn’t like that.

She smacks her gum, “Is this about Billy?”

“Is what about Billy?”

“Don’t play that stupid fucker shit with me, Harrington,” Carol snaps. She’s full of burning hot coals. Avenging attitude. Steve loved her, once upon a time, “You’re mad because Tommy played with your toy last summer when we were on a break.”

And.

Because Steve loved her, once upon a time, he doesn’t mention that Tommy stole Billy’s underwear from his locker last week. Doesn’t admit that he’s holding his breath always, waiting for the moment Hagan’s lingering stares to lurch everyone back in time.

To before Steve.

Steve bites his tongue and mutters, “You know about that?” Because despite what Carol’s eyes may tell him, Steve’s better than he was, once.

Before Billy.

“Of course, I know about that,” Carol says, voice trembling, “Tommy wouldn’t lie to me. We love each other, we tell each other everything–”

“I know. Me and Billy–”

“You’re going to tell everyone about Tommy unless I do whatever you say, right?” She snaps. There’s a fear Steve’s never seen before, taking root in her eyes. For herself. For Tommy and Billy and underneath all that, Steve. “I know how this works, Harrington. I wrote the book on blackmail–”

“Carol, look, I. If I tell everyone, it’s only a matter of time before the witch hunt swings back around to me. And to Billy, and. He’s a pain in the ass, most of the time. I’d still rather die than see anything happen to him.”

Piece by piece, Carol deflates until she’s normal. Friend sized. “I get that,” Carol says, “I mean. Tommy Hagan is my boyfriend.”

Steve turns to dump his vodka down the drain, scrubbing all the vitriol from his face to show that he’s not that kind of person, anymore. “If Billy’s the ass cheek, Tommy’s the hole.”

Carol, shedding the chip on her shoulder, giggles. And Steve. He missed that sound.

So he says, “I missed you,”

And Carol admits, “I missed you too, dumbass.”

And Steve smirks. “If Billy and I have an ounce of luck, our love will be just like yours.”

Lies through his teeth.

–

Uncle Johnny used to say things about the girls he knew in Chicago.

Over a glass of wine, sprawled on the chaise lounge in Mrs. Harrington’s room, he’d exclaim that straight women were the same everywhere, cut from the same mold as the cheerleaders at Hawkins High who would hang on Uncle Johnny’s arm and call him their “best friend,” but turn on him if given the chance.

As a child, Steve took everything that came out of Uncle Johnny’s mouth as gospel, even the things that didn’t add up.

Steve thought, peeking through the slats in the door as his mother told him to go play, that it was impossible to have more than one best friend. And besides, boys and girls can’t be best friends, because girls don’t like basketball and digging for worms in the soft springtime mud, and if every girl who met Uncle Johnny thought he was their best friend, maybe he was the common denominator.

The problem.

Uncle Johnny had made the extrovert’s mistake of over-availability, like the time Steve had promised two school friends he’d sleep over on the same Friday night.

The only difference between Steve and Uncle Johnny was that Steve only made that mistake once and learned his lesson.

Truth be told, that wasn’t a fair judgment.

The older Steve got, the more he realized that some girls are predisposed to deceit. Their tongues cut sharp as knives, fingers gouging the wounds left behind so the bleeding never stops, and all the same, they try to make room for themselves inside of Steve’s body. Coiled like varicose veins.

Steve doesn’t have chick friends until Carol.

And he doesn’t have good chick friends until Robin, and Buckley changes everything. Steve’s worldview, how he sees himself, how he treats other people, and like most things, it gets him thinking about Uncle Johnny.

How the best friend for a gay man is probably a lesbian, and Robin’s a good thing. The best to ever happen outside of Dustin and Billy, so.

He blames Robin for Friday morning.

In classic carol fashion, they make it sex days before the other shoe drops. She’s gotta marinate, make everyone suffer, and right when the dust has settled, the Earth turns dry again.

The snap of Tommy’s fist against the back of his skull before second period feels cosmic.

The ricochet gets Steve biting down on his tongue, and he swallows his own blood and blames Robin for luring his guard down in a weird, Twilight Zone sort of way.

If it hadn’t been for her and the rose-colored glasses she handed over along with her friendship, Steve would never have stood in front of Carol Perkins and flapped his pathetic, sentimental mouth.

He knows better.

The punch cracks through every layer of Steve’s better judgment. Hurts more than any he’s ever had because he’d thought Carol would hold her water. Tit for tat, you know. Eye for an eye is probably more accurate.

“What the fuck,” Robin shouts, and her chemistry books clatter to the floor, “Tommy, what gives?”

Tommy grabs the back of Steve’s collar and spins him around like he weighs nothing.

White metal slams against his forehead, and somewhere behind them a crowd is forming as Robin screams for help.

“Teaching the queer a lesson,” Tommy says. Sneering and laughing.

“Steve can’t fight,” Robin insists. “You know that.”

And Steve, for all the parts of him that grew soft under the constant, annoying buzz of love from those around him, still opens his mouth to drop the bomb. To defend himself. But the second his lips part, tongue poised to kill just like Billy taught him, Tommy gets his hands on Steve’s collar.

Done deal.

Dead meat.

Tommy roughs him up, and gets in Steve’s face so the entire world and all the pale white light from the fluorescents fizzle out.

He’s like an angry bull. There are tears clinging to his lashes when he spits, “Going on a date tonight, lover boy?”

Billy’s English Comp seminar is on the other side of the school. It’s minutes from the waring bell, he won’t hear about this for another hour, much less make an appearance, and–

Something’s trickling like rainwater into one of Steve’s eyes. He’s going blind. He can’t see the world beyond this moment, but he peers around Tommy’s ugly, sneering face, anyway.

Tommy shoves him against the locker, “Your white knight isn’t gonna save you, Harrington,”

Steve can smell the chicken tetrazzini they had for lunch. He’s disgusting. Every time breath puffs hot and putrid from his gaping mouth Steve can almost make out the shape of something stuck between Tommy’s two front teeth.

He’s got dirt under his fingernails.

His hair is never brushed or styled. He wears the same underwear two days in a row, and Steve can’t help but grin.

“What’s so fucking funny,” Tommy sneers.

Which get’s Steve laughing, almost giggling, because, “You’re so pathetic, Hagan,” Steve’s head wavers a little, some of that old venom coursing through his veins, “You were pathetic when you were getting your dick wet and you’re pathetic now.”

Tommy shoves him harder against the metal, hinges digging painfully into Steve’s back. “You wanna die today?”

“Sure,” Steve grins, “Doesn’t matter what you do to me. It’s hilarious that you think even if was dead and gone he’d ever pick you–”

Tommy shoves him out and away, and the first blow feels like taking a sandbag to the chest.

For all the time that they were friends and all the bad blood that washed the memory away, Steve’s never actually felt how meaty Hagan is all over. From his neck, down to his arms, where his wrists dilate like pool floaties.

His blows land like anvils from the sky.

Steve’s getting crushed. He doesn’t see the point in fighting back, but somewhere through the springing crowd of onlookers, Robin begs him to kick Tommy’s ass.

It’s hilarious.

Steve’s laughing so hard he’s got tears streaming down his face, doubling over with every word, every blow until Mr. Derkosh pulls them apart.

–

It stops being funny when Principal Murphy keeps him in the office all through second and third period.

Steve wants to go home.

His head throbs. He’s worried about getting blood all over the hideous wood-paneled furniture the secretaries probably think makes the place more comfortable, but all of that is swallowed by the lapping waves of anxiety he feels.

Steve bounces his leg and thinks about getting to Billy.

To explain what happened, why he’ll probably have to eat his lunch in this drab and boring office.

Tommy seethes somewhere in the back room, each world hurling against the wall like dead pigeons. Steve can just make out that Hagan’s facing suspension for starting the fight, and that seems only fair.

Steve never threw a single punch.

Steve’s probably got a broken nose and as much as he yearns for his bed and a bowl of ice cream and a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon, if he gets sent home his parents will flip.

From somewhere across the Atlantic his father will phone in and tell Steve’s mother that she’ll have to take care of it. Steve will march through the streets of Hawkins like Marie Antionette to the slaughter.

He’ll be suspended and grounded and forbidden to every leave the house because his parents always choose the worst possible moment to give a shit about him, and Billy will never know why Steve missed their date.

Just then, the backroom door swings open and the knob takes a chunk out of the drywall.

“Watch it, Mr. Hagan,” Principal Murphy says.

Steve remembers that Tommy once said she wasn’t intimidating because she’s a woman.

Steve had laughed.

He feels guilty about that, now, as if Tommy’s blows had dug up all the old rot inside him Steve worked so hard to polish away.

Tommy shoots daggers at Steve the whole way around the secretary cubicle as if everything, lost love and both world wars and the inevitable demise of humanity were somehow Steve’s fault.

“You’re dead, Harrington,” Hagan says, just as Principal Murphy shouts at him to get his bag and head home.

Steve wants to say it doesn’t matter. Get in line.

But Principal Murphy turns cold, lifeless eyes onto Steve, as if she’s already forgotten who was the perpetrator and who got knocked around like a pool-que. “Mr. Harrington,” She says, gesturing to the back room, “Let’s have a quick word, alright?”

It should terrify him. It doesn’t.

Steve’s already dead.

He’s going to miss his date tonight and Billy will never speak to him again.

–

Steve walks away with after school detention.

He spends the rest of the afternoon in Ms. Murphy’s office, sealing envelopes and staring at the wall. He’d be lying if he said he wouldn’t have preferred suspension.

At least then he could’ve run down the hallway and slammed into Billy’s classroom and declared he’s drowning in a mote of love that will never, ever run dry.

When the final bell rings and the school cleans out, Steve resists the urge to press his nose against the glass. He imagines Billy, hair loose and wild, running home to get ready for their date. Steve pictures flushed cheeks and small, secret smiles when Max wonders what’s got him so excited, and.

Steve takes his time, waiting for the secretaries to forge his letter home.

Mom’ll be furious. Steve tucks it into his back pocket, waving goodbye to the ladies who are just trying to do their jobs.

Hawkins High is a ghost town.

Everyone’s shoved off for the weekend. He takes the turn into the parking lot, head throbbing when the sunlight pierces through him.

The entire world may land on a pillow made of hope when Billy pushes himself of the side of the Beamer.

Steve gapes.

“Look like someone kicked the shit out of you, Harrington.” Billy’s eyes could back the sun into a corner, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I,” Steve mutters, temple throbbing slowly. “I got detention.”

“Robin told me. Hagan kicked your ass, pretty boy.”

“I don’t care,” Steve says. He closes the short distance between them, fingers rising to tangle in the lapel of Billy’s denim jacket. Detention is almost worth getting to touch Billy, like this. Tied together in a sea of cracked pavement and springtime glow. “I don’t care about him. All I could think about was you.”

“What for?”

“I didn’t want you to think I stood you up,” Steve tries desperately, “I’ve wanted this so long. I’ve had dreams about it and I didn’t want to fuck it up and lose you before I had the chance to say–”

Billy leans into Steve’s touch, eyelashes low and sleepy, and. “Can’t lose me,” He says, “No matter what.”

Billy’s nose flares bright red and Steve wants to kiss it.

So he does. Steve kisses him all over, feeling the clandestine tickle of Billy’s eyelashes on his face when they press in close and Steve feels like the pieces of himself have been glued back together.

He’s whole and drying.

Billy pulls away. Tucks the hair behind Steve’s ears. “We should probably postpone our date.”

Steve doesn’t want that. He opens his mouth to say so, but instead he asks, “Will you come take care of me?”

And there was a time, not so long ago, when Steve never imagined saying those words to anyone. He’s the foundation, in everything. The fortress.

But Billy nods and knocks him gently on the chin, and Steve knows they’ve got time.

All the time in the world.

–

For the INCREDIBLE @ihni . Thank you for your patience and I hope it was enjoyable. You’re one of my favorite creators on any app ever, it was an honor to write something for you.

All my love,

Jaz

#harringrove #passivenovember #oh this is so good #your word choice is phenomenal

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