Work Text:
He doesn’t know how he fell into this slippery slope with Stan.
The first time it happens, it’s in a dimly-lit party (Kappa-Delta-something), the heavy bass of the music and shots making his head spin and boundary lines blur until he’s being tugged up the stairs by his collar. Their teeth clank together, and Stan tastes like sour strawberries and cheap tequila, and he can barely make out his body in the darkness. But then hands are tugging and pulling at bare skin, and Bill has no complaints as they fall into each other.
It’s the first time they’ve done something like this, something so carnal and base and unlike themselves, but he isn’t too harsh on himself. Stan isn’t a close friend, more of a friendly acquaintance he mostly knows as, “Richie’s roommate” and “guy with the turtleneck in my philosophy class,” so it isn’t like their very reckless and very drunk dalliance will ruin some long-standing bond. Besides, they’re sophomores in college. One-night stands, or in my case “hit-and-runs,” are an indispensable and quintessential part of the college experience, Richie has told him on numerous occasions, and while he usually avoids taking any of Richie’s advice, this particular sentiment seems fairly reasonable in the grand scheme of things. It happens, and it’s fun, and it’s over.
Stan, at least, seems to take the advice to heart. Bill wakes up at five in the morning, half-naked and cocooned in somebody else’s scratchy sheets, and Stan is gone. The comforter still smells like strawberries.
***
We are condemned to repeat the past. Santayana.
He sees Stan glance at him from across the lecture hall. He’s wearing a black turtleneck inside the seventy-degree classroom. It suits him. Bill meets his eyes, and Stan nods at him, faintly acknowledging what happened last night.
He could leave it like that. A short inclination of closure after their encounter. It would be easy. (But Bill doesn’t like easy.)
He tilts his head, barely. Stan raises an eyebrow, his expression twisting into something almost amusing, and returns to color-coding his notes.
Stan waits for him by the door after class. Bill almost expects them to shed like snakes in the bathroom or something equally vulgar, but instead, Stan pulls out a neon pink slip of paper and hands it to him.
“Will you come with me to my cousin’s eighth birthday party?” He says casually, as if this is some kind of daily occurrence. His bluntness is almost endearing.
Bill bites his cheek, glancing briefly at the sparkly party invitation. “What benefits come with attending an eight-year-old’s party?”
Stan hums casually, but his grip on his messenger bag tightens — as if he’s nervous. “Cake, plastic party favors, and wonderful children.”
And so naturally, Bill puts a dent in his entire schedule for the day and says yes.
They end up sitting crisscrossed and eating sheet cake in a princess-themed bounce house rental surrounded by the sound of air inflating rubber. Obviously.
“I really didn’t think I’d be talking to y-you again,” Bill admits and then curses himself because, why the hell would you say that?
Stan’s expression doesn’t crack. “Why?”
“Well, you kind of bailed on me.”
Stan flushes and moves a piece of hair out of his face. “I didn’t know the protocol for that type of thing. Didn’t want you to feel weird.”
Bill dips his fork in cream and swirls it around on the plate. It’s back again-- the dizziness he felt at the party, except now he only has sugar to blame. “So why did you think bringing me to another party was a good idea?”
“Another?” Stan bites his lip to tamper the smile that’s pulling on his cheeks. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Shutting me down?” he pouts, leaning towards him. His skin tingles, waiting, anticipating.
“Given where we are, most likely.”
Bill grins, ducks down, and--
Smudges cream across Stan’s face.
“You ass一” And Stan returns the favor, firmly shoving his plate of cake into Bill’s cheek. The top layer of frosting droops down his neck and falls down his shirt. It’s warfare.
He doesn’t know why the air around them feels so warm it’s crinkling, why stumbling on bouncing plastic and flicking pink icing at Stan feels as good as it does, but he doesn’t want to think about it. Bill’s a writer, and he always, always, always overthinks and sulks over long, emotional tangents, and for once, he doesn’t want to think. He doesn’t want the words to come. He wants to laugh at Stan absolutely ruining his sweater with cake and then laugh at Stan laughing so hard that he hiccups.
But he can’t help himself, and the feelings and the words do bubble to the surface, especially when they collapse over the uneven nylon and Bill kisses him with lips that taste like cheap sheet cake.
***
“Sounds like boyfriend territory to me,” Beverly shrugs when Bill tells her about it at lunch. (Well, technically he tells Richie and Mike, too, but it’s her advice that he’s actually looking for.)
Bill shakes his head ardently, but Beverly only raises her arms in mock obliviousness and sips her sweet tea that’s 90% sugar water. “No, it was like… the way he said it i-implied that he thought it was a one-night stand.”
“Uh, yeah, and then he invited you to his third-grade cousin’s bouncy house party.”
“Well…”
Mike slurps his juice box, his straw between his teeth.
Bill continues, “Well, yes, but we didn’t really talk that much.” Beverly pauses mid-sip. “No! No, not- not like that. We just like, had a… cake fight in the jump house.”
“A cake f一”
“I can’t believe this,” Richie cuts in. “I cannot believe this.”
Bill turns to Richie, who had been uncharacteristically silent for the duration of the entire conversation. “What?”
“You hooked up with Stanley Uris,” Richie says, enunciating each syllable.
“Jesus Christ, Richie, this was established a while ago一” Beverly starts, but Richie interrupts again and slams his hands onto the table.
“Billiam Denbrough, you and Stanley Uris.” Richie continues, his voice rising steadily, and he sees multiple people in the dining hall glance at them curiously. Bill wishes he had broken the news to them in a much less public place. “You hooked up with Stan the Man, the most fastidious person that I know, my roommate and best friend of 一 what? 一 three years, last week at a fraternity party, and you didn’t even bother to tell me?”
“Richie, please shut up,” Beverly tries, but her attempts are futile.
“No, no, no, Bev, this is between me and Bill.” Richie reaches across the table, smudging ranch all over his jacket sleeves, and grabs Bill’s shoulders. “How could you betray me in this way, Bill? How could you soil poor Stanley, make him your boy toy, and not tell me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t th-that anything would come out of it.”
Richie’s eyes widen comically. “Well, I sure know someone is definitely coming一”
Beverly snatches Richie’s cookie and takes a grotesque bite from it. Richie spends the rest of the lunch pouting and squishing against the other side of the booth to avoid her, but he doesn’t bring up Stan again.
***
This time, it’s Bill chasing Stan down after philosophy (which is kicking his ass at this point).
“Do you h-have a partner for the Santayana project yet?” he asks, keeping his tone purposely light and measured. Stan scrunches his face thoughtfully, and it dawns on him that he and Stan are hardly acquainted enough for him to be asking this question and that spending even more time with his one-night (does the fight in the bounce house even count?) stand probably isn’t the greatest idea. “I mean, l-l-l-like, I know that philosophy i-isn’t my s-s-strongest, but I f-f-f-figured…”
Stan doesn’t interrupt him or try to finish his thought as most people would. It’s oddly refreshing.
Bill takes a deep breath. “It might be okay s-since we’re kind of friends and all.”
The dimple in Stan’s cheek pops out when he smiles. Bill hadn’t noticed it before. “Gee, thanks.”
“So…” Bill shifts from foot to foot restlessly.
“Meet me at mine at four,” Stan says, then pauses and adds, “Richie will be at a party.”
Bill is going to fail philosophy.
They do manage to get a good chunk of work done, planning and discussing ideas on Stan’s pristine white carpet for a few hours in the afternoon. Neither of them is keen on the nuances and deep revelations of 20th-century philosophers, but Bill thinks that they’ll do well. There’s a certain sharp edge to Stan’s cool personality when they’re working, something that’s hard and driven and ambitious. Something that refuses to accept mediocrity, let alone failure. At six, they wordlessly feast on trail mix and low-sodium potato chips while taking notes and drawing Venn diagrams. Stan had made a loose agenda for them, and they’re supposed to finish the charts by tonight. But then Richie is yelling out a hurried goodbye and slamming the door so loudly that Stan cringes, and they are alone. And well. You know.
Needless to say, the notes and diagrams go unfinished that night.
***
“Do you remember that quote from last week’s unit?”
“Hm?” Bill doesn’t look up, still trying to button his shirt. There’s only a few at the top, but they weren’t exactly designed to be pulled open so roughly.
Stan brushes his hand away, kneeling on the mattress to button his shirt for him. “We are condemned to repeat the past.”
Of course Bill remembers, but it isn’t like he’s going to show it. “Thought you didn’t l-like philosophy?”
Stan swats his chest. “Shut up, asshole. I’m literally on my knees buttoning your Gap shirt for you.”
Bill huffs out a laugh. “I d-do remember.”
Stan finishes, but his hands linger on Bill’s shirt. “Do you think that we are? We’re not even together, but we keep doing this.”
“Condemnation is a big word for what’s going on here,” Bill says. Stan scoffs, but his face is unreadable. He lets go of Bill’s collar. “Plus, I don’t think Santayana ever got to try Smirnoff.”
They sit in silence for a moment.
“Do you…” Bill swallows, “do you want to be together-together?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know, either,” Bill replies honestly.
Stan nods. The setting sun turns his hair dark red around the edges.
“Well,” Bill says after a beat, “Santayana awaits, but Richie shouldn’t be back for another few hours.”
Stan mutters something about having to redo his buttons, but he pulls Bill down to meet him anyways.
***
You only get one sophomore year.
So Bill lets Richie drag him to different apartments, different garages. He drinks and dances at parties hosted by organizations that he isn’t even a part of, and nobody feels the need to say anything because they’re all doing the same thing. Meeting and hooking up is a no-go, but he asks for numbers and usually gets them, thanks to, as Richie so eloquently puts it, his “white boy of the month” charm.
When Richie drags Stan to these parties, though, it’s different.
It’s an unspoken agreement between them. They aren’t exclusive. Sometimes Bill will flirt with someone the same night that Stan will pull him into a dark hallway and kiss him against the wall. And Stan knows, will sometimes even point at his watch while Bill offers coy smiles to a girl, and if he cares, he doesn’t show it. Besides, he’s the only person that Bill is kissing anyways.
So Bill lives his fall semester to the fullest, making suggestive small talk with strangers over red Solo cups and eyeing the door, waiting to see if Stan will show up and kiss him into a wall again.
***
“You see this?”
Bill looks up. Beverly doesn’t exactly wait for his response, instead shoving her screen in his direction. Bill squints at the photo, recognizing Stan’s profile and noticing the gourmet ice cream in his hand. “Did you know that your boyfriend is going on dates with Patricia Blum?”
Bill stares at his lunch and swirls his potato salad around with his fork mindlessly. “There's only one hand in that photo. Plus, he isn’t my boyfriend. I don’t c-c-care.”
"No, Bill," Beverly says slowly, as if he's particularly stupid. "Patty posted her own cute little cone at the exact same time that Stan posted his. Hence, they went together."
"Good work, Bev," Bill responds tritely.
Beverly scoffs and slumps back into her booth, eyes still glued to her phone. “Huh. They'd look good together, though. Very vanilla and proper and get off drinking white wine with upper- middle class people. I can see it.”
“So you don’t think I can handle upper-middle class sophistication?”
Beverly’s smile is chagrined. “Sorry. You know what I mean. You’re all artsy and emotional, and Stan… Stan…” she pauses and scratches her lower lip thoughtfully, “I mean, Richie showed me his bedroom once, and it could’ve been in some MOMA exhibit. You guys are just unexpected, that’s all.”
“Right,” Bill agrees and doesn’t have any justification for why his skin tingles at the thought of Patricia Blum and her expensive ice cream cone.
It’s five in the afternoon, and Stan is panting beside him, one hand draped over his eyes to block the orange sun rays pouring through the window. His neck is a canvas of black and blue. Patricia Blum and her ice cream cone can go to hell. “That was rough.”
“Too rough?”
Stan rolls his eyes, mocking. “ Too rough.”
Bill reaches his hand over to trace the line of bruises along Stan’s skin but decides against it, instead propping himself up on his elbow. “You hear that Richie’s g-gone celibate?”
Stan huffs out a puff of laughter, blinking sleepily at the ceiling. “Yeah. It’s all a ploy to get Eddie to go on a date with him,” he murmurs nonchalantly.
Bill’s head snaps towards him. “What?”
“Oh. Shit,” Stan winces and presses his cheek into the pillow, “shit.”
“Richie has a-a boyfriend?”
“Yes. Well, technically no. I thought you knew?” Stan says defensively, the edge of his words tilting upwards in dread. “You can’t tell him that you know about it. You can’t tell anyone. He’ll kill me.”
“I like it when you get nervous,” Bill sighs and collapses back into the pillows. He wonders when he became so bold. Stan gives him a pointed look, and a small, smug smile pulls at Bill’s cheeks. He doesn’t bother to bite it down. “I’m telling them, by the way. Lunch tomorrow is going to be great.”
Stan groans, the sound muffled by the sheets. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your secondary gossip source.”
“Hey, I think that I give you good gossip, too.”
Stan pulls Bill closer, his arms threading around his neck. “That’s true. It’s actually better than the sex.”
Bill hums against him, and Stan pulls his lip between his teeth.
***
Bill likes the pattern they’ve fallen into.
He likes how they are. He likes not having to worry about commitments to each other. He likes the escape from those deep, nonsensical thoughts that sprout up in his head like weeds (“The Writer’s Burden,” his little brother had put it). He likes being in college and not having emotional responsibilities. Most of all, he likes how Stan doesn’t care. He likes the way he and Stan know each other’s bodies inside and out and the way the air buzzes when they’re under the covers. He likes it, and he isn’t ashamed to admit that he does.
The thing is, he also likes it when Stan stays huddled together in bed with him for a few extra minutes in the morning to complain about something trivial, like what to get for his cousin’s 15th birthday or how someone flooded the bathroom next to the science wing. He likes when they quote philosophers between handfuls of peanuts and when he listens to the faint sound of Stan’s furious typing on the keyboard. He likes watching cheap Netflix shows and throwing popcorn at poorly-written dialogue with him.
He likes being Stan’s friend.
(“Bullshit” is what Richie calls it, but when has he ever listened to Richie?)
***
The issue comes when they turn in their project, leaving no concrete reason for them to hang out, and Stan stops looking at him from across the lecture hall and coming to parties. Bill finds that parties just aren’t as exciting without the possibility of him walking through the door.
He wants to text him and almost does so immediately. Poor communication complicates everything, and Bill doesn’t plan on letting this go to shit because he’s nervous. But then his fingers are refusing to press “send,” and he’s staring at his own message, slightly horrified. His eyes repeatedly scan over his words, hey u okay? still wanna hang?, and his own desperation seems to jump out of the screen. This isn’t like a break-up or anything. They aren’t together. They made that very clear. He can almost picture Stan’s face scrunching up when he receives it, the way he’ll sigh about overly-sentimental art majors being so impractical , how he’ll flip his phone over and return to his physics homework. Bill isn’t even in the position to text him this.
Backspace, backspace, backspace. He’ll think of something later. (He doesn’t.)
***
It’s a lazy Sunday morning, and there’s dew on Bill’s window.
He stares through the glass, waiting for his essay’s words to come the way they usually do, waiting for the weeds to sprout. All he sees are placid droplets of water cutting through the grime.
His phone chimes, mercifully, and he snaps his head away and unlocks it. It’s a message from Stan.
Sorry for avoiding you. I need space. This was fun.
His gaze stays locked on the screen, waiting for a follow-up message. His heart feels like it’s thrashing in his throat, and his stupid, useless lungs won’t seem to function. Bill waits. Nothing happens. Stan’s text bubble disappears, and Bill is left with the crying drops of dew on his window.
***
“Haven’t seen Stan around recently,” Beverly remarks nonchalantly. Bill meets her eyes in the mirror, but she quickly turns her attention back to curling her hair. Her photography is being displayed at some minor, unpretentious art show in an antique bookstore, and Bill agreed to be her plus one. Richie would usually be her first choice, but he would drink too much and offend too many people, and Mike has work, so Bill had to fill in as a last resort. Beverly releases the clamp, and a perfect ringlet emerges before falling flat on her neck. “Seriously?”
“Have you ever d-done this before?” Bill sighs, pressing his back against the wall.
Beverly purses her lips, determined. “No,” she turns to Bill, “and not really what I was talking about. Are you going to tell me about your boy toy or what?”
“Bev, you’ve met him like, three times.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” She frowns at her hair, concedes, and decides to comb through it with her fingers, where it falls into loose curls anyways. Bill doesn’t see why she had cared to mess with it in the first place. “I’ve spoken to him about twice, but I literally saw him sneaking out of your room like every other day last month. Plus, when he wasn’t already here, you would measle back here at ungodly hours of the morning.”
Bill’s cheeks heat up, but he forces out a response. “It wasn’t anything s-ss-serious. He stopped talking to me. I got drunk and messed up with a girl. He cared, or didn’t. I don’t know. It’s done.”
Beverly pouts thoughtfully as if she’s mulling over something, before she reaches for Bill’s hair and ruffles it sympathetically. She offers him a smile that almost looks transparent in the weak, fluorescent lighting. “Sorry, Bill. You’ll find someone else.”
It’s deflating. For some reason, he had expected her to devise a plan of action or demand that he do something outrageous and spectacular.
She readjusts her slinky green dress in the mirror so that one of the straps is strewn over her bare shoulder almost artfully. “Good?”
Bill inclines his head. “Good, Bev.”
Beverly is greeted almost immediately with raised eyebrows and smiles, and the little circles of people across the room make room to accommodate her. She tries to include Bill in the conversations, she really does, but he can tell that these people aren’t very impressed with him. Everyone at the gallery is wearing something lagenlook or postmodern, while Bill is wearing his father’s untailored black suit. It isn’t that they dislike him by any means, but they don’t complain when he leaves Beverly to her networking while he picks hors d'oeuvres off of waiters.
He wanders the aisles of framed works, from amateur photography to ones that seem to have a developing eye. Beverly’s photo, one that captures the mundaneness of city life in the eyes of a pigeon, stands out among the rest of them. He looks at it for a long while before continuing to browse and skim over artist’s statements.
“Bill,” Beverly calls him after about an hour from the end of an aisle. Both of her straps have fallen off her shoulders, and she still looks nice, but not quite as bright as when they arrived.
“How did it g-”
She cuts him off. “I think you should see something.”
She reaches for his hand, letting their fingers twine together, and leads him away from the food portraits and into the last aisle, which consists of all black and white photographs. Bill turns to her, but she only squeezes his hand twice and nods towards a small picture hanging quietly between two large country landscapes. It’s so tiny, so unnoticeable, that Bill probably wouldn’t have even stopped to look at it.
He blinks at the picture, and he knows.
It’s Bill, sleeping and wearing that half-unbuttoned Gap shirt, and Stan’s hand is splayed across his chest. Their faces aren’t captured, but he knows.
Something pools into his stomach then, something warm and almost painful. We are condemned to repeat the past, Stan had reminded him that day, when the sun painted streaks of red into his hair.
Bill turns to Beverly almost frantically. “I-is he here? Is Stan here?”
She nods.
Bill yanks his hand away from hers and runs through aisles and aisles of mediocre art, trying to spot a head of curly bronze hair against framed photographs. Each aisle comes out bare or filled with strangers. Stan. Stan. Stan. Stan.
Stan.
He pauses. Stan is looking at a landscape of the city, his silhouette fitting in so seamlessly that it seems like he’s part of the photo. Bill holds his breath, wills his heart rate to slow, and watches Stan stare at the tiny, luminescent lights and streets in the picture. He takes a step closer to the photo, as if he can see more than what’s on the surface.
“Stan,” Bill whispers. Stan only seems to blend into the city, absorbing its colors. “Stan.”
Stan turns to him, his eyebrows pulling up and wrinkling his smooth forehead. “What are you doing here?”
"I d-di-didn't know that you liked art," Bill says stupidly, before biting his tongue. Pull it together. “I s-s-saw your picture.”
“Oh,” Stan responds carefully, but Bill can see the scarlet blossoming under his cheeks. “What did you think?”
Bill takes a step closer. “It was c-confusing.”
Stan doesn’t back away. “How so?”
“You pushed me away.”
They aren’t talking about his picture anymore.
Stan sighs, averting his gaze back to the city lights. “You didn’t want a relationship. I gave you a way out. I made it easy for you.”
“I don’t want it easy.”
“Then what do you want? You want things to go back to how they were? You want to be my fuck buddy?” Stan sighs angrily.
Bill shakes his head. “No, not that,” Bill takes a breath, “I don’t want to repeat the past.”
“Then what do you want?”
Bill feels like he’s swallowed a thousand suns. “I want to be with you.”
Stan’s eyes don’t leave the photograph. Bill tentatively more steps towards him, waiting periodically to see if Stan will move away. He doesn’t.
“Bill,” Stan says slowly, finally turning to him, hot breath tickling his skin. His eyes fall on Bill’s lips and stay there.
“Stan.”
There’s so much that he wants to say. He wants to tell him about the quotes he’s memorized in class, how much he’s wanted this, how much he’s wanted him – not just the dark, sweet underbelly of his lips, but the lighter, innocent parts of him that burn in the sunlight and rejoice at children’s parties. He has entire screenplays in his head, waiting to be properly written, all to explain himself to Stan. But his words are pressed between their mouths as Stan makes the first move, slating them together carefully, delicately.
Stan kisses him in a small bookshop disguised as glittering city lights, and everything else falls away.
***
He wakes up to the sound of fingers on the keyboard.
“Hi,” he murmurs into Stan’s chest.
“Hey,” Stan replies, still clicking away.
Bill rolls onto his side. “R-random question, but would you like to… go get something to eat sometime?”
Stan closes his laptop. “Are you asking me out?”
He drums his fingers against his stomach. “I-I mean, if you want me to.”
Stan pulls the sheets up to his neck and snuggles in closer to Bill. He closes his eyes contently. “Careful, I might not put out on the first date.”
They laugh against each other, and it feels so much better to feel Stan’s laugh against his lips than see it from across the room of a dark party. “S-so it is a date?”
Stan rolls on top of him, his hair curtaining their faces so that they’re shielded, engulfed in strawberry shampoo mixed with oscillating crosses of sunshine. Bill decides to trust the young morning light and its promises, however weak they may be.
“Yes,” Stan exhales, “It’s a date.”