Chapter Text
“sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve learned until we’ve already known it for a very long time.”
—what now?, ann patchett
✉
When they straggle their way back through the front door of Mike’s house, it’s to discover their mothers perched on opposite ends of the sitting room sofa, deep in conversation as Ted Wheeler snores in his adjacent recliner. Holly is nowhere to be seen.
“Oh,” says Joyce, startling when she sees them standing in the doorway. “Where have you two been?”
Will glances at Mike, who shrugs back at him helplessly. There’s not exactly any reason for them to lie from where Mike stands.
“Out on a walk,” is all Will says in the end. Joyce takes this in stride, and Mike’s own mother nods and smiles and waves them towards the kitchen, where there’s leftover brownies and ice cream waiting.
Somehow it’s still strange to Mike that they can do things like that now—just get up and leave in the middle of dinner; disappear for hours without anyone noticing or minding that they’re gone. It’s true that he’s never had the most mindful parents, but family meals and being home before dark were always where his mother drew the line that marked out the boundaries of his childhood. Sometimes, Mike forgets he’s an adult, especially as he’s still living in this house, and now walking home with Will by his side again and sitting next to him on the kitchen stools, eating brownies and half-melted ice cream like they’re in their tweens instead of twenties. Sometimes, Mike forgets he’s allowed to cross the lines, and so he just goes on living inside of them without any good reason to leave.
“Do you want to do something tomorrow?” Will asks once they’ve finished their dessert, arms folded on the counter as Mike rinses the bowls out in the sink.
He shuts off the tap and wipes his hands on his pants. “Like what?”
“I mean, we don’t have to—”
Mike shakes his head. “I don’t mean that I don’t want to. I’m just curious what you had in mind.”
Will shrugs. “I didn’t really have anything in particular. I haven’t lived here since the eighties, remember? Maybe none of the places we used to go are still around. I don’t even know if they opened another mall.”
“They didn’t,” Mike tells him. “Everything else is pretty much the same, but would you even want to do that?” Will tips his head curiously, so Mike elaborates, “I mean, we’re not thirteen anymore. Would it be weird to hang around at the arcade all day, or my basement, or, like, the movies?”
“Movies are normal, Mike.”
He waves a hand, flushing a little under Will’s amused gaze. “You get my point.”
“I do,” Will concedes. He scrunches his brow, thinking. “I don’t know, what did all of you guys usually do after I moved? Like when you came back from college, maybe?”
Mike picks up a dish towel from the counter and starts wiping up imaginary spatters of water, then stops when he realizes he’s seen his mother do the same thing at least twenty times in the last month alone. He knows he’s making it awkward, and he’ll have to talk about this sooner or later, seeing as Will might already know, and Mike ought to be honest with him regardless if they’re going to be friends again, but—
Well. It’s still a little shameful for him to admit, even now.
“None of us really hung out much after you moved,” he manages after a moment too long spent staying silent. “Um. At all, really.”
Will says, “Oh.”
“It was partly my fault, maybe,” Mike admits, squeezing the towel until his knuckles turn white, staring down at the kitchen tiles instead of up at Will. “I had— a not-so-great time in high school, I guess. But everyone had shit going on, and by the time we got to college, we just weren’t, you know?”
“Weren’t what?”
“Friends,” Mike whispers, still tight in the throat at the thought of it after all these years.
“Oh,” Will says again. He sounds very sad. Mike knows the feeling.
He breathes out sharply, shaking out the towel and folding it atop the counter, lining up all the edges and corners very precisely because he needs something to focus on besides the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, the one that’s been coming and going since he started high school and couldn’t escape the lingering feeling that everything good was going to end someday soon.
Mike clears his throat and says, “Anyway. I had to babysit Holly a lot when Nancy went to college, so. I didn’t really get out much after growing out of the arcade and stuff.”
“You’re telling me,” Will says, eyebrows raised, “that you haven’t played Dig Dug since you were thirteen?”
“Well—”
“You wouldn’t ever want to go to the arcade again, just because you’re an adult?”
Mike wishes he hadn’t folded the towel, because he’s very tempted to flick it at Will’s teasing face right now. “I didn’t say that!” he protests. “If you want to go to the arcade, we can go to the arcade, geez.”
Huffing out a laugh, Will shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m saying. I mean, sure, we can go to the arcade, but I’m asking what you usually do.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to do something you hate, and I want to spend time with you, dumbass.”
Mike blinks. “You—”
“Oh god,” Will says, sounding somewhere between amused and distressed. “Mike, that’s what friends do. They hang out.”
“I know that!” he hisses. His face feels like it’s on fire. If it’s possible to be out of practice at friendship, apparently Mike is. The fact that he can’t remember the last time he hung out with someone who wasn’t his teenage sister probably isn’t a good sign. Sagging back against the counter, he repeats, softer, “I know that. It’s just been a while, okay?”
“Hey,” Will says, leaning across the counter to lay his hand on Mike’s wrist. He waits until Mike looks at him. “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. I’d be okay with doing whatever, as long as it’s you and me, okay? I’d just like to spend time with you again.”
Ducking his head, trying not to stare at Will’s hand, still on his wrist, Mike replies, “Yeah, I’d, uh— I’d like that too.”
✉
They part ways without settling on what to do the next day, just the decision to meet on Main at eleven. Joyce hugs Mike so hard he can hardly breathe and tells him all over again how glad she is to see him, and he won’t deny that it pleasantly warms his chest to hear. He even remembers to hug her back this time.
Will doesn’t hug him goodbye, but he gives Mike’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before heading out the door after his mom. Mike has to force himself to close the door and go up to his room so he won’t stand there staring after them and letting all the bugs in.
That night, for the first time all summer, he falls asleep before dawn.
✉
By the time he’s properly woken up the next morning, Mike’s figured out exactly where to take Will. It’s not the most thrilling destination, but then, this is Hawkins. The most thrill they ever get nowadays is whatever is showing at the Hawk.
It’s already miserably hot by the time Mike’s coffee has kicked in—hot enough that he doesn’t want to walk all the way to Main, but he also doesn’t want to call and ask Will for a ride, because that means explaining the car situation, which still makes shame curdle deep in his stomach. Instead, Mike manages to convince his mother to let him out on her way to the store. It means he feels like a kid getting dropped off at school again, but it saves him a hell of a lot of sweat and discomfort of a different sort, so he takes it. Will’s already there, standing in the shadow of one of the storefronts’ awnings.
“Know where we’re going yet?” he asks, stepping out of the shade and falling into step with Mike, who keeps walking past Pam’s and the furniture store.
“Yep,” Mike answers, but doesn’t elaborate, and Will doesn’t pry. He was always good at that, Mike recalls. He remembers a lot of things about Will, and a surprising amount of them have held true even now. He hopes that the thing he’s banking on for this morning is one of them.
It only takes about half a block to reach their destination—a narrow storefront with no awning and peeling green paint. Back when Will still lived here, before the owner sold it and moved down to Miami, it used to be called Main Street Vinyl. Now it carries vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, and the neon sign in the window reads Hawkins Music. Mike’s been here more than a few times since the change in ownership, but after hauling a box of music to and from his dorm in Indianapolis, he stopped collecting quite so many albums. Will, however, used to love music, almost as much as his brother, who used to lend him and Mike tapes every time he got new ones. He’d recommend this artist or that album, and it’s because of Jonathan Byers that Mike still catches himself mindlessly humming The Clash while he cleans.
“Ta-da,” Mike says, a little belatedly, and gestures at the door. “You’re still into music, right? I mean, dumb question. Who isn’t into music, right? But you know what I meant, probably, because of Jonathan and stuff. I know it’s not much, but they’ve got a pretty good variety, and—”
Will shakes his head, blessedly cutting Mike’s rambling off, and by the way his whole face has lit up Mike can tell that he guessed right again. He says, “No, this is great!”
Maybe it wasn’t guessing, Mike thinks, pulling the door open and following Will inside. Maybe it was knowing. Maybe they aren’t such strangers after all.
✉
(“Hey, look at this,” he says, sometime later, holding up a copy of Wish for Will to see across the stacks. He doesn’t have his own copy, but he’s heard “Friday, I’m in Love” on the radio every weekend for months. “You still like The Cure, right?”
Will raises his eyebrows and snorts. “I don’t know, you haven’t suddenly stopped singing ABBA’s praises since I last checked, have you?”
“Touché,” Mike answers, thinking of the collection of albums he has stored under his bed at home—one box dedicated entirely to ABBA and ABBA alone—and gives Will the album when he holds out his hand for it. They lapse back into silent browsing after that, but they’re both smiling.
Things aren’t the same as when they were kids, but maybe they don’t have to be. Not all of it. Maybe different can be good, too. If they can be new people and still love the same bands, surely they can find common ground again. They can make this work.
All in all, their afternoon in Hawkins Music isn’t anything monumental, but it’s a first step back towards finding each other. It’s a start. That’s all Mike needs it to be.)
✉
They reconnect cautiously, picking up old habits and newfound confidence over a span of days, then a week, then two. They go for walks and watch old movies in Mike’s basement. Mike loses Dig Dug spectacularly at the arcade. Will picks him up in Joyce’s ancient Pinto, now handed down to him, and they go for drives just to talk or listen to new albums. Mike tells him about the books he’s read, and Will talks about college.
(He went to CalArts on a scholarship. His least favorite medium is sculpture. He learned how to drive in eleventh grade, and his favorite song is still “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” Mike tucks every new thing he learns away for safekeeping, a dragon with a hoard he never expected to have again.)
For the first time in a long time, Hawkins starts to feel like home again, and Mike starts to feel like himself.
✉
Joyce has bought a three-bedroom ranch house on Cherry Street, close enough for Mike to walk to on cooler days. It’s so much closer than her old house on Kerley. It’s strange, having Will so near again, but Mike’s not complaining.
The walls in Will’s new bedroom are plain beige, but he invites Mike over one Tuesday afternoon and breaks out a bucket of sunshine-yellow paint, hands Mike a paintbrush, and sets to work. Repainting Will’s room takes the entire afternoon. Mike plays ABBA tapes on Will’s stereo until he smacks Mike with his brush until he agrees to change the music. They get nearly as much paint on themselves as the walls and have to open a window because the fumes are so overwhelming. That night, Mike goes home with a headache and permanently ruined jeans, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
✉
Mid-July, they go swimming in the quarry like they were never allowed to when they were kids. The Sattler Company still owns the place, but it’s been abandoned for years. Lovers’ Lake and Lake Jordan are still more popular swimming spots for people who aren’t looking to brave the Hawkins Community pool, but the quarry has grown more popular in recent years as all the old rumors about it being haunted have mostly died off. They still have the place mostly to themselves in the afternoon, and it’s just the two of them by the time the light’s turned golden and syrupy-slow.
Mike crouches at the water’s edge, skipping stones while Will sits beside him and smokes. The smell doesn’t bother him so much anymore. If anything, it reminds him of being a kid in the backseat of Joyce’s Pinto again, windows down, riding home from school with Will on the rare Fridays when he got to stay over at Will’s instead of the other way around.
They haven’t said anything for a long time. Mike doesn’t mind. With other people, silence becomes smothering, heavy with unspoken questions and judgements and expectations for his life. With Will, it’s just silence. They can just sit here and smoke and skip rocks and nothing about that is weird or uncomfortable or slowly compacting Mike’s lungs down into the size of a teaspoon. He likes it.
The longest skip he’s gotten so far is six. He wings a rock out onto the water. Three. Another, and this one makes it five. Mike hums to himself and rakes his fingers through the pebbles at his feet, trying to find a good one—flat and smooth and not too big, just like Lucas taught him in second grade.
He’s assembled a small pile of potential skipping candidates when Will reaches over and taps his wrist. When Mike looks up, he’s holding out a hand and rippling his fingers in solicitation.
“Rock me,” says Will. The setting sun has limned his hair in liquid gold.
Mike drops one of the flatter stones into his waiting palm, and after a moment of squinting carefully across the water, Will sits forward and skips the rock out onto it with a measured flick of his wrist. Mike counts nine skips before it sinks far out in the quarry, sending ripples cascading every which way.
Mike whistles. “Damn. Who taught you to skip rocks like that?”
Will laughs and says, “You did.”
It’s funny how quickly we forget things. How easily they come back.
✉
When they’re in the car and on their way back into town, Will pulls to a stop at an intersection and glances over at Mike, fingers tapping nervously on the steering wheel. His eyes are dark in the streetlights’ dim glow.
“Hey, so,” he begins, reaching over and turning the radio down. “I told you Jonathan’s working in Chicago right now, yeah?”
Mike nods, wondering where this is going.
“Well, he has this Friday off, and he wants me to come up and visit for the day. See the city a little. The Art Institute.”
“That sounds like fun.”
Will’s fingers keep tapping on the wheel as the light turns green and he accelerates through the intersection. “I was wondering if— I mean, you don’t have to, but would you want to…you know.”
Mike says, “I know…what?”
This earns him an eyeroll. “Would you want to come with me?”
He means to hesitate. He means to think it over—if it’s a good idea, if Will really wants him to go, if seeing Jonathan again after being such a shitty friend to his brother is a good idea. He doesn’t.
Instead, before he even really registers his mouth moving, Mike says, “Yeah. Yeah, I want to.”
Will lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree, so clearly it can’t really be a bad idea.
“Cool,” he says, flashing Mike a sidelong smile. “I’ll pick you up Friday morning.”
“Cool,” Mike echoes. He can’t help himself, not when Will’s involved. He smiles back and hopes the darkness will hide how fond it probably looks.
✉
Will picks him up at six-thirty on Friday morning. He laughs at Mike’s sleepiness, hands him a thermos of coffee (because he’s still Will Byers and a saint even if he’s terrible for waking Mike up this early) and lets Mike sleep for another hour while they cruise down the I-65. When he wakes up again, he’s the furthest he’s been from Hawkins in nearly two full years.
It only takes another two hours to get to Chicago. They spend most of it listening to the radio and talking about nothing in particular. Mike’s been before—senior year they took a class trip and mostly visited Navy Pier, the Sears Tower, and the science museum. By that point, the most he was speaking to anyone was telling Jennifer Hayes okay, sure, when she asked if he would take her and her friends’ picture in front of Lake Michigan. They didn’t go the Art Institute. Mike remembers the bus driving past it, glimpsing the lions out front, and thinking Will would have been so jealous if Mike went without him.
Funny how these things work out.
The plan is to spend a few hours in the Art Institute and then meet Jonathan for lunch. There’s nothing Mike particularly wants to see in the city, but Will has a list a mile long. Mike’s unconvinced half of it isn’t just specific paintings on showcase in the Institute. As for himself, he’s not what he’d call an art connoisseur, nor does he know much about it at all, but Will’s excited enough for both of them, and frankly, Mike’s just happy to be out of Hawkins for a day.
They spend four hours in the Art Institute. Will’s hand darts out to grasp Mike’s wrist in giddy anticipation the second he glimpses American Gothic across a room, and he doesn’t let go for three full galleries. Mike doesn’t say anything, just lets himself be towed from room to room, painting to painting to sculpture to painting again, even though Will’s enthusiastic grip is practically tight enough to bruise. He doesn’t mind it.
Kind of the opposite, if he’s honest, though he wouldn’t be if you asked.
Will does let go eventually, pulling a sketchbook and pencil out of his bag and stopping here and there to sketch museumgoers and works of art alike. He holds the pencil tight as he held Mike’s wrist, and his first few sketches are shaky with excitement.
“Hey, Monet’s not going anywhere,” Mike says, jostling Will’s elbow with his own—but only after he sets the pencil down for a second to flex his fingers. “Breathe a little, will you?”
Flushing, Will says, “I just— that’s a Monet,” and gestures to the painting in front of them like it hung all the stars in the sky. He’s sketched out the mother and her daughter currently standing in front of it, hand in hand.
“And that’s a Byers,” Mike teases, nodding to the open sketchbook. Will’s somehow managed to capture the little girl’s tip-toed pose with just a few quick lines. It’s like magic. Mike watched him do it, and he still doesn’t understand how it worked. One minute the page is blank, the next there’s an entire person there, radiating emotion and movement and life.
“You’re ridiculous,” Will decides, knocking his shoulder against Mike’s. “I dunno, I’m just excited about being here, you know? Seeing all these paintings I learned about in school hanging on a wall, like, three feet away from me…”
“It’s cool,” surmises Mike.
“Very cool,” Will agrees, picking his pencil back up, then pausing to glance up at Mike. “Hey, you know we don’t have to sit here for so long, right? I can— I can be done sketching.”
Mike shrugs. “It’s fine.”
“No, I mean,” Will says, and then stops, chewing his lip. “I mean, like, if you’re bored, you don’t have to sit here with me. We can go, or you can look at stuff on your own. You don’t have to sit here and watch me draw.”
“I like watching you draw,” he says, and it makes him feel raw and skittish and clingy, but it’s true. Fuck the museum. Fuck Monet. Mike would be happy to watch Will draw all day long, if Will would let him.
“Okay,” Will says, soft and rather pleased, and this is going to be the death of Mike, maybe, probably, for sure.
Will goes back to drawing, and Mike goes back to rubbing his wrist and pretending he’s not jealous of the pencil.
✉
He loses Will at one point. Obviously it isn’t on purpose, but one of the paintings catches his eye across the mostly-empty room—probably because it’s huge and dark and impossible to miss—and at some point between Mike noticing the painting and crossing the gallery to look at it, Will wanders off into some other room, and Mike doesn’t even notice.
The painting is tall, maybe eight or nine feet, and towers above Mike so he has to crane his neck up to see it fully. It’s nothing particularly special, outside of the size; in fact, it’s just a door with a wreath on it.
But also, it’s not just a door. There’s an incredible level of detail, down to the wilted roses of the wreath, the petals strewing the doorstep, the carved doorframe, the nicks and scratches on the varnished wood.
And there’s the hand. A wrinkled one, old and weatherbeaten as the door itself, resting gently on the doorframe, just above the knob, like the owner wants to go in but isn’t brave enough. Like they’ve been standing there outside that door for years, and might just go on standing there forever.
It’s silly, maybe, to feel this captivated by a hand on a door, but Mike can’t stop staring. It’s like the painting has cast a fishhook into his mouth, catching him in the tender skin of his cheek, holding him there while it reaches down his throat to grasp at his insides and squeeze.
Open it, he wants to urge the hand’s owner. Open the door. Just open it.
But they aren’t going to, he knows. Mike has a feeling that maybe it’s too late anyway. It’s not a feeling he likes.
✉
(“What are you looking at?” Will asks, appearing at Mike’s shoulder and making him jump. He leans in and reads the placard next to the painting: “That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, or The Door. Wow, look at the details. And the layers of color here on the wood— wow. Wow.”
Mike swallows around what seems like a throatful of gravel and says, “Yeah. It’s very—tall.”
“Reminds me of you,” Will teases.
As he loops his elbow through Mike’s and tugs him away, Mike steals one last glance at The Door and wonders if Will realizes just how right he is.)
✉
There’s so much to see at the Institute that despite Will’s dedication to cram in as much as possible, Mike still feels like he’s only seen a fraction of the artwork on display. His personal favorites are the miniature rooms—Will has to pry him away from some of the tiny intricate displays despite Mike’s protests of Wait, Will, look at the chandelier!
Will says his favorite is Nighthawks—a painting of a diner they both stand and look at for so long that they end up running thirty minutes late to lunch with Jonathan later. It’s just a diner, really, painted mostly in shades of blue and green and yellow—but also, it’s like the door from earlier.
“It’s so lonely,” Mike surprises himself by saying, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Like, they’re all just sitting there by themselves.”
“Yeah,” Will says. He’s standing close enough that their arms are just barely pressed together from shoulder to elbow. He hums, melancholic. “It reminds me of college.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Just—lots of people but not much community, I guess? A lot of California was like that.”
“Oh,” Mike says.
Will glances at him, slantwise and thoughtful, and asks, “What does it remind you of?”
And Mike says, “Honestly? Home.”
They don’t discuss many paintings too closely after that, but Mike still catches Will shooting him thoughtful looks all the way to the café where they’re meeting Jonathan. He doesn’t know what to do about that, so in the end he does nothing at all.
✉
Lunch with Jonathan goes, in a word, well. He and Will have clearly talked since June, because he doesn’t seem at all surprised at Mike’s presence, though sometimes Mike catches him peering curiously across the table at him, glancing between Mike and Will in a way that makes Mike feel like the time Will took him to the beach on their spring break trip and he could feel sand in his shoes for days afterward. Like then, he feels rubbed raw and uncomfortable and hyper-aware of his own body. But Jonathan never does more than look, so Mike can thankfully pretend that he doesn’t notice it. He hopes Will doesn’t, either, but he feels entirely too exposed to glance over and check. It takes extra effort to stay tuned into the conversation.
“I don’t know,” he answers when Jonathan asks him about his interests since high school. “I mean, I used to write—short stories, mostly, but I worked for the school paper in college for a while. I liked it.”
“You write?” Will asks, looking at him in surprise. That’s right—Mike never told him.
“Wrote,” Mike corrects. “It’s been a while.”
“You’ll have to let me read some of your stories,” Will says, poking him gently. “I bet they’re great. You came up with the best campaigns when we were kids.”
“Oh, um, sure. I guess.” He can feel his face heating with something like embarrassment. Across the table, Jonathan looks on in amusement, poorly hiding his smile behind a sip of water.
“Maybe you should try writing again,” he suggests when he sets the glass down. “Will always used to rave about those campaigns.”
“Jonathan,” Will hisses. Under the table, there’s a scuffling and a sound of someone’s foot (Mike assumes Will’s) connecting with someone else’s leg (that must be Jonathan’s). As Jonathan’s words sink in, Mike’s face heats even further and he shoves a chip into his mouth as a helpful distraction. It tastes like nothing at all.
When he finishes chewing, he says, “Sure. Maybe.”
Thankfully, the conversation moves on after that.
Mike spends the rest of their time in the café focusing down on his sandwich and chips while listening to Jonathan tell Will about his job for the Tribune and all the bands he’s gotten to see since moving to the city. (It’s a lot of bands. Mike’s pretty impressed, honestly.) He joins the conversation when invited, fielding questions about Nancy, Hawkins, how his summer’s going; but mostly he’s content to sit and listen while his knee knocks against Will’s under the table where he can pretend it’s only an accident.
Mike knows better. He thinks Jonathan might know, too.
✉
Jonathan shows them around the city for the rest of the afternoon and insists on taking pictures of the while he does it. It makes Mike feel like a little kid again, posing on Halloween and before D&D games and on Will’s birthday for Jonathan to practice photography and archive every important memory they shared from kindergarten to freshman year. He’s never liked having his picture taken, much to his mother’s displeasure, but Mike doesn’t mind so much when it’s Jonathan taking it. Or maybe he just doesn’t mind that when Jonathan’s taking his picture, it’s always with Will.
They end the trip in a bar as night is falling, though they can’t exactly drink much, since they have to drive back to Hawkins tonight. Jonathan offers his spare room to them like any good brother, but Mike has a morning shift tomorrow he really can’t miss, and they have to decline.
Still, they split a bottle of cider and talk at the bar for a time. A girl pulls Jonathan away to dance, and Will laughs at him as he goes. Mike keeps expecting Will to venture out onto the dance floor himself—enough girls are certainly making eyes at him—but he never leaves Mike’s side, except once, to go to the bathroom. While he’s gone, a pretty blonde who vaguely resembles Jennifer Hayes slides up next to him and runs her hand down Mike’s arm.
“Hi,” she says, and, honest to God, bats her eyelashes.
“Uh,” Mike says, glancing down at her hand. Her hand, on his arm. “Hi?”
He almost says who are you, or maybe what do you want, but then thinks better of it. His mother did manage to instill some manners in him, after all.
“Are you going to wait for me to ask you to dance,” the girl inquires coyly, “or are you just going to sit there looking lonely all night?”
Oh. Oh.
“Sorry, but I’m here with someone,” Mike blurts apologetically before he can think better of it. The girl’s hand slips immediately away from his arm.
“I see,” she answers, sounding somewhere between disbelieving and disappointed. “Well, you know where to find me if you change your mind.”
She gives him a faux pout, tosses her hair over her shoulder, and sashays back into the crowd. Mike drains the last of his and Will’s cider—sorry, Will—and tries not to grimace.
“Who was that?” Will asks, suddenly appearing and plopping back down onto the stool at Mike’s side. Mike nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Just some girl,” Mike shrugs, swallowing past what feels like his entire heart in his throat.
“Did she want to dance with you?” asks Will. “You know you can do that, right? You don’t have to sit here with me the whole night.”
The thing is, he doesn’t sound very fond of that. Of Mike, dancing. Or maybe just dancing with that girl, or any girl. But—no, that’s probably not it. Mike’s being ridiculous. Why would Will care?
He shrugs, picking at the label on the empty cider bottle. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not gonna ditch you, man.”
“Are you sure?”
Will’s brows are furrowed, and he looks at Mike like he’s some kind of riddle to be solved. Mike doesn’t feel like a riddle. He just feels uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” he manages. “Besides, I, uh— I wasn’t interested anyway.”
For a moment, Will looks like he wants to say something, but then his eyes dip down to the bottle in Mike’s hand and he’s too distracted by Mike finishing all the cider without him to pry. Mike finds himself equal parts disappointed and relieved. He breathes out a sigh, and when he looks over Will’s shoulder, he sees Jonathan standing there.
The look he gives Mike tells him he saw the whole thing. More than that—it’s a look that says he definitely knows.
Mike’s still not sure if that’s a good thing.
✉
At the car, Jonathan hugs Will so tight Mike’s amazed he doesn’t crack a rib.
“You know you can always come visit, right?” he asks.
“I know.”
“Anytime. I mean that,” Jonathan says, pulling back and giving Will a gentle shake, then ruffling his hair until Will ducks out from under him, swatting at his hands and laughing. “I’ve got a bed with your name on it, okay? My offer still stands.”
“I know,” Will repeats, quieter, but no less fond. “Thanks, Jonathan.”
And then Jonathan moves so he’s standing in front of Mike.
“Take care of yourself,” he says, then nods towards Will. “And keep an eye on this one for me, okay?”
“Okay,” Mike says, and then he doesn’t say anything at all, because Jonathan reaches out and hugs him, too. It’s a quick hug, and not nearly as back-breaking as Will’s, but it’s Jonathan and he’s hugging Mike and frankly, Mike thinks he’ll never stop being astounded at the Byers family’s ability to forgive and forget.
After a second’s hesitation, he reaches up and hugs back. It’s nice. Solid. Like what Mike imagines any brother’s hug would feel like.
Then Jonathan lets go, and before Mike can really process half of what’s happened, they’re climbing into the car and pulling out onto the street, heading back towards the I-65 and their sleepy, waiting town.
“Today was fun,” Will says as they accelerate down the road.
Mike hums in agreement.
“Thanks for coming. I’m glad you were here.” It’s too dark to tell, but Mike thinks he can hear the smile in Will’s voice.
“I’m glad too,” he says, and then he has to fold his hands together and tuck them between his knees, just to be sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. It doesn’t stop him from wanting to do it any less, though.
✉
(They stop for a late, late dinner at a little diner halfway between Chicago and Hawkins. It’s cramped and cheap and a little dirty, but it’s full of golden light and they have the best pancakes Mike has ever eaten. He pours syrup on his eggs like he did when he was a kid, and Will calls him gross while doing the same.
Mike kicks his shin under the table. Will squawks and kicks back, but Mike just catches Will’s ankle between both of his and holds it there.
Will lets him.
Mike holds on, and Will doesn’t move away.
It’s a tiny thing, and it opens a universe behind Mike’s ribs.
The diner is full of light and life and Will, here, ankle resting against Mike’s, head thrown back as he laughs at something stupid and meaningless Mike’s said to make him do just that, and all Mike can think is how this, too, is home, and it’s nothing like the diner in that painting at all.)
✉
It’s getting closer to being early than late by the time they cross back into Hawkins. With his luck, Mike’s probably not going to manage to get more than four or five hours of sleep before he has to be up again for his morning shift, but he can’t really bring himself to care, not when today was so good. Not when Will’s beside him in the car, happier than Mike’s seen him all summer.
Will pulls to a stop on the street by the Wheelers’ mailbox. The lights in most of the houses are off by now, theirs included. His mother has left the porch light on for him.
“Thanks again for coming,” Will says, turning to look at Mike. “I’m glad we could do this.”
“Yeah,” Mike says, and tries not to sound like a complete idiot. “See you.”
He unbuckles, climbs out of the car, and is two steps across his front lawn before he hears the sound of a car door behind him. A second later, Will’s at his side.
“What are you doing?” Mike asks, bemused.
“Walking you to your door.” Will shrugs as he says it, like this is the most normal thing in the world.
“It’s, like, ten yards away.”
“And it’s late,” Will counters teasingly.
“It’s Hawkins.”
“It’s like you want me to play the nineteen eighty-three card.”
Mike says, “Will,” and tries not to sound endeared.
“Mike,” Will deadpans right back.
“You’re a dork,” he decides. Will just tilts his head and stares at him until Mike relents and starts back across the yard. Halfway to his front door, something occurs to him. “Hey, what did Jonathan mean about an offer?”
“Oh,” Will says, sounding almost too nonchalant, “he invited me to live with him.”
Mike stops in his tracks. “In Chicago?”
Will makes it two steps before noticing Mike isn’t beside him anymore. He swings around, raising his eyebrows. “Well, yeah. That’s where his apartment is. He has a spare bedroom, and it’s as good a place as any to break into the art scene.”
Mike has to roll that one over in his head a few times before the full implications hit him. When they do, it’s like a punch to the chest. “Are you?”
“Am I what?” Will asks. Mike’s pretty sure he knows what.
He says, a little haltingly, “Going to live with him. In Chicago.”
Will looks down, twisting the toe of his Converse into the grass. Finally, he shrugs, but it’s anything but casual. “I don’t know. Maybe, when summer’s over—” He makes a frustrated noise, shoving his hands into his pockets. “But I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”
Mike wants to ask him why he didn’t immediately accept Jonathan’s offer. Why he would even consider staying here in Hawkins when he could be anywhere else, but especially somewhere like that, full of people and artwork and opportunity. Why he would hesitate to live with his brother, who Mike knows he might be closer to than anyone. He is so, so afraid of what Will’s answer might be—he’s afraid Will might not have an answer—but it’s not fear that stops him from asking, in the end.
No, that award goes to the fucking sprinkler system, which Mike managed to forget switches on at night when everyone is supposed to be asleep and very much not standing in the middle of the front lawn, like he and Will are right now. One catches Mike full in the face before it rotates away across the grass with a chk-chk-chk and a glistening stream of water. They’re both drenched in seconds, too shocked to move out of the spray.
Very slowly, Mike reaches up and wipes his hair out of his eyes, sidestepping so the sprinkler won’t hit him head-on when it comes back around. He meets Will’s eyes, and he can’t help it. He laughs. He laughs so hard he can’t breathe, and Will laughs along with him, doubling over as the sprinklers keep running, drenching them even further, laughter ringing out like church bells on the otherwise silent cul-de-sac. It goes on for so long Mike’s ribs begin to ache, but every time he calms down enough to look at Will, utterly sodden and bedraggled, he loses it all over again. It’s like being drunk. Like being a little kid again, playing in the sprinklers with his best friend, knowing everything will be okay. Mike wonders when it was they forgot how to be those kids.
At some point, they end up sprawled out on the wet grass, side by side, breathlessly giggling as the sprinklers finally shut off all around them. Chicago and Jonathan’s offer aren’t forgotten, exactly, but the thought of them doesn’t hang over both of them quite so heavily, like the sword of Damocles with its thread ready to snap.
“Oh my god,” Will finally wheezes, once they’ve both calmed down enough to think straight. “I can’t believe this. I’m going to ruin my car seats.”
“I can lend you some towels,” Mike tells him, rolling his head over to take in Will’s grin, flushed cheek pressed into the cool, damp grass that isn’t nearly tall enough to hide his own smile. At least he can blame his breathlessness on the laughter.
✉
They have to hold in several more bouts of exhausted giggles as they creep through the sleeping house. Mike leaves his sodden tennis shoes at the door and sends Will on his way with a bundle of towels and the promise to come by the next day.
“See you tomorrow!” Will calls over his shoulder as he heads back across the glistening lawn.
“See you,” Mike answers, softly, fondly, even though he knows it’s too quiet for Will to hear.
In the morning, he’ll get an earful from his mother for tracking water and grass clippings all over the entryway, but tonight Mike leans back against the front door, stupidly smiling face hidden in his hands, and can’t bring himself to care.
✉
The next day, he gets off work to find Will leaning against his car at the curb.
“Hey, stranger,” Will says, smiling brightly. It’s like staring at the sun.
✉
He spends the afternoon lying on Will’s bed in his bedroom with the yellow-painted walls, still crammed full of boxes that are only half-unpacked, watching Will paint. When they were kids, Will was always the better artist, drawing their D&D characters and his dog and all their friends as the Ghostbusters. This is different—more abstract; full of swirls of explosive colors and bold strokes. The canvas is done almost entirely in shades of blue. As he works, he tells Mike about various abstract art movements he learned about in college—about Picasso and Pollock and Rothko. Mike doesn’t understand all of it, but he likes to listen. He likes hearing Will’s excitement and watching his hands dart here and there, splashing blue after blue on the canvas until it’s something wonderful and incredible like Mike’s never seen.
“I think it’s amazing how a painting can be about anything without having to look like it,” Will says rather dreamily, “you know? It’s like I’m painting the feeling.”
Mike clears his throat. “So, what’s this one then?”
Will grins at him. There’s a streak of bright cyan across his cheekbone. Mike wants to reach out and rub it away, but he folds his fingers into his palms instead.
“Can’t you tell?” Will asks brightly. “It’s you.”
✉
Later, Joyce pops her head in through the door and asks Mike to stay for dinner. He surprises himself by agreeing. Mike hasn’t seen much of Joyce Byers since that first night at his house, but now that things are better between him and Will, he doesn’t find the thought of being around her to be quite so terrifying.
It helps that Jonathan didn’t seem angry at him either, if he’s honest.
She makes lasagna and only burns it a little. They eat it at the kitchen table because the dining room is still full of boxes and paint cans, and Mike doesn’t mind a bit.
Afterwards, he helps carry the dishes into the kitchen. When Joyce starts filling the sink with hot water, he finds himself lingering instead of retreating to the living room, where Will is picking through records to put on. The thought of going home hasn’t crossed his mind.
“Can I help?” he offers awkwardly.
Joyce Byers looks him up and down, and then, instead of booting him from her kitchen like Mike’s mother does every time he’s tried to help since he was eight years old and broke her gravy boat on Thanksgiving Day, she smiles a slow, fond smile, and nods.
“I’ll wash,” she says, handing him a dish towel from the counter, “and you dry.”
They work in silence for a while. In the living room, Will puts on a Kenny Rogers album, likely for his mother’s benefit. He pokes his head in at one point, but Joyce shoos him away.
“You can have your friend back when I’m done with him,” she says, and Will pretends to roll his eyes as he disappears back into the depths of the house.
It’s surprisingly relaxing, doing the dishes. Mike leans against the counter while Joyce scrubs at the casserole dish, running the towel through his fingers and humming vaguely along to the music. The A-side runs out before the dish is ready to dry, so he goes to flip it.
When he gets back, Joyce pauses her washing to look at him, still wrist-deep in soapy water.
“You know, Mike,” she says, “I’m glad you’re here.”
He thinks she means here as in the kitchen, as in helping with the dishes. When he says so, she smiles slightly and shakes her head, turning back to the sink and rinsing the suds off the casserole dish.
“No, no. Just—here. With us. With Will. It’s good to see you two this close again.”
“Oh,” Mike says, flustered. He nearly fumbles the pan when she hands it to him, but manages to hold on, just standing there and holding it for a full ten seconds before he remembers he’s supposed to be drying it, too. “Yeah, me too. I, um—I missed him.”
It’s a normal thing to say, but somehow it feels like he’s taken one of Joyce Byers’ kitchen knives and slit himself open for her to look inside. Mike’s always had a bit of an honesty problem; either he lies, or he tells the truth in the worst possible way. He’s been doing a lot of both lately.
“He missed you, too, honey,” Joyce says. She reaches out as though to touch his shoulder, then glances at her soapy hand and seems to think better of it. “We all did, you know, but especially Will.”
“Yeah,” Mike manages, throat unexpectedly tight. He ducks his head and stares determinedly down at the dish in his hands, working the towel into all the corners to collect any stray moisture.
“He’s been lonely for a long time,” Joyce confides, sighing. “I’m glad he has you again. You’re good for him, Mike.”
Mike’s not so sure if he believes that, seeing as he’s never felt anywhere near good in his life, but he clutches the thought close to his heart anyway, folded right between his ribs. “I think he’s the one who’s good for me,” he admits. It feels like he’s saying so much more.
This time, Joyce does touch his shoulder, sweeping her thumb soothingly over his collarbone even as his shirt grows dark with dishwater.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says sympathetically, and that’s all it takes for the tears Mike didn’t even realize he was holding back to start slipping out. She shakes her other hand out over the water and pulls him into a hug, rocking him back and forth right there in front of the sink, lets him press his face into her shoulder like a child. “I can tell.”
They stay that way until the end of the song and half of the next, Joyce holding him and Mike letting himself be held, letting himself bask in the fact that somehow, some way, he hasn’t completely fucked things up with her or her son or even his older brother. That there are still good things in his life despite his past self’s manic determination to prove that there aren’t and shouldn’t ever be again.
“Mom,” Will complains, startling them both from where he stands in the doorway. He sounds mildly horrified. “He’s crying. What did you even say to make Mike cry?”
Pulling away from Joyce and wiping at his eyes, Mike can’t help himself—he laughs.
It’s good to be home.
✉
July wears on and fades into August. Usually, it’s Mike’s least favorite time of year, when the days are stretching on endlessly and emptily and it seems like summer will never end and he’ll be stuck in his bedroom forever. Then he dropped out of college, and suddenly his life shrank back down to his parents’ house in Hawkins and stayed that way. Every month became August.
Things are different this year. This year, he has Will again. This year, there are things he can lose that aren’t just himself.
✉
One of Mike’s coworkers, Cindy, goes on maternity leave, meaning Mike’s now taking the lion’s share of her former shifts. He doesn’t mind having the extra money, and he definitely doesn’t mind that Will starts spending Mike’s lunch breaks with him, perched side by side on the hood of his hand-me-down car. Mike eats, and Will smokes, and sometimes they talk. Sometimes they don’t. One day, Mike brings a few of his old stories for Will to read.
They’re bad, mostly. Objectively. They’re full of an innocence Mike lost a long time ago, utterly guileless in their depictions of life and friendship and happiness. Mostly he wrote fantasy, poorly renamed versions of their old D&D characters going on quests and adventures together long after their real-life counterparts stopped talking. It was Mike’s way of denying their distance, maybe, and his role in it. He doesn’t let Will read most of those. But there are a few he’s written that he thinks were close to something better, even if they weren’t quite what he wanted them to be. Two strangers meeting in New Mexico; two cousins on a porch; a sister’s unanswered messages to her hospitalized younger brother. He brings all of them and more for Will to read, a new one every few days. It’s terrifying to relinquish each sheaf of paper to someone else’s hands.
It's also nothing short of wonderful.
“These are amazing, Mike,” Will says. When Mike snorts, he kicks his ankle—hard. “Stop that, I mean it. They’re really, really good. I like them a lot.”
Mike hopes the heat on his cheeks is just his tendency to sunburn instantly on summer afternoons. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Will repeats, nodding. “You should keep writing. If you want to.”
Mike thinks he might want to. Mike wants a lot of things, most of which he shouldn’t, but that’s never stopped him before.
“You really think so?” he asks, unable to meet Will’s gaze. Instead, he picks the crust off his tuna sandwich, still sitting uneaten in his lap. There’s something wild and toothed and yearning in his chest. Something shaped a bit like hope. It’s nothing short of unbearable.
Will says, very softly, laying two fingers on Mike’s elbow, “I do. You could really go places someday, I think.”
Places like Chicago? Mike wants to ask. He swallows the question with a bite of his sandwich and lets it sit like a rock in his stomach. Will hasn’t brought up Jonathan’s offer, one way or another, since that night. The thing is, though, he also hasn’t finished unpacking his room in Joyce’s new house; just leaves everything in a jumble of boxes like he can’t decide if he’s staying or going, like he couldn’t care less either way.
“Thanks,” Mike says to his lap more than Will.
“’Course,” replies Will.
Mike goes back to his sandwich. He hopes summer never ends.
✉
(Here is what Mike doesn’t tell Will: not every story he’s written is fiction. Not every story he’s written is old. He only listened to half of the messages Nancy left him when he was stuck in the hospital in Indianapolis, his mother watching his every move like a hawk, but he still thinks about them sometimes. Enough to write a story, even, but not enough to call her back.
Not enough to tell Will, either.
Not yet.)
✉
Will arrives unexpectedly at the Wheelers’ house one afternoon in late August. Mike opens the door to his determined expression and doesn’t even have time for a hello before Will is saying, “I got an offer to work at the Kinko’s downtown.”
Mike blinks, tries to parse together the rest of what Will’s saying in the line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. “Um. Congrats?”
“I haven’t said yes yet.”
Mike thinks, yet. Will has been offered a job here in Hawkins. Will could conceivably stay here longer than just the summer. Will might not accept Jonathan’s offer.
Will also hasn’t said yes yet.
“Un-congrats?” Mike offers. Will rolls his eyes the tiniest bit. “Are you going to say yes?”
“It depends.”
Mike steps out the door and closes it behind him before his mother can come downstairs and complain that he’s letting all the cold air out, or letting all the flies in, or whatever else she can find to be unhappy about.
He asks, “Depends on what, Will?”
Shifting from foot to foot, Will chews on his lip. Finally, he nods to himself and says, “On what you’d say if I asked you to come to Chicago with me. And not just— not just for a day trip, okay?
“I thought,” Mike says, and then stops for a moment, feeling a little dizzy as Will’s words sink in. “I thought Jonathan just had one extra room.”
Will shrugs. It’s not nearly as casual as he seems to be aiming for. “We could get bunk beds?”
He says it like a question. Like Mike has the answer. In a way, Mike supposes he’s right. He wants to say yes. He’s never wanted to say yes to someone more in his life, so much so that this doesn’t even feel particularly real, as though he never woke up this morning and is still curled up in his bed upstairs, hidden beneath the covers, retreating to a world where he can have everything he’s ever wanted. Everything he’s never dared to.
“Why?” Mike asks instead. He’s better at wanting than having, after all.
“Why what?”
He folds his arms across his chest as though they could hope to hide everything crammed into his chest; everything that’s been threatening to leak out for months now—an oil spill, a nuclear leak, lead in the groundwater, toxic waste in his mouth. “Why would you want me to move to Chicago with you?”
Will stares at him for a long, long moment, searching gaze probing Mike’s face. He seems surprised, almost. Confused. Like he wasn’t expecting this. Well, that makes two of them.
“Because you’re my best friend, Mike,” he says at length. It sounds like half an answer. “And it’s not would, okay? It’s not hypothetical. I’m really asking. I do want you to go.”
Mike whispers, “Oh.”
“Yeah,” replies Will. “Oh.”
Shuffling his feet, Mike wraps his arms a little tighter around himself despite the heat and stares out over Will’s shoulder, taking in the lawn, the mailbox, the curl of Maple Street beyond, this place where he’s spent all but a few years of his life. This place he’s afraid he’ll die in. There’s something pushing at his ribs, something that’s been waking up all summer. Mike’s afraid it will never go back to sleep. He’s afraid it would kill him if it tried.
“If you don’t want to—” Will begins.
“No,” Mike says, unable to look at him. “No, that’s not it.”
“Then what is?”
He takes in one deep, steadying breath, and then another. Closes his eyes, lets his arms drop from around his middle. Feels the ache of something in his chest, something he’s spent years refusing to put a name to, for his sanity’s sake, or maybe his pride’s. When he opens his eyes again and finally looks at Will, he’s looking back silently and steadily. One thing about Will Byers: he is always looking back. Always reaching. Always searching for Mike in whatever labyrinth he’s constructed to hide in. They’re nearly at the center, now, Mike knows. Nearly at the heart.
“Are you okay with going somewhere?” Mike asks quietly. “There are some things you should know.”
✉
He doesn’t have a specific place in mind, just tells Will to pick somewhere and drive. It doesn’t take long before Will’s pulling up to the curb and shifting the car into park. Mike looks out the window and nearly laughs when he sees where they are.
After everything, it feels appropriate to be back at this damn playground again.
They settle on the swing set with the weeds coming up to their knees, and Will lights a cigarette before twisting a little in his swing so he’s facing more towards Mike than away.
“Okay,” he says. “Talk.”
And Mike does.
“The story I let you read,” he says. “The one about the phone calls. That wasn’t fiction.”
Will just looks at him, brows slightly furrowed. He hasn’t put the pieces together yet. Mike’s mentioned the accident to him once or twice in passing, but he’s never explained it in detail. Never explained that accident isn’t even the right word.
Heedless of the rust and the dirt and the heat, Mike wraps his fingers tightly around the chains of his swing. They burn. Mike aches. That’s the only word for it.
“I’m going to tell you this,” he says slowly, “but I don’t want— anything. Pity. Whatever. I just want you to know the truth. You deserve it.”
“Why?” Will asks. Mike wants to laugh. He wants to cry.
“Because you’re my best friend,” he answers, echoing Will’s words from before. The other half of an answer. The start of a question, unasked. Swallowing roughly, Mike looks over to meet Will’s probing gaze and says, “Do you remember when I told you how I hit that tree two years ago?”
Will nods. He doesn’t look away, so Mike won’t either.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Mike says. Just like that, one of his biggest secrets, one only his mother and his sisters know about, is out and hanging heavy in the summer air between them. “I did it on purpose.”
“Mike,” Will whispers. That’s all.
“Things were bad,” Mike tells him haltingly, hands flexing around the chains. “They had been for a long time, but suddenly I just couldn’t take it anymore, you know? I just wanted it to be over. All of it. So one night I— I found the first sturdy tree I could and put my car into it. It didn’t work, obviously. I woke up in the hospital with a broken leg and everyone telling me I was lucky to be alive. Mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight. I don’t know how she knew, but she figured it out. I guess she told Nancy what happened, because she left me, like, thirty messages and threatened to kill me herself if I ever tried it again.”
He'd never heard his big sister sound so scared. Not once. And Holly had spent every night in the hospital with him, curled up in the same bed because the nurses couldn’t manage to pry her away. They never talked about it afterwards, but sometimes when she looks at him, Mike can tell they’re both remembering. Probably that’s why talking is something they both prefer to avoid.
In all of this, he finds himself laughing, more than a little bitterly, and Will flinches a little at the sound.
“The tree got the worst of it. I felt so fucking bad for that tree. It was just minding its own business, and I couldn’t even put my car into it right.” He releases the chains and folds his hands between his knees, hoping to hide their shaking. “I, um. Actually went out and apologized to it, if you can believe that.”
He offers Will a weak grin, which Will doesn’t return. “Anyway. That’s all in the past now, but I thought— I thought you should know.”
The first thing Will says since Mike launched into his story proper is, “Thank you for telling me.”
Mike shrugs, more than a little stiff.
“Can I ask a question, though?” Will asks.
“Anything,” Mike tells him, and then holds in a wince at how utterly honest he sounds. Way to be subtle, Wheeler.
“What does this have to do with you moving to Chicago with me?”
Everything, Mike thinks. It has everything to do with that. But how to explain it in a way that makes sense, instead of taking Will’s hand and placing it on his chest, fingers splayed to where he can feel the erratic thumping of Mike’s stuttering, starving heart and saying, This. This is what.
“I’m not always okay,” is what he settles on eventually. “Mostly, even. I don’t know if that’s a thing I can be anymore. I don’t— I don’t really know who I even am. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want that around all the time.”
“Hey,” Will says, nudging Mike’s foot with his own. “Don’t talk like that.”
“But it’s true.”
Will takes a measured drag on his cigarette before saying, “Yeah, okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that matters, you know?”
Mike shakes his head. For years now, most of his life has been defined by the fact that he’s not okay. That nothing is okay. He’s spent twenty months convinced he will die in his childhood bedroom, and there’s nothing he can do about it. How can there be more than this? How can he have it, take it, keep it?
“Nobody’s okay, Mike,” Will says gently. “You aren’t, Jonathan isn’t, my mom isn’t. Fuck, I’m not okay. None of us really know who we are, either. But I know some things.”
“Like what?” he whispers.
“You’re a writer,” Will begins, listing things off on his fingers. “You’re the person who taught me how to skip rocks. You love ABBA and pop music and soft rock. Your favorite color is blue, and you’re my best friend. If you move to Chicago with me, you can be my roommate, too. That’s a start. That’s somebody. And we can figure out the rest together, if you want.”
Mike says, very quietly, “I do.”
“Okay,” Will says, like it’s nothing. It’s probably everything.
“You’re wrong about one thing, actually,” Mike says after a moment. He has one shoulder leaned against the chain further from Will, and he cranes his neck a little so he can look at him sitting there, somehow resplendent in the summer light despite the fact that he’s only wearing a paint-splattered t-shirt and fraying jean shorts.
Will arches one brow. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Mike says. “I don’t think blue is my favorite color anymore. I think might be yellow.”
Will rolls his eyes, readjusting his grip on his cigarette where he holds it against the chain. There’s rust and ash on his fingertips and a smile tugging at his lips. “Damn. My bad, Mike. I don’t know you at all and we can’t be roommates.” His tone practically drips sarcasm, sticky as a popsicle melting down Mike’s wrist, but he’s also grinning ever wider, bright and warm and endless as the summers of their childhoods. “Is there anything else I should know?”
Mike gazes at him for a moment, taking all of him in, and says, “Yeah. This.”
And then he leans in and kisses Will Byers right on his smile.
Will inhales so sharply that Mike, for one terrible second, thinks, That’s it. That’s the end. Thinks of a car hitting a tree at forty-five miles per hour. Thinks of an old painted door that should have stayed shut. Thinks, It was nice while it lasted. Everything is.
And then with a rattle of chains, Will surges forward, his free hand coming up to grip Mike’s shoulder. Then he opens his mouth and kisses back, and Mike has to grab the chains of the swing to keep himself from losing his balance and tumbling into the weeds like a fool. The angle is awkward and anyone walking by could see them and honestly, Mike doesn’t give a damn. He’s too busy chasing the taste of nicotine and smoke on the backs of Will’s teeth.
He thinks he understands what Will meant all those weeks ago, about the taste being the thing that hooks you. Except maybe it’s not the nicotine that’s going to snare Mike, heady and sharp and addicting. Maybe it’s just Will.
While he’s not exactly capable of forming coherent thoughts at the moment, Mike decides he’d be okay spending the rest of forever like this. Unfortunately, they’re both human beings who possess sets of lungs, and said lungs have a tragically limited supply of oxygen, meaning at some point they have to come up for air. That point comes sooner rather than later. They stretch it out as long as possible, so long Mike might start to forget why he was ever worried about this in the first place, but eventually Will breaks the kiss, pulling back to rest his forehead against Mike’s as he sucks in a slightly ragged breath. For a moment, all is quiet. The swings creak. The insects buzz. They breathe. Will smells like cigarettes and citrus, turpentine and home.
“So,” Will says, more than a little teasingly, “I guess we won’t be needing the bunk beds?”
Mike groans. He doesn’t move away, though, because he is a weak, weak man. “Shut up, Byers.”
“Make me, Wheeler,” Will grins.
And Mike? Well. Mike is only too happy to comply.