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Robin shows up at his too-big, too-empty house four days after Steve has sex with Eddie.
It’s sort of dramatic, even for her - they have a shift together in less than twenty-four hours, after all, and it’s not like they won’t have plenty of time alone on a Wednesday afternoon. But Robin’s always a bit dramatic, always operating on a slightly high frequency than the people she’s with, and Steve adores her for it, he does, it’s just -
His frequency is especially low right now, and he’s not quite keeping up with what Robin’s saying. She’s talking a mile a minute, something about checking on him and the end of her Family Video shift and Eddie.
Jesus, Eddie.
Part of the problem is that he’d been so sweet. Had Steve spared even a singular thought to the possibility of having sex with Eddie goddamn Munson, with his soft hair and his less soft hipbones and his nimble fingers and his stupid pet names that made Steve’s toes curl, he would’ve imagined it rough. Maybe it wouldn’t have stuck in his head so persistently if Eddie hadn’t treated him like he cared.
But Eddie’s soft, like his hair. Like the flesh of his bottom lip and the skin of his earlobe, because Steve knows what those feel like now. Knows that Eddie is gentle, at least with him, and knows that he’s grateful for it even now, even after, because he’s not sure he could’ve handled rough. Or - he could’ve handled it in the moment. The after, though -
He’s already not handling the after too well. He’s been pretending that the panic attack he had not twelve hours after was Upside Down-related, and it’s not helping.
Robin snaps her fingers in front of Steve’s face; he jumps, just a little.
“Wow,” Robin says. “Eddie was right.”
Steve blinks. “What?”
Her brow creases, and she touches a hand to Steve’s forehead, then the side of his neck. He jerks away, batting at her hands. “What’s your problem, Rob? Geez.”
She does lean back, even as she slaps right back at him. “What’s your problem? Were you even listening to me? Eddie said I should come check on you, but he wouldn’t tell me shit about why.”
Steve nods jerkily, fingers spasming in air. Eddie came to Family Video. Eddie talked to Robin. Eddie’s worried about him.
Okay, the first two are normal. Eddie and Robin are friends, maybe even more so than Steve and Eddie are. But he’s worried.
Steve steps away from Robin, heading back toward the living room. He wants a drink. He wants to be as high as physically possible without puking. He wants to drive into the woods and scream for as long as his lungs can stand.
He sits on the couch. Thinks of Eddie’s stupid beautiful cheekbones and kicks his legs up so he can tilt over and bury his face in the couch.
“Steve,” Robin says. He groans into the cushion. “Steve.”
“Go away, Robbie.” His tone is harsher than he means it to be, but he knows the nickname soothes the blow. “I don’t wanna do this right now.”
He hears her sit on the floor in front of him, and she reaches up to knead at shoulders, carefully pressing her thumbs into the knots in his muscles. Steve loves her so fucking much.
“Baby,” she starts, because she does this now, calls him a bunch of pet names of varied absurdity because the joke of them being a lesbian and her aggressively straight best friend will never not be funny to her. At least until - well.
Maybe the joke can still work. Something about a lesbian and a sexually repressed nineteen-year-old burnout walking into a bar.
God, he’s pathetic.
Robin leaves one hand at his neck but removes the other to offer to him, nudging at his elbow. He allows himself to ignore it for just a second before dragging one of his arms out from where it's tucked underneath his torso and taking her hand, lacing their fingers together and squeezing. Because he’s pathetic, and he needs her desperately.
She squeezes back. “Steve, what’s going on?”
He doesn’t know. He maybe hates himself a little for it.
Steve shifts to prop his head on his forearm so he can look at her. Feels off-kilter in ways he never has before, even when fighting actual interdimensional monsters, knows it shows on his face because he’s seen the exact look that he knows is in his eyes right now in the mirror. Over and over for the past four days.
He’s definitely a shit person for the way he’s treated his friends these last few days. He’s gone to his shifts with Robin and apparently acted normal enough that it took her this long to stage a proper intervention, but he knows he’s been distant and standoffish. He’s canceled on Dustin. Nancy called, once, and he’d been so cagey even over the phone that she’d gotten that high-pitched lilt in her voice that always starts up when she’s concerned about him.
He thinks maybe he’s allowed, though, given the circumstances. He didn’t have excruciating sexuality crisis on the list of further tortures he could experience after everything, and yet.
Robin rarely holds eye contact for longer than a few seconds. Eddie does it too, Steve’s noticed, though the two of them pick different spots on other people’s faces to look at when they’re not making eye contact. Eddie’s gaze either flits around so constantly that Steve sometimes starts to wonder if the paranoia is surging again or stays fixed on the other person’s chin. Robin stares at people’s left ear.
She makes eye contact with him now, ducking down to take up more of his eyeline and blinking at him and poking her lip out a little in that imploring way she does when she wants something at a faster pace than Steve is giving it.
Steve sighs, and there’s a telltale prickling behind his eyes - God, he hasn’t had a migraine in almost two months. “Rob, if I tell you - and that’s still an if, because I really need to say it, but at the same time, I think I might vomit if I do - but if I tell you what’s going on, you can’t make a joke of it. It’s not - I’m not - I’m actually struggling. You know? My mental state is on really thin ice right now, so if you react the wrong way, it will be the reason I snap and commit a ton of crimes. And not, like, fun crimes - real ones. Real, serious crimes, Robin -”
“Steve,” Robin says. “You’re acting like me.”
“Oh. Right.“
“Which is rude, first of all, just because you’re jealous that Eddie is replacing you doesn’t mean you can try to usurp me - ”
Steve flinches. At his name, like a little schoolgirl who embarrassed herself in front of her crush.
Robin’s brow furrows, then smooths out. She softens, visibly, settling into her spot on the floor in front of him, settling into a different headspace.
She taps her thumb against the back of his hand. “Right, I’m serious. If this is serious, I’m - I’ve got you. The floor’s yours, and I promise no stupid jokes.”
He eyes her for a moment, considering. Catalogues the way that she looks at him now so that he can cross-compare it later with however she’ll look at him after he says it.
He knows she’ll take it well. Of course she will, it’d be hypocritical not to. But she looks at him with this very specific glint in her eyes, one of fondness and understanding and a constant undertone of amusement and the feeling of being so perfectly compatible with someone, and he doesn’t want that look to change, even just a little. Even in a good way, which it probably will be because he’s like her.
Maybe. Maybe there was something to be said about Steve’s thought process about Nancy and Jonathan, or maybe he can just repress this memory like he’s repressed so many of the rest of them and never circle back to it.
He thinks he might not mind being like that if like that also means like Robin.
Steve thinks that if the world were more like Robin, he’d get along with it better. Thinks maybe if he was more like Robin, he wouldn’t have ducked into the back room when Eddie showed up at Family Video twenty-six hours after and asked Robin if he was doing okay.
“I had sex with Eddie,” Steve says to the ceiling. He doesn’t choke around the words, but it’s a near thing.
It’s quiet. He feels Robin’s fingers go slack around his and has the split-second irrational thought of fuck what if she’s homophobic and then wants to melt into the floor.
It shouldn’t be this big of a deal. He knows that.
He also knows that he called Jonathan a queer - not queer, but a queer, because even he knows there’s a difference - not that long ago. He also knows that this is going to be the thing that makes him finally move out of his parents’ house. He also knows that if he’d figured this out two years ago, he might not be alive today.
It’s different when it’s him. It shouldn’t be, because he loves Robin with his whole heart and he would fight every creature the Upside Down has to offer in hand-to-hand combat for her, which he has proven to be patently bad at, but years of watchful eyes and his dad’s poking and prodding and pushing him toward masculinity and, more importantly, away from anything that could be construed as even slightly feminine - or, God forbid, gay - still has a hold on him.
He still keeps the nail bat in his car: fact.
He still carries his father’s words in his head and in his stomach and in the back of his mind when he touches (or, purposely, doesn’t touch) other guys: fact.
He had sex with Eddie: fact.
(He liked it: fact.)
Robin’s fingers retighten around his, just enough pressure to feel like an assurance.
He looks at her. His eyes are still burning and oh, that’s not a migraine, it’s just tears.
“Oh, Steve,” Robin breathes, and then she’s hauling him upright, bodily, and yanking him into quite possibly the most aggressive hug he’s ever had. Second most, maybe, after Dustin almost choked him out when Vecna was finally defeated.
It’s nice. His arms don’t automatically come up to hug her back, because he’s only halfway affiliated with reality right now, so he has to consciously make himself reach out for her. Circles his arm around her waist while she holds one hand between his shoulder blades and one hand in the hair at the base of his neck, tucks his face into the crook of her neck, and doesn’t cry.
She smells like vanilla and citrus and cardamom. Eddie smelled like cigarette smoke and weed but also cinnamon and honey and rosemary.
She holds him for a long time, not letting go until he makes the move to pull back, and even then she leaves her hand in his hair. She’s one of three people who’s allowed to touch his hair. Jane asked him once if she could try to braid it, and what was he going to do, say no to her?
(Eddie is the third, sort of. He had a thing for Steve’s hair when they -)
He chokes this time, on a dry sob, and Robin shifts her hands to cup his face.
“Okay, Steve. It’s okay that you’re freaking out. It’s okay that you - had sex with Eddie. Jesus, I should’ve seen that coming - sorry. Sorry, I’m sorry, you’re not up for jokes. Are you alright, honey?”
“No,” he croaks. “Not even a little bit.”
“Alright, okay. Was it - was it bad? Or -”
“No. No, I - it wasn’t - he was nice. He was really nice and fuck, it was good, Robin, I fucking hate this -”
“Hate what, Steve?”
“That I - that this is - Robin.” He twists his fingers into the collar of her shirt, clinging to it like he can cling to his own prior perception of himself. “Robin. I need you to understand.”
She gently pries him off of her shirt and folds both of his hands into hers. He feels like they should be in another bathroom. Maybe he’d feel more real that way.
Softly, she asks, “Understand what?”
“I love you,” he tells her, like a prayer. “I love you, and I - I’m not homophobic, you know that. But I’m freaking out. I’m freaking out, and I know it’s ridiculous ‘cause why should I be freaking out if I’m not homophobic, but I’m freaking out so fucking hard right now, Rob.”
She’s hard around the edges but always soft in the end. All jokes and jabs and defense mechanisms until it comes down to it.
“It’s okay,” she repeats, imploring, and she says it in a way that doesn’t quite manage to make it feel true to him, but a way that makes it feel like it could be, eventually. Something, a piece of him, settles. “It’s okay to be freaking out, Steve. I get it. I know you’re not homophobic, okay? And this isn’t - it’s not about me right now. I don’t need you to water down your sexuality crisis for me, sweetheart.”
Eddie called him sweetheart that night too. Called him a lot of things, actually, like handsome and beautiful and so fucking good, baby. He’d said it all like he thought he’d never get to say it again. Like he was getting it out of his system.
“Does he -” Steve clenches and unclenches his jaw, tightens and untightens his fingers around Robin’s palms. Takes a second, because Robin’s giving him permission to. “Did he seem upset?”
She squints at him for a second, then, catching up, “Eddie?”
He nods.
Robin smiles this little smile that’s all the things he wanted from her - fondness and understanding and a hint of amusement. “No, he didn’t. He was worried, but not in a life-or-death way. He seemed like he understood. Kind of seemed like he was expecting this.”
Steve nods again, slower, and it’s - fair, yeah, even Steve had seen this coming as soon as he’d let Eddie kiss him.
You can, he’d said, somewhere between strained and casual. Because Eddie had glanced at his lips for the third time in five minutes and he hadn’t been high on weed, just on the simple fact of still being alive and maybe a little bit on Eddie, so he’d looked at Eddie and said, You can. Kiss me, I mean. If you wanted to.
And then he’d let Eddie take him apart in Steve’s queen-sized bed in his too-blue too-old too-reminiscent-of-times-long-past room and he’d done his best to take Eddie apart in turn.
“I wanted to,” he says, even though he knows Robin knows that by now, because there’d been this terrible thought in his head for hours after that he could just pretend it was pity sex or say he’d been so keyed up that he was willing to fuck anyone as long as it got him off. Even though not even Eddie’s shitty self-esteem would’ve believed that. “I - I don’t think I realized when it happened, how much I -”
“Yeah, that’ll happen.” She shifts on the floor, and for a second, Steve’s good host instincts kick in and he starts to tell her to sit on the couch with him instead before he remembers that she’s made up of a hodgepodge of idiosyncrasies, as she’d once put it, whatever the fuck that means, and one of them is that she prefers sitting on the floor. “It’s kind of the opposite, but the first time I kissed a boy, I was like oh, it won’t be that bad, I’m probably just a late bloomer anyway, and then I puked afterwards, so.”
Steve snorts.
“Do you think you’re…?”
She says it in the same tone that she’d said his name in the Starcourt bathroom, kind and patient with a tinge of desperation.
“I don’t…I’m not gay.”
“Okay,” she says, placating.
Then, “I liked it.”
“Okay. That’s okay, Steve. You’re okay.”
“I’m so confused, Robbie. And I - God, I’m so scared.”
“I know.” She leans forward to touch her forehead to his, slides her hands up to wrap around his biceps and squeeze again. “We’ll figure it out, alright? You and me, like always.”
“Okay,” he chokes out, and yeah. Maybe it will be.