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Tommy can’t find where the thread starts, even now.
He doesn’t remember it coming in waves, smooth and linear, or even like a basketball to the gut, like one day he woke up hyperventilating and realized he was in love with Steve Harrington. No, it was bits and pieces; leaning into his friend in ways that his brain marked as wrong, unable to place the sick feeling that rose up when he thought about himself. Despite it all, holding his breath between the instances that Steve looked at him. Tommy held his breath a lot when Steve was around.
It wasn’t that Steve didn’t like him enough. Tommy was his best friend since kindergarten and the two of them had probably seen more of each other than anyone else by the time they reached high school; every day Tommy would go over to Steve’s and they’d listen to records or get into trouble in the neighborhood. He was stupid, but Steve was stupid too, and they greeted any serious issue with a hand wave and a raspberry—just the way Tommy wanted it.
But there was always something, some itch in the back of Tommy’s mind that insisted Steve didn’t like him as much as he liked Steve. And even back then, Tommy knew that he liked Steve a whole hell of a lot.
One thing Steve did like was girls, and as soon as he was able, he started picking them up left and right. Tommy assumed he was envious of all the sex and attention when he became miserable in the face of Steve’s conquests, so he began sleeping around himself—although he was never quite as good at it, not without Steve’s unbelievable charisma. Perhaps that was part of the whole thing, too; the way Tommy was just a little more ordinary, a little less attractive, a little less informed about who liked what and how to do it to them. He could never quite measure up to Steve, not really, not even when he let his feet fall in Steve’s footsteps so carefully that they only left one set of prints behind.
“What about her?” Steve nodded across the party, the picture of suave indifference while he and Tommy leaned against a wall. Sophomore year, early winter. Tommy took one look at the girl he was suggesting and scoffed.
“You’re not suggesting I sleep with Julie Martin, right? She gave half the school chlamydia in, like, a month, don’t you remember?”
“Yeah, but that was last year. She’s still hot.”
“No way, man.”
“Okay, fine. Her?”
Steve pointed to a girl wearing red lipstick and a pretty blue blouse, and Tommy shook his head.
“Even I know Jennifer East’s out of my league.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Now I get why you complain about not getting any all the time. You’re too fuckin’ picky.”
“No, it’s just ‘cause I don’t look like you.”
Steve pursed his lips and that familiar hot shame crept into Tommy’s cheeks but he didn’t say anything else. After a moment Steve gestured across the room again.
“How about her?”
Tommy’s eyes widened. “Carol Perkins? She’d eat me for breakfast.”
And Steve, he made this face like he’d just settled a very important decision before throwing Tommy a grin and clapping a hand on his shoulder. A thousand different reactions all crashed in on Tommy at once and he stood there for a moment, catatonic, not realizing that Steve was trying to guide him forward.
“Not anymore,” Steve said as he led him into the crowd. “You’re in the court of King Steve now.”
So Tommy got a steady girlfriend before Steve did, but it still felt like Steve was leagues ahead somehow. Their traded stories of makeouts turned into traded stories of fucking, sometimes so detailed that Tommy got embarrassingly hard from just talking, but Steve always laughed it off. Called him a horny son of a bitch and shoved at him until Tommy told him to stop touching me, god dammit, don’t touch me when I have a hard-on.
It’s likely that the thread was always there, from the minute Tommy first got a good look at Steve’s face, but it got covered over time by the wax of adolescence. Tommy was always confused about something, and he couldn’t talk about it with Steve, because Steve never seemed to be confused about anything. He acted before he thought and it almost always turned out in his favor, even when he was infected with the upstart little idea to get it in with Nancy Wheeler.
Nancy. Tommy will never fucking understand it but something about this girl made Steve hit the ground in an instant—Tommy had never seen him face down at someone’s feet like that, so head over heels that he forgot himself. She wasn’t even anything special, not a bombshell like Steve usually preferred, not a seeker of the spotlight or a daredevil. But Tommy saw firsthand how Steve melted into the idea of her like she was some all-consuming whirlpool, able to find in Nancy what it seemed like no one else could.
Tommy, personally, hated her—and that was maybe the beginning of him coming into consciousness about why he felt so violently about Steve. He felt violently about everything for a while, so angry, getting into fights with Carol and Steve and anyone who stepped a toe in the way of where he was going. The thread tangled and frayed and he was so mixed up, jaded with no reason why, just left with the feeling that Steve hurt him again and had been hurting him for a while.
“Maybe setting you up with Carol was a bad idea,” Steve said once, a cigarette in his mouth while the two of them drove to school. “You’ve been such a fucking dick lately.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Tommy replied. “You’re so obsessed with your prissy little girlfriend that people are starting to say she’s got you on a leash. And you think my relationship has problems?”
Steve blew a plume of smoke out the window. “Asshole.”
“Aw, did your ego get a boo-boo?”
“Shut the fuck up, Tommy.”
Tommy’s not entirely sure why he fought with Steve so much, but something was definitely blooming in the middle of all the anger—something shaped like heartbreak. He buried it, and then it surfaced again, over and over until it was impossible to ignore.
No, it wasn’t linear, but Tommy thinks he realized something when he almost came with Steve’s name on his lips instead of Carol’s once.
There’s a particular feeling that emerges while you’re watching yourself lose someone, Tommy learned, and it was the most painful part of a decade of friendship. First, the fights. Spending less time alone together, then none, just waiting until the next time you can see him—knowing it won’t be warm anymore, knowing you’ll have to watch him be warm with someone else. Then, less vitriol and more silence, nothing to say to each other, forgetting how to be in each other’s company; Tommy squeezed the life out of his friendship with Steve with his own two hands around its neck.
Steve and Nancy didn’t end up working out anyway, but it didn’t matter. By the time everything was barreling downhill and Tommy was watching Steve and Jonathan Byers beat each other to a pulp on the pavement, he knew things were irreparable. He tried to sink into his new, bitter role as best as he could, blowing the same raspberries that he and Steve used to blow at trouble together—but he wasn’t doing it out of nonchalance anymore. He’d never be the same kid who loved Steve blindly and innocently, like looking into the sun, like running with scissors.
In the end, it was Steve who gave the final push.
“You’re both assholes, that’s my problem.”
Tommy frowned. “Are you serious right now, man?”
“Yeah, I’m serious.” Steve pushed past him, headed for the driver’s seat door. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Done what?”
“You know what.”
“You mean call her out for what she really is?” Tommy met his eyes with all the fire that used to lick at him when Steve brushed against his shoulder or threw him a wink. “Oh, that’s funny, because I don’t remember you asking me to stop.”
“I should’ve put that spray paint right down your throat.”
It was the first time Tommy saw Steve’s anger fly out of him unrestrained, those last dregs of their precarious truce swirling out of existence. Tommy couldn’t care less that they were talking about Nancy in that moment; he was done with Nancy, done with Carol, done with this whole stupid web Steve had spun around them both. Steve came at him ready to put his fists up and Tommy shoved long-buried resentment into him in retaliation.
The thread was in their bodies pressed together against that car. The thread curled around them sourly, like it knew both of them had done it wrong, but Tommy felt it all the same—years built upon years of quiet longing and held breath. And then—
And then, the most peculiar thing.
Steve’s eyes on his mouth, just for the most fleeting of moments. A shift in Steve’s hips like his body was acting on something he didn’t fully understand, a fraction of a movement that made them spark against each other like flint and stone. Tommy thought he imagined it at first but then it happened again, the eyes, the shift; even in the middle of a fight, Tommy forgot where he was when Steve showed the slightest sign of letting him in.
But this time, he wasn’t alone. He saw the moment Steve realized the crack in their facade had been exposed and watched Steve’s face shutter hard enough to make Tommy stumble back. The show was already set, the curtain about to drop; both had played their parts with flourish and left only one thing to do—Tommy finished the fight with a yell, letting something ragged creep into his voice as he screamed at the taillights of Steve’s car. Carol was silent all the way back to her house and when Tommy left her there, he knew something had shifted that wouldn’t be able to shift back.
Tommy spent three days holed up in his room after that, lifting his covers over his head so he could pretend he didn’t exist.
He still sees Steve around town, sometimes. He’s hanging out with Robin Buckley now, and Tommy doesn’t know if they’re together but he can’t bring himself to find out. He drives past the video store where they both work and thinks about going in, about what he would say, about if he’d even be able to look at Steve at all. He thinks about what it felt like to touch him so often that it makes his head hurt.
And maybe all of this is a lesson, but Tommy only got half of it. He wonders if Steve feels like he learned anything from the time they spent as friends. Tommy hates to think that he himself might’ve learned something, that anything productive might’ve come out of what hurt him so much. Most days he wants to pretend like nothing happened at all.
But Tommy can’t find where the thread starts, even now, and he can’t find where it ends either.