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Will loves his family, but he hates Hawkins. It’s his bête noire every Christmas — the desire to see his siblings, his parents, butting up against the exhaustion of small-town existence. He has to steel himself for the grocery store gossip, the furtive looks, every time he comes home from California. He knows Jonathan and El — even his mom and Hopper — understand. They can even empathize. But they’ll never get it completely.
It gets better when he stumbles over the Indianapolis bar scene. Not that he drinks — he saw enough of that as a kid — but apparently, other gay people do. They congregate in bars, at any rate.
During Christmas break his junior year of college, he ends up at O.P.’s on a whim. He drives up to the city to get away from the Hawkins of it all, tired of people he’s known since he was a kindergartener gawking at his new ear piercing. The rainbow flag on 16th street stops him.
O.P.’s is a bit of a racket, but it’s insanely low-key compared to the spots around L.A., brimming with the Midwestern simplicity Will often misses at school. There are a few rooms: a long bar, a dance floor, a place where all the leather queens mingle. It’s easy for him to find his desired place there, which is really no place at all. He can sit at the bar and nurse a tonic water, chat with the friendly patrons and brush off the leery ones. He’s practically a square there, his single hoop earring lost in a sea of chains and mesh and seasonally-inappropriate short shorts. The time passes easily at O.P.’s. He can feel his shoulders relax.
He considers bringing El and Jonathan there, certain they could use a break from having the weirdest surname in town, too, but middle child syndrome gets the best of him. He feels a little high on the drive up the next year, on his way to reclaim this thing that’s only his. He’s just begun his senior year of college and it’s almost 1994, and he has a good feeling.
He lets a polite, shy-seeming guy pull him onto the dance floor, buoyed by optimism. He even sways to the gay bar classics, Diana and Whitney and a seemingly endless stream of Madonna. It’s a little past ten and the place starts filling up. More bodies make the dance floor claustrophobic, which is Will’s cue to go. He swipes some of the sweaty hair out of his face and nods his thanks to his dance partner, who blessedly doesn’t follow him off the floor.
His plan is to spend the rest of the night drinking seltzer and filling the notebook in his back pocket with sketches, because his senior exhibition feels minutes away, even in December. That all goes out the window when he sees Mike Wheeler sitting at the bar.
Will literally scrubs a hand over his eyes to make sure he’s not seeing things. He’s not. It’s undeniable — even in a shadowy bar corner, lit mostly by the neon green lights shooting in from the dance floor, Will would know that face anywhere. He’d spent most of high school covertly drawing it. He’d practically gotten into CalArts because of that face.
Mike still looks like Mike. He dresses a little edgier, maybe. His hair falls just past his shoulders, onto a leather jacket. There are rips in the knees of his jeans. His long legs are hanging off his stool, and he’s picking at the label on his beer. He looks nervous, maybe a little out of place, though the other patrons certainly aren’t complaining. He’s getting plenty of looks from the guys mingling around the bar, though he doesn’t seem to notice.
So Mike is, unbelievably, in a gay bar, but at least some things haven’t changed.
Guilt and self-consciousness wash over Will. A little indignance, too, because it’s not like Mike had tracked him down after they left for college, but, well. If he had called, Will knows he wouldn’t have called him back. If Mike had written him, Will’s not even sure he would have read the letters. The few times he’d run into the Wheelers in town on breaks, he’d kept things cordial. Brief.
They’d graduated and Will had disappeared — not just to Mike, to everyone. It’s not like it was mean-spirited. He needed to leave Hawkins in the rearview, to figure out who he was without the ghosts of monsters at his heels. Mike had stayed in Indiana. Dustin and Lucas and Max had ended up in Chicago. Will had gone the farthest, all the way out to California, and he’d tried to become a different person.
In some ways, he insisted, he was. He was different from all of his friends — always had been. There was a reason he’d been singled out on the playground, and they would never get that. They would never know what it felt like for Will to realize, one day, that all those bullies and his own dad had been right. They didn’t have friends and mentors dying right now. It wasn’t their fault — they were just normal. They’d never understand.
Except, well, now Mike is sitting here, at O.P.’s, getting elevator eyes from two bears and a leather daddy.
Will goes up to him. He’s feeling charitable. There’s a new year two days around the corner. And for once in their weird, lopsided relationship, he has the advantage. Mike is on his turf.
“Buy you a drink?” he asks, trying to sound casual.
Mike’s eyes widen comically as he registers Will’s face, his mouth dropping open in surprise. His gaze flits up and down Will a couple of times, and then he finally answers. “I— yeah.” He grins, blinking away his shock, and pulls the next barstool closer to him. “Yeah.”
There’s still green light fluttering across Mike’s face. Janet Jackson is playing over the speakers. If I was your girl, oh, the things I’d do to you.
Will takes the seat and orders another beer and a soda water with lime. The bartender is quick, and Will clinks his glass against Mike’s bottle, tells him, “Cheers.”
Mike laughs, a breathy, disbelieving thing, his eyebrows high and smile wide.
“What—” he starts, just as Will is saying, “So…”
Will shakes his head, trying not to blush. “You go.”
“I mean—” Mike barks out a laugh again. “What are you doing here?”
Will gives him a wry look, eyebrows raised, as he sips his drink. He could certainly ask Mike the same question. “Here, Indiana, or here, here?”
Mike reddens a little. “Here, Indiana.”
Will shrugs. “Still got another week until winter term.”
Mike nods at the bar top, like he finds that answer scintillating. “And how’s that going?” He asks, looking back at Will. “El said you have to do, like, some big senior exhibition.”
Will and El don’t talk about their old friends — or rather, Will changes the subject whenever she brings them up. He never imagined that she might mention him to them.
“Yeah,” he tells Mike, a little thrown and trying not to show it. “Good.”
“What are you working on?”
Will’s not sure what would be worse, if he ran into Mike and Mike acted indifferent, or this. Having all of Mike’s intense, singular focus trained on him again. He’d forgotten how Mike could make him feel like he was the only person in the room. In the world, even.
“Uh, as you’ll be shocked to learn,” Will says, trying to cut the tension with some sarcasm, “I’m working on character design. For comic books, that sort of thing. A little animation.”
Mike’s eyes get huge. “No shit, animation?”
Will hides his face in his drink again. “It’s just something I’m trying out,” he says. “My advisor used to work for Hanna-Barbera.”
“That’s so fucking cool,” Mike says, grinning.
“How about you?” Will asks, desperate to change the subject.
“Oh, you know.” Mike rolls his eyes. “Gearing up for my BS in engineering,” he says, emphasizing the BS.
Will snorts. “Sounds fun.”
“It’s computer engineering. Could be worse. I don’t know.” He picks at the label on his beer again. “Ted and Karen are paying for this degree, so. I figure I’ll graduate, make some good money. Pay for my own writing MFA.”
“That’s—” Will blinks. It’s weird, seeing Mike talking like this — so practically. So adult. “That’s a great idea.”
Mike looks at him with that wide-eyed intensity again. Asks, “Yeah?” Like Will’s opinion really matters to him.
“Yes,” Will tells him. “You should absolutely do that.” He fumbles in his back pocket, suddenly itching for nicotine. “Mind if I smoke?” Mike waves him off and he takes out a pack of Marlboro menthols, lights up.
Mike gestures at him with his beer bottle. “Still doing that, huh.”
“Yeah, well,” Will exhales a cloud of smoke. “So’s Hopper, so my mom’s lectures don’t really stick.”
“Very artsy of you,” Mike tells him with a smirk.
Will laughs. “Yeah, okay, leather jacket. You wanna bum one?”
If he was talking to anyone else at this bar, he’d be sure they were flirting. But this is Mike, and an entire adolescence’s worth of mixed signals has taught him not to get his hopes up. Mike shrugs, takes one of Will’s Marlboros and borrows his lighter. When he inhales, hollowing his cheeks, Will tries not to stare.
“So, uh,” Will starts, taking a drag off his own cigarette. “What brings you here? Here, here.”
Mike looks a little uncomfortable as he takes his next sip of beer, but after a moment, he looks at Will and grins. “The patronage.”
Will feels a way that he hasn’t felt in quite some time — since he stopped talking to Mike, actually. He feels a little like he’s going insane.
He feigns indifference as he asks, “And what does that mean?”
They have a brief, wordless conversation where Mike looks at Will like, Come on. Like he’s being obvious about something and Will simply isn’t getting it. Will raises his eyebrows, shakes his head at him. If Mike is trying to say what Will thinks he’s trying to say, he needs to hear it.
“I’m — you know.” Mike clears his throat. “Gay.”
Will does his best to take this news neutrally, although he is more than a little convinced that he’s somehow stumbled back into a Vecna vision, or that this bar got firebombed and the last five minutes have been conjured by his brain to give him a peaceful death as he expires from smoke inhalation. He’s lived his entire life thinking that Mike would only say those words to him in his most pathetic fantasies. Even in his own head, he’d resigned himself to the fact — because in his head, it was a fact — that Mike was never — could never be — like him.
He’s not about to say any of that, though, so he just says, “Oh.”
The color rises in Mike’s cheeks. “It’s still new.”
“How new?”
Mike looks up, as if searching his own brain. “A month.”
“Wow,” Will says. And then half because he’s just curious, half because he’d like to know in advance if Mike has some guy waiting for him down in Bloomington, he adds, “How? Uh, did you…”
Mike takes a long sip of his drink, then says, “Therapy.” It is absolutely the last thing Will is expecting him to say, which must be obvious, because Mike laughs. “I know,” he assures him. “I had, like, a full mental breakdown over this fucking class that— well. It’s not important, but, anyway— the receptionist at the health center basically hauled me into a counselor’s office, and the rest is history.”
“Wow,” Will says again, like an idiot.
“I know. I should send her a thank you card.” Mike stubs his cigarette in the ashtray on the bar. He’s barely smoked half of it. He looks at Will, considering. “When did you know?” he asks, after a moment. “I never asked.”
“Oh, I mean.” Will sighs. “Realistically, it was when I was probably…eight? Nine? But with my dad and everything, I kind of…” He closes one hand into a fist, like that’ll explain everything. “I don’t think I let myself know, if that makes any sense, until, well. High school.”
He says that last part from behind his drink again, because he’s positive his entire face has gone pink.
Mike just looks at him, blank-faced. “Why, what happened in high school?”
Will stares at him for a second. Mike stares back. He’s not kidding. How is he not kidding?
“Mike,” Will laughs, sounding more than a little harried. “I had, like, the most obvious, embarrassing crush on you in the world.”
Will waits for recognition to register on Mike's face, for him to say, Oh, right, maybe grimace at the awkwardness of it all. But Mike furrows his brow and looks at Will like he’s waiting for a punchline. “No, you didn’t.”
Will blinks. “You can ask any of our friends. I’m sure they would confirm it.”
Mike raises his eyebrows. “Dustin and Lucas would confirm it?”
“Okay, fine.” Will rolls his eyes. “You can ask Max.”
“I—” Mike shakes his head. “I had no idea.”
Will lights up another cigarette. “Well that’s at least a little comforting,” he says ruefully.
“No, I mean, maybe if I had known…” Mike clears his throat. He drums his long fingers against the bar top, watching his own hand for a moment as it taps out whatever song is in his head. “I talked about you in therapy. A lot.”
Will flinches, completely thrown by the change in subject. He’s sure if he had a therapist, he could say the same, but still. “What?” he asks. “Why?”
Mike gives him that look again, like Will is being an idiot. Will is starting to wonder if maybe he is.
“Because I was, like, obsessed with you,” Mike says, his voice softer. “I think you’re the coolest person in the world.”
Will tries desperately not to spiral out about the conflicting tenses in those statements. Obsessed, past tense. Think, present. Mike looks at him evenly, and Will has no idea what it means. He used to be able to read Mike like a book. At least, he thought he could.
“Mike,” Will says, and hates that it sounds like pleading. “What is this?”
Mike shrugs. “I— miss you,” he stutters, resting one hand on the bar top. The tips of his fingers are inches away from Will’s.
“You miss me how?” Will asks.
He doesn’t actually know what he wants Mike to say. He just wants an answer — any answer. Some conclusion to the confusing, fucked up mess that is his relationship with Mike Wheeler. Some confirmation that he’s not crazy, or he wasn’t, but it’s too late now.
Mike opens his mouth, like he’s trying to form the words. Sighs. A few long moments go by, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Okay,” Will says, impressed by the evenness in his own voice. “I think I’m gonna go. Jonathan probably wants his car back.” He sighs as he puts a five on the bar top, tells Mike, “It was nice to see you,” without actually looking at him.
He’s halfway down the block when Mike calls his name. Despite his better judgment, he stops, watches Mike bound up to him. He’s already out of breath despite the short distance and his long strides. He puts his hands on his knees and gulps air for a second.
If he wasn’t about to cry, Will would be trying very hard not to smile. Mike is a fucking loser. Will wishes he didn’t like him so much.
After a shuddering exhale, Mike looks up at him. “I don’t— do you still—?” He lets out a frustrated breath. “I don’t wanna read this wrong.”
Will frowns at him. He can feel the frustrated tears building in his eyes. “Mike, I don’t get you,” he says. “Use your fucking words, please.”
Mike nods. “Right,” he says. “Okay.”
He moves a little closer to Will, until they’re barely a foot apart. His hands are balled in his jacket pockets and his cheeks are red from the late December air. A breeze blows some of his hair into his face, and he brushes it away from his red mouth, tucks it behind his ear. He’s shivering a little. He only has that leather jacket on, which Will thinks is incredibly stupid and Midwestern and a little bit hot all at once.
“Here’s the deal,” Mike says, looking right at Will. “Unless you tell me not to in the next five seconds, I’m gonna kiss you.”
And then he holds up his right hand and puts his thumb against his palm.
Will’s eyes widen. Heat rises in his face.
Mike lowers his pinky finger and then his ring finger, leaving Will with two seconds left.
Will watches the breath clouding in front of both of their faces. He wonders if it’s possible for your heart to beat so much, and so loudly, that you actually die.
Mike’s middle finger is next.
Will doesn't know what will happen after this — if kissing his estranged best friend will make things better or a thousand times worse, if Indiana and California are so far apart that this will be over before it even started, if Mike is even out to anyone aside from his therapist and Will.
Will does know one thing: Life is fucking short.
Mike is still staring at Will as he puts his last finger down.
They reach for each other at the same time. Will takes Mike by the lapels of his stupid fucking jacket, and Mike takes Will’s head in his hands, pressing his lips to Will’s like it’s the last chance he'll ever get. It’s desperate, but still sweet. Careful. Mike kisses Will another one, two, three times, and Will is halfway to laughing before Mike pulls him in a fourth time. Will smiles into it before opening his mouth just a little bit, brushing his tongue against Mike’s.
Someone in a truck going by wolf-whistles at them, and Will and Mike flip the car off simultaneously. They lean into each other, laughing.
Mike cradles Will’s face in one hand. Will stands nearly as tall as him now, but he feels small, adored. Like he did when they were little kids. He rests his forehead against Mike’s.
“Hey,” Mike says, grinning. “Can I buy you a drink? And then coffee tomorrow?” He strokes a thumb over Will’s cheek. “And maybe dinner the day after that?”
Will grins back and leans in for another kiss. He's so happy he's dazed, halfway to incredulous. He takes one of Mike’s hands in his own. It's soft and real and the tips of his fingers are cold. Will wraps his other hand around Mike's, too, to warm him up.
“Yeah,” he answers. As if he could possibly say anything else. “Okay.”