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For once in his stupid fucking life, Mike has a nice dream.
It isn’t nice at first. His mom is yelling at him to get out the door for some big trip, and every time he turns to throw clothes into his suitcase, his closet is suddenly empty. But then the room shifts, and he’s in Will’s new house, cross-legged on the floor of Will’s bedroom. Will sits in front of him, wearing a Hellfire Club shirt, and Mike is so glad to see him. They’re playing some card game that Mike doesn’t know how to play, and every time he puts down a card Will laughs, tells him he’s losing. Mike just laughs with him. It’s so nice to see Will happy.
In the dream, Will suddenly gets up to leave, and Mike gets up, too, catches his hand. Wait. We’re not done yet, he tells Will. Don’t go. Will says, You’re right and I’m sorry. Mike leans in and kisses him. It makes his whole body feel warm. Will kisses him back and smiles.
The dream shifts to something else that Mike doesn’t remember. A little while later, he wakes up.
—
The Party doesn’t usually stay at Dustin’s. His place is way too small. That’s not a judgment on Dustin, or Mrs. Henderson — Will remembers what it was like to be the one with a house that was too small for his friends — it’s just that their house isn’t meant to fit much more than the two of them.
But El and Max have claimed Will’s house and issued a strict No Boys Allowed dictum, Nancy and the other older kids have taken over Mike’s basement to do god knows what, and they’re all terrified of Erica, so — Dustin’s house it is.
“All right, Lucas and I can take the living room, you and Will can take my bed,” Dustin says, after they all start slumping over halfway into Beverly Hills Cop II.
“Oh,” Mike says, a little too quickly. “I can just grab a sleeping bag, it’s no big deal.”
Will looks over at him, hoping Mike will meet his eye so he can tell him it’s fine for them to share the bed. Because it is. They’ve been having sleepovers together since they were in kindergarten.
Even if Mike has somehow realized how Will feels about him — which Will is pretty sure he hasn’t, because he’s been pretty careful about not making things weird; unlike Mike, who seems to love making things weird, like he is right now — it’s not like that has to change anything. Will’s not going to, like, maul him in his sleep.
He wants to communicate all of that in a glance, but Mike isn’t looking at him.
Dustin grimaces at Mike. “No offense, dude, but you talk in your sleep, and I need my eight hours.” He pats him on the back. “Besides, there’s only one sleeping bag in this house, and it’s going to Lucas so I can sleep on the couch.”
“Man, come on.” Lucas rolls his eyes. “Be grateful you get the bed,” he tells Mike.
And just like that, it’s settled.
Will really isn’t nervous about sharing a bed with Mike. At least, he’s no more nervous about doing that than he is about all the other mildly compromising, intimate friendship things he does with Mike all the time, like when Dustin and Lucas try to force them all to talk about who they have crushes on; or when Mike squishes next to Will every day at lunch, their bodies flush from ankle to shoulder.
What’s not helping is Mike’s recent skittishness, which Will is pretty sure rears its head exclusively around him. Will doesn’t think he’s changed. He’d come out or whatever, but that had been last year, and Mike hadn’t been weird about it then, so why freak out now? It reminds him of Mike’s ill-fated visit to California, when he’d suddenly decided he was too heterosexual for hugs and regular correspondence. And that had been three years ago, so, what the fuck? If anything, Will moons at Mike a lot less than he did when he was fifteen.
Will stews a little as they take shifts using the bathroom and changing into pajamas. They just survived the first week of senior year but it’s still summer-hot, and Mike is wearing a T-shirt and shorts to bed. Will pettily thinks that Lucas wouldn’t wear all that to sleep next to him on a hot night. He’d just wear no shirt and boxers, because he wouldn’t be worried that he was sleeping next to someone who was too gay. Will is wearing a shirt and shorts to bed, too, but — it’s different. That’s just the kind of guy he is.
If he was being reasonable, Will would admit that sleeping in Dustin’s tiny bed next to a shirtless and/or pantsless Mike would, invariably, stress him out. But Mike’s earlier reticence has put him in an unreasonable mood.
They don’t talk much as they settle down. There are logistics involved, because Dustin is still small enough to fit comfortably in a twin bed — either they have to spoon, sleep with their noses inches apart, or sleep back to back. It’s pretty obvious which option will be the least awkward, so Will curls up on his side, his knees poking off the edge of the mattress, and feels the mattress dip as Mike does the same.
“’Night,” Mike says, his voice annoyingly neutral.
“’Night,” Will echoes, then sighs and shuts his eyes.
It’s not a restful night. Mike might have been stiff around Will while he was awake, but that doesn’t stop him from flailing around and muttering unintelligibly in his sleep. Will wakes up once when Mike elbows him in the spine, then another time when Mike shifts to lie on his stomach and nearly knocks him off the bed. Will quickly becomes too tired to care about where his body is in relation to Mike’s, so at first he’s barely fazed when he wakes up, some time around dawn, to find Mike’s arm slung across his middle. Will’s baggy shirt has twisted and ridden up in the night, and part of Mike’s forearm is touching his stomach, which — that’s fine. Great. Whatever. Suddenly, Will has never felt more awake in his life.
He tries, very delicately, to extract himself from the bed, half-rolling, half-flopping in an attempt to get out from under Mike’s arm. Just when he’s on his back, about to put one of his feet on the floor and finally wriggle free, Mike’s arm shifts higher.
“Wait,” he says, his hand to Will’s face. He says it so urgently that Will turns to face him, sure he must be awake, that there must be some imminent danger he can’t sense for once, or some terrible news Mike needs to tell him. For a split second Will wonders, horrified, if that’s why Mike has been so weird. It's not Will’s fault at all, Mike is just — terminally ill, or joining the Peace Corps and moving to Rwanda, or—
But Mike’s eyes are still closed. The hand he has against Will’s face is certainly there, but it’s sleep-soft. Despite his grave tone, he looks at peace. Will tries to ignore the ache in his chest. He could count each of Mike’s freckles from here. He takes a mental picture of the way Mike’s eyelashes fan out against his face. Maybe he can recreate this on paper later, since it’s probably the last time he’s ever going to see it in real life.
Just when Will is about to turn, start moving again, Mike tilts his head forward and kisses him. It’s brief, chaste — just a brush of lips against lips — but it definitely happens. And then Mike just settles down again, the side of his face pressed into his pillow so hard he’s probably getting sleep lines.
Will can hear his blood rushing in his ears. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, waiting for the shock to clear from his brain.
“Mike,” he says after a moment, but it comes out more like a croak. He clears his throat and tries again. “Mike.”
Mike stirs, and Will freezes for a moment as panic comes over him in an icy rush. Because, yes, he should probably say something, but — what? What, exactly, is he supposed to say right now?
He doesn’t get to find out, because Mike just groans sleepily and rolls over onto his side, facing away from Will.
Will takes a minute to collect himself, and then he slips out from the bed, tugs his clothes on, and gets the fuck out of there as fast as he can. He scrawls out some bullshit note to Dustin and then gingerly leaves through the front door. His heart is racing as he bikes the entire way back home, the sun just barely rising in the sky.
—
When Mike sits next to Will at lunch on Monday, Will jumps a little bit, leaning further into Lucas’s space next to him. Mike tries to look at him, like, What the fuck?, but Will just keeps his head down, picking at his sandwich like nothing strange at all has happened.
It’s not the first weird thing Will has done today, either. He’d biked all the way to school instead of waiting for Mike to pick him up. When Mike tried to say hey to him in homeroom, he’d suddenly become engrossed in conversation with Geoff Kinsey. (Which, it’s not like Mike has anything against Geoff Kinsey, he’s fine, or whatever — for a guy with adult braces — but it’s not like he and Will are usually chatting it up.) And then Will hadn’t sat in the back of their government class, where the empty seats are, so that Mike could sit next to him.
Now, this.
Mike taps his foot against Will’s under the lunch table. “Are you okay?” he asks, voice low. If something is going on with Will, Mike knows he probably won’t volunteer it outright. He probably doesn’t want to bother anyone, which Mike thinks is stupid, but whatever.
Will shifts his foot away. “Hmm?” he asks, barely glancing at Mike. “No, yeah, I’m fine.” He turns to watch whatever debate Dustin and Max are in the middle of, and Mike frowns at the back of his head.
“I’m just saying,” Dustin insists, “that scientifically speaking, Wolverine would beat Wonder Woman in a contest of brute strength.”
“Nobody was talking about brute strength,” Max shoots back, her eyes narrowed. “The question was, would Wonder Woman beat Wolverine in a fight?”
“The answer is yes,” El says from Max’s side.
Max points to her. “Thank you.”
“They have a point,” Will offers quietly. “She has superhuman strength plus flying. Logan just has superhuman strength.”
“Uh, and healing powers,” Dustin scoffs.
“Well, okay,” Lucas pipes up. “What does it mean, ‘Who would win in a fight’? Are we talking about one of them killing the other one, or just knocking the other one out?”
“Killing,” Dustin answers, at the exact same time Max says, “Knocking the other one out.”
That only sends them further down the rabbit hole. Dustin attempts a long-winded speech about the nature of human warfare, but he keeps getting waylaid by Max, who makes a fart noise every time he pauses for breath.
“So are you, like, friends with Geoff Kinsey now?” Mike asks the back of Will’s head.
It at least gets Will to look at him, even if Will is looking at him like he’s an idiot. “What?”
“Geoff Kinsey is nice,” El says from across the table. “He always pays attention when I have to speak at the front during English class.”
“Geoff Kinsey has adult braces,” Mike deadpans.
The confused line between Will’s eyebrows deepens. “He’s still in high school.”
Mike rolls his eyes. He suddenly doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. “He’s eighteen,” he mutters, picking at his tater tots. “He’s an adult.”
In what is either a continuation of his suffocating weirdness or a gentle act of mercy, Will doesn’t say anything in response.
—
Avoiding Mike is hard, it turns out, because Mike is the most relentless person on earth.
Well, he’s second to Nancy, probably. Mike is the second most relentless person on earth.
Given Mike's own weird behavior, Will had thought it wouldn’t be a problem to give him some space. He figured Mike would welcome it, actually. He doesn’t. If anything, Will’s sudden strangeness makes Mike forgo his own. He’s back to consistently ignoring Will’s personal space — or at least trying to, because Will is doing his damnedest to put at least one friend between him and Mike at all times.
Obviously their friendship has gotten a little too weird and enmeshed, because now Mike’s subconscious is telling him to do things like kiss his gay best friend. They should, like, be around other people for a little bit and give their brains a chance to normalize. And eventually, hopefully, they’ll both forget that any of this ever happened. Ideally, Will will forget about the kiss, which means he won’t have to tell Mike about it, because he still has absolutely no idea how to even begin that conversation.
A week goes by. And then two.
Will is not forgetting about the kiss.
He’s doing the opposite, actually, which just figures. It had barely been a kiss, but now his brain has blown it up into this grand, romantic thing. When he’s alone in his room or zoning out in class, it just sneaks up on him — Mike reaching for his face, leaning in, pressing their lips together. In Will’s head, Mike is actually awake. They’re in Will’s bed instead of Dustin’s. Will kisses Mike back, and Mike hums, sleepy and content, and lets Will press him into the mattress.
And it’s not like kissing Mike is a new train of thought for Will, but now he actually has something to work with. His evil little brain has taken this scrap of a kiss and upgraded all of his fantasies from black-and-white to technicolor. He thinks about kissing Mike in his bed, in Mike’s bed, under the bleachers, in Mike’s car, in Mike’s basement, at Skull Rock, and it’s like he can almost feel it now. He thinks about what Mike’s mouth would feel like on other parts of his body, and those pictures are suddenly clearer, too. It’s like now that he’s gotten a drop of water, he wants to drink Lake Michigan.
Distracting doesn’t even begin to describe it. His head is an all-consuming place to be. When he’s not getting worked up over the — now slightly more vibrant — concept of Mike’s mouth, he’s suffocating under the weight of this secret. His friendship with Mike is suffering, yes, and that’s terrible, but Will is also a little bit worried that he’s going to flunk out of his last year of school.
At least the cacophony inside his brain makes it easier to ignore Mike’s concern, his pushiness, his general Mike-ness. Will is certain he’s doing the best thing for their friendship in the long term. He just hopes he doesn’t go insane in the meantime.
—
Will isn’t just weird on Monday. He’s not just weird for a week. He acts like a nutcase for seventeen entire days before Mike realizes what the common denominator is.
It’s him.
Mike spends one long Thursday afternoon thinking back to the first day Will started acting like this — when he’d been chatting up that mouth-breather Geoff Kinsey — and everything comes crashing over him in a hot, horrible wave.
The Saturday just before that, they’d shared Dustin’s bed, and Mike had had that dream. The good one. The one where he’d kissed Will.
He’s tried not to dwell on it too much since. It’s not like he didn’t already know he wanted to kiss Will. He’d come to that realization in, like, May. The sky is blue, water is wet, he wants to kiss Will. He got to have a nice dream about it. Great. No dream or realization can change the fact that Will is his best friend — and his ex’s brother — who thinks he’s a total dip. If Mike has to white-knuckle it through the end of high school and subsist entirely on glances at Will’s mouth, then he can do that, probably. And then they can all go to college and Will can get some hot, buff, artist boyfriend, like he deserves, and Mike can, he doesn’t know. Die.
It’s fine, is the point. Mike has the whole wanting-to-kiss-Will thing under control. At least, he thought he did, but now he’s connected the dots between that sleepover and Will’s dodginess, and he realizes—
Will knows.
That’s why he’s still pretty much normal around Lucas and Dustin and Max and El, but the second Mike walks into the room, he goes all Edward Hyde. He knows Mike has a thing for him, because Mike must have said something in his sleep while he was having that dream. And now Will is avoiding him, because he obviously doesn’t feel the same way and he’s too nice to just tell Mike to fuck off.
Mike paces his room, going over it all in his head. At first he feels like he’s going to barf, because Will knows, but then, the more he thinks about it, the more pissed off he gets. Like, does Will really have to avoid him? Mike is practically an adult; he can handle a little rejection. Maybe Will is weirded out by the fact that Mike likes guys, too, but, well, fuck that. It’s not like he gets to own the concept just because he figured it out first.
No, actually, Will probably thinks Mike is a total freak, because he had a crush on his sister before he ever had a crush on him. Which is so petty of Will, when Mike really thinks about it, because Mike can’t exactly control who he likes, or into whose family they may or may not get adopted.
Really, Will is being incredibly immature about all of this, and Mike deserves to give him a piece of his mind.
Before he really has the wherewithal to stop himself, he’s grabbing his car keys and heading out the door.
—
Will is at his house, sitting on the front porch stairs with a sketchbook. Just seeing him makes Mike’s resolve flicker a little, because it’s the late afternoon and there’s all this golden light washing over him and he’s got that concentrated look he gets whenever he’s really into a piece of art. And, well, it’s Will. Mike is totally whipped when it comes to Will. He knows this.
But then Mike gets out of his car and starts striding toward him, and Will scrambles up like he’s about to run for the hills, and Mike remembers why he’s mad.
“Hey,” Will says, a little breathlessly, wiping charcoal on his jeans. “I’m sorry if you wanted to hang out, I’ve got, like, my mom wants me t—”
“Are you avoiding me because of that night at Dustin’s?”
Will somehow manages to look even more terrified. “I—” he stutters, eyes wide. “Uh. What?”
“Cut the shit, Will,” Mike snaps. “You’ve been fucking — weird to me ever since we stayed over there, and I think I know why.”
Will blinks. “You do?”
“Yeah.” Mike crosses his arms. With every fiber of his being, he wills himself not to blush. “I had, like — look, I had a dream about you that night, okay, where we were, I don’t know, like, a couple, or something.” He can feel the heat rise in his face, but he keeps glaring at Will anyway. “And I guess I must have said something in my sleep to clue you in, because I can’t think of any other reason why you would be such a fucking basket case around me, specifically, starting right after that.”
Will shakes his head slowly. “Mike—”
“Look, save it, okay?” Mike barges in. “Obviously you don’t feel— and that’s fine, I can handle that, but you’re being a fucking dick about it when you should’ve just talked to me. It’s not like—”
“Mike!” Will shouts, and he looks so desperate that Mike actually shuts up for a second. “I don’t— You— you kissed me.”
And, well, of all the things Mike thought Will would say to knock him on his ass during this conversation, he never anticipated that. He feels his arms drop to his sides like they’re suddenly boneless. “What?”
“You were— dreaming, or whatever, and you— yeah. You kissed me.”
Will looks like he wants to die, which at least makes two of them. Mike balls his hands up into fists. His breath is coming in shorter. He hadn’t accounted for an outcome in which he somehow ended up more humiliated.
“Okay, well.” He hates how obviously dazed he sounds, like he's just been clocked over the head. “I’m sorry, or whatever. Like I didn’t mean to do that, obviously, but you didn’t have to, like— you could have just told me to get lost, Will. You didn’t have to treat me like I had fucking— leprosy.”
“That’s not—” Will has the audacity to let out this frustrated little laugh. “That is not what I was doing.”
Mike makes an indignant noise. “I haven’t been alone with you for even, like, a second in the last two weeks!” He gestures wildly. “You wouldn’t talk to me in class! I couldn’t even sit next to you at lunch!”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, okay, Mike?!” Will yells. He looks like he regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth. He suddenly can't look at Mike — he says his next words quietly, his eyes somewhere over Mike's right shoulder. “I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long and then I finally did, but it was like I didn’t, because you didn’t even remember, and I was the only person who could tell you, and I didn’t know how to do that without you finding out that I—” He cuts himself off.
All of the anger leaves Mike in an instant. He feels like he’s been stopped in his tracks, like Will just used a freeze ray on him.
“And you’re right, okay?” Will continues, choking a little on the words. He sits back down on the steps, self-consciously wiping a few tears on his sleeve. “I’ve ruined everything, just like I always thought I would, and I’m fucking— I’m sorry.”
Mike stands limply on the concrete in front of him. It feels a bit like the world has stopped turning. “You wanted to kiss me, too?”
“Only for, like, five years,” Will says sardonically. There’s not a lot of bite in it, though, because he’s sniffling. “Wait,” he says after a beat. He looks up at Mike. “What do you mean, ‘too’?”
Mike suddenly feels like he has enough energy to run a marathon, like he just won the lottery or published his first novel or rolled above the final boss's AC. Will wants to kiss him. Will has wanted to kiss him for years. Through some bizarre twist of fate, Mike hasn't fucked everything up forever by finally making a move on him while he was unconscious.
There's a smile tugging at his lips. “By too, I mean, like, also. As well.” Mike points at himself, then at Will. “In addition to you.”
Will just keeps looking up at him. “What?”
“I’m— I like you, you idiot.” Mike laughs. “I didn’t just dream-kiss you because my brain picked some random person.”
“Oh,” Will replies, with the air of someone who does not understand what they’ve heard at all.
“Not being around for the last couple of weeks has been the fucking worst.” Mike sits next to him on the steps. “And that’s— all the other stuff, even if you didn’t— I just like being around you, Will.”
Will looks at him askance. “Okay, well, so why were you being weird before the Dustin thing?”
Mike stares at him. “Because I didn’t know how to just be around you anymore after realizing how badly I wanted to fucking kiss you.”
It seems to finally register with Will this time, which — the fact that Will had trouble believing Mike at all makes his head spin. He’s the hard sell here, not Will. Mike is basically a stick bug with a Mensa IQ and a short attention span. Will is — Will. He’s sitting so close to Mike, the last dregs of evening light making his skin glow, and he has charcoal smudges on his hands and his jeans. He’s kind and humble and funny and beautiful. Mike doesn’t know how he ever tricked himself into believing he could get through high school without doing something about it. He sends a brief little thank-you to his subconscious.
Will’s gaze is heavier when he looks at Mike now. He glances down at Mike’s lips for a second before telling him, his voice low, “I want to kiss you, too.”
Mike swallows. Says, “Okay.”
They both lean in slowly, all nervous glances and strained breaths until Will puts a hand on Mike’s cheek and closes the last few millimeters of distance. When their lips meet Will inhales sharply, which makes something flare in the pit of Mike’s stomach, and he has to consciously back off, rest his forehead against Will’s, remind himself that this is the first of hopefully many chances they’ll get to do this. When he pulls away, Will chases his lips for a second. Mike thinks he should be sainted, knighted, and given the Nobel Peace Prize for not crawling right into his lap and putting his tongue down his throat.
“How was that?” Will asks, a playful edge to his voice even though he’s speaking just to Mike, barely above a whisper. “I mean, compared to the dream.”
“I—” Mike tries. He already sounds wrecked. He doesn’t even bother to clear his throat. “Shut up.”
He pulls Will in again with a fist to the collar of his shirt. He’ll send his regrets to Oslo in the morning.