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–Christmas 1987–
"Merry Christmas!" El had just opened the door when she was already trapped in a hug by her best friend, red hair that was sprinkled with snowflakes blocking her vision.
"Merry Christmas, Max!" El smiled and hugged her back.
"Yeah, Merry Christmas, El."
The two girls pulled away from each other and El looked at Mike, whom she hadn’t noticed before and who was still standing outside behind Max.
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot," the redhead slightly turned to look outside as well, "I found him on my way here. You didn't tell me he was sleeping over too."
"I didn't know," El replied, "Will probably forgot to tell me." She frowned at Mike, who apparently didn't understand that it wasn't directed at him.
"And I thought we were on good terms, you know, friends. Not bitter exes," he said with mocking offense.
"We aren't!" El replied quickly, and then added "bitter exes, I mean. We're friends. Come in, there's snow in your hair everywhere," she took a step away from the door to make space for him to walk in, then closed it.
She walked over to the stairs. "Hey, Will!" She called upstairs, in the direction of Will's room.
"Yeah?" In the corner of her eye, she saw Mike, who was kneeling to untie his boots, look up at hearing his best friend’s voice.
"You didn't tell me Mike was sleeping over!" El called again.
"Oh yeah, I forgot, sorry El!"
"He forgot about you Wheeler, doesn't that suck?" Max joked, Mike scrunched up his nose, only for a second, and went back to untying his boots.
"He just forgot to tell El I was sleeping over, that happens." He shrugged and got up. "I'll head upstairs. You'll survive being left alone with Max, right El?"
"Yeah, I'll be fine. You're the one who probably wouldn't survive that," she replied.
"Come on El, you have to open my present!" Max grabbed El’s wrist to pull her to her room before Mike could answer, and El stopped thinking about how long he could be safe being left alone with Max.
They were playing a card game, one of the presents Max had gotten El (the other being a really nice purple messenger bag which made her feel a bit guilty about not getting her best friend anything in return, but she'd already promised to make sure to get her a great present as soon as she could), when she remembered something she wanted to ask.
"Hey, Max?"
"Hm?" The redhead hummed while thinking about what card to play next.
"Do you think Mike likes Will?" That made Max look up from her deck, and El continued, "he's just been acting kind of weird around Will since he..." she trailed of, trying to remember what word she wanted to use.
"Came out?" Max supplied.
"Yes!" El snapped her fingers. "Since Will came out.
"I don't know," Max shrugged and finally decided on what card to play, "maybe he has a problem with it, or something."
El frowned. "He said he didn't."
"Of course he'll say that, Will is his best friend, after all." She paused to take a sip of some hot chocolate that Mike and Will were "kind enough to share with them" (Mike's words). "But it might still be hard for him to really get used to it. I mean, if people tell you that being queer is wrong your whole life, one of your friends coming out won't just make you forget about that. Your move." El played one of her cards. "Also, Mike is one of the most obviously heterosexual people I've ever met, like, when you lived in California he kept whining about how Joyce was always on the phone and he couldn't talk to you, or when I moved to Hawkins he was so set on the party staying only the boys and you, I have no Idea how he took you two breaking up so lightly."
"Maybe he's not, though," she replied.
Max looked up while taking a card. "Why not?"
"Well—" El took a card as well.
They had been back in Hawkins for almost two days, and Mike hadn’t brought up what he’d said while El was in Max’s mind fighting Henry. She didn’t know how to bring it up, because to be perfectly honest, she didn’t believe him.
“You’re still awake?”
El blinked and shook her head, then looked up. She hadn’t even realized that she had zoned out while looking at the absolute mess on the table in front of her. Actually, the entire basement—the Wheeler’s, or rather just Mike’s basement—was a mess.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said to Mike, who was standing at the top of the stairs, quietly closing the door behind him, smiled sympathetically. “Me neither.”
El smiled back, and Mike came down the stairs and sat on the chair opposite her.
“I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about when— “ he stopped and took a deep breath, “when you were in Max’s mind, fighting Vecna or—whatever, did you hear me talking to you?”
So he didn’t know she’d heard him.
“I didn’t,” she lied. “What did you say?”
Mike’s eyes widened a bit for only a second. “I—it was nothing, really! I was just—rambling, you know, saying whatever I could think of, since I thought you were gonna die or something. I was panicking so I didn’t really think so—nothing important, yeah.” He looked dowm at the table.
“So you can only say it when you think I can’t hear you?”
“What? Say what—”
“You can’t say that you love me if you know that I can hear it,” El cut him off. “So, I think, you lied to me, Mike.”
“I didn’t lie. I do—I do love you, just not like that.”
“Like what?” El leaned forward a little, confused.
“Like, romantically. Like you’ve been my girlfriend for over a year—you have but it doesn’t feel like that—I don’t know. It’s like the same way I love my parents, and my sisters, and my friends, you know?”
El nodded but didn’t have time to think of a response before Mike started talking again.
“And I’d thought if I acknowledged that I was wrong about liking you in a not-friend way I’d have to acknowledge that maybe I liked someone else in a, well, not-friend way. And I didn’t want to do that because that person isn’t— “ his eyes were fixated somewhere on the wall behind El while tapping on the table with his index finger in a quick rhythm.
“That person isn’t a girl.”
That surprised El. She had learned pretty much everything she knew about relationships from Mike (or Max), but no one had ever told her that a boy could date another boy.
“Is that a bad thing?” She decided to ask.
“No!” Mike replied quickly. “I’s not bad, but there are a lot of people who think it is, which is stupid, because it’s not like you get to decide if you like girls or boys like that.”
“So could I like a girl in a… romantic way?”
“You could, technically, yeah,” Mike replied, “also there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What is it?” El asked.
“Will showed me the painting,” he said.
El smiled. “So it was for you? Will refused to show it to me or even tell me who it was for, I mentioned it in one of my letters to you!”
“You didn’t know it was for me? Didn’t you commission it?” Mike looked at her, completely confused, El probably looked the same.
“No, didn’t you read my last letter? I told you that I thought it was for a girl,” she said. When Mike didn’t answer she continued, “did you really not read it?”
“No, yes, I did read it, sorry,” he finally replied, “you know, I think I’ll try to sleep again. You try too, yeah?” Then he smiled at El, before getting up and going back upstairs.
“Yeah.”
But El couldn’t just tell Max all of that. Most of the things Mike had said didn’t seem like her place to talk about.
“Will made a painting for him and then said that I commissioned it. He showed it to Mike before I piggybacked from that pizza dough freezer last year. That was also when Mike told me that he loved me.” That would be enough, probably, also nothing that Argyle or Jonathan couldn’t have told her.
“Makes sense." Max nodded. "Mike said "I love you" to you because of the painting, but Will made the painting and you didn't commission it."
"Exactly." El replied, glad that her best friend didn’t question her further.
"Okay, you have a point." Max put down a card. "Last card. But if he does like Will, what are we going to do about it? Try to get them together? We don't even know if Will likes him too."
"He definitely does. I thought the painting was for a girl he liked at first but—you know."
"Then it's just a matter of how we—oh!" Her eyes lit up. "Do you have mistletoes here? I don't think we'd find any outside in the dark."
"I think so, but why would we need mistletoes?" El took another card, and Max put her last one down.
"Beat you again!" She grinned. "There's this—I guess you could call it tradition, that if you're next to someone under a mistletoe, you have to kiss them. Have you never heard of that?"
El shook her head.
“Now you have. Does that sound like a plan?”
El grinned. “It sounds like a plan.”
They had found a mistletoe—luckily—and then come up with a more detailed plan: Mike and Will were watching some movie about a kid who wanted a gun for Christmas (well, that's all El had picked up from it), and the plan was that El would use her powers to levitate their mistletoe over the boys' heads (ideally without them noticing) and then fix it on the lights that were conveniently hanging there.
If everything went according to plan, one of them would look up after the mistletoe was already hanging securely above them and they would not ignore the "tradition".
El and Max were hiding under the stairs, the only hiding spot where they could actually see the couch, which was not fully turned away from them, without being seen themselves if whoever was sitting there didn't turn around.
Whoever sitting there currently being Mike and Will.
“Ready?” Max asked, so quietly El wasn’t sure she didn’t just understand it because she’d read her lips. She nodded anyway and looked at the mistletoe in front of her. After a second, it slowly started to float away from them and above the two boys sitting on the couch.
If either of the two looked up, they would see the floating mistletoe above them and immediately know what the girls were up to. Luckily, it only took a second for El to find the perfect spot right above them where the mistletoe wouldn’t fall off the lights.
Now, all they had to do was wait for one of them to look up.
It had been about two minutes, when Will glanced up and obviously noticed the new decoration above them, but he chose to ignore it. Then, not much later, Mike noticed it too, but he didn’t look down. Instead, he tapped his best friend’s shoulder.
“Hey Will, look up.”
What’s—oh,” Will said when he saw what Mike wanted him to look at. “Strange place to hang a mistletoe, don’t you think?”
“I think we’ve seen stranger things.” Mike shrugged. “So, you know that means we have to—”
“Yes, we have to kiss, I know. I’m scared of standing next to people during Christmas every year because of that,” he said, El could see that he was smiling.
“And?”
“And what?”
“Should we?” Mike asked, “it’s okay if not, that rule is pretty stupid anyway.”
“The rule isn’t the problem, I’m just thinking, do I really want to have my first kiss while watching A Christmas Story?” Will said.
“First?” Mike turned his head to look directly at the boy sitting next to him, “did you never kiss anyone while you lived in California?” He asked like it was the most shocking thing he had ever heard.
“I think there were, like, one or two girls that liked me? Or maybe I got that wrong, but I wasn’t interested in kissing any girls for obvious reasons, and it’s not that easy to just kiss a guy. And I still had a massive crush on you the entire time, so I wasn’t interested in any guys there either.”
El and Max looked at each other at the same time, both with wide eyes. Will had just admitted that he had had a “massive crush” on Mike since before they had moved to California.
She expected Mike to be at least a little surprised, but he only laughed. “Well as you know, I’ve kissed people before. But don’t worry, I won’t judge you.”
“By people you mean only El, and I wasn’t worried about your judgement. The movie is really my only problem here.”
“It’s not a bad movie! Also we’ve both seen it multiple times, so it’s not like you’d miss anything,” Mike said, “but it’s okay if you don’t want to, still. Unless you’re just talking around it because you’re nervous?”
“Yeah, kinda…”
“Yeah, makes sense. I was nervous too when—never mind, doesn’t matter right now—how about you just—close your eyes?”
El couldn’t see Wills face anymore, but he did probably close his eyes, because a second later Mike was holding his face and kissing him. El had to do her best to keep herself from cheering. She looked at Max, and they probably both thought that they shouldn’t be spying anymore, so they left their hiding spot and snuck back to El’s room while giggling as quietly as they could.
“They were already together!” Max said loudly, but hopefully not so loud that it wouldn’t be heard in the living room, the moment the door was closed behind them.
“We didn’t even consider that.” El let herself fall on her bed, next to the playing cards they still had to put away.
“My expectations in them might actually be a little low, especially in Mike.” Max sat down next to her.