Chapter Text
“Hey.” Mike sets his paper cup of coffee down on the workbench beside his chair.
Will blinks.
He looks good. He’s dressed for fall, suede jacket zipped up over a striped sweater. His hair is overlong, his bangs sparser than Mike remembers, and the structure of his face is more defined than it once was. He’s all lines — neck and jaw and collarbone. Mike wonders if he’s eating enough.
“I’m sorry,” Mike says. “I should’ve called.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you should’ve,” Will mutters. “Shit.”
He looks away, ducking his head, and pours himself a cup from the coffee maker by the window. He drinks half of it in two gulps, then coughs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Are you okay?” Mike asks.
“No,” Will says. He sets his cup down. “This — you’re in a MassArt painting studio, Mike.”
“Yeah.” Mike scratches the back of his neck. “Sorry. Again.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It was the only place I could get into without a key.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Will scrubs both hands over his face, then lets them fall to his sides. His skin is pink, and he’s looking anywhere but at Mike. Light streams in through the half-shuttered windows; it catches Will’s sharp profile, his tensing jaw.
“Are any of these yours?” Mike asks, tentatively.
Will looks up. Mike gestures to the various canvases populating the room — some still drying on easels, others hanging on the walls. They’re in a variety of styles. Mike spent his afternoon studying them. His eyes traced over the brushstrokes, over the shadows and highlights, trying to discern which one might be Will’s.
He had settled on a portrait situated in the far corner of the studio. It was done in greyscale, and depicted a shirtless man with wild hair, sallow cheeks, and a necklace made of dice. It was something about the effortlessness of his open expression.
“Yeah,” Will says, eventually.
“Cool,” Mike says. “Um. Which ones?”
There’s a plea in there, somewhere. Don’t ask about school. Don’t ask about Chicago. Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here. Don’t ask me where I’m staying tonight.
Will watches him for a moment. Mike wonders what he sees in his expression.
Then, Will crosses the room, the worn-out legs of his jeans grinding between his brown boots and the floor. He stops when he reaches the black-and-white portrait, standing to the side and resting his hand atop the canvas.
“Here,” he says.
Mike feels the smallest spark of triumph in his chest.
“It’s good,” he says.
“It’s fine,” Will says. “I love portraiture, but it’s not really ‘fine art’ once you get to your senior year. It’ll probably get a C.”
“That’s bullshit,” Mike says, unthinkingly.
Will raises his eyebrows. “C-plus.”
“Better,” Mike says, and gets no response. He grits his teeth.
He wants so badly for Will to smile. He wants so badly for Will to shout, to cry, to shove Mike into a wall so that his skull cracks hard against it. He wants so badly for a gesture that will tell him what’s behind this terse silence.
“Are you okay?” he asks again.
Will bites the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Mike says.
Will scoffs. “Liar.”
He picks at the folded edge of the canvas with his fingernails.
“Are you here to see me?” he asks, staring firmly at the movements of his fingers. “Or are you just here?”
Mike frowns. “I’m at your college.”
“Not here,” Will says, gesturing at the walls, at the building, at the totality of the school around them. “I mean here. Like. Boston.”
“Oh,” Mike says. He crosses his arms over his stomach. “I don’t know.”
For the first time since entering the room, Will’s expression twists. A fissure of emotion opens up on his face, souring his mouth, pulling his eyebrows down and together. He shakes his head, letting go of the canvas and shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Right,” he says, tightly. “Of course you don’t.”
Mike feels his chest start to constrict. “Will.”
“You should probably go,” Will says. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“Will,” Mike says. He stands up from his chair and takes a step and a half forward, before thinking the better of it. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t you?” Will says.
“No.” Mike shakes his head. “I didn’t mean to lie. And … I am here to see you.”
Slowly, the deepened lines of Will’s face smooth. His mouth unfurls.
Before he can speak, Mike rushes to say, “And I kind of don’t know anyone else here, anyway. So I was thinking — maybe you can show me around?”
It’s such a stupid line. It’s a play at indifference, at pretending like they both don’t know that something must be terribly wrong for Mike to be in Boston in mid-October. Mike looks Will in the eye and tries to beg his compliance. Tries to draw upon years of a seemingly-telepathic connection, hoping it hadn’t really ended when a red, drooling wound opened up in the ground, both of them just kids.
“Okay,” Will says. The line of Mike’s shoulders sags. “Let me get some work done first, though.”
“Yeah. Sure,” Mike says. “Um. Can I wait here?”
Will starts to shrug his jacket off, folding it over the back of a chair.
“Obviously,” he says. “Where else would you go?”
***
Mike didn’t bring much stuff to Boston. A duffel’s worth, enough to sling over his shoulder as he walked between airport terminals and to shove into the trunk of a cab. Will eyes it as they spill out onto the street, wind nipping at the points of their faces.
“Do you want to drop that off somewhere?” he asks.
“What?”
Will tugs one of the straps hanging off of Mike’s bag.
“Oh,” Mike says. “Yeah. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” Will says. “Come on. I parked just down the block.”
They start to walk. The city’s nice, but rather than admiring the architecture or the patches of landscaping, Mike watches the ease with which Will navigates the street. He steps over a pothole without looking. Carves around a cafe storefront with tables sitting out on the pavement. His three years spent living here are obvious; anyone would think he’s a local. Mike, in contrast, lags behind, having to watch for obstacles more carefully. The distance between them grows until Will looks over his shoulder and realizes how far ahead he’s gotten, and waits quietly for Mike to rejoin his side.
Mike wonders if he’d ever looked so at home in Chicago. He never moved off-campus, even during the junior-year purge, and towards the end, he didn’t leave his dorm much at all. He had always felt obtrusive out on the streets, like an obstacle himself rather than someone who’d dodge them. People would bump into him, brush past him, and each careless touch would shove Mike further into obscurity.
“Here,” Will says, as they round the corner. He digs in his pocket for his keys and approaches one of the cars in the line: a tan shitbox with half the back-bumper missing. As he unlocks the driver-side door, he nods at the damage and says, “It was like that when I bought it, by the way. I’m a good driver.”
“I figured,” Mike says.
Will gets in, unlocking the passenger door from the inside. Mike throws his duffel in the backseat then slides in next to him.
“It’s kind of nice though. In a way,” Will says.
“Hm?”
“The broken bumper,” Will clarifies. “Everyone on the road always assumes I’m reckless or something. So they give me way more space than everyone else.”
“Oh,” Mike says. “Nice.”
Will nods. “Do you drive?”
“Not really,” Mike says. “I mean, I can. But I don’t have a car or anything.”
“Right,” Will says. “I guess you would’ve had to leave it in Chicago, too. That can get dicey. Especially if you don’t know when you’re coming back.”
Mike slumps down in his seat, staring firmly out the window. Will’s car smells like mint and pine, and Will has never in his life let anything go. Mike hopes that his silence speaks volumes. That it might stifle the expectant way Will’s hand sits unmoving on the clutch.
“Nevermind,” Will mutters, shoving the key in the ignition.
The engine sputters and spits and groans. For a moment, Mike thinks the car’s not going to go. Then it does, rattling out into traffic like it’s the last thing it’ll ever do.
“Are you cold?” Will asks, after a moment.
Mike glances at him. His eyes, of course, are fixed on the road.
“A little, I guess,” Mike says.
“Yeah. Um. Sorry, I don’t know why I asked,” Will says. “The heater’s busted. The whole car will…” He gestures vaguely. “...start to fill up with steam.”
Mike snorts. The corner of Will’s mouth twitches.
“Do you have any tapes?” Mike asks.
“Yeah,” Will says. “Glove compartment.”
Mike opens the compartment. Tapes almost spill out onto his lap, shoved haphazardly together alongside boxes of ibuprofen and tins of caffeine tablets. Mike shuffles through the ones on the top of the pile, afraid to go digging much deeper, and finds himself soothed by how predictable all the titles are. He almost smiles at the pretentious lack of mixtapes. Then he finds it.
“Knew it,” he says.
“Knew what?”
Mike shuts the glove compartment then shoves a tape in the player. Bruise Violet starts to blare over the speakers.
“I knew you’d be into this girl-rock shit,” Mike said.
Will shakes his head. “That’s sexist, Mike.”
“I mean it in a good way,” Mike says. “I mean, I like it too. I just meant that when I heard it, I knew you’d be into it.”
Will clears his throat. “Um, actually, Robin got me into it.”
“Robin?” Mike frowns. “She still lives here?”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s getting her doctorate from BU now,” Will says. “Sociolinguistics.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Mike says.
“Yeah,” Will says, “but she’s really good at it.”
“Cool,” Mike says.
He wonders if it’s obvious how little he wants to talk about Robin. Any mention of her name just forces the obvious question back into his head — the one that’s plagued him since he was seventeen, and Will announced he was applying to art school in Massachusetts.
“Not New York?” he’d asked. “Your brother’s there.”
“Maybe as a backup,” Will had said, shrugging.
That day, Mike had held his tongue. As Will bent back over his portfolio, curating the order of his paintings, Mike’s stare burned into the back of his head. What’s so different about her? he thought. What changed when we were sixteen? Are you going to spend the rest of your life chasing Robin Buckley?
They’re silent for the rest of the drive. Mike sneaks intermittent glances at Will, and Will’s never looking back. He hadn’t lied; he is a good driver. Maybe a little too cautious at times, but that’s better than the opposite. His hand flexes on the wheel as he maneuvers it, his spare arm resting against the window. Mike only realizes that he’s staring when Will turns to look in his blind spot and raises his eyebrows. Mike’s gaze snaps back to the road ahead.
***
Will lives in a small brown building.
“It used to be, like, a block of townhouses,” he says as he opens the front door. “But I guess some rich asshole bought them up in the 60s and turned them into apartments.”
The lobby is musty. The carpeting is old, a garish kaleidoscope of gold and green. It kicks up dust wherever Mike steps. There’s no elevator, either. Just a thin, rickety staircase that groans under Mike’s weight. His bag has to be yanked through the passage made by the wall and the bannister.
“I’m just on the second floor,” Will says.
There are only three apartments on each floor. Will approaches number 202 and shoves two different keys in both of its locks, then kicks the door hard at the base. It cracks open reluctantly.
“The handle is weird sometimes,” he explains, then walks inside.
The room Mike finds himself in is cluttered, eclectic. The floor is wood, accented with various mismatching rugs. The kitchen is a small nook with a stove, a set of cupboards, and a mint-green fridge crowded with fliers and novelty magnets. There’s a kind of living room, too, with a worn leather couch and a wicker chair. The furniture faces a TV cabinet stuffed with VHS tapes.
“Drop that wherever,” Will says, waving his hand. “Hey, Val.”
Mike is in the middle of shrugging his duffel off his shoulder when he realizes that he and Will are no longer alone. Will’s greeting a girl in the kitchen with a quick hug — she’s sitting at a table made of vinyl and metal, wearing a giant t-shirt and purple tights, a volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry open on her lap.
“Hey,” she says to Will, reaching a hand up to pat his back. Then, her eyes flicker over to Mike. She raises her eyebrows. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Mike says. After a moment, he holds out his hand. She shakes it. “I’m Mike.”
“Valerie. Will’s roommate,” she says. She turns in her chair, tucking her knees up to her chest and leaning back against the wall. “So. How do you guys know each other?”
Mike thinks Will’s cheeks are going pink, but he might be imagining it. Will turns around, busying himself with refreshing the coffee maker.
“I’m from Hawkins,” Mike says, after it becomes obvious that Will isn’t going to answer.
“Hawkins?” Valerie asks.
“My hometown,” Will says, not turning around.
What, she didn’t know? Mike wants to ask, but it’s not like he doesn’t know the game. College friends, girlfriends, roommates — none of them could be allowed to get too close, in case they started caring about him enough to ask after the scars that littered his body, or saw him waking up from a nightmare and making a mad dash for the kitchen knives.
“Sorry,” he mutters, realizing how he might have messed things up.
Will shakes his head. “It’s fine.”
“You guys are cheery,” Valerie deadpans. Her eyes flicker down to Mike’s duffel, sitting on the floor between his feet. “Are you moving in, or something?”
“Um,” Mike says, glancing at Will. “I’m living kind of a nomadic existence right now.”
Valerie snorts. “Are you writing a novel too, Bukowski?”
At that, Will cracks a tiny smile. It makes Mike itch around the collar.
“No,” he says, not sure what else to say. “Not … at the moment.”
“Ah,” Valerie says, obviously still amused.
The coffee set to steep, Will turns back around, leaning against the kitchen counter. He tugs his sleeves half-over his hands.
“Val?” he says. “Do you know if Lou’s gonna be here tonight?”
“Um, maybe,” Valerie says. “Why?”
“Just wondering,” Will says.
“Do you, uh,” she says, glancing briefly at Mike, “need the room to yourself?”
This time, Will definitely goes red. “God — no.”
“Because if you do, he can sleep in my bed tonight,” Valerie says. “Hell, kick him out on the couch.”
“Val — shut up,” Will says. He tucks his hands into his armpits, and doesn’t look at Mike. “I was just wondering.”
“Okay,” Valerie says. “Whatever you say.”
Will bites the inside of his cheek, then jerks his head towards the leftmost door along the back wall.
“Come on,” he says to Mike. “You can put your stuff in here.”
Will’s bedroom doesn’t have much natural light. There’s one window that’s presumably over Will’s bed, judging by the fact that its sheets are tucked in and the other bed has an ashtray and Cheeto crumbs in it. The window’s slat blinds are down, but not sealed, letting struggling beams of yellow sunlight sprawl lazily across the floor.
Mike leans his bag against the wall next to the door while Will goes and sits on his bed, mattress springs squeaking underneath him.
“This is it,” he says.
Mike nods. “I like it.”
His eyes catch on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that acts as Will’s headboard. It’s crammed with tapes, graphic novels, art supplies, textbooks, and — Mike suppresses a smile — stacks of battered D&D handbooks, from last year’s 2E release all the way to the original 1974 edition that Will got for his ninth birthday.
“Yeah. Well. It’s not much, but at least it’s warm,” Will says. “Central heating. And my roommate’s basically never here.”
“Valerie?”
“No, Lou. He pays rent and everything, but he’s always at some bar. He spends every other night on someone’s couch. Or in someone’s bed.”
“Oh,” Mike says. “Is he — um.”
Will raises his eyebrows. “Is he what?”
“You know.” Mike gestures. “Like. Gay.”
Will stares at him for a moment, then shakes his head, looking away.
“And are you asking me that because he sleeps around?” he says. “Or because he’s fine sharing a room with me?”
“I wasn’t trying to imply anything,” Mike says.
“Yeah,” Will says. “You do a lot of things without trying.”
This room stinks of weed and cigarettes and cheap cologne. It’s starting to go to Mike’s head. He feels dizzy, like his vision’s slanting, the ceiling blurring with the floor.
“Whatever,” Will says. “It’s … it’s fine.”
“Will.”
“Are you hungry?” he asks, sounding tired. “We have stuff for sandwiches.”
Mike swallows down the words burning in his throat. He doesn’t even know what they would’ve become, had he let them spill from his tongue.
“Sure,” he says, because really, he hasn’t eaten since that stale croissant at O’Hare Airport that morning. “A sandwich would be good.”
***
“I can’t believe you’re a vegetarian now,” Mike says.
They upgraded from sandwiches to grilled cheeses. Will’s toasting them on a skillet with some butter from a spray-can, and the look he gave Mike when he asked for ham on his was unrivalled.
“Really?” Will says. “I can’t believe you’re still fine eating dead things. It’s not even fully a moral issue. It’s just gross. Like, once you’ve seen an actual corpse, I don’t get how you can see flesh as anything other than flesh.”
Mike’s glad that Valerie’s disappeared into her bedroom. This conversation would be hard to explain.
“I guess I just don’t really think about it,” he says, shrugging.
“Wow,” Will says dryly. “Shocker.”
The cupboards are filled with stacks of gaudy bowls and plates, no two alike. Will serves Mike his sandwich on a plate emblazoned with David Bowie’s face, rhinestones hot-glued around the rim. Mike frowns.
“Is this, like, safe to eat off of?” he asks.
“All our plates are lead-free,” Will says, putting his own plate (Kate Jackson in a bikini) down opposite Mike’s. “Promise.”
“If you say so,” Mike says.
He picks up his sandwich. It looks good, warm and glistening with grease. He takes a bite, then groans.
“Fuck, this is good,” he mumbles.
Will huffs a laugh. “What, they don’t feed you in Chicago?”
Mike shakes his head. “Not like this.”
He eats in silence for a few moments, barely swallowing one bite before he’s tearing another chunk off. He can feel Will’s eyes on him all the while. It makes his skin burn.
“Did you like it there?” Will asks.
Mike swallows. “What?”
Will’s tapping his fingers on the table, food untouched. His mouth is taut, his gaze almost shrewd. Mike feels like an insect trapped under glass, waiting for the sun to warp and split and burn his small body to nothing.
“Chicago,” Will says. “Did you like it there?”
“I don’t know,” Mike says. “Sure.”
Will sighs. “Mike.”
“What?” Mike drops his sandwich. “Just ask me then, Will. Just ask me what you actually want to ask me.”
Will leans back against the wall, his eyes not leaving Mike.
“It’s midsemester,” he says eventually.
Mike crosses his arms. “I know.”
“You’re in Boston, and it’s midsemester, and you’re in your senior year.”
“I know.”
“And none of us have heard from you — for months,” Will says. Mike wonders if he’s imagining that his voice has gone raw, as if worn through from use. “Months, Mike. After three years of letters and calls and promises, you drop off the face of the earth. And you don’t come home for summer.”
“Home?” Mike says.
“You know what I mean.”
Mike picks at the crusts of his grilled cheese. It doesn’t look so appetizing anymore.
“Can I stay here tonight?” he asks. He hate the way his voice stumbles.
A sharp intake of breath. “Mike.”
“Please don’t make me explain,” Mike says. “Please, just — I will. I swear. But please. Just let me sleep here tonight.”
For a moment, Will says nothing. For a moment, Mike imagines hitchhiking to Illinois with the spare change in his pocket, nothing leftover after the cab fare and the box of his stuff he shipped back to Hawkins. Arriving in Chicago having taken a leave of absence from school, no classes to occupy his mind and no bed in which to spend the night.
Then: “Okay,” Will says. “You can have Lou’s bed if he doesn’t come home.”
“It’s filled with crumbs,” Mike says quietly, not sure how to say thank you.
Will shrugs. “I have a spare set of sheets.”
He rips his grilled cheese in half with his hands. It’s cold enough by now that the cheese doesn’t drip without the barrier of the crust holding it in. He takes a hefty bite, then lets it fall down to his plate as he chews. He nods towards Mike’s plate, where the remaining half of his sandwich is congealing, leaking grease onto David Bowie’s face.
“You don’t pull the crusts off anymore?” he asks.
Mike blinks.
“Oh. No,” he says, looking down at his sandwich. “No, not really.”
“How come?” Will asks. “You always said you thought the two different textures were weird together.”
“Yeah. Well.” Mike picks at one of the rhinestones on his plate. “That’s fine in middle school, when you’re already an ugly loser who plays D&D, but, uh. I guess I didn’t want people in college to think I was a freak.”
“I get that,” Will says, nodding. “Are you used to it now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Will says. “I don’t know. Do you still think it’s gross?”
Mike hadn’t really thought about that.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess so.”
“Pull them off, then. I don’t mind,” Will says. “I already know you’re a freak.”
He bends over his sandwich. He’s not looking at Mike anymore, but Mike’s looking at him. Then, for the first time since he was eighteen, Mike pulls the crusts off his sandwich before eating it.
***
Mike watches Will strip Lou’s bed and tries not to focus too hard on the various stains that mar the mattress.
“I can do that, you know,” Mike says, as Will wrangles a fitted sheet.
“Good timing,” Will says. “You think you’re slick, letting me play maid?”
“No,” Mike says. Then, “Shit, I mean —”
“I know what you mean,” Will says, fluffing up the pillows. “It’s fine.”
Will finishes making Lou’s bed — Mike’s bed — in silence. A look of gentle concentration passes over his face, his brow furrowed just so, his lower lip jutting out over his top. He pulls back once he’s done, having made sure that the blanket reaches all the way to the edges.
“It might still smell a little. Sorry,” Will says. “Lou’s, like, a serious chainsmoker.”
“Oh,” Mike says. “None of those were yours?”
He’s referring to the ashtray he emptied out into the trashcan under the sink, that now sits soot-streaked on Will’s bookshelf.
“No.” Will snorts. “I mean, I’ve smoked pot once or twice, but never cigarettes. Who do you think I am?”
“I don’t know,” Mike says. “I mean. I wouldn’t’ve guessed that you smoke pot, either.”
“I don’t smoke pot. I’ve smoked pot. There’s a difference.”
“Clearly.”
“Whatever, Mike. You can’t get through a BFA without doing something recreational.”
Will sits on his bed, pulling his socked feet up underneath him. It’s dark out, now, but in a way that snuck up on them. It happened so slowly that they didn’t think to turn on the lights. The only reason Mike can still see Will’s face is the soft yellow glow from the desklamp that Will must’ve forgotten to switch off the night before.
“So,” Will says.
“So,” Mike says.
Will picks at a thread on his jeans. “Are you tired?”
Not really. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” Will says. “Um, you can change in the bathroom, I guess. I think Val’s done with her shower.”
Mike nods. He lays his duffel bag out on Lou’s bed, unzipping it and rooting through his shoddy, impulsive packing job to find a decent pair of sweats and a t-shirt. He folds them over his arm and turns around to find Will watching him.
“I’ll, uh,” Mike says. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
Will nods.
The fluorescents of the bathroom are too harsh to cope with. Mike doesn’t realize until he’s standing under them that the rest of the apartment’s lights, at least the ones he’s seen, are warm-toned, yellow. He shivers under the duress and he hasn’t even started taking his clothes off yet.
He pulls his sweater over his head. It smells of plane, that ambiguous scent of gelatinous food and vomit clinging to every fiber. He takes his time folding it, even though he’ll have to wash it before wearing it again, and sets it atop the closed lid of the toilet.
He wonders if Will is changing, too. He probably is. It’s his bedroom, and there’s no sense in them taking turns to use the bathroom when they could get both jobs done simultaneously. Mike shuts his eyes briefly and sees mole-speckled shoulders, pale clavicles, knees scarred from years of tumbling off of bikes.
He decides he probably should take a shower after all. If his clothes smell of the plane, so does he. He shucks off his jeans with much less fanfare and shoves them on top of his sweater. He takes off his glasses and sits them by the sink.
The water pressure is okay. Good, but not great. Mike needs great water pressure to get into the roots of his thick hair. He tries anyway, picking what looks to be the cheapest shampoo of the bunch — drugstore head-and-shoulders — and uses as little as he can. He digs his fingers into his scalp, trying to get a lather going. Trying to feel clean.
Then, he shuts his eyes and drowns for a moment. Makes himself forget everything but rising steam and cold tile. Presses his forehead against the wall.
It’s only after he’s done that he realizes he never asked Will for a towel. He shuts the water off, not wanting to waste it, and stands trembling in the shower stall as the cold rushes in. He folds his arms over his chest. He doesn’t like being naked. It makes him feel vulnerable at the best of times, even without the ugly white light highlighting every awkward shadow of his body.
He waits until he’s dry enough to justify getting dressed. He tugs on fresh boxers, sweatpants, a Slint t-shirt he’s owned since he was seventeen. He doesn’t look at himself in the mirror.
He cracks open the door to Will’s bedroom carefully. It’s dark; even the lamp’s been turned off. Will is a softly-breathing lump under a pile of blankets, the crown of his head just barely peeking out onto his pillow. Mike shuts the door with a click.
He tugs down the covers of Lou’s bed and slips underneath them. Certain things disconcert him — the wall is on the wrong side of his body, and the sheets smell of the wrong kind of detergent. He wonders what bed he’s comparing this one to. Not the one in his old dorm, undoubtedly reallocated to some late-arrival freshman. And not his bed back in Hawkins, either. Not anymore.
“Are you awake?”
Mike flinches.
“Uh,” he says. “Yeah?”
He hears shuffling, like Will’s turning over in his bed. He keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling.
“Can I ask you something?”
Mike swallows. “Sure.”
More shuffling. Maybe Will’s trying to get comfortable.
“Why here?” he asks. Mike’s hand tenses where it’s knotted in the sheets. Despite the cold, he feels himself start to sweat. “Like, I get that you needed someone. I get that. But why here? Why not Durham? It’s closer. And Dustin’s got his shit together. Why not San Francisco? I’m pretty sure Max and Lucas actually have money. Shit, why not Hawkins?”
“Will.”
“It’s not a stupid question.”
“No.”
“And I have a right to know. You could at least give me that much.”
Mike squeezes his eyes shut.
Because you’ve always loved me, he thinks. And I don’t think there’s any love left for me in the world.
“Because we’re best friends, right?” he says eventually, forcing his voice to stay even.
A moment’s pause. Then, “Yeah.”
“So. There,” Mike says. “Why would I go anywhere else when my best friend’s here?”
He knows Will knows it’s bullshit, but he prays that Will won’t say it. Once it’s spoken into reality, Mike doesn’t know what he’ll do.
“Goodnight, Mike,” Will says quietly.
Mike’s spine relaxes a little against the mattress. He opens his eyes for a moment, blinking out into the dark.
“Night, Will,” he says.
He falls asleep to the sound of Will’s breathing evening out. And the bed doesn’t smell, not really. Any lasting ash or nicotine has been drowned out by the familiar scent of cedarwood, sweet and warm.