Archive of Our Own

After the bridge closes, it snows on and off for a month.

The meteorologists all say it’s too early in the season for something this heavy, accumulating to a foot all across Hawkins, mysteriously dwindling outside town lines. They throw around theories and numbers while Ted Wheeler snores in his recliner, but Mike knows this is just one of those things they’ll never understand. It’s like the sky is letting something go, shedding all the interdimensional tension built up over the past four years.

So why does Mike still feel so tense?

Everything should be okay. Everyone is home safe, defying all odds. Holly is remarkably resilient, not deterred from tearing through the rest of A Wrinkle in Time and all its sequels, Mr. Whatsit be damned. In their shared time in Camazotz, Max apparently decided Holly and Mike might as well be twins; when the Party finally get Holly and her friends set up with their old D&D set in the basement, Holly immediately bosses everyone around, and Mike flips Max off before she can even pull a face at him.

Holly does have nightmares, which breaks Mike’s heart, because he still does, too.

El’s powers dwindled after the gates closed, until her very last nosebleed dripped on the Wheeler’s white tablecloth as she telekinetically stole the maple syrup from Will. She still has Henry’s blood, but after everything ended she told Mike she felt closed off from him somehow, like his death had severed the tie between them she’d always resented. Mike secretly wonders if her powers are still there, if she chose to close herself off again. To live a normal life. To close herself off from Mike, too; quiet with her nose in a book in his bedroom until he pressed the matter so hard he practically forced her to break up with him.

“I don’t think we need the same things,” she said finally, at which point he tried to goad her into telling him what exactly she thought he needed, until she fixed him with a look that somehow reminded Mike of getting a chest X-ray when he had pneumonia at 7 and the doctor had pointed out all the little parts of him on the big blue screen.

“Anyway, it isn’t about you, Mike. I need to know what I want for myself. Not you, or Hop, or Kali.”

She’d said it so definitively, like she didn’t want him at all. When she left the room, he turned on the radio and tried to make himself cry.

Here’s the thing: if you gave Mike a couple beers from Ted’s basement stash, or maybe a healthy serving of Russian truth serum, he could have told you he’s known for a while that he doesn’t feel the right things for El. He can’t pinpoint when it stopped, or if it had ever started at all: he still remembers what Lucas said all those years ago, that he was just happy a girl finally wasn’t grossed out by him. But he loved El so much — loves her. He loves her quiet thoughtfulness, her ability to ground him while he spirals. He loves her fuzzy buzzcut and her long, Joyce-sanctioned bangs and the way she wears Will’s flannels over little floral shirts. He loves her with and without her powers, and he really swears he wasn’t lying when he told her that in the pizza cooler, even if somehow it felt like he was.

He just doesn’t really love kissing her. When Lucas gushes about Max, and eventually Dustin starts screaming and covering his ears and Will looks nervous and Mike fake gags on his hands and knees to make everyone laugh, he gets the feeling he’s supposed to be thinking about doing more than kissing her. He’s just. Not.

After the breakup, it’s like one weight is lifted off and another comes crashing down. He feels something a lot like relief when he realizes he doesn’t have to pretend with her anymore, to perform dragging her off to make out because that’s what boys are supposed to want, to get her lipgloss on his teeth, to face the big, black hole he sees when he imagines his future with her. But the relief sparks the guilt, and he spirals every time: if he doesn’t want to go to college with this girl, to get married and move to another city and build a life with this person he swears he loves, what the hell does he want?

He knows there are people who want other things. He knows, now, that Will wants other things. And honestly, he doesn’t know what he thinks about it.

He’s not, like, a bad person. He remembers Troy calling Will a fairy, and his dad implying he’d been killed by some other queer in the kitchen when he thought Mike wasn’t listening. Shoving Troy on his ugly little face and watching El make him piss himself was like, top 5 badass moments of his life, and he’s literally faced interdimensional monsters. He’d make every homophobe in the world piss themselves if it made Will crack a smile. He knows he doesn’t care that Will is gay, even though he’d grown up thinking it’s a bad word. So what is bothering him so much? Why is it that when he thinks about Will with this mystery boy who he’d liked and gotten over he feels so sick to his stomach?

Why are things so awkward?

After everything, after Will had nearly died to save them all from Vecna, Mike had run to him. He’d let Will collapse in his arms, told him he was amazing, kept an eye on him while he recovered at the Squawk. Will was quiet with him, but he was recovering, he was traumatized, he was hurt. But then Will was back on his feet, and he was still quiet, and Mike didn’t have the guts to reach out and find out what was wrong. Especially not when he wasn’t quiet with Lucas, or El, or even fucking Robin. It was just Mike, Mike who’d apparently done something wrong, who didn’t react fast enough or well enough when Will came out to them, or who had clearly done any number of other stupid things to make Will hate him. Just Mike — who admittedly isn’t talking either.

He wants to call Will a sorcerer again and see the way it makes his face flush. He wants to lend him comics in class and talk about them on the weekends. And he wants to pester Will about this crush, poke at him with the childish “whoisitwhoisitwhoisit” he gave Lucas and Dustin back in the day when either of them saw a cute girl in class who would never have given them a second glance. But something about this feels delicate, like if he pushes the wrong button Will will shut himself off even more, or think the wrong thing, or think the wrong thing. That Mike thinks it’s him and would be freaked out by it, or that Mike thinks it’s him and wouldn’t be freaked out by it, that Mike’s making everything about himself again, when apparently even his own breakup wasn’t about him, and he should really stop overestimating his importance in the lives of superpowered teens who are cooler than him.

This is where he always ends up: thinking about Will makes him think of El, and thinking of El makes him think about Will. The relationships are inextricably tied in his brain, and maybe they always have been, from the moment he went searching the woods for Will and found El instead. And now, he’s hardly friends with either of them, and he doesn’t think he can fix it. Back at the end of the world, he’d put it in a box to avoid, focus on bigger problems, exhaust himself until he crashed for 5 hours and wake up at 6 AM for coffee and more planning. He doesn’t miss those days, the constant fear, the bags under his eyes, the bruised ribs—but now there’s kind of nothing to fucking do. He’s back in high school, he’s supposed to be thinking about college, and the whole time it won’t stop fucking snowing. He thinks about it while he avoids his homework, he thinks about it while he tries to watch TV, and he’s thinking about it on Thanksgiving break when he decides he’s sick of feeling suffocated in this fucking house and opens the front door and runs into Will on the front steps.

“Oh!” Will says, at the same time as Mike says, “Jesus fucking Christ you scared the shit out of me.” He stumbles back and nearly loses his balance on a patch of ice, and Will’s giving him a look of mild concern that makes him feel stupid, and isn’t this a spectacular way to show your gay ex best friend that you’re not freaked out by him, to jump back from him so fast you nearly break your ass. Really excellent work.

“Almost broke my ass,” Mike says, eloquently.

Once he escapes imminent danger (of the ice variety, at least), Mike looks at Will, who’s not looking at Mike. His eyes are fixed somewhere near the doorbell, like he’s wishing he could merge into a timeline where he walks up the steps and doesn’t run into Mike and rings the doorbell and is answered by anyone who isn’t Mike. He’s holding a box of crayons and the tip of his nose is red, and Mike resents himself for keeping him out here in the cold any longer than needed.

”Um, for Holly,” Will says, gesturing at the crayons. “I’m more into painting now, so.” He grimaces, and his eyes flick around wildly.

”Right,” Mike says. “Cool.”

He barely remembers to let Will in the front door before he runs down the steps and as far down the street as he can get before the cold starts to burn in his lungs.

Mike flops on his back in the snow about 15 minutes from his house. He imagines how much further he’d have gotten on his bike, if the roads weren’t so bad. If he were twelve years old and half as tall and 50 pounds and years of trauma lighter. He’d circle the town for hours without getting winded. He’d fly down hills and feel his heart race from something other than fight or flight. Exhilarated, the way kissing El never felt. The way it was supposed to.

When he feels the first sign of damp snow soaking through his jeans, he stands up, shaking wet flakes out of his hair. He’s made it to the small playground his mom used to take him and Nancy to when they were little, where she would build houses out of sticks and they’d tell stories about the tiny people who lived inside, on the rare days they weren’t trying to pull each other’s hair out. There’s nobody here, and in the snowy quiet he can hear his own breath and the creak of the swings in the soft wind. He drags his feet through the snow to the swingset and sinks down into one. His legs are too long now, especially where the snow has piled up, and the metal chain is cold on his fingers. Unbidden, the memory floods in again—him and Will on a different set of swings, five years old, deciding right then and there that they would be friends. It had been so simple, then. It never felt like a question that they’d be friends their whole lives. Will wouldn’t go missing and get hurt and even if he did Mike wouldn’t fuck up so spectacularly when he got back because it would always be easy to talk to Will, like breathing, and he’d never feel this rift between them, as wide and frightening as the red scars that had split Hawkins 18 months before.

He’s starting to get a little sick of feeling sorry for himself when a shock of cold and wet rushes down his spine, and he realizes he’s been thwacked in the back of the neck by a snowball. It takes all his willpower not to fall off his swing into the muddy ditch he’s been digging with his sneakers. He whips his head around and sees a burst of red hair flash behind a bush, that absolute asshole, and then El emerges on her own, her hands held up in a peace offering, and the snowball he’d been planning to hurl at his assailants melts in his mind’s eye. He can’t really go throwing snow at his recent ex girlfriend who dumped him in a way that made it pretty clear it was his own damn fault, even if Max is a fucking snake who deserves frostbite.

El sinks into the swing next to him, rocking herself back and forth gently. Her sleeves are pulled down over her hands like mittens, and her face is flushed with cold, and Mike lets himself watch her, waiting to feel a spark of longing that never comes.

”I’ve never been on a ‘playground,’” El says finally, and doesn’t that just make him feel like shit all over again.

“How’d you find me?” He asks. They’re a lot closer to his place than the spot the Hopper/Byers have been renting, even though it’s a bit less remote than Will’s old house. He scans the bushes behind him. “Where’s your sniper?”

”Max is ‘laying low,’” El says. “She thinks we need to talk.”

”Do we?” Mike says. He’s pretty sure the last conversation (two weeks and three days ago, exactly) ended clearly enough.

“Maybe,” El nods. She’s been staring out at the white sky, but now she turns her eyes on Mike, and it makes him nervous in a way it never used to. “Why are your pants wet?”

He feels himself flush. “Can’t a guy play in the snow?” It comes out stupid, childish. He frowns down at his wet sneakers.

”Karen said you went on a walk. Will said you were strange.” El shrugs. “I went to bring Holly a book that Jonathan lent me.”

”Why’s everyone hanging out with Holly?” Mike snaps.

“It was a good book.” El glares at him. “Your sister has been through a lot. Maybe some of us can relate to that.”

Mike kicks up a flurry of snow. I’ve been through a lot, he wants to say. I keep losing all of you.

“I wanted to say that maybe we are better as friends,” El says finally.

Mike snorts. “You’re breaking up with me again?”

“Mike.” Her voice is gentle, probably gentler than he deserves. He makes himself look at her again. “Better than not friends. Better than not talking.”

She looks down at his legs, and he realizes she’s learning how to make herself swing. She leans back, pumps her legs in unison with him, and somehow they both laugh. If they make it through this conversation, he’s gonna show her how to jump off.

“I want to be friends,” he says, half out of breath. “I don’t know if I know how.”

“Why not?” El kicks up a spray of snow on the upswing. “You have friends.”

“We were dating,” he says, even though it feels like a crazy word for their relationship, for the kissing that went on between life-or-death situations. “It’s different.”

”Why?”

”’Cause it is,” he says. “You’re supposed to be angry when you break up.”

”Are you angry with me?”

He thinks on it. He tries to find the bitterness, the rage at her leaving him, the wishing he could kiss her, and he finds none of it. He shakes his head, even though she isn’t looking, and he knows she understands.

”I love you,” she says. “Isn’t it easier to say when we aren’t ‘in love’?”

So he tries it: “I love you too.”

And he jumps off the swing.

~

El and Max run off when the sun starts to go down, not before they all launch themselves and each other into snow drifts until their bones are freezing. When Mike crashes into his own front hallway, soaked and flush with cold, Will is still on his living room floor, packing his art supplies into his backpack.

He gives Mike a once over, with a quirked brow that Mike can’t quite place between judgement and concern.

“Hey,” Mike says with a half-grin, and it’s somehow the bravest thing he’s said all day.

”You look like a wet dog,” Will says, a hint of a smile in his voice that makes Mike’s insides go warm.

”Snowy out there,” Mike says intelligently.

Will’s face shifts into soft concern, and he fidgets with his backpack straps. It takes everything in Mike not to turn tail and run up to his bedroom. He pushes his hair out of his face, and he thinks maybe Will tracks the motion with his eyes. Mike can’t think of a single thing to say, and it’s clear Will can’t either, unless he doesn’t want to. The fear that he’s fucked up so badly that Will would rather never speak to him again slithers in, and it takes serious guts for Mike to walk over and sit down on the couch. He gestures in the direction of Will’s bag.

”Did you guys draw anything cool?”

Surprise crosses Will’s face, but he unzips the bag again and pulls out a drawing. It’s black and white, pencil sketching with a little black pen detail, but it’s clearly this very room: couches and TV and Mike’s dad’s armchair. Holly is at the center, her own drawing in front of her.

”She took hers to her room,” Will says. “I wanted to give her this, too.”

He hands it over, and Mike takes in the detail. Will’s style isn’t photorealistic, but it feels like his home, like his little sister on the carpet, engrossed in her crayons. Mike’s always felt sort of in awe of Will’s eye, of his ability to put what he sees down on paper, while Mike talks himself in circles in his notebooks without ever really saying anything at all.

“It’s really good,” Mike says softly.

“You should see her unicorn,” Will says, nodding at the stairs.

Mike has made it this far, but he still can’t think of anything to say. Will zips his backpack again, but the drawing stays on the coffee table this time. Mike plays with a loose string on the sleeve of his jacket. It’s not supposed to be this fucking awkward. They’re supposed to be MikeandWill, inseparable on the playground and passing notes in class and having sleepovers and falling asleep in front of the TV and waking up to eat eggs with syrup and write stories for their campaigns until Will has to go home. Instead, Mike avoids his friends in the snow and Will would rather hang out with his little sister.

“You don’t have to do this,” Will says suddenly. Mike looks up abruptly.

”Do what?”

”We don’t have to pretend to be friends again.” Will stands up, shrugs his backpack over his shoulder. “Really, it’s fine. Actually, I’d probably rather not.”

“What the fuck,” Mike says.

“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Will says on his way to the door. His eyes are red-rimmed and Mike genuinely has no fucking idea what’s going on. “Sorry, I guess.”

When Mike thinks about it in bed later that night, he imagines himself standing up, saying Will, wait, or even just I don’t understand. What he does is sit on the couch and let him leave.

~

It’s not the last walk he takes in the snow. The week of Thanksgiving break, Mike finds himself outside nearly once a day, letting his feet carry him wherever they want to go, until his mom starts to worry about his choice of footwear. On bad days, he thinks he might like to get frostbite, to end up in a hospital bed where he can find out who actually gives a fuck if his toes fall off. If Will would give a fuck if his toes fell off.

“Dude,” Lucas says one afternoon, when Mike decides to take his misery to someone else’s living room couch. “You’re killing me. I’m gonna make at least one of them take you back, for all of our sanity.”

Mike doesn’t know what to do with that: with the idea that even to their friends, his relationships with Will and El aren’t as different as they probably should be.

And it’s not the only thing he thinks about, really. On one of his walks, he decides he hates break almost as much as he hates school. On another, he contemplates what motivates a mom to serve something as disgusting as pork chops. And on another, he realizes he’s probably a little in love with Will Byers.

It hasn’t snowed the last couple days, and the ground is slushy and wet, everything piled up in filthy snowbanks down the side of his street. Today, the sky is a gray-white. Ted says they can expect anywhere between four and ten inches tonight. They’re calling it a winter storm warning, like it hasn’t been winter storming for a fucking month. It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and Mike is almost excited for school to start back up, just so he can have something else to be annoyed about.

Mike trudges out behind the house and into the trees, and he’s thinking about Will’s fucking crush again, this boy who isn’t him but also isn’t definitively not him, and he’s so bored he snuck a glass of his mom’s wine in a water bottle in his backpack. Maybe it’s the liquid courage that makes him brave enough to think about it, to really look at it.

When he thinks of Will with this imaginary boy, holding hands and kissing while Mike watches, whispering to each other in the basement with all their friends, Mike wants to throw up on the ugly snow boots his mom made him wear. It’s like maybe he is a giant piece of shit, no better than Troy and his friends or his and Will’s stupid dads, just better at hiding it. He can’t ignore the sense of wrongness when he thinks about Will being with someone like that, some stupid boy making Will blush and laugh the way Mike used to.

Oh.

Mike’s aimless walking has taken him to the railroad tracks this time, and he veers off into the woods and sits down on a fallen tree.

In this other scenario, where the boy is somehow Mike—it’s not the disgust that makes him unable to look at it. It’s something else, a stomach-dropping, rollercoaster feeling, like he’s at the top of the quarry looking down but El’s not here to catch him this time, to drag him back to safety. Like if he jumps, there’s no going back. He’ll never be normal again.

He’s always felt something special with Will. When they were little, they got teased for holding hands. They were inseparable from that day on the swings, and even when they met Lucas and Dustin and formed their little party, it was always Will he put his sleeping bag next to, Will who he could talk about his fears with, Will whose moods he could read, whose quietness he could decode when no one else could. It was Will whose disappearance felt like losing a limb, like some part of Mike had been forcibly removed while he’d slept, and he woke up in a world where somehow nobody quite understood. Will whose hand he held when he woke up from a mindflayer-induced nightmare, the only friend he’d pull up in his bed and lie down next to, not quite understanding why he couldn’t fall asleep after.

It was Will in California, who looked different and cute and made Mike nervous, who gave him a painting and a speech that made him feel special, and then told him it was all Eleven. Will who gave him the strength to tell El he loved her, even when it felt like a big confusing lie.

And it was a lie, wasn’t it? Two weeks ago, when El dumped him, she told him she didn’t need him. El doesn’t even give a shit about D&D, never did. Mike isn’t her knight in shining armor. El wrote him a letter from California, telling him Will was making a secret painting for someone he liked.

Mike stands up off the log. God, he can’t be sure, but he’s suddenly really, pretty sure:

There is no other boy. Maybe some things are about him after all.

When they were small—when the bullies sneered at them for holding hands—it only made Mike hold on tighter, mouth breathers, fuck ‘em, but by fourth grade Will started letting go. Mike wonders now if it was because Will knew already that he was different, that there was real danger in showing this kind of affection because it meant something. If maybe that’s the reason Will is holding back from him now. Shit. Mike always assumed he was the asshole here, who must have done something to make Will hate him. He’d never considered the possibility that Will might think Mike hates him.

The roads are half-salted by now, and this is like a four alarm emergency. Mike runs home for his bike and is halfway down the hill as the streetlights turn on. In their soft yellow glow, the snow starts to fall.

~

Mike spends the whole bike ride thinking of kissing Will. It’s like the floodgates have opened; now that he’s let himself think about it, there’s no going back. He thinks about how Will would be surprised at first, how his eyes would flutter closed, how he’d sigh into Mike’s mouth and curl his hands in his sweater. Mike imagines himself climbing up to Will’s window, or throwing rocks like the movies, until Will lets him in and Mike doesn’t have to say anything, just—kiss him until they both run out of breath, run his fingers through his hair, lay him down on his twin bed and show him exactly how not-grossed out by him Mike is.

Unfortunately, he’s probably going to have to do a lot of talking.

Will’s light is on when Mike pulls up outside. It’s about 5:30, and in an hour his own mom is going to be frantically calling his friends to ask where Mike is for dinner, but Joyce usually closes on Saturdays and Hop will let them eat whatever they want out of the fridge. The thing is, Mike really doesn’t want to see Hopper right now, considering how it went over last time he was making out with one of his kids, so a Steve-esque window move may actually be his best bet.

This new place is still one story, just a fraction bigger with an additional room for El. It means it’s easy enough to pull himself up to Will’s window. The curtains aren’t drawn, so he can see Will at his desk, pencil in hand. Even the back of his head is cute. Mike is so fucked. This is completely weird and mortifying, but it’s getting really cold, and the wind is threatening to shake him off the side of the house. He takes a breath and knocks on the glass.

Will jumps at first, and when he turns around he gives Mike the most spectacular eye roll he’s ever seen. He stands and stares for a second, like he’s really contemplating letting Mike die out here in the cold, frozen solid to the side of his house, like The Shining but much more pathetic. Mike tries to give his best impression of pleading without losing his grip on the windowsill. Will finally opens the window, and Mike falls in like somebody threw him. This isn’t going as romantically as Mike imagined it, and when he looks up from the floor Will’s expression says they still have some arguing to get through before Mike’s allowed to kiss his face.

“What do you want, Mike.” Will’s arms are crossed in front of his chest, and Mike wants to stab the guy who made him feel this defensive, even though it would probably really hurt. You, he thinks, a bit hysterically. The problem, he realizes, as he scrapes himself up off Will’s floor, is that he has no clue how to talk about this. He only realized it maybe twenty minutes ago, and especially lately he’s felt like the gold medal winner of saying the wrong fucking thing.

He traces back his own realization, as Will traces the path his wet shoes leave on his carpet with his eyes.

”Why’d you lie about the painting?” Mike says.

It’s the wrong fucking thing. Something in Will’s face breaks, and he turns away. Mike steps closer to him, stutters something like “I didn’t mean—“ and then Will’s whipping around to look at him. If his expression was closed off before, now it’s straight up cold.

“Is this why you broke into my house? To accuse me of lying to you?”

”Technically, you let me in,” Mike says.

”Right.” Will scoffs, and finally sits on his bed, picking at a hole in the knee of his jeans until the threads unravel. “You’re being mean,” he says, finally.

”I’m not being—maybe you’re mean!” Mike wants to pull his hair out. “You let me think my girlfriend had all this shit to say about me, and it turned out she wanted to break up! Like—maybe I should get to be mad. You had no right to put words in her mouth.”

“Go home, Mike.” Will flops backwards on his bed. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

”Too bad!” Mike is aware he’s shouting a little, and this is not at all how he wanted this to go. “Maybe I wanted to know it was from you! Maybe then I could have told you how I felt, instead of you assuming shit. What am I supposed to think when you don’t tell me anything?”

”What am I assuming, Mike?” Will says quietly.

“Stuff!” Mike says.

Will laughs, once. “And I don’t tell you anything.”

Mike groans and continues his pacing. He knows what he has to say, even when he doesn’t know anymore how it’ll be received. He’d told Holly about Mike the Brave, but now he’d rather argue in circles than confess anything that might hurt. Will’s the brave one, who’d sat in front of all their friends and told them his closest secret; who’s sitting in front of Mike now, choking it down and thinking Mike hates him.

“You won’t even tell me who you like,” Mike says. Again, it’s not what he means to say.

“Mike, don’t.”

“Hey, you were perfectly ready to tell everybody about it three weeks ago!”

“When I was terrified Vecna would use it against me?” Now Will’s voice is raised, too. His hands are shaking in his lap where they’re tying his denim strings into knots, and Mike thinks he’d probably be standing up and pacing too if it wouldn’t put him closer to Mike.

“And how do you know they’re not like you?” Mike says, wheeling around to look at him. “How do you know?”

“Because I know him,” Will says quietly. “Because I know he likes girls, and maybe he’s—he’s confused right now, because he got dumped and he’s terrified to be alone, but I know he’s going to leave Hawkins and meet a nice girl and get married and he’ll be able to kiss her and hold her hand in public, and I never will!”

The knock on the door comes so abruptly they both jump out of their skin. Will stands up and Mike can see his own feelings echoed in the tension of his spine: like they’ve been caught doing something wrong.

“What,” Will says, shaky.

Jonathan pokes his head in and gives Mike the most scathing look he’s ever been on the receiving end of in his seventeen years.

“You okay?” He says softly, clearly directed only at Will. It’s probably fair. Fuck Mike, or whatever.

“We’re fine,” Will says. Mike says, “Yeah,” but then Jonathan gives him a look worse than the first one. Jeez.

“Winter storm warning’s been on the news all day. You’re not biking out of here.” Jonathan nods to the window. He looks like this is the worst news he’s had to deliver in his life. “You’d probably better call your mom and tell her you’re staying.” He shoots daggers at Mike again. “On the couch.”

“Jonathan!” Will groans.

Mike runs to the window. He’s not wrong: his poor bike is already half buried in a snowdrift, and it’s practically snowing sideways. Mom’s definitely losing her shit.

El’s sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water and a magazine when Mike runs down to the phone. She raises an eyebrow at him and he just shakes his head, dials his phone number, and holds his breath while he waits for a response.

”You’ve reached the Wheelers,” his mom says on the third ring.

”Mom,” he says. “Can you come get me?”

“Michael,” she says. “I was worried sick, and I can’t see an inch in front of my face out there. Can’t you stay at Will’s tonight?”

“I don’t really want to?” Stupidly, he feels the prickle of tears in his eyes. “We’re not really friends anymore,” he says softly. Which she knows, she has to, but he can hear her intake of breath, like she never thought he’d actually talk about it. And also I really like him and maybe he used to like me but I fucked it up beyond repair and I might be totally hopeless.

”So you got yourself stranded there in a blizzard?” His mom says finally. He groans, leans his forehead against the wall.

”I don’t know how to fix it,” he admits.

Karen sighs. “Sweetie, do you owe him an apology?”

He makes an undignified sound, like a dying animal. “Why’s it always my fault?” He shouts. El slurps her water obnoxiously.

“If it’s worth fixing, and I think it is,” Karen says. “Nobody ever said it would be easy.”

”So I can’t get a ride,” Mike says.

”I’ll try to pick you up in the morning, honey. And make sure you tell Joyce thank you.”

Sure, fuck, whatever.

He slams the phone on the receiver and slowly turns to face El. She’s not even pretending to read her magazine. Mike flips her off. “Why’s everyone in this house want me dead?”

”Bad behavior,” El shrugs. She flips him off too, seamlessly. Max is an incredible influence.

Mike slinks over to the kitchen table, but El is suddenly pretending to read her magazine again. It’s one of those hot pink gossip ones that he knows can’t actually be this interesting. “Elevennnnn,” he says. “Can we talk?”

She spits the ice cube she was chewing back into her glass. “It’s not me you need to talk to,” she says.

~

He ignores the advice for most of the night. Joyce manages to make it home from work early thanks to a coworker’s truck, and she comes bearing frozen pizzas. Dinner is horrendously awkward. The adults are civil to him, but he knows that everyone knows. He might actually be saved the humiliation of having to talk to Will by Hop pulling a shotgun on him if he tries to sneak to his room. Somehow, El’s his ally through the entire meal, the only one who talks to him like normal, and she even squeezes his hand once under the table. You can fix this, it seems to say. He doesn’t deserve her.

After dinner, Joyce gets him set up on the living room couch. He remembers the plaid print on her spare pillows from sleepovers at the old house.

“Need anything?” She asks, after she hands him an extra blanket and a hoodie that he recognizes as Will’s and tries not to think about.

”No, this is great,” he says. “Thanks.”

”Get some sleep,” she says. She pauses, like she’s thinking of saying something else but thinks better of it. “Goodnight.”

”Goodnight, Mrs. Byers.”

Mike does not sleep.

The racing thoughts are back again, and brighter than ever. Will had all but admitted Mike was the boy he’d been talking about. The crush he used to have. Mike flops over on his back and stares at the ceiling. Will liked him, and Mike threw it away because he couldn’t take a hint or get over himself or let go of the dying relationship that was hurting him and El both. And now Will’s right down the hall, and all Mike has to do is not step on any creaky floorboards and tell the fucking truth. Easier said than done.

He’s just gonna go to the bathroom, and then he’ll see if Will’s light is still on.

It is, and the door is cracked a little, which he’s taking as a good sign. So he’s gonna knock, and he’s gonna confess all his dark and messy thoughts, and he’s—

Will opens the door before he can do anything. He’s in a striped sweater and pajama pants and mismatched socks, and he looks so sad and warm Mike wants to curl up with him and never let go.

“Can I try again?” Mike says. Will, miraculously, steps aside and lets him in. Mike paces back and forth and then sits on the foot of the bed. Will stays standing, leaning against the door like an escape route.

”You know I love your painting, right?” Mike starts. “I love everything you paint. I have, like, a book of your drawings from when we were little. I used to look at them when you were missing.” It’s too much and too honest and saying it feels a little bit like throwing up, but something’s changing in Will’s expression already, and he reminds himself: worth fixing.

“When you gave me the painting, and I thought it was from you, I felt like—maybe we could be close again. Like you still wanted to try, even though I was an asshole and neither of us reached out. And then you said it was from El, and I didn’t really understand ‘cause she was never into any of that stuff, but you guys got so close when you were gone and I thought, maybe it’s for the best, you know? You wouldn’t—lie about her wanting to fix things.”

Will says his name softly, but Mike barrels on.

”There’s one more thing, okay? When I realized it was from you, I was scared because I wanted it to be from you. So badly. I think I probably always wanted you to tell me, hey, clearly El doesn’t need you, but I do, and here’s this really nice gift, and what are you gonna do about it.” He laughs nervously. “And then when you told us there was someone…”

He takes a breath. He’s been running his mouth at a hundred miles an hour, because he’s afraid if he stops he won’t start again, but Will’s still standing by the door, looking so nervous and so far away, and Mike’s tired of him being both of those things.

“Can you come here?”

Will cracks a little smile and walks over. He lets Mike tug him down next to him by the sleeve of his sweater. He’s still avoiding Mike’s eye, glancing up and back down at his feet. His cheeks are pink. Mike’s heart is in his throat.

“Okay. When you told us that you — liked a boy. I freaked out a little, and I’m sorry. I should have hugged you sooner. And I don’t know if I’m exactly like you, or if I’m something else, or if you’re right and I could pretend to be happy in some suburban bullshit marriage, but I don’t care because all I’ve done since is think about how badly I wanted it to be me.”

Will’s breath catches. He’s looking at Mike finally, eyes wide and green and open, and Mike’s so obsessed with him it makes his stomach hurt.

“And I don’t want to be some crush you got over, I want it to still be me, and always be me, and I’m fucking terrified that I’m too late.”

”Mike.” Will says. “Of course it’s you.”

”Like—“ Mike fidgets with the hem of his sleeve. “Still me?”

Will laughs, and his eyes are wet. “Still you.”

When Mike kisses him, it feels like coming home. Like staying up all night at a sleepover, laughing in Mike’s basement until his dad got mad. Like coasting down the big hill on Cornwallis without hitting the breaks, the way your stomach swoops at the bottom. It’s just a press of lips, because Mike’s still half-afraid he’s misreading everything and is going to find himself on his ass in the snow on Will’s front steps, but it makes sense, kissing Will, like he’s not really sure why he spent so much time not doing it.

He pulls back after a second, or tries to, because then Will’s hand is in his hair and he’s pulling Mike in and kissing him back. They’re definitely both crying a little and Will tastes like salt and the stupid toothpaste Joyce buys that Mike doesn’t like but might have to use for the rest of his life. He curls his fist in Will’s sweater to pull him closer, and Will tugs on the hair at the back of his neck until his lips fall open and Will licks into his mouth. Something about this gives him crazy butterflies, that Will presumably has no idea what he’s doing but instinctually knows how to want him like this. Mike’s never been one to play fair so he bites down on Will’s bottom lip, enough to get a noise out of the back of his throat, and then does a spectacularly clumsy job of laying them down without stopping for air. Will giggles against his mouth and it’s the best thing Mike’s ever heard.

He has the distinct thought that it’s never felt like this before.

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize sooner,” Mike says when they finally break apart. Will looks all dazed, like it’s taking a second for him to register Mike’s words. His lips are bitten pink. Mike wants to spend the rest of his life making it up to Will. He wants to start right now.

Will reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. His fingers trail down Mike’s neck and come to rest in the dip of his throat, and Mike shivers. “When did you realize?”

”Like—“ Mike swallows. Best guess: “An hour ago?”

“Michael.” Will sits up suddenly, and Mike whines about it. He’s giving what Mike assumes is supposed to be a stern look, but his eyes are smiling. “I have spent —“ he throws his hands around wildly. “My entire life—and you—an hour?”

Mike groans and covers his face with his hands. “I’ve been called an idiot, like, historically.”

”Mike, if you’re not sure about this, I can’t…” Will folds in on himself, lost in his big sweater. “I think it would kill me if you decided you didn’t mean it.”

Mike sits up and pries his hand out of his lap, lacing their fingers together. He catches Will’s eye and holds him there. “I promise.” He laughs a little. “It was a really long hour.”

Will smiles and tucks his face into Mike’s neck. His breath is warm on his skin and Mike files it under his currently very rapidly expanding list of favorite things. And then—

“Wait,” Mike realizes. “Your entire life?”

Will’s face burns hot. “Well, probably a lot of it. I didn’t really have a word for it, when we were kids. It was like, you’d go home at night and I’d miss you more than the other guys. I just wanted to hold your hand.”

Since they’re being honest, Mike says: “I always felt like something was wrong with me. Before, with El, it was fun, I guess, but I always wanted to want her more than I did. I mean, you know her. She’s amazing and strong and kind and pretty and I was there and I took her in and I guess we both thought that must be enough.” He frowns, thinking back to what she’d said in their breakup, how she’d looked at him in that way that made him feel exposed. “When she broke up with me, it was like she knew something I didn’t. I guess with my parents and stuff, it was hard to know. I wasn’t allowed to look at it. Not like it was any easier for you, but I don’t think I could kiss you in my house.”

Will hums. He looks up at Mike again, his eyes soft, his lips quirked up in a smile. There’s a freckle by the corner of his mouth that Mike wants to lick, or something. “I guess you’ll just have to kiss me in my house, then.”

”Yeah.” Mike says. There’s a pause.

”Mike,” Will says, sheepish. “You should kiss me again.”

So he does.