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The quick answer is that Steve wanted to visit Jonathan. He’d hauled his behind all the way to New York and knocked on Jon’s door at the ass end of the evening just to visit, and because Jon is one of only about four people that are capable of knocking some sense into Steve the Hair Harrington’s thick, hairspray-coated Skittle-shell of a head, Jon did the responsible thing: forced him to get eight hours before he tried to explain himself.
So, the quick answer is, Steve’s waking up on Jon’s roommate’s shitty, musty sheets because he wanted to visit Jonathan. And because Jon’s roommate wasn’t home.
Unfortunately, it’s been eight hours, and now Jon seemed to want the long answer, and it’s an answer that Steve didn’t have because that would’ve involved explaining why he wanted to visit and… well, he just didn’t know.
So, he picked a different question and answered that instead.
“Coffee. I want coffee. Know anywhere to get a decent cup of coffee around here?”
Jon shook his head in disbelief from the other bed.
---
“So, bought a bunch of flowers, y’know, something real pretty. You know what the ladies like, right? Yeah, you know what they like. And, you know,” two expressive hands flew away from the diner’s bench table and into the air, “who wouldn’t wanna get a nice bunch of flowers, right? Right? I like flowers, you like flowers. Girls like flowers! Well, anyway, Candace wasn’t into it-”
“Wait, Candace?” Jon interrupted. “I thought you were dating, uh,” he snapped his fingers, “Katy?” At least, that was the name Steve had given him over the phone not two days ago, all puppy-dog excited about a date at the bowling alley.
“Dude, no, Katy was- this was before Katy. Geez, if you’re gonna help me out here then you’ve gotta keep up.”
This conversation was making Jon’s bacon go cold. “Help you with what, exactly?”
“Figuring out why I can’t keep a single lady happy, dude.”
“You want me to help you… fix you relationships?”
“Yeah!” Steve took a big bite from his pancakes and with a full mouth he emphasised his point. “Fix my goddamn relationships!”
Head in hands, Jon groaned.
---
“I asked Robin about it afterwards and she totally agreed with me, dude. It’s a goddamn funny movie!”
It was a pretty funny movie, Jon privately had to agree.
“But Chloe clearly did not agree.”
Steve pulled a can beef soup from the shelf, letting it crash against the walls of the shopping cart as it fell in.
Jon coughed around his cigarette. “Did she, like, leave you at the theatre?”
“No,” Steve sighed. “I drove her home. It was super awkward, she didn’t say a single word.”
Jon winced behind a puff of smoke.
“Okay but she clearly doesn’t like the same shit as you, so maybe you dodged a bullet there,” he tried to reason, only for Steve to pluck the cigarette right out his hand.
“Dodged one bullet or the whole damn clip? I mean, how many times can I ‘dodge the bullet’ before it starts being a pattern, man?”
The way Steve took a drag, no coughing, no cringing expression, was far too practiced for Jonathan’s comfort.
“…Since when do you smoke, dude?”
He wanted to take the cig back, take another drag for himself, but the image Steve made was so lonely. The half-burnt stub dangling from two fingers, his eyes fixated a little wild-looking, a little blank on the embers, haloed in the too-warm fluorescent glow. Jon couldn’t bring himself to break that image. Not like this, anyway. Steve was made for surer, steadier hands.
“Helps with the stress, I guess.”
“Yeah.” Jon looked away. “Yeah, it does.”
---
If Jon was understanding correctly, Darlene was first. Some girl from school, Jon had never noticed her himself but he’s certain she noticed Steve. Everyone did. Jon did. Darlene did, and then she did again, and then one date turned to two, and two turned to unanswered calls, turned to Robin’s phone ringing off the hook, turned to “there’s plenty more fish in the sea!” and that was that.
Second, then, was Stephanie, who was the single mother of one of those baseball kids. Honestly, Jon would consider her the most promising of the bunch, but that was mostly because he’d heard the way Steve talked about Stephanie’s son. It wasn’t unique, exactly. Steve really loved all those kids, he really did his best to be there for all of them. Bill was one of the kids he’d had more luck connecting with, for sure, but that still wasn’t enough in the end. They fizzled out after a mild three weeks.
Steve spent a little longer mourning that relationship, particularly since he still had to see Stephanie’s little tyke once or twice a week at practice that semester, but eventually he hit it off with Carrie. Carrie did an excellent job of lifting Steve out of his stupor. She did not do an excellent job of sticking around. It was at this point that Jon identified the clear pattern. For all the parting ways that occurred in Steve’s little rollercoaster of a life, never was he the initiator. He was doing a hell of a lot of being-broken-up-with, not much of the breaking. It made Jon… just kind of sad.
And that was when Steve met and lost Chloe at the movie theatre. You know this one. And Candace shortly after that, though there were a couple of doomed flings in between.
And finally, Katy. The girl Steve had been so thrilled to be taking bowling literally two days ago. Steve hadn’t bothered regaling Jonathan with the tale of that surely-fruitless venture, but whatever it was it had been damaging enough for Steve to drop everything and scarper all the way to Jonathan’s roommate’s shitty, musty sheets.
I may have misled you somewhat about the number of versions of this story that exist. There’s the quick version, and for sure there’s the long version, too. But there’s also a sort of mid-length, moderate-pace, in-between version.
“I ran out of women in Hawkins.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jon rightfully reacted.
“I don’t see why you’re complaining, man. You wanted me to come to New York and now I’m in New York.”
“Yeah, I wanted you to move to New York, in a structured, premeditated way. Not this.” He gestured with the jeans in his hand. Steve’s jeans. Steve’s new jeans, right off the discount rack, about to be tossed right next to Steve’s new shirts and socks and underwear because god forbid Steve could’ve thought about maybe packing a bag before he took the midnight train going anywhere. “And I didn’t want you to move in with me just so you could work your way through every girl in the city.”
Jon, uncharitably, muttered something under his breath that might’ve been ‘so stupid’ or ‘oblivious douchebag’.
“Look, clearly Hawkins is some kind of a bad-luck charm, sucking out all of my good mojo with its… its bad mojo, and the ladies here in NY are gonna react totally differently.”
“No, they’re not, Steve. They’re gonna react exactly the same because they’re not the problem.”
Jon winced as soon as the words left his mouth.
“Yeah, dude, Hawkins is the problem, I just said that. Wait, you don’t think,” Steve smacked Jon’s arm, “you don’t think I’m the problem, do you?”
“…I didn’t say that.”
Steve, fuck, Steve looked genuinely upset. “Dude, what the hell…”
Jon tried not to flounder. “The problem is that you’re looking for answers in the wrong place.”
It took a second for Steve to pretend not to be hurt. “Yeah, dude. Hawkins. I just said that.”
---
Jon’s fork and Steve’s spoon made a tepid kind of scraping sound against the plastic shells of their TV dinners, but the only reason Jon could’ve told you that was because Steve was being so uncharacteristically quiet. They were eating the same thing but attacking it from different angles, because Jon had only bothered to invest in one set of utensils. After all, he was just one guy. He thought it was kind of fitting. Steve the Spoon gently and delicately scooped about six tubes of macaroni up at a time. Jon the Fork stabbed his way to their centres, picking them off one-by-one, letting some of the sauce slip through the tines. Well, maybe he was being a little hard on himself.
“…Do you really think it won’t be any different?” Steve asked quietly, gazing down at a spoonful that Jon realised he had been not-eating for a good few minutes now. He chuckled emptily, and the spoon slapped back into the plastic shell. “It probably won’t make a difference where I go, you know? The chicks don’t…”
He scrubbed his hand over his face.
“Y’know, they don’t want…”
Stared at the carpet.
“…What am I doing wrong, man?”
God, he looked so lonely. Jon gently pulled the TV dinner from his hands and replaced it with his own fingers. He even dropped to the floor so that Steve wouldn’t feel threatened.
“You’re not doing anything wrong, Steve,” he muttered. “You’re just looking in the wrong places.”
The eyes that met Jon’s were tired and hollow, desperate and open.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Steve begged.
It may have been because Jon was a product of his time that he was such a coward, or possibly because he’d lived this experience from the passenger seat, but even now he couldn’t bring himself to say the big, scary, ostracising words that Steve needed to hear.
“Steve,” he buzzed low, deep in his throat and his chest. “You were looking for a woman and you came to me.” His thumbs tracked smooth patterns over the back of Steve’s knuckles. “I think your body knew what it was doing before your brain had the chance to catch up. Does that make sense?”
Steve didn’t answer but for the trembling of his fingers. It didn’t matter; Jon knew what those eyes looked like, the ones that know and are too afraid to say it. They ran in his family. So, he stopped asking Steve to talk.
As Jonathan leaned up, he pulled Steve down by the nape of his neck, closing the space between them, pressing their mouths together and waiting patiently for the tears, the punch, the fervent denial.
Steve kissed Jonathan back like it was his only chance. His hand overlaid Jon’s at his neck and it, in tandem with their other still-grasped fingers, clenched around Jon as one might grip a lifeline, and, privately, Jonathan was glad to have been right.
---
The long answer was that Steve is sleeping on Jon’s shitty, musty sheets because he wanted to visit Jonathan, and maybe he didn’t know it at the time but he wanted Jonathan to kiss some sense into him with such magnetic intensity that it had dragged him all the way across state lines. The long answer was that Steve was never really as sure about what he wanted as he seemed to think he was, but he was right when he’d said that it wasn’t Nancy Wheeler. Maybe it had been, once, but time is an impervious, viscous cheese sauce that was always falling through the tines. The long answer was that Steve has tried all different types of love and decided that the one he was missing was the kind that tasted of cigarette smoke and called him a douchebag sometimes, but let him in anyway.