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On New Year’s Day, less than two months after the bomb and the end of the Upside Down, Mike comes out to Will.
A lot of unexpected things have happened to Will by that point. He saw a whole world collapse, taking his sister with it. He watched his mom fall in love again after his dad effectively threw her heart on the ground and stomped on it. He befriended another real, actual gay person in Hawkins, Indiana—two, even, after the dust settled and Robin introduced him to Vickie properly.
Still, Will is completely at a loss when, at two a.m. on the first day of 1988, Mike turns to him and says, “I need to tell you something.”
They’re lying on Mike’s basement floor, less than a foot between their sleeping bags, laughing about Nancy and Jonathan’s latest awkward attempt at friendship when suddenly Mike goes all serious. Will is tipsy off of one glass of champagne—as if his defenses aren’t already low enough from being within touching distance of Mike—and he softens as Mike’s brow furrows. A thin beam of dim, orange light from the half-open bathroom door keeps them safe from total darkness. Will can just barely see the shadows deepen below Mike’s eyes. He loves the sloping planes of Mike’s face, the way they absorb the light. The subtle shine at the swell of his mouth. Will learned how to shade, drawing that face.
“Of course,” he says, forcing his gaze up to Mike’s eyes. “What’s up?”
They’ve gotten even closer these last two months—another thing Will never saw coming. He’d been fully prepared to lie low until college, let Mike lick his El-related wounds in peace and pray that he never connected the dots enough to figure out Will’s so-called crush. But Mike leaned on Will when the grief got too big to carry alone, and Will leaned back. They held each other up. Mike made good on his promise: they were best friends.
Maybe Will should feel wronged, should hate Mike for all the shared glances and weighted statements and casual touches that never amounted to anything—but the thing about Mike is that Will loves him, as simply and reflexively as breathing. He’s never loved another boy, and it’s increasingly difficult for him to imagine he ever will. Robin was right, in a way. Will doesn’t need Mike to reciprocate his feelings the way he used to. He’s not the velveteen rabbit; he doesn’t need Mike’s love to make him real. As a result, everything between them feels less fraught, sweeter. It’s probably pathetic—at least, that’s what the meanest voice in his head tells him late at night—but sometimes Will thinks that even if he loved Mike forever and never got anything back, that would be okay. Just getting to love him would be enough.
“You know what you told everyone at the Squawk, before…?” Mike asks, not quite looking Will in the eye.
“Yeah,” Will answers. Of course he knows what Mike’s talking about, even without specifics. It’s dark, but sometimes he feels like laughing about it—all that buildup, all that fear, and his coming out had been the least important thing that happened that whole day.
“Um, I’ve been thinking, and—I think I—” Mike cuts himself off and screws his face up, turning back to face the ceiling. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say this,” he says, one hand over his eyes. “Or, I do, I just—”
“That’s okay, take your time,” Will tells him, impressed by the evenness of his own voice. Privately, his heart has relocated to his large intestine. This is it. Time to face the music. Mike has finally figured him out.
Mike blows out a breath. “I think that I’m the same way.”
Will blinks. Waits a moment. Mike does not elaborate. And then, all at once, Will gets what he’s actually trying to say.
“As—as me?” he asks. His voice is definitely uneven now.
“Yeah,” Mike says to the ceiling.
“But you’ve—I mean—” Will doesn’t know where to start. There are about a hundred reasons why that doesn’t make any sense, and ninety-eight of them have to do with his sister, whose name they still can’t really say without breaking down. The other two are that this is Mike, and Will is supposed to be alone in this, like he’s been alone in so many other hard things.
Mike chances a glance over at him. “I know. That’s what kind of started this, because, like, you know. I’ve been thinking about her so much.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s not that I didn’t love her, it’s just—I couldn’t do it the way I was supposed to, I guess?” Mike scrunches his face up again. “Like, I was scared to tell her I loved her because I was scared of losing her, sure, but really it was also because I knew she wanted me to mean it, you know, that way, and the idea of saying that to her—it made me, like—nauseous. Every time I thought about doing it, it just—it felt like a lie.”
He looks so sad just saying it; Will can’t begin to imagine how painful it must have been for Mike to agonize over this for—god, how long? Years? He thinks about California, about all the pep talks he gave Mike. About Mike looking right at him in that godforsaken pizza shop in the middle of the desert, the lights going haywire all around them. He thinks about how Mike looked then.
Terrified.
“I’m sorry,” Will says softly, earnestly. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well.” Mike looks at him and shrugs. “I didn’t want anybody to. I thought I was just, like, broken. And then you—” He laughs. “I can’t believe you just said it. That you just knew. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out.”
Will looks at Mike, considering. He wants to believe him, badly. But also—maybe El just hadn’t been the right girl for him? Just because Mike didn’t love El, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t love some other hypothetical girl, someday. Will’s having a hard time letting that one last reason go. Sure, this is Mike, okay. But Will is supposed to be alone in this. Life has taught him not to hope, so this can’t possibly be what it looks like. Because if this is what it looks like, then it’s halfway to being the thing Will has tried not to hope for more than anything in the world.
He decides to rip off the band-aid. “So, I mean, you’ve thought about…?”
And knock him over with a feather, Mike quickly fills in the blank. “Guys? Yeah.”
Mike swallows, and Will watches the shadow underneath his Adam’s apple move in the low light.
“Like…”
“Like that, yeah.”
Which is all very…unprecedented. Mike is seriously going off-script, here. The Mike that lives in Will’s head has never fantasized about men—or if he has, he would rather die than admit it.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Mike says, plainly embarrassed. “I mean, I think I sort of didn’t want to acknowledge it. Or, like, admit it to myself, if that makes any fucking sense. But I mean, yeah. Since I was, like…god.” He laughs. “Since I was—twelve?”
Twelve. It’s like Mike is doing this on purpose, coming up with more and more things to make Will’s brain explode. Okay, sure, it’s Mike telling him this—and maybe he’s telling the truth, and Will doesn’t actually have to be alone with this. Maybe they don’t have to walk blindly into an adulthood they’ve been given no roadmap for, a life that every news station says will end too soon. Maybe they can help each other figure out the way forward.
But—Mike’s felt this way since they were twelve? That’s almost five years.
Will figured it out when he was four, thrown together with some other kids at the playground so his mom could grab a smoke or poke her head in the nearest bar, try to find his dad. He learned from a very young age that even the way he played pretend was wrong. Princes married princesses, kings married queens. These facts—stated plainly, obviously, as if read from a rule book that Will had never been given—didn’t stop Will from knowing, the same way he knew his own name and birthday, that he wanted something different.
Of course he’d tried to want the normal thing anyway, especially after the Upside Down. Suddenly the girls at school were fascinated by him, and he knew that he should do…something about that, even if the what was perpetually unclear to him. He danced with the pretty girls at the Snow Ball. He tried to imagine what it would be like to hold a girl, kiss her like all the heroes did in all the movies. He couldn’t picture it. He thought he must have been wired wrong—that if everyone’s brain was a little bit like a receiver, he was the only one getting the wrong frequencies.
It was like Mike said, just now. Will knows what it’s like to feel broken.
Mike looks at him that way he does sometimes—like Will is a puzzle he wishes he could solve. Even in the low light, Will could get lost in that stare. It’s incredible, really, that he hasn’t developed an immunity to it yet, that it still makes his heart stutter, every time. Will thinks he could mix paint for years and still never capture the exact color of Mike’s eyes. The bottomless, rich brown. And, Jesus, they really are lying right next to each other right now, aren’t they? Have they been this close to each other this whole time?
“Can you say something now?” Mike asks, quiet, and Will wants to kick himself. Mike is vulnerable, probably scared, and here he is, mooning at him. Useless. Pathetic.
“Yeah, sorry,” Will says on a heavy exhale. “Don’t take this the wrong way, I just sort of feel like I’m having an out of body experience.”
Mike raises his eyebrows. “Oh, sure, why would I take that the wrong way?”
“No, sorry, I’m—Mike, that’s—that’s amazing,” Will says, laughing. Because it is. When he lets it sink in, lets himself believe that this is real, he feels like he’s three, seeing a sparkler on the Fourth of July for the first time; like he’s six and he just saw the opening credits of Star Wars. He is amazed.
“Yeah?” Mike asks, and there’s that stare again. Will is determined to ignore it, to be a good friend for once.
“Are you kidding? I actually have someone to talk to about this stuff now, and it’s my best friend,” he gushes. “I mean, Robin’s great, obviously, but she’s going to be at college soon, and, you know, I’m pretty sure girl stuff is different anyway…”
He trails off because Mike is still staring at him, a small smile on his face.
“Wow,” he says quietly. “You’re really excited.”
“Well, yeah,” Will laughs. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know,” Mike admits, turning to face the ceiling again. “I guess I just didn’t want you to feel, like, weird about it, or to think I expected anything from you, or something.”
And Will had been ready to say something, eager to reassure Mike that there’s no way he would ever feel weird about this, but that second part makes him come up short. What could Mike possibly expect from Will that Will wouldn’t be ready to give him, no questions asked?
Mike breaks the silence eagerly, the nylon of his sleeping bag rustling as he shakes his head. “God, I’m not making any fucking sense,” he says, laughing dryly. “Ignore me.”
And maybe on another night, Will would make him elaborate, would screw up all his post-Vecna courage to tell Mike to stop talking in circles about them—about him. To explain that when Mike says shit like that it hurts him, makes hope burn bright and searing in his chest and shame crash over him in a cold, brutal wave.
But Mike has been so honest tonight, and as Will looks at him, his dark hair spilling onto his teal sleeping bag—the same one he’s been sleeping in, next to Will, since they were too little for their feet to reach the bottom—Will knows that Mike is just another kid like him. He’s sure that Mike is just as scared and lost as he is about all the normal Hawkins teenager stuff, like college and acne and the government’s molasses-like progress on lifting established quarantine protocol. But now Will knows that Mike is scared about all the stuff beyond that too, just like him. He understands that Mike, who is often so anxious about saying the right thing that he manages to say the absolute wrong thing, wouldn’t have told him this if he hadn’t contemplated every angle of it. Every implication. Mike, too, is thinking about what it means to try and have a future and be gay at the same time—two things that, as far as the world they live in is concerned, are fundamentally incompatible.
So Will decides to let them both just enjoy this—the newfound understanding forged by Mike’s confession, the sweetness of a shared secret, the promise of a new year.
Will says, “Okay,” and then, “thanks for telling me.”
Mike smiles at him, uncharacteristically shy, and nudges their shoulders together. Even through his sleeping bag, Will feels the contact like a shock, like Mike shuffled across his mom’s old shag carpet before he touched him.
“Yeah,” Mike tells Will, looking up at him like Will is two feet taller than he really is, a small smile tugging on one side of his mouth. And, god. Will doesn’t understand Mike, but he loves him. “Of course.”
—
On February 14th, another unexpected thing happens. Mike asks Will to come to his house while his parents are at church. Just Will, nobody else.
The asking isn’t that unexpected. Singling Will out isn’t, either. They’ve been closer than ever since New Year’s. Will wondered, after Mike came out to him, if that meant he was going to let the rest of the party know, too, but he hasn’t. And now that Will knows this thing about Mike, it’s like he’s received exclusive access to a whole other part of his life—a part that Will didn’t even know Mike was keeping from other people in the first place.
Things at the Wheeler house are not good. Mike’s dad got home from the hospital in mid-December, and Mrs. Wheeler acted like it was a Christmas miracle. But in the wake of their town nearly succumbing to a fairly accurate rendering of Christian hell, churchgoing is the hottest thing in Hawkins, and Ted Wheeler—medically dead for three-point-five minutes, obviously spared for some higher purpose—can be seen every Sunday hobbling into a pew. He’s hooked on Pat Robertson—hammered his campaign sign into their front lawn, wears a Robertson ’88 button, shells out extra for the Christian Broadcasting Network, the whole deal. As far as Ted Wheeler is concerned, God used those earthquakes to take a scourge out of Hawkins, a warning to cities like New York and San Francisco. Karen takes him to church, a hand on his arm to help him walk, and preens while all the nice ladies coo over her scars sympathetically. Mostly, though, she’s too drunk—or too busy pretending not to be drunk—to care too much about anything.
Will knows this stuff now because he’s the person that Mike calls late at night, so angry he’s near tears, after another frigid dinner table debate with his dad. It’s scary, honestly, some of the stuff Mike’s dad believes. At least Will’s dad was just ignorant, talking out of his ass because he knew exactly what to say to get under Will’s skin, but Mike’s dad has subscribed to an entire belief system that would happily justify the death of his only son. And at her best, Karen wishes everyone would just get along. No wonder Nancy is still with Jonathan all the time, even though they aren’t together anymore.
So yeah, it’s not so crazy that Mike would ask Will to hang out one on one, especially while his parents aren’t home. But, well. February 14th is Valentine’s Day. Will didn’t just magically forget that, even as Mike babbled some nonsense about wanting to show him a new comic book or talk through their next campaign, or something. That part is a tad unprecedented.
Not that there hasn’t been…something happening between them, Will is pretty sure. Ninety-eight percent sure. The first few times he’d chalked it up to their newfound closeness, but that logic only took him so far. Will is just four—maybe three—more instances of Mike openly staring at his mouth away from having a complete mental breakdown. Or kissing Mike. Or both.
So Mike is maybe attracted to him. Will can incorporate that into his worldview, insofar as Mike is attracted to guys and Will is the only guy in Hawkins who might, hypothetically, be interested. Obviously, Will is interested. He bombed a chemistry test just last week because he’d been up half the night absolutely wired at the thought of it. The fact that Mike might, hypothetically, be interested back is ruining his life.
But Will isn’t going to do anything about it. Really, he’s not. He knows now more than ever just how much he’d be throwing away if he traded his and Mike’s friendship for something physical. It’s not like that’s what Will really wants, anyway. Or, like, yeah, of course he wants that, but more than he wants Mike to just kiss him already, he wants Mike to ask him out on a date. He wants to hold Mike’s hand. He wants to be Mike’s boyfriend.
And obviously none of that is going to happen, so, yeah. A casual Valentine’s Day hang feels loaded.
Will still ruffles his hair into something presentable and puts on his best outfit—his nicest cords, Jonathan’s old The Clash tee, and the green tartan wool overshirt his mom bought him last month. And then he bikes over to Mike’s, face burning despite the bitter February chill, and steels himself for whatever it is he’s walking into.
Mike greets him around back, at the basement door, and Will’s resolve immediately weakens. Mike is in a blue and maroon-striped rugby shirt, his nicest jeans, and the white Converse that he bought just so Will could draw all over them. Will follows him through the door, and he swears he can smell cologne, the fancy Hugo Boss stuff that Mike’s mom got him for Christmas—the same cologne he’d wrinkled his nose at when the rest of the party was making fun of Mike for it, even though he secretly finds it sexy.
So, okay. If Mike just wants to kiss Will, maybe that’ll be fine.
It doesn’t take long at all for Will to find out why Mike invited him over, though, because he’s barely sat down on the couch before Mike starts explaining himself, pacing in front of Will like he’s about to give a presentation.
“Okay, so, I mean, it’s Valentine’s Day, obviously,” he starts, and Will fights valiantly not to react. I am aware, Mike, thanks. “And the other day I was thinking about—I don’t even know if you even remember this, but, you know when we were little and we would get these at school, and then at lunch we would try and make up stories with whatever words we got?” He hands Will a small, pink box with hearts stamped all over the front, the candy inside rustling as it moves. Conversation hearts. “Anyway, you’ve been so great lately, helping me out with—everything, and I just wanted to, you know. Tell you that I’m grateful, I guess.”
Will stares at the box in his hand, feeling winded. He doesn’t know how it still manages to sneak up on him, after all this time, but sometimes he forgets that Mike is so sweet. If pretending not to be in love with someone was a video game, Mike would be the final boss.
“Where did you even get this?” he asks, turning the box over in his palm. Melvald’s is still boarded up; the government is releasing their chokehold on Hawkins as slowly as possible. They’re still eating flash-frozen rations at school like FEMA refugees.
“Murray,” Mike says simply. “Open it. Let’s see what you got.”
So Will does, gently unlatching the cardboard top and pulling out one candy at a time, reading the messages as he goes. He places them in a little line on his thigh: blue, yellow, orange.
“Okay, what’ve we got here. ‘Be mine,’ ‘be mine,’ man, another ‘be mine.’ What are the odds of getting three in a row, do you think?” he murmurs to Mike, shaking another candy out of the box. It’s yellow, the red writing on it shining up at him almost mockingly. “Another ‘be mine,’ this is—” Will pours a handful of hearts onto his palm and sorts through them with one pointer finger, turning each one over to read it. Finally, he looks up at Mike, totally at a loss. “I’m sorry, I think maybe this is a defective box, or something? They all say ‘be mine.’”
Mike snorts out a laugh, but there’s no humor behind it. “Uh, yeah, no, I don’t think so,” he tells Will, settling next to him on the couch. His left knee jiggles like he’s just ingested Looney Tunes earthquake pills.
Will frowns at him. “I’ve never seen a box where they all say the same thing, have you?”
Mike bites at the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, so, you know how I said I asked Murray to get me, uh, just the one box?” He glances furtively at Will, who nods dumbly, the small pile of candy hearts growing moist in his sweaty hand. “I actually asked him to get me, like, forty.”
Mike watches as everything clicks into place for Will—just watches, like he hasn’t just blown Will’s world into smithereens. Shiny-eyed surprise irons the pinched confusion out of Will’s face, and his breath catches in his throat. He still feels completely bewildered, but in a different way. He feels like there’s hope shining out of his pores.
“What?”
“I’m—I like you,” Mike blurts out. “And I know that this is, like, corny, and apparently kind of confusing, but I wanted to, I don’t know.“ He shrugs dramatically, his shoulders almost up to his ears and his hands slapping together in his lap. “It’s Valentine’s Day, and I just—thought you should know.”
Will is speechless. Paralyzed, actually, the candy hearts still sweating in his palm and lined up on his thigh. He should save them, he thinks distantly. He should figure out a way to, like, preserve them in resin, or something. But he doesn’t move. He just keeps staring at Mike, his eyes swimming, and Mike must have really had to psych himself up for this, because now he’s so keyed up that he can’t stop talking.
“And it’s not like I can ask you to a dance, or even really on a date, so,” he gestures lamely at the hearts. “Don’t ask how long it took to sort them, okay? I mean, especially if you don’t—uh, you know, don’t feel the same way. In that case, definitely please don’t ask. Really ‘I’m yours’ probably would have been more appropriate, because ‘be mine’ is sort of like, you know, I want to possess you, a little bit Freddy Krueger, but—anyway. I figured, I don’t know, close enough. I do have, like, fifty thousand candy hearts that say ‘cutie pie’ on them now, though, if you know anybody who’s looking. Like, seriously, there were so many that for a second there I was like, shit, maybe I should just go with ‘cutie pie,’ but that seemed, I don’t know, not particularly romantic, or whatever, so—”
“Yes,” Will finally cuts in, trying to put Mike out of his misery.
“Not that that’s not true, I mean, of course, you know, I think you’re—”
“Mike,” Will tries again, louder this time. “Yes.”
Mike finally stops short, looking up at him. “Yes?”
Will holds up one of the hearts—a pastel green one—between his thumb and forefinger and repeats, “Yes.” He sniffles, because of course he’s crying. He cries over sad commercials, how could he not cry about this? “I—god, Mike, I like you, too,” he says, laughing wetly.
He puts the candies back in their box and places it somewhere safe, lest he snot all over them, and then he does the bravest thing he’s done in months: he puts his hand on Mike’s knee. It stills immediately.
“If that’s really what you want,” Will says, his voice low and quiet, “I’m—yeah. I’m yours.”
“Oh,” Mike says, somehow sounding shocked. “Okay. That’s—cool.”
Will can’t help it. He has to laugh. “Yeah. Super cool.”
“Sorry, I’m just—really?” Mike is doing it again. Staring at Will like he’s speaking in code.
“Yes,” Will confirms in plain English. “What?”
Mike circles a finger next to his head. “Sorry, I’m—recalibrating. I had a whole, like, explanation.”
“What, like you needed to convince me?” Will asks, and he’s joking, because he’s spent a quarter of his life looking at Mike and thinking I love you at him so hard that he figures, to anyone with eyes, he’s as good as said it. Several times.
But Mike just frowns and says, “Well, yeah!”
“That’s…insane,” Will laughs, because it is. Alternate dimensions and telekinetic children and kid-obsessed megamonsters are nothing—this is the craziest thing he’s ever heard.
“Why?”
“Because, Mike,” Will says, like that’s enough of an explanation all by itself. It really should be, in Will’s opinion, but—well, Mike has put all his cards on the table, so maybe Will should, too. “Because I was already yours, before any of this,” he says before he can convince himself not to. “Because I’m—I’ve been crazy about you for, like, a really long time.”
“You have?” Mike asks, and Will could scream. How can he possibly make Mike understand that he’s Mike? That Will has loved him through several shaggy haircuts and dubious fashion choices, across thousands of miles and against insurmountable odds. That in the darkest moments of Will’s life, his love for Mike has been a tiny pinprick of light, his own personal Polaris. That if Will’s heart was made of candy, it would say MIKE in big, red letters.
Will doesn’t have a chance to start saying any of that, though, because Mike asks the million-dollar question: “How long?”
Will takes a deep breath. Winces. “Eighth grade?” he tells Mike with one eye open. “At least?”
“Will,” Mike says, like Will just told him he’s been bopping around with black lung, or the bubonic plague. He’s gripping Will’s hand—the one that was on his knee—like a lifeline. “What—how did you survive? I only figured this out six weeks ago, and I felt like I was gonna die if I didn’t tell you today.”
And, hey, Will thinks, that’s really sweet, but also—what? “You figured this out six weeks ago?”
Mike’s cheeks go a little pink. “Yeah,” he admits, fiddling with Will’s fingers. “You gave Holly a Christmas present and I got this crazy, like, pain in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack for a second. I thought I was going to die.” He laughs. “And then on New Year’s Eve, when everyone was counting down to midnight, I had this thought, and, like, it was suddenly so clear. I wanted to kiss you.”
Mike looks right at him as he says that last part, and Will thinks he would do anything to save this moment, to remember in perfect clarity what it looked like when Mike looked right at him and said, “I wanted to kiss you.” He also thinks he has not properly breathed in about ten minutes.
“What the fuck,” Will says, exhaling, because what the fuck else can he possibly say to that. And Mike laughs, surprised, so Will laughs, too. He’s so happy he feels a little crazy. He’s reminded, weirdly, of Willy Wonka and that scene where Charlie drinks the Fizzy Lifting Drink. He thinks that if Mike wasn’t holding his hand, he might just float away.
“Sorry, I’m like—” Mike starts, then shakes his head. “I know I did, like, a big gesture, but I don’t know what to do next. I sort of didn’t plan this far ahead.”
Even as Mike says it, he’s staring at Will’s mouth. Will fights back a smirk. He barely recognizes his own voice when he asks, “What do you want to do?”
“Um,” Mike says, barely even bothering to look up and meet Will’s eyes. “I sort of really want to kiss you, if that’s okay.”
If that’s okay. Will could laugh right in his beautiful face. I sort of really want to give you the most romantic Valentine’s Day of your life, if that’s okay. I sort of really want to make all of your wildest dreams come true, if that’s okay.
Somehow, Will thinks he can agree to those terms. He does desperately need to blow his nose first, though, so he fumbles his way through a response—”Yeah, that’s—definitely, just—one sec”—and does his best to gracefully excuse himself to the restroom.
He splashes some water on his face and dries it with one of the Wheelers’ nice, fluffy washcloths. He pauses for a second before he goes, looking at himself in the mirror. This is what he looked like before he kissed Mike Wheeler for the first time. He’ll never be the same again. He smiles at himself uncertainly, then grins. Mike is waiting for him.
Mike. Is waiting. For him.
And waiting impatiently, apparently. Will returns to find him still sitting on the couch, but his knee is jiggling crazily again and he’s got his fingers severely tangled in his lap, like his knuckles have personally wronged him. Will settles next to him, one leg folded on the couch so that he can face Mike properly, and Mike relaxes slightly, as if being around Will makes it easier for him to breathe.
“Hi,” Mike says. Will wonders if it’s possible for a person to kill another person with a word as simple as hi.
“Hi,” Will says back, and then he leans in.
He’s expecting it to be more awkward, honestly. It is his first kiss, after all. But as soon as their mouths connect, it’s perfect. Soft and sweet and just—everything. They fit together so easily, Mike’s hand at Will’s cheek and Will’s hand on his knee. When they break apart after a few seconds, Mike blinks slowly, as if waking up from a dream, and says, “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Will agrees, pulling Mike back in with two hands on either side of his face.
Mike inhales sharply, his hands settling at Will’s waist, under his overshirt. Will can feel the heat of them through his T-shirt, and that makes him feel dizzy, crazed—makes him open his mouth a little bit against Mike’s, which makes Mike bite at his lower lip. It’s an unending chain, like a chemical reaction that never burns itself out. Because Mike bites his lip, Will makes a shuddering, nasally noise; because Will makes that noise, Mike hums against his mouth. Every new thing is better than the last. Mike sits up a little and leads Will into tipping his head back, opening his mouth more so that Mike can press their tongues together, and Will honest-to-god moans. It’s just so good—he’s touching Mike and tasting Mike and hearing Mike. The soft hitch of his breath as he inhales, the punched-out, almost devastated sound of his exhales. Will can smell the sharp citrus of Mike’s cologne, the distinctly boyish, blue smell of his shampoo. He feels surrounded, held, consumed. It’s incredible. Even the paranoid, most battered part of this brain has to admit that this is actually happening, because there’s no way that Vecna could possibly do it justice. Even in his own rich fantasy life, Will couldn’t conjure up all of this. He’d figured making out with Mike would be amazing. He didn’t know it would be life-changing.
“Are you sure you’ve never done this before,” Mike pants, pulling away just enough to kiss Will’s jaw, then under his ear, then the side of his neck.
“Yeah,” Will manages, even as he cranes his neck to give Mike better access, his voice obviously wrecked.
Mike pulls back to look at him. “You’re so good at it,” he says, almost like he’s angry about it, and Will feels unstoppable. He feels like a god. Whatever the Wheelers are doing at church right now is their business; as far as Will is concerned, this is worship.
As if on cue, the house’s front door squeaks open somewhere above them and Mr. Wheeler’s cane thumps against the hardwood. Mike flinches, his hands flexing against Will’s thigh, his waist.
“Fuck,” he says, closing his eyes. He looks defeated.
Will would do anything to wipe that look off of Mike’s face under normal circumstances. Now, after everything, he’s about a hair’s breadth away from charging upstairs and seeing if he can’t make Mr. Wheeler clinically dead for four minutes. He swallows the anger, bitter and hot, and swipes his thumb across Mike’s cheekbone until Mike looks at him.
“We could go to my house,” he offers, speaking softly. “Or, you know, I could stay here and we can just—hang out.”
Mike smiles a little, his cheek pushing up against Will’s thumb. “Do you want to just hang out right now?”
And, well, Will could be happy watching paint dry as long as Mike was there, but—
“No,” he admits around a laugh.
“Okay, so, maybe…” Mike tugs delicately up at Will’s T-shirt, untucking it from the front of his pants. “We could be quiet?”
Will swallows, afraid because he just got this and he doesn’t want to lose it, afraid because keeping quiet is, apparently, not a strength he brings to the hookup table. But he also trusts Mike so completely. He knows that Mike—the boy who slept by his bedside, who never gave up D&D after Will whined about it all summer, who sorted candy hearts for him—would rather jump in front of a moving car than hurt him on purpose. He knows that Mike wouldn’t take this risk if it might put either of them in any real danger.
Will's mom would probably want an easier first relationship for him. Some nice boy at college who comes from the big city, a guy with accepting parents who will invite him home for Thanksgiving. A boy who never fights with Will and treats him like he’s breakable after Will wakes up next to him, crying from a nightmare. Someone with no baggage of his own, who could never even comprehend Will’s. A guy who doesn’t confuse Will, who could never have both the forethought to stage an elaborate, romantic confession and the impulsivity to plan nothing afterwards. Will would probably die of boredom within a month.
When it comes to Mike, he’s read the fine print. He knows how high the stakes are for Mike; he knows that he’s essentially signing up to keep the very best thing in his life a secret. He doesn’t care.
Will leans back against the arm of the couch. He lets himself fall, reaching for Mike as he goes. Mike follows, smiling despite the muffled sounds of the TV upstairs, the clinking of glass in the kitchen. He leans over Will, looking at him like nothing could make him happier. He puts his hands on Will like he doesn’t believe in hell. He kisses Will like it’s easy.