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The rain had been coming down for days.
Not the gentle summer kind that made Hawkins feel softer, greener, almost forgiving. Not the kind that rinsed pollen and dust from the air and left the world smelling clean. This was relentless. Hard. It drummed against the roof without a pause, it had turned the yard into a muddy field, and dragged the sky so low Hopper swore he could feel the weight of it pressing straight through his skull into his brain.
Cabin fever had set in.
Joyce paced when the restlessness got too high and she thought no one noticed. Back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, fingers worrying at the cuffs of her sweater. She reorganized drawers that did not need reorganizing and flipped through old magazines with worrying speed. The television murmured in the background—daytime talk shows, cooking segments, static—noise layered over rain, layered over music from the kids’ bedrooms. Sound stacked on sound.
Will had retreated into his sketching with more force than usual.If anyone dared to speak to him while he was drawing, his answers came clipped. Annoyed. Dinner became a negotiation conducted mostly through silence.
Jane had tried books first.
Five of them lay abandoned in different corners of the house. Each one declared stupid after only a few chapters. She took to “walking“ despite the weather, which really meant standing in the rain in the middle of the road, in her raincoat, drawing crooked shapes and riverbeds into the softened dirt with a stick, until rain blurred them away.
Now she tended to stay in her room, door closed, listening to the same songs on repeat. The rhythm thudded faintly through the walls, steady as the rain.
She and Will hadn’t spoken properly to each other for two days, except for the occasional banging of walls.
Hopper really needed to get her out of the house. Library would probably be a terrible idea.
Maybe frogs. Some distant ditch on the far end of town. Something muddy and solitary. Something that didn’t involve the rest of them.
Even Hopper—who prided himself on surviving worse with less—felt it. The irritability. The buzzing nerves. The way his jaw ached from constant clenching.
Jonathan had drunk last of the orange juice.
And Steve Harrington was there.
Every.
Damn.
Day.
Hopper did not understand how someone could technically have a job and still manage to exist in his house from mid-afternoon until well past dinnertime. The weather was bad, sure. Roads slick. Visibility terrible. Which meant people should stay home.
For their own goddamn safety.
Steve arrived anyway. Damp from the rain, hair only slightly deflated, boots placed neatly on a trash bag by the door like he’d done it a thousand times. His jacket hung over the drain in the bathroom. He sprawled wherever space allowed—floor, couch, bed—taking up space in that loose, careless way of his.
Laughing too loud.
Tracking in bad weather like it was a personality trait.
Smiling too easy.
And then there was the issue of Jonathan’s room.
Hopper had quickly laid down the law.
“One rule,” he had said, standing in the hallway, finger raised. “Door stays open. Three inches. Minimum.”
Not two.
Three.
Jonathan had stood there, arms crossed, jaw tight enough to crack. He’d nodded once.
Steve had nodded too. Immediately. Offensively earnest.
Hopper hadn’t liked that either.
It didn’t matter if Jane perched on the edge of Jonathan’s bed flipping through a box of tapes or his books. Didn’t matter if Will somehow managed to crawl out of his room and make it to Jonathan’s. Didn’t matter if it was just the two of them and the damn rain banging on the windows.
Door.
Open.
Three inches.
Hopper had his reasons. And they were plentiful.
He didn’t trust Steve and his constant reapplication of chapstick. Didn’t trust hair that went in neat and came out tousled. Didn’t trust Steve’s stupid charm, or the way he said sir. He didn’t trust flushed faces or music nudged just a little too loud, as if it were competing with Jane’s limited rotation on purpose.
All that racket covered other noises.
He was sure of it.
He trusted none of it.
He’d seen things.
When the rain had first started, Steve had reached for Jonathan by the front door, hooking two fingers beneath his chin and tipping his face up with an ease that spoke of practice. He’d seen the quick press of lips. He’d seen Jonathan’s hand curl into Steve’s jacket to keep him there a fraction longer before Steve had slipped free, already grinning.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Steve had called, backing down the steps into the rain.
And he’d come back.
Every day.
The little shit.
Which meant that what ever was happening behind the door was much worse.
At first, the door stayed open.
Three inches. Steve had actually measured it with his fingers, glancing up for Hopper’s approval.
Unable to eyeball it.
Amateur.
Then the weather got worse.
The cold crept down the hallway. Wind found every gap in the house and whistled through it. Rain hammered the roof so hard it sounded like static.
The door drifted inward on its hinges, nudged by a draft.
“Door!” Hopper barked from the kitchen.
He could see Jonathan’s foot nudging the door open with his foot, a sliver of his face tight with irritation.
Three inches.
Next day, the culprit was apparently a pillow.
It flew—light, careless—and clipped the door just right.
Click.
Hopper was there in less than ten seconds.
Jonathan’s muttered swearing slid under the door before it opened again.
Three inches—offered with a thin smile.
Then came rebellion.
Jonathan shut it deliberately while Hopper was outside finally reorganizing the shed, probably thinking he wouldn’t notice.
He noticed.
They argued in the hallway, voices sharp, while Joyce pretended very hard to scrub the already clean sink.
“You don’t get to pretend you live alone,” Hopper snapped.
“I’m not pretending anything,” Jonathan shot back. “I’m asking for privacy.”
“You’re asking for trouble.”
Steve stood behind Jonathan the whole time, hands hovering awkwardly in the air like he was ready to physically separate them if necessary. Eyes darting back and forth. Silent. Watching.
When Jonathan retreated back into his room, Steve lingered in the hallway.
“Chief,” he started cautiously.
“It’s three inches, Harrington. Not complicated.”
“I know. I’m just saying— we’re not—” He faltered. “We’re just hanging out.”
Hopper turned to him.
“Doors don’t close for ‘just hanging out.’”
Steve flushed. Actually flushed.
Hopper’s eyes narrowed. “That supposed to reassure me?”
Steve hesitated, then shook his head. “Uh, no?”
Good answer.
The kid was finally starting to learn after two months.
Later the excuse was that the house was crooked.
“If it was crooked,” Hopper said flatly, “you’d have trouble closing the door.”
Jonathan yanked the door open harder than necessary.
Three inches.
Then four.
Then back to three when Hopper glared.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“I don’t care who did it. I care that it keeps happening.”
They tried an improvised doorstop.
Something heavy, practical. A book didn’t work. A sneaker slid uselessly. Stacks of VHS tapes on both sides of the door collapsed. They finally settled on an old brick they used to prop open the front door.
It held the door at three inches.
Perfectly.
For two hours.
Then Jonathan ate the last of Jane’s snacks.
That was strike one.
Then, almost without thinking, he told her that after listening to Out of the Blue all day, it was beginning to sound like circus music.
Strike two.
Worst of all, the book he’d wedged under the door earlier had been one she’d been reading. Somewhere in the struggle to keep it propped open, her bookmark had slipped out and gone missing. When she tried to find her place again, she flipped too far and spoiled the twist.
The door didn’t just close after that. It slammed with a sharp flick of concentration and a heavy thud as Hopper shouted.
“Three inches!”
This time Jonathan shouted back.
Steve had learned not to comment.
The house shrank as the storm pressed in.
Through the narrow gap Hopper could see too much and not enough.
Feet dangling off the edge of the bed, toes angled toward each other. Steve sprawled on his back, one arm bent behind his head. Jonathan leaning over him, fingers slipping under the hem of Steve’s shirt.
Too close.
Too quiet.
Jonathan glaring at Hopper.
Hopper paced and reorganized the kitchen drawers. Joyce had started watching Martha Stewart. That was always a bad sign. He hid the potato masher.
He imagined things.
He didn’t want to imagine them.
But he imagined them.
Even when the door was open.
Especially then.
Because three inches meant he could hear the way their voices dropped when they forgot themselves. Could see the shadow of movement on the wall. Could watch Steve’s hand disappear from sight.
Finally Jonathan snapped.
“This isn’t about the door!” he said, voice shaking. “This is about you not trusting me.”
Hopper stared at him. “You want trust, you earn it.”
Jonathan laughed, sharp and hollow. “Good to know where I stand.”
The silence afterward felt heavier than the rain.
Later, when the downpour softened from pounding to steady, Joyce found Hopper in the kitchen with another drawer open, staring at nothing.
“You’re going to drive him away,” she said gently.
Hopper scoffed. “I’m trying to keep him safe.”
“From what?”
He didn’t have an answer.
She sighed. “Hop. The reason Steve’s here so much is because the weather’s awful. And because his parents have been home more than usual.”
That landed.
“They’re never home,” Hopper muttered.
“Oh, they’ll leave,” she said, “They always do. And then the boys will probably just spend all their time at Steve’s. Alone. In a big empty house. With no rules. No doors you can monitor. And no endlessly looping music or annoying family.”
The rain tapped at the windows like a warning.
“And isn’t it nicer that they’re here? That they feel safe enough?”
He swallowed.
“And at least this way,” she added carefully, “Steve isn’t sneaking in through Jonathan’s window in the middle of the night.”
Hopper’s brain short-circuited.
“Through—”
“I meant hypothetically.”
Hopper gripped the counter like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
Sneaking.
Window.
Night.
His vision blurred.
“You’re saying,” he managed, “this is… better?”
“Yes,” Joyce said simply. “And you’re going to have to apologize to Jonathan. Okay?”
Hopper laughed once. It came out strangled.
He pressed his hand to his temple. “I’m going to have a stroke.”
From down the hall came laughter—Jonathan’s, unusually bright and unrestrained. Steve's joined in.
The door was closed.
Again.
Hopper stared at it.
The storm roared in his ears.
He focused. As if he could will it open with pure stubbornness.
He could feel the pressure building in his head.
The door creaked.
Barely.
“Jim, sit down. You’re going to give yourself a nosebleed.”
He lowered himself into a chair, still staring down the hall at that narrow strip of visibility.
Three inches.