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It started with a cough. Small thing, almost polite, the kind she tried to muffle behind Robin sleeve while pretending to organize the syrup bottles. Steve glanced over but said nothing. Then it happened again, a little rougher, and she cleared her throat like she was trying to shake something loose. By the time the afternoon rush hit — a grand total of six people, because this was Hawkins and no one truly needed ice cream on a Tuesday — she was moving with the particular slowness of someone running entirely on willpower.
"You look terrible," Steve said, not unkindly.
"Thank you, Steve. That means so much." She sneezed into the crook of her elbow and blinked at the menu board like it had personally offended her. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm fine-adjacent."
He handed her a napkin. She took it without argument, which was how he knew she wasn't fine-adjacent either. Robin never took anything without a sarcastic comment attached.
She made it through the rest of the shift, barely, running on spite and what Steve suspected was her third cup of the break room's terrible coffee. When they finally flipped the closed sign and he looked over at her, she was leaning against the counter with her chin in her hand, staring at nothing, and there were dark circles under her eyes that hadn't been there that morning.
"Go home," he said.
"I'm going," she muttered, already untying her apron. She didn't even fight him for the last of the cleaning duties, which was when Steve privately upgraded his diagnosis from probably a cold to genuinely unwell.
The call came at eight-fifteen, just as Steve had settled onto the couch with a bowl of cereal he'd convinced himself counted as dinner.
He picked up on the second ring. "Harrington."
"I can't come in tomorrow." Her voice had taken on a new quality — slightly nasal, distinctly miserable — and he could hear the scratch in it even through the phone line.
He set down his spoon. "How bad?"
"Fever. My mom says I have to stay in bed." A pause, and then, with the energy of someone who had rehearsed this part: "But it's fine. I'll find someone to cover."
"You don't have to find someone, I can—"
"Steve. You cannot run Scoops Ahoy alone on a Wednesday. You know this. I know this. Even the ice cream knows this."
He opened his mouth, closed it again. She wasn't wrong. Wednesday was when the kids from the middle school got out early, and they descended on the food court like a small, sticky plague. Last time Robin had been on break and left him alone for fifteen minutes, he'd accidentally given a nine-year-old a double scoop of flavors that weren't on any menu because the kid had just kept pointing and he'd panicked.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. But whoever you find, just make sure it's someone normal. Someone who knows how a cash register works."
"I know how to find a replacement, Steve."
"What about Jen from the movie theater? She seems competent."
"Jen from the movie theater moved to Cincinnati."
"What about that guy, Tom? The one who worked at the pretzel stand?"
"Tom quit and I'm pretty sure he's in a band now."
"What about—"
"I will find someone," Robin said, with the careful patience of a woman running a fever and losing it simultaneously. "Someone good. Someone who can work a three-day fill-in without burning the place down. Okay?"
"Okay, but—"
"Someone who isn't going to make your life difficult."
"That's all I'm asking."
"Great." She coughed, rough and rattling, and he winced on her behalf. "I'll call you when I've sorted it."
"Feel better, Robin."
"Don't be so nice to me right now, I can't handle it." A click, and she was gone.
Steve held the phone against his chest for a moment, staring at the ceiling. Three days. He could manage three days. It was fine. Probably fine.
He fell asleep unconvinced.
The Starcourt Mall in the morning had a particular atmosphere — quiet in a way that felt temporary, the shops still pulling up their grates, the janitors making their last rounds before the day officially started. Steve had always found it vaguely peaceful, the half hour before they opened Scoops Ahoy, when it was just him and the hum of the freezers and the faint sound of someone's radio from the store down the hall.
He came up the escalator with his bag over one shoulder and his mind already organizing itself around the morning tasks: restock the napkins, check the syrup levels, make sure whoever Robin had found actually showed up and wasn't going to bail on him by ten a.m.
He turned the corner toward the ice cream shop.
He stopped.
The lights inside were already on, which meant someone had used the spare key Robin kept taped behind the staff schedule — information she had apparently shared with her replacement, which was fine, that was sensible, that was the kind of responsible handoff that made Steve feel better about the whole situation.
What did not make Steve feel better was the person currently standing behind the counter.
He knew Eddie Munson the way everyone in Hawkins knew Eddie Munson: by reputation first, by sight second. The guy had been at the high school long enough that he'd become part of the furniture, a fixed point in the social landscape that people navigated around rather than through. Steve had never had a reason to navigate toward him. Their circles didn't intersect; they existed in the same building the way two weather systems coexist — present, aware of each other, mutually disinterested.
But there was nothing mutual about what Steve felt right now, looking at Eddie standing in the middle of his ice cream shop, wearing the Scoops Ahoy uniform — the full thing, white and blue, the short sleeves, the little neckerchief — with his hair pulled back into a messy pile at the back of his head and the Ahoy hat sitting at a slightly defiant angle on top of it.
He looked like a nautical fever dream.
"Hey," Steve said, because his mouth had apparently decided to proceed without consulting the rest of him. "What are you — those are my socks."
It was not what he'd meant to say. It was, technically, correct; he'd left a spare pair in the staff room last week and they were visibly Eddie's socks right now, the dark ones with the little anchors that Robin had given him as a joke. But it was not the point.
Eddie looked down, then back up, entirely unbothered. "Yep," he said. "Figured the look required full commitment."
Steve walked in. He put his bag down on the counter. He picked up the phone.
Robin answered on the third ring, sounding like she'd been assembled from spare parts. "If you're calling to tell me you can't find the coffee filters, they're in the—"
"Eddie Munson," Steve said.
Silence.
"Robin."
"Steve—"
"Eddie Munson." He turned slightly away from the counter, dropping his voice, though given the size of the shop it accomplished approximately nothing. "Out of every single person in this town, out of everyone you know, you found Eddie the Freak Munson and put him in a sailor hat?"
"I prefer the Freak Eddie Munson, personally," Eddie said from directly behind the register, conversational, like he was commenting on the weather. "The full title really lands."
Steve pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. "He can hear me."
"Yes, I can," Eddie confirmed. "The shop is like twelve feet wide."
"Robin," Steve said into the phone.
"He was available," Robin said, in the flat tone of someone who had rehearsed this too. "He's responsible. He's done shift work before. And he owes me a favor." A pause, thick with implication. "A big one."
"I don't care if he owes you his entire soul, he's—" Steve glanced back despite himself. Eddie had located the notepad they used for the daily specials board and was writing something on it with a pen he'd apparently found in his own pocket, utterly relaxed, like this was his shop and Steve was an interesting exhibit. "He's going to be a problem."
"Steven." Robin's voice had gone quiet in that way it did when she was about to say something unreasonable and knew it. "It is three days. Seventy-two hours. You have survived worse things than three days with Eddie Munson."
"I'm not sure that's true."
"Dingus. Pull yourself together." She coughed, hard, and he heard her muffled groan afterward. "I am lying here with a hundred-and-one fever and a box of tissues that I have gone through at a frankly alarming rate. I do not have the bandwidth to find you someone better. Three days. That's it. Then I'm back and we never speak of this again."
Steve looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had nothing to offer.
"Three days," he finally said.
"Three days." She sounded relieved, and exhausted, and slightly guilty, which meant she knew exactly what she'd done. "You'll be fine."
"I won't."
"You will. Bye, Steve."
The line went dead.
He set the phone back in its cradle and stood there for a moment with his hand still resting on it, composing himself, reminding himself that he was a professional and that professionalism meant not having an argument with someone before the shop had even opened.
"So," said Eddie, from behind him, in a voice that carried just enough amusement to be irritating. "You want to show me where you keep the chocolate, or should I find it myself? Because I will find it myself, and I feel like you'll have opinions about where I look."
Steve turned around slowly.
Eddie had the pen tucked behind his ear now. The hat was still crooked. He was looking at Steve with an expression of absolute, infuriating patience, like he had all the time in the world, like he had been waiting for exactly this moment for a long time and found it completely worth it.
Three days, Steve thought.
Seventy-two hours.
He picked up his apron.
The first hour was, against all statistical probability, almost fine.
Eddie learned the register without being shown — he just stood in front of it for about ninety seconds, pressed a few buttons with the focused expression of someone defusing something, and then announced "got it" and moved on. Steve watched this happen from across the counter and felt the specific unease of a person who had been fully prepared to explain something and had been denied the satisfaction.
The syrup bottles were labeled. Eddie read the labels. He didn't ask where anything was, didn't knock anything over, didn't do any of the things Steve had been quietly bracing for since he'd picked up his apron. He just settled into the rhythm of the shop with an ease that was, frankly, a little annoying, like he'd done this before or like doing new things had simply never intimidated him.
"You've worked a service job," Steve said eventually, not quite a question.
"Bowling alley," Eddie said, wiping down the counter in broad, efficient strokes. "Two summers. You'd be amazed what people do to rental shoes."
"I wouldn't, actually."
The college girls arrived around noon. There were three of them, probably a year or two older than Steve.
"Welcome in," he said, leaning forward on the counter. "What are we thinking? Fair warning, if you don't know yet, I'm going to recommend the chocolate marshmallow and I'm going to be right about it."
"What if we want something else?" the girl in the front said, who had the specific confidence of someone used to being the one who set the tone.
"Then I'll tell you you're wrong very nicely."
She laughed. They all laughed. Steve knew this rhythm — it was comfortable, it was easy, it was the best part of the job in a lot of ways, the back-and-forth with people who were already halfway to having a good time. He was warm without being pushy, charming without being annoying about it. It was, genuinely, one of the things he was actually good at.
From his left, very deliberately and at a volume calibrated for just the right amount of carrying: "He says that to everyone, by the way. In case that's relevant information."
Steve turned. Eddie Munson was standing at the far end of the counter with one elbow propped on it, looking at the girls with an expression of cheerful helpfulness that was so obviously a vehicle for something else that Steve wanted to physically move it off his face.
"Don't listen to him," Steve said pleasantly, to the girls.
"I'm just providing context," Eddie said, equally pleasantly. "Like — the chocolate marshmallow recommendation, specifically. He does make it sound exclusive. That's a skill."
"Munson."
"It's a compliment. You're very good at it. You do this thing with your eyes." He gestured vaguely at his own face in a way that communicated absolutely nothing useful and yet somehow perfectly described what it was describing. "It's very effective. You should know that. As a consumer insight."
The girls were watching this exchange with the delighted attention of an audience that had come in for a snack and gotten dinner theater. The one in front was smiling in a way that was specifically the smile of a person watching two people do something they hadn't quite figured out themselves yet.
"I'm going to get the chocolate marshmallow," she said.
"Great choice," Steve said, and did not look at Eddie.
"I really did call it," Eddie said, to no one in particular.
Steve scooped the ice cream. He smiled at the customers. He handed over the cones with the professional composure of a man who was absolutely not aware, with every nerve ending on his left side, of Eddie Munson leaning on the counter and emanating a specific kind of satisfied amusement like a small, insufferable radiator.
The girls took their ice cream and drifted toward the tables, and Steve waited until they were out of easy earshot and then turned to Eddie and said, quietly and with great feeling: "What was that."
"I was being transparent. People appreciate transparency."
"You were undermining me."
"I was adding nuance." Eddie's expression was entirely sincere in a way that was so clearly performed it was almost a different kind of honesty. "There's a difference. Nuance is good. Nuance makes people feel like they're getting the full picture."
"Eddie."
"Steve."
"Don't call me Steve."
"That's genuinely your name, though."
"Call me Harrington."
Eddie tilted his head, the sailor hat tipping further sideways. He appeared to consider this with actual seriousness for a moment. "Harrington," he said, trying it out, and the way he said it — slower, with a kind of deliberate weight that turned it from a name into something else — was somehow worse than Steve. "Okay. Sure. I can do that."
He said it in a voice that made it extremely clear he was going to keep calling him Steve.
The ice cream incident happened at two-seventeen.
In retrospect — and Steve would spend some time in retrospect about this, later, in the car, staring at his own steering wheel — it was not one failure but a sequence of them, each reasonable on its own and catastrophic in combination.
The first failure: the cookie dough vat in the second drawer had been shifted too far forward during the lunch rush.
The second failure: Steve decided to swap it himself rather than asking Eddie, because asking Eddie to do things had started to feel like a small but meaningful tactical concession in something he hadn't decided yet whether he was winning.
The third failure: the replacement vat was heavier than it looked, and the fourth, final, and most consequential failure was that Eddie Munson had apparently had the exact same idea at the exact same moment and had his hand on the other side of the handle before Steve had registered he was there.
Their hands closed around the handle simultaneously.
A very brief, very loaded pause.
"I've got it," Steve said.
"I've also got it," Eddie said.
"I said I've got it."
"And I heard you. I'm choosing not to accept that."
"Munson, let go of the—"
"You let go of the—"
"I was here first—"
"I was also here first, we were both here first, this is a paradox, just let me—"
"If you drop this—"
"I'm not going to drop it, you're going to drop it by—"
"Let. Go."
"You."
"Me?"
"Yes, you, let—"
Eddie let go.
Steve, who had been pulling with both hands against Eddie's resistance, did not have time to adjust for the sudden absence of counterweight. The vat lurched backward with a force that he was completely unprepared for. It hit his chest. He stumbled. His elbow caught the edge of the counter and what happened next was less a fall and more a gradual architectural collapse — one part of him following another, the vat tipping, the lid coming loose, a truly spectacular arc of cookie dough ice cream leaving the container entirely and redistributing itself across Steve's uniform shirt, his forearm, the side of his neck, and, in one especially targeted strike, his left cheekbone.
He sat on the floor for a moment and took stock.
He was covered in ice cream. He was sitting on a floor that smelled like sugar and regret. Somewhere above him, Eddie Munson had made a sound that Steve could only describe as gleeful.
"You let go," Steve said, to the floor.
"You told me to," Eddie said, from approximately six feet above him. His voice was doing something complicated that was obviously a laugh being held together by a very thin string. "Those were your exact words. You said, and I'm quoting here, let go."
"I didn't mean—"
"Language is about meaning what you say, Steve. It's a social contract."
Steve looked up. Eddie was crouched down now, elbows on his knees, head tilted, looking at Steve with the expression of someone watching a piece of theater they had somehow accidentally written and were now quite enjoying. The sailor hat was still crooked. There was a small smile at the corner of his mouth that was obviously trying very hard to be a normal, sympathetic expression and failing completely.
"Fuck you, Munson," Steve said.
Eddie's expression shifted in a way that was so deliberate it had to be intentional — eyebrows lifting, mouth curving just slightly further, the smile going from trying-to-be sympathetic to something else entirely. He said, "Is that an invitation? Because you should know I've been told I'm a lot to handle."
Steve felt his face go hot for the second time that afternoon and hated himself for it. He pushed himself up off the floor. Ice cream slid down his forearm. He was a disaster. He was a documented disaster and Eddie Munson was crouching three feet away looking absolutely delighted by every aspect of it.
"Get the mop," Steve said.
"Already on it." Eddie stood, and in the process somehow managed to make even that look unbothered, like he just happened to unfold at exactly the right speed and end up exactly the right height. He disappeared into the back.
Steve stood in the wreckage of the cookie dough incident and breathed.
He was fine. He was completely fine. He had been covered in ice cream before, it happened, it was an occupational reality, and it was not the fault of Eddie Munson specifically, it was the fault of a deeply unfortunate sequence of events that Steve had partially contributed to.
Eddie came back with the mop and a roll of paper towels and handed the paper towels to Steve without comment. Steve took them. He started cleaning up his arm. Eddie started on the floor.
They worked in silence for approximately forty-five seconds, which was the longest Steve had gone without being either irritated or flustered by Eddie's presence since nine o'clock that morning, and he was just starting to appreciate it when Eddie said, without looking up:
"You've got some right here, by the way."
"I know, I'm getting to—"
"No, I mean—" Eddie straightened, reached out, and with one finger — one single finger, no hesitation whatsoever — touched Steve's cheekbone, a light, brief contact that lasted maybe a second. He pulled his hand back. He looked at his finger. He looked back up at Steve with a perfectly calm expression and then, maintaining full and direct eye contact, put his finger in his mouth.
Steve's brain went somewhere else for a moment. He wasn't entirely sure where. It was warm there.
"Cookie dough," Eddie said thoughtfully, as though this were a culinary assessment. "Pretty good, actually. Weird that it's better after spending time on your face, but here we are."
"You can't just—" Steve gestured, vaguely, in the direction of his own face. "That's a workplace. There are rules."
"Name the rule I broke."
"I—" He couldn't. There was no rule. There was no employee handbook clause that covered whatever had just happened. "It's implied," Steve said, with great dignity.
"Most of the interesting stuff is," Eddie agreed pleasantly, and went back to the counter.
Steve went back to the mop. His face was doing things it had not done in years and he was not going to think about why.
"Can I ask you something?" Eddie said, around two-thirty, in the lull before the after school wave hit.
"No," Steve said.
"I'm going to ask anyway." He was leaning against the back counter, eating a waffle cone that he'd made himself with total unself-conscious ease, as though helping himself to work supplies was simply a normal thing that happened. Steve had started to say something about that and then thought better of it, because the math on that particular battle was not in his favor. "Do you have different smiles? Like, a catalogue?"
Steve looked at him. "What."
"I've been watching—"
"That's the problem."
"—and I think you have at least four. There's the welcome-in one, which is professional and nice. There's the I'm-going-to-recommend-something-and-I'm-right one, which is the same but with more eyebrow. There's the one for when a little kid says something funny, which is different because it's fast — like it happens before you decide to do it." He paused. "And then there's the one from earlier, with the old guy, where it went different. More real. Like you actually liked him."
"I do actually like him. He comes in every Wednesday."
"See, that one's better." Eddie said it like he was completing an observation he'd been working on for some time. "The other ones are great, don't get me wrong — they work, they're clearly very effective, I've watched them work on like fifteen people today — but that last one's better because it's not doing anything. It's just there."
Steve held this for a moment. The reasonable response — the one that maintained the professional distance he had established as today's operating principle — was to say something about ice cream restocking and end the conversation.
"Why are you analyzing my smile?" he said instead.
"I told you. I'm observant. It's a gift." He took another bite of the cone. "Also you have a very expressive face. I mean that as a compliment, before you do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're trying to decide if something is a compliment or something to be annoyed about, and your forehead does—" He touched his own forehead to indicate, apparently, a specific micro-expression. "That."
"My forehead doesn't—"
"It really does. It's doing it right now."
Steve became briefly and involuntarily aware of his own forehead. He forced it into neutrality. He watched Eddie watch him do this with an expression of such warm, genuine amusement — not mocking, just delighted, in the way of someone who found the world mostly interesting and this particular corner of it especially so — that the thing in Steve's chest did something small and inconvenient.
"You're something else," Steve said, mostly to himself.
"I really am," Eddie agreed. He didn't say it with arrogance.
"Restock the sprinkles," Steve said. His voice came out slightly different than he intended.
"On it, boss," Eddie said, and the word boss did a thing it had absolutely no business doing, and Steve turned back to the counter and was very busy for the next several minutes.
By the time the mall lights started dimming in that particular end-of-day way — the gradual hush that moved through the building like a tide going out — Steve had spent nine hours and forty-three minutes in the company of Eddie, and could say, with the exhausted certainty of a man who had been thoroughly outmaneuvered in a game he hadn't agreed to play, that he was not okay.
Not in any dramatic sense. He wasn't in crisis. He was simply, quietly, profoundly not okay in the specific way of someone who had spent the day being looked at — really looked at, in that particular Eddie way that felt less like a gaze and more like something being read — and had not found a single effective defense against it. Eddie had spent the morning getting under his skin with the casual efficiency of someone who had done this his entire life and found it easy. He had done the thing with Steve's face, the ice cream, the finger, the holding of eye contact while doing it, all without a single flicker of self-consciousness.
He had analyzed Steve's smiles with the focused attention of someone completing a research project. He had leaned against counters in a way that should not have been interesting and somehow was. He had said, at one point in the mid-afternoon, while they were both reaching for the same tub of sprinkles: "Sorry, are you in my way, or am I in yours?" and then hadn't moved, just stood there waiting for Steve to decide, close enough that Steve could smell whatever he used on his hair and Steve had said "I was here first."
Eddie had said "Yeah, but are you going to do anything about it?" and Steve had grabbed the sprinkles and left and spent the next ten minutes being extremely focused on the display case.
It had been, in summary, a day. One of the longer ones. One of the ones Steve suspected he was going to be thinking about for a while, in the dark of his room, staring at the ceiling, doing his best not to examine any of it too closely.
The last customer left at eight forty-two.
Steve locked the front and turned the sign. Eddie had already started on the counter — he did that, Steve had noticed, just picked up the task without discussion, without waiting to be directed, without making it a thing. It should have been a neutral observation. It kept not being neutral.
"You can do the machines," Steve said, because if he gave Eddie a task on the far side of the shop he could have six feet of breathing room and that was a resource he needed. "I'll do the counter."
"I'm already doing the counter," Eddie said, without looking up.
"I can see that. I'm asking you to switch."
"Why?"
"Because I'm telling you to."
Eddie looked up at that, and the smile that arrived on his face was the specific slow one — the one Steve had catalogued over the course of the day without meaning to, the one that arrived when Eddie had clocked exactly what was happening and found it entertaining. "Harrington," he said. "Are you putting me on the far side of the shop on purpose?"
"I'm delegating tasks efficiently."
"You're managing proximity." He said it like a gentle diagnosis, entirely without judgment, which was somehow worse than if he'd been smug about it. "It's okay. I understand. I've been a lot today. I contain multitudes and they all showed up."
"Do the machines, Munson."
"I'll do the machines," Eddie agreed pleasantly, "but I want you to know that I see what's happening."
"Nothing is happening."
"Sure," Eddie said, and went to the machines, and Steve turned back to the counter and absolutely did not watch him go.
He worked. The cleaning had its own rhythm — wipe, wipe, rinse, move — and Steve fell into it, the familiar sequence loosening something in his shoulders that had been tight since about eleven-thirty. The shop smelled like the end of a sugar-heavy day, warm and sweet and slightly exhausted. Outside, the mall had gone quiet. Somewhere deeper in the building, the janitorial crew was running a floor buffer and the distant hum of it was almost soothing.
"Can I tell you something?" Eddie said, from across the shop.
"You're going to anyway."
"This is true. I want to be honest with you, though, because I think you're a person who appreciates honesty."
"I don't know where you got that idea."
"You make a specific face when people aren't being straight with you. It's very readable." A pause. "I like that face, for the record. It's a good face."
Steve cleaned a spot on the counter. "What did you want to tell me."
"I'm having a good time."
Steve looked up.
Eddie was looking back at him from across the shop, one arm resting on the soft-serve machine, entirely at ease — the way he always seemed to be, like ease was his natural resting state and effort was something he chose only when it interested him. "Today," he clarified, unnecessarily. "I'm having a good time today. I thought you should know."
"You knocked over a vat of ice cream."
"One of the better parts, honestly."
"You—" Steve stopped. He turned back to the counter. He was not going to smile. He absolutely was not. "You're unbelievable."
"Also one of the better parts," Eddie said cheerfully, and went back to the machine, and Steve's face did the thing it had been doing all day — the warmth, the helpless, inconvenient warmth — and he cleaned the same spot twice without noticing.
They worked in quiet for a few minutes. Real quiet, this time. The comfortable kind. Then Eddie said, thoughtfully, like he'd been turning it over: "I've been thinking."
"Dangerous."
"About the sprinkles thing."
Steve's hand slowed on the counter. "There's nothing to think about. I got the sprinkles. It's done."
"See, I'm not sure it is. Because the way I see it—" The sound of him moving, closer, the specific acoustic of footsteps crossing the tiled floor. Steve kept his eyes on the counter. "—you had a choice. You could have waited for me to move. Or you could have said excuse me, or you could have reached around me, any number of things. But what you actually did was grab them and leave very quickly, which is a choice that contains information."
"It contains the information that I needed the sprinkles."
"It contains the information," Eddie said, now closer — not behind him, but off to the side, leaning against the back counter, close enough that Steve's peripheral vision could fill in the details without him turning, "that you didn't trust yourself to stand there."
Steve put the cloth down. He turned around. Eddie was exactly where he'd sounded — back against the counter, arms loosely crossed, sailor hat pushed back on his head, watching Steve with the full attention that he'd been deploying on him since eleven in the morning with a specificity that Steve had never once successfully looked away from cleanly.
"Munson," Steve said.
"Harrington."
"You've been doing this all day."
"Doing what?"
"This." Steve gestured, a short frustrated wave that he immediately regretted because it looked like he was pointing at Eddie as a concept. "The — whatever this is. The things you say. The way you—" He stopped. He started again. "I don't know what you think you're—"
"I know what I'm doing," Eddie said. Simply, clearly, not unkindly. "Then what—"
"I'm flirting with you, Steve." He said it the way someone might say the store closes at nine or the sky's pretty clear tonight — like information being offered, without performance, without the arch quality that had lived in most of his day. Just the fact of it, sitting there. "I've been flirting with you since approximately eleven-fifteen this morning and you've been responding to it since approximately eleven-sixteen, and I think we both know that, so—"
"I haven't been—"
"You have. The blushing is a strong indicator."
"I don't—" Steve stopped. He was aware, with the acute physical certainty of lived experience, that his face was currently doing the thing. Right now. In real time. As direct evidence against his own argument. "That's not—"
"I'm not saying it to embarrass you," Eddie said, and his voice had shifted, gone quieter, something underneath it that wasn't the performance version — the version Steve had been getting glimpses of all day, the one that showed up in the afternoon light and the parking lot and the moment with the sprinkles. "I'm saying it because I think you've spent the whole day trying to turn it into something manageable and I'd rather you didn't."
"And what would you prefer?" Steve said, and his voice came out different than he'd planned — lower, less steady, something in it that sounded less like the professional distance he'd been maintaining and more like the thing underneath it.
Eddie looked at him for a moment.
Then he said: "I'd prefer you stopped talking."
Steve opened his mouth — to say what, he wasn't sure, something defensive, something managerial, something that would put things back in order—
Eddie moved.
It wasn't fast, exactly — nothing about Eddie Munson seemed to happen fast, he had a quality of taking up exactly the time he needed and not apologizing for it — but it was decisive: two steps across the small space behind the counter, one hand landing on the shelf behind Steve's shoulder, and before Steve's brain had finished processing the input data of Eddie being this close, Eddie had kissed him.
It was — it was good. That was the most coherent thing Steve's mind could produce in the moment, good, this is good, his body arriving at the conclusion several seconds before his brain finished the sentence. Eddie kissed the way he did everything else — like he'd decided to do it and was now fully doing it, no hesitation, no checking, one hand coming up to the side of Steve's jaw with a steadiness that somehow registered as both question and answer simultaneously. His mouth was warm. He tasted faintly of the waffle cone from earlier, which should have been absurd and was instead devastatingly effective.
Steve, who had been in the middle of a sentence, forgot what the sentence was.
He kissed back. He didn't decide to — it just happened, some deeper operational layer of him bypassing the parts that were still trying to have the management conversation, his hand finding the front of Eddie's ridiculous sailor uniform without any input from the part of him that was supposed to be in charge. Eddie made a small sound against his mouth, something that was halfway between satisfied and amused, very Eddie, somehow and the hand on Steve's jaw shifted, thumb brushing his cheekbone, and Steve's brain went, quietly, entirely offline.
When Eddie pulled back — not far, just enough — Steve was aware of several things at once: the counter behind him, the low light of the closing shop, Eddie's hand still at his jaw, Eddie's face very close, and the complete, yawning blankness where his last several thoughts had been.
"That," Steve said. His voice had a quality it didn't normally have. "What was—"
"You weren't stopping," Eddie said. He sounded, genuinely, a little breathless himself, which was the most useful information Steve had received all day. "Talking. You do this thing where you start and then you can't stop and then you say something practical and then you start again. I needed you to stop."
Steve stared at him. "That was — your method. For getting me to stop talking. Was to—"
"It seemed efficient."
"Efficient," Steve repeated.
"Also," Eddie said, and now the smile was back — not the performance one, not the slow deliberate one, but something newer, something Steve didn't have a name for yet because he'd only seen it arrive just now, in the past thirty seconds, in the low light of a closed ice cream shop in a mall in Hawkins, Indiana, "I've been wanting to do that since about eleven forty-five."
"Eleven forty-five," Steve said. "That's—" He did the math. "That's almost nine hours ago."
"I'm patient," Eddie said. "When I want to be." His hand was still at Steve's face, thumb tracing a small, absent path along his cheekbone like it had always done that and saw no reason to stop. "Also you knocked over the ice cream at like two o'clock and there were extenuating circumstances after that."
"You knocked over the ice cream."
"That's an ongoing debate."
"It's not a—"
"Steve," Eddie said.
"What."
"You're doing it again."
Steve closed his mouth.
Eddie looked at him with that expression — the new one, the one Steve didn't have a name for — and something in Steve's chest settled, the way things settle when you've been holding them in a particular position for a long time and finally get to put them down.
"Two more days," Steve said.
Eddie's smile did something at the corners. "Two more days," he said.
And then, because Eddie Munson was constitutionally incapable of letting a moment end without getting the last word, he added, quiet and warm and completely shameless: "Probably should've led with this, honestly. Could've saved us a lot of time."
Steve laughed — a real one, short and helpless — and Eddie looked at him like that was exactly what he'd been waiting for, and the mall was quiet, and the shop smelled like sugar, and outside the evening was full and warm, and Steve Harrington, who had spent nine hours telling himself this was fine and almost believing it, thought: yeah. Yeah, okay.
Two more days.