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Mike let himself drop onto Will’s bed with a drawn out sigh. He waited for a couple of seconds, then turned to see if Will was at least paying attention even if he didn’t respond. His boyfriend was already watching him, peeking over his sketchpad with raised eyebrows.
“Difficult day?” he finally asked.
Mike sighed dramatically again. “The worst.”
Will laughed, then put his art supplies to the side. Leaning over Mike he teased: “You poor thing.”
But with Will so close and the sunlight from the window glinting in his eyes, Mike no longer had patience for the thing he had started. He didn’t want Will’s teasing, and he didn’t want to think about the parts of his day that had been genuinely difficult—most of which was the fault of his mom. “Kiss it better?” he asked bluntly.
Will smiled, but for a moment Mike was scared he’d been too forward. They hadn’t been doing this for long, and Will had said ‘no’ before. Not in the privacy of his bedroom, but still—
Then Will leaned forward and pressed his lips to Mike’s. It was short and chaste compared to some of the other kisses they’d shared before, yet still it left Mike breathless in a way that some other, equally innocent displays of affection had not. It left him torn between pulling Will in closer, maybe even on top of him, to deepen the kiss, and pushing him away because he was suddenly and overwhelmingly feeling like falling. In the end that left him simply staring up at Will as he pulled away, returning Mike’s awestruck gaze with one of amused puzzlement.
They sat and stared for a long moment, in which Mike wasn’t sure he got any closer to figuring out why his stomach had swooped so painfully at a simple kiss. Before he could ask Will for a repeat, or if he’d ever felt like that—an incredibly stupid question all things considered: Will was a good boyfriend and didn’t have weird moments like that—Will’s bedroom door flew open.
Mike jumped, whatever strange apprehension had made itself at home in his stomach tripled as the Chief stared him down. He looked to Will for help, but his boyfriend was already back to his seat at the head of the bed, his sketchpad in his lap and staring his stepfather down unimpressed.
“Three inches goes for you as well,” Hopper said.
Will said nothing.
Mike swallowed, his irritation tampered by the memory of finding Hopper’s jeep locked down and the man’s eyes glinting with madness. He wasn’t scared of the man, exactly, but there were some things that Mike better just keep from him. Like his relationship with Will.
Will and his stepfather continued to say nothing, but Mike could see the silent communication happening in the way Hopper shifted awkwardly in the doorway and Will gripped his pencil tightly.
After a long moment in which Mike wished he could disappear under Will’s bed or something, Hopper said: “Well, as you were.”
He pulled the door almost close, then disappeared back down the hall. Mike didn’t dare breathe again until he heard Hopper’s footsteps sound on the stairs.
Will made a strange clucking sound—struggling not to laugh with his hand pressed against his mouth. Mike raised an eyebrow, but that only made it worse. He pulled Will’s hand away, and his boyfriend almost doubled over with his snort.
The next one Mike couldn’t help but echo, and soon they were giggling loud enough that Mike wouldn’t have been surprised if Hopper came barging back up the stairs to ask what the matter was. But the door stayed open three inches, no more.
And his stomach swooped again, but this time he wasn’t sure if that was actually such a bad thing.
“Careful! Careful!” Mike’s mother cried, and she nearly spilled hot sauce over her blouse in an attempt to avoid Joyce as Will’s mother hurried across the kitchen with the potatoes in hand.
It hadn’t been the first near miss of the evening, and at this rate Mike was surprised that the two women had managed to not ruin dinner. They had come close, Joyce irritated by Mike’s mother’s attempts to help her and Mike’s mother irritated by Joyce’s way of cooking, but somehow the Byers’ new kitchen had stayed intact. The families’ friendship as well, although Mike was pretty certain the next dinner invitation would have to come from his mother; Joyce didn’t look like a woman who wanted any of them near her kitchen ever again.
From the living room behind the kitchen came a shout—Hopper, although Mike couldn’t tell if he was celebrating or yelling at the TV. The Chief and Mike’s dad were watching the game, and because of Hopper’s general demeanor, no one but El and Holly had dared to join them.
It meant the rest of them were camped out in the kitchen and dining room: Nancy at the dining table, hammering away on a typewriter although Mike couldn’t fathom what was this important to write on a Saturday night. She’d graduated months ago and was thus no longer working for the school paper, and college didn’t start until a couple weeks from now. Jonathan had given up trying to make her see that and was now perusing the newspaper for something interesting, not that he seemed successful. And Will, sitting between Mike and Jonathan at the island counter, was folding a napkin over and over again in a strange ritual of good luck for what was hopefully not the first and last Wheeler-Byers family dinner.
Mike gently tapped his foot against Will’s to get his attention, and Will stilled his fidgeting at once. He had no real reason to want Will’s attention and cursed his mother for insisting that it would be rude if Mike and Will holed up in Will’s room until dinner. Mike wanted to kiss his boyfriend, or at least bury his face in Will’s stomach and let Will play with his hair—as of late Mike’s favorite past time—but instead all he could do was wind his foot around Will’s ankle.
Will smiled gratefully, shifting his own foot so that he could press the top of it against Mike’s. Mike smiled back. Will raised an eyebrow, and Mike shrugged. Will folded up the napkin neatly before shoving it towards the pile from which he’d taken it, then held his hand out expectantly towards Mike.
For a moment Mike’s heart stopped at the idea that Will wanted to hold his hand right here in the middle of the kitchen, right in view of both of their families—not a single person of which knew about them yet. Heat crept up his neck, and he had to resist the urge to bury his face in his hands to hide the inevitable blush.
Then Joyce cursed and the kitchen came back into focus—as well as Will’s actual demand: The pen and scratch-paper he knew Mike kept in his pocket still, a leftover habit from the days of the apocalypse.
Mike handed them over, watching with probably too obvious interest as Will unfolded the crumpled paper with deft hands. The page was more than two thirds covered in his own runny handwriting, having served mostly as a place to keep his notes for the upcoming campaign while he didn’t have his DnD notebook handy, but Will ignored the nonsensical NPC names to fold the page so that only the free space was visible. Mike tried not to feel too self-conscious about the fact that he could probably have sat her all night, watching Will sketch with nothing but a ballpoint pen. He maybe would have succeeded, if the swooping feeling hadn’t returned, making him, for perhaps the first and only time in his life, glad when his mother asked him to set the table.
The air was cool when Mike surfaced, gasping for air. For a second he tread water as he tried to orient himself, not helped at all by the bright sun beating down on the lake. It was Lucas’ giggle that betrayed him, and Mike whirled on his friend—to no avail. Even as he tried to grasp Lucas and return the favor of dunking him, Lucas wound his arm around Mike and pulled him back under the water.
Mike came back up spluttering, but neither his next attempt at dunking, nor the attempt to get away that followed were successful. Lucas was in the process of pushing him underwater yet again when a shout came from the shore.
That, at least, was enough to put a stop to Lucas showing off, and when they spotted the source of the noise, the competition Mike had always been destined to lose was forgotten. When Lucas had first thrown Mike into the lake, there had been two members in the audience: Max and Erica. Now that number had tripled.
Mike waved, then used the opportunity to escape towards the safety of dry land, Lucas hot on his heels. He stopped in front of Max first, shaking his hair out over her in retaliation for laughing at his miserable defeat at Lucas’ hands, and was rewarded with a handful of pebbles pelting his shins. Not that he really felt the sting: Will was standing a few feet away, peeling off his tank top, and the only thing Mike could really care about was his regret at having made this a group hangout.
Then again, the idea of being alone with Will in this situation made him scared and excited at the same time. Better than to have his friends there as a buffer—even if it meant he couldn’t just run his hands up the plains of Will’s stomach that came into view as his clothes disappeared. Since there hadn’t been exactly time for this kind of summer activity with the threat of Vecna and the Upside Down hanging over them, Mike wasn’t sure at which point in between that cursed summer that had driven the Byers from Hawkins and everything that had happened since then Will had put on the weight that he was showing off now. He wasn’t surprised by it; he had felt the new solidness of his boyfriend through his shirts during make-out sessions and the one or other time when he’d let his hands wander underneath them—but there was a difference to seeing the whole extent of it, and bathed in the bright summer sun too.
Over the past couple of years, neither of them had gained much in terms of muscles, like Lucas, but while Mike had simply grown into a more stretched out version of his childish lankiness, Will had filled out nicely. And seeing him Mike wanted to pull him in by the hips until Will was pressed flush against him, heavy and real and very much Mike’s.
“You mind giving me a hand?” Will asked.
Mike shook his head, taking a moment too long to understand what Will was talking about: sunscreen and his back. He nodded, a little too eagerly, and slipped behind his boyfriend.
That put the rest of his friends into view, but Mike did his best to ignore them, goofing off and getting ready to enjoy the day in the sun to the fullest. Still he could not help but peak over Will’s shoulder to check if any of them had noticed the heat creeping up into his cheeks and the way his hands, especially, seemed to burn where they rubbed circles across Will’s bare skin.
“I already talked to my mom,” Will said, and his voice seemed to Mike to echo across the lake even though Will had pitched it low. “So, if yours is okay with it I might sleep over tonight.”
Mike bobbed his head in agreement, then realized Will wouldn’t be able to see and fought to get out a “Sounds good.”
Will gave him a smile—then laughed as Steve tried to wrangle Dustin into the water. Mike’s stomach swooped at the sound of it. It was a familiar sensation by now, although one that he’d only slowly gotten comfortable with. But here, in the bright sun and surrounded by his friends, he realized that the danger that had first made him apprehensive of the feeling didn’t lay with the thing itself: Instead it was simply the idea that anyone else could ever find out about it.
If that happened they could probably see right through the heart of him, and the idea that anyone might have that knowledge of him was worse than any number of crazed psychics and alternate dimensions.
With Mike done, Will hurried to join Lucas in what was clearly becoming an all out war in the water, but Mike stayed rooted to the spot, fighting to breathe past the panic that had come suddenly and unexpectedly. He could not put a name to it, and while he could not look away, looking at the water hurt.
Then Robin said: “Hey, Wheeler. Mind giving me a hand with that as well, since Dingus over there decided fighting literal children in the water was more important than me?”
He shook himself and forced a smile. “Sure.”
Mike toed over the mattress on the floor to crawl onto his bed beside it and buried his face in the duvet. The day had cooled significantly since the sun had set, but his sunburned cheeks and neck cared very little for that. They had spent most of the day wandering the woods around Lake Tippecanoe, but somehow the sun had found its way under his unprotected skin anyway. Half of them had suffered the same fate, only Will and El having remembered the sunscreen from the beginning and the rest of them not fortunate enough for Vickie’s arrival later into the day to save them.
And so they had spent most of the evening alternatively slathering themselves in Aloe Vera and laying dead in the corner of the basement—the only room in the house that didn’t feel akin to an oven.
Now that the sun had set and his mother had ripped open all of the windows, the rest of the building had become habitable again, and if Mike slept without the covers, he thought the heat wouldn’t be too bad—or at least would be if there wasn’t a second body in his bed, working overtime as a human space heater.
Officially Will’s place was on the floor, but ever since they’d gotten together the second mattress had been purely for show. They rolled it out, messed up the blankets, and then Will climbed into bed with Mike. In the winter and spring that had been nice: the extra warmth was welcome, and Mike couldn’t remember feeling safer or more content than when his pillows smelled like Will and his boyfriend had an arm draped over Mike’s middle.
Since the beginning of July, Mike was no longer a fan of that kind of domesticity. More often than not he’d woken up in the middle of the night to kick off the covers—and during the more extreme nights try, in vain, to put some distance between him and his boyfriend. Will, perpetually cold, had been less bothered by the temperatures than Mike’s soft rebukes, which made things difficult. Still they had managed—somehow.
At least they had, up until now. But up until now, Mike had managed to not burn his face off in the sun.
Hearing the door click, Mike rolled over, blearily blinking up at the dark shape that was Will coming to hover over him.
“Brushed your teeth?” he asked.
Mike muttered something like agreement.
Will climbed onto the bed, settling on Mike’s legs. “Need some more Aloe Vera?”
He probably did, but Mike shook his head. He’d had enough of the smell of it for one night, and besides, it only helped so much.
Will gently trailed his fingers over Mike’s reddened skin, then asked, teasing edge gone: “Does it hurt a lot?”
With a sigh Mike pulled himself properly onto the bed, then stared up at the ceiling. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not really painful, just makes me feel like I’m being boiled alive.”
“Is that something we need to be looking out for during the next couple arcs? Giants boiling us alive?”
“Very funny.”
“If that’s going to be a concern I’d just want the party to be prepared,” Will said with a shrug and a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Cute,” Mike said.
“No,” Will replied, although the way he was looking at Mike said he hadn’t fully heard him. Without a warning Will shot forward, mouth latching onto Mike’s jaw. “You’re cute.”
“I look like a crab,” Mike replied.
Will shook his head, and Mike was powerless to stop him as Will pressed him into the mattress with his whole body and began playfully nibbling at whatever parts of Mike he could get his teeth onto, jaw and neck and earlobes. Mike playfully tried to shove him off, but that only incensed his boyfriend.
“So cute,” Will intoned in between bites. “Just adorable.”
And then Mike stopped fighting him because he had realized: It wasn’t just whatever parts of him Will could reach. It was only the ones that had escaped the brutal heat of the sun.
His stomach swooped again, followed by goosebumps that ran deliciously cold down his back. With a content sigh he wrapped his arms around Will’s back, pulling him in closer as he shut his eyes and enjoyed the moment.
“What?” Will demanded, annoyed.
Mike could not hold that against him: the whole afternoon had been a mess, from Joyce and the Chief simply refusing to leave the house like they had planned, El and Kali showing up unplanned, and then Jonathan calling from college. The fact that dinner now lay in blackened shambles on the kitchen counter was only the icing on a very messed up, equally blackened cake.
He wound his arms around Will’s middle and pressed a kiss to the back of Will’s neck. “It’s alright.”
Will let out a sigh but relaxed somewhat in Mike’s arms. Mike hid his smile against Will’s shoulder. Will sighed again.
“I followed the recipe exactly, and I’ve done this with my mom before. I don’t understand what happened!”
Mike hadn’t been paying attention to what Will was doing, too caught up in the sight of Will moving so confidently in the kitchen and the delightful domesticity of the whole situation, so he could not offer an explanation. Instead, he said: “Well, I appreciate the intention and the effort. I—” he paused, not sure what he had been about to say. He pressed the missing word as a kiss to Will’s shoulder. “I’ll order pizza. You want your regular?”
Will shook his head. “I don’t have pizza money.”
“Well, I do.”
“Mike,” Will argued, although mostly for show. They had established pretty early after their relationship had taken this unexpected turn, that your boyfriend paying for dinner did not count as handouts. Will had mostly been good about accepting that.
He turned in Mike’s arms, hugging Mike back, and Mike only pulled him in tighter, content to starve if it meant he got to hold Will just a little longer.
Mike took a deep breath before he exited the car, the nerves that had been building relentlessly over the course of the day finally reaching their peak now that their source was in sight. It was stupid, kind of. The radio station looked no different, and his reason for being here was no different either—except it also kind of was.
He grabbed the small package from the passenger seat, then let himself in. The light above the recording booth was on and the blinds down, so he followed the hallway further into the building. The break room somehow had a more chaotic look to it than it used to have back when the radio station had been their headquarters, but it still looked the same. Here was the coffee table over which they’d used to splay their maps, there the chairs and stools over which they had sprawled, sometimes in seriousness during a debriefing, other times exhausted from chasing after an inter-dimensional, mind-reading monster. The table was covered in mugs and old newspapers now, and the chairs had been stacked to the side of the room, unused, but still the room was familiar.
And would always be, considering that this had been where Will had first confessed to his lie about the painting—and here had been where Mike first had found the courage to kiss him.
He let the smile at the memory slip onto his face, then stuffed the package into his back pocket and began cleaning up a little. The mugs went into the sink of the small kitchen just off the side of the break room and the newspapers he sorted by date. He knew better than to get rid of the old ones, so he simply put the stack onto a side table.
Mike was in the middle of picking up the records that had also been brought and been left scattered about the room when he heard the door open.
“Knew it was you,” Will said, smile audible in his voice.
Mike turned to reply in kind. “Am I early or are you guys just late again?”
“Believe it or not, you’re early for once.”
Mike laughed, then opened his arms to welcome Will as he crossed the room. They said ‘hello’ with a kiss, but when Will pulled away his eyes snagged on the couch.
“Just a couple feet, huh?” Mike asked.
Will simply kissed him again.
Mike reciprocated for a moment, before the reality of where they were standing kept intruding. “Am I keeping you from work?”
If he was early, Will likely would be needed in the recording booth at least once more while Robin closed out her show—and the stations only other DJ would also already be hanging out somewhere in the building. Although the old geezer Mike was less worried about: Likely he’d retreated to some closet for a nap before his night shift began.
Will opened his mouth to reply, but the voice from the door was faster: “Technically, but in the interest of solidarity I’ll overlook it. Especially today.”
They both jumped, and the fact that Will’s heart seemed to be racing just as fast as Mike’s helped him rein his own back in. He let out a low breath, then glared at Robin over Will’s shoulder.
She set off across the room as if she’d done nothing wrong, waving nonchalantly at Mike before coming to a stop in front of the coffee table with her hands on her hips. “Oh, you put away my cup.”
“Considering the nasty bacterial cultures already breeding in there, you’re welcome.”
Will giggled at the joke, while Robin gave him the stink eye.
“You do recognize that I have complete power over whether or not you two lovebirds will make it in time for your sweet anniversary dinner reservation, right?”
Will laughed again, and if Mike wasn’t so in love with the sound he might have been offended. Instead he let Will wrap his arm around his shoulder as he turned to Robin. “No reservation. We’re grabbing burgers at the diner and then see what’s playing at the theater.”
Which, Mike supposed, was his cue. “Well, about that.”
He handed the package to Will, swallowing the nervous flutter in his chest. It would be fine. This wasn’t even the first gift of this kind he’d gotten Will, and he’d not made any changes to their plans, and so there was really no reason for him to be acting like this. As established, the whole thing was kind of stupid.
Will gingerly took the small rectangular package from him, giving it a short, experimental shake and then rewarding Mike with a knowing grin. The first part of the gift, at least, was obvious.
However, “that’s not all there is to it.”
Will carefully slid his fingers between the paper to pry it loose, then cooed as he caught sight of the ticket stubs Mike had secured in the cover of the mixtape. “You already went to the theater! So, what are we watching?”
“Near Dark. It’s supposed to be really good and—”
“—can’t do much wrong with some vampires,” Will finished his thought for him.
He beamed at Mike, and immediately Mike’s nervously fluttering heart calmed down.
“Incredible,” Robin commented dryly.
“Don’t you have to be on air again soon?” Mike asked.
Robin waved his concerns off but hurried back to the door anyway, leaning into the hallway to listen to the records turn in the recording booth.
Will used the unobserved moment to wrap his arms around Mike’s neck and kiss him. “Thank you. I love it.”
Unsaid, although Mike knew he felt that way: I love you.
“Ugh,” Robin said from the doorway. “Just get out of here already before I get any more nauseous.”
With a laugh they gave her a mocking salute, then hurried past her just in case she changed her mind.
As he squeezed through the door, Will’s hand in his, pulling him forward, Mike couldn’t help but calling back, though: “Jealousy looks bad on you, Buckley!”
“OUT!”
Will held the door open for Mike, and then they both hurtled through the cold November evening towards Mike’s car.
“Wanna see if the tape is any good?” Mike asked as Will slid into the seat next to him.
Unsaid because Mike wasn’t sure how to say it: I love you too.
In the early morning light Mike turned over, not quite ready to be awake, and found another body pressed tightly against his. With a sigh he threw his arm over Will’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
And in the quiet half-dark with no one to hear him, he practiced the words he only managed to say out loud when no one was listening: “I love you.”
“I’m just saying it’s bullshit,” Dustin said, leaning back in his chair and gesturing. “There is a clear bias here.”
“Dude, it doesn’t matter,” Lucas said. “You’re just mad you don’t get to accompany Princess Isolde to the ball.”
Mike couldn’t help but feel like his tone was off, though. He didn’t say it like he would have if he was arguing with Erica or Mike, like he was trying to actually win the argument: He said it like he was trying to get Dustin to shut up. The look Lucas and Dustin gave each other seemed to all but confirm it, and Mike’s stomach twisted unhappily.
He turned to Will, trying to see if he had noticed as well, but his boyfriend only seemed to be amused by their friends’ antics.
Dustin took a deep breath so he’d have enough air for whatever long-winded explanation was sure to follow. “It does matter because this is not an isolated incident! This isn’t just me being mad that I didn’t get to do the thing I wanted to do ever since it looked like this campaign was going to end in us infiltrating a circle of nobles, complete with espionage and a fancy masquerade ball. This is about a clear pattern that continues to establish itself: Mike keeps favoring Will!
“You know it’s true, and it’s not just about the princess. Either of us asks Mike to pass the popcorn, and he won’t lift a finger. Will asks him to pass the popcorn and Mike is on his hands and knees before he’s finished the sentence, and offering him a foot massage on top of it all. We ask Mike to hang out and it’s all ‘oh no today’s not good I have homework and SATs and yada yada’ and then we head over to study together and he and Will are already sprawled out across the basement working. We ask either of them to go see a movie and it’s ‘I was going to see that with Will’ ‘I’ve already seen that with Mike’ ‘Sorry, I already got plans with Mike-slash-Will.’”
Lucas ignored most of that: “You know the princess isn’t even real, right? That she’s just King Tristan in disguise? We did discuss that.”
He gave Dustin a meaningful look, and Mike sighed. Will was the only one to react to that noise, and he raised a concerned eyebrow in Mike’s direction.
Mike shrugged, not sure if he wanted to do anything about this. It wasn’t like Dustin was necessarily wrong, or like Mike could pretend otherwise. He considered all three of them his best friends, and he thought he treated them all equally in that regard—but Will was his boyfriend, too.
Not that Dustin and Lucas knew that.
“It’s not about the princess!” Dustin said.
“Sounds to me like it is,” Lucas dismissed Dustin’s argument.
And Mike could leave them at that for a couple more minutes, let Lucas brush the topic back under the proverbial rug for him, and not think about it further. Clearly Dustin and Lucas had talked about this before and had come to the conclusion that they should let Mike and Will pretend like nothing had changed; whether they had accurately guessed what exactly it was that had changed about Mike and Will’s behavior towards each other was unclear, though. Either way it seemed like it hadn’t bothered either of them too much—or at least it hadn’t until Princess Isolde’s decision to ask Will the Wise to accompany her to the masquerade ball instead of Dustin the Bold.
“All I ask is that we’re adults about this situation and acknowledge the pattern,” Dustin said.
“Dude,” Lucas warned him.
Dustin dared him to continue with a look. Lucas returned the sentiment with a gesture.
Mike ignored their silent communication to look back to Will again. His previous mirth had slipped off his boyfriend’s face, replaced with worry. When he saw Mike looking, he gave him a small, forced smile—and then reached out below the table, running his foot down Mike’s calf. Mike appreciated the support even if it didn’t help him come to a decision.
He and Will had talked about telling the others, and more frequently so over the past couple of months. Neither of them expected a bad outcome, and both of them were starting to feel the weight of secrecy dearly. The problem was that things were already about to change: They’d start their senior year of high school in the fall, and then it would be time for college and moving away from Hawkins and each other and their childhood. The introduction of relationships to this fragile ecosystem had already almost wreaked havoc on their friendship, and that had been an outside force; them dating girls who came into their larger friend group from elsewhere. It had not changed how they operated as a core group.
That he and Will were dating was not something they could keep secret forever, but Mike had been half planning to wait until college. Things would be different already then, and so him and Will being him-and-Will would only be a blip on the radar.
“Fine. I’ll pick up another woman at the ball,” Dustin said, although he sounded unhappy with having to relent.
“Why do you wanna pick up anyone at all? It’s not real! You’re just roleplaying with Mike!” Lucas said. “It’s weird!”
“Why? Because he’s a guy?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were implying—”
Will had ultimately been in favor of telling them, of course. Friends didn’t lie, and they were lying in the most simple definition of the word. And besides, it wasn’t like their childhood lay untouched by the sands of time and the horrors of the Upside Down. Things had already changed and would always be changing.
“You’re spending too much time with Steve—”
“Just because Steve has queer friends at college—”
“I don’t think you can be using that word—”
As of late the want to agree with him had been growing inside Mike. It snuck up on him in the quiet moments, hidden away under table tops and in empty rooms. It was there in moments when he was shaking with laughter and wanted nothing more than to hold onto Will, shaking just as badly as him. It was there in the lazy movie nights that they spent on the couch together but always careful not to touch—not to cuddle, like they would have if they’d been alone. It was there in the distance between what he felt and what he did: His hands, his eyes, his words all kept to himself while inside he felt like bursting into flames at the smallest sound, look, or touch.
And it was there in the jealousy: Lucas and Max did not keep this distance. Nancy and Jonathan did not keep this distance. Robin and Vickie did not keep this distance.
None of the boys and girls at their school ever did. And Mike and Will could never be them, but they could at least be something around their friends if they just admitted to the truth.
“Just ignore him, Mike,” Lucas said to shut up the argument Mike had mostly missed. “Let’s just finish getting ready for the party and then we can get started on the ball next session. Where were we on the ‘Zone of Truth’ strategy, Will the Wise?”
“Well—” Will started, then fell silent at whatever it was that he caught in Mike’s expression.
Probably the decision Mike wasn’t sure he was sure about yet.
Mike took a deep breath, then said: “It’s not playing favorites.”
“Dude, you don’t have to—” Lucas said.
“We get it. Per definition you really can only have one best friend,” Dustin said.
But that was the thing: “That’s bullshit, and it’s not what I’m trying to say. You three are my best friends. But the thing is— The thing is— Will is—”
“Your first friend,” Lucas offered. “Like Dustin said, we get it. And it’s fine, really. We said it was fine.” The last part was directed at Dustin.
Mike clenched his jaw, stomach twisting as he came up against the gulf between the idea of telling his friends and the reality of it. If he’d set out to tell them the truth he could have perhaps figured out what to say beforehand, but now the words—any words at all, really—remained firmly lodged in the back of his throat.
He looked to Will for help, then quickly away again: he didn’t want to put the burden of explaining on Will. Not when he had been the one to not take up Lucas on his offer to let it slide.
“It’s not fine,” Mike said. “It’s not—Like, with the Princess. It’s not like I didn’t wanna let you accompany her, but it would have been weird. Because we’re two guys. And I don’t mean that in a— I’m not saying it’s weird for two guys to do that, but it’s weird because I’m not— Because we’re not— Because I am but not with you and it would have been weird with Will here so I decided he should take her instead because it’s not weird with him.”
He exhaled and then at once regretted saying anything at all as he was met with only silence. He ran back all that he had said, trying to judge if his explanation had been sufficient—or had made sense at all—and found he hadn’t said at all what he’d meant to say. Lucas and Dustin looked at each other, then him, their faces twin masks of confusion.
Which was great, just great, absolutely—
“We’re in a relationship,” Will clarified.
There was another beat of silence, then Lucas almost yelled: “I fucking told you King Tristan was flirting with Will! I told you and you said that was just his cover!”
“Because why would I assume that King Tristan—”
“Even Max said he was flirting!”
“You told Max?” Mike said, but his words were drowned out by Lucas’ laugh.
“This whole time you were trying to get Mike to write a princess or something for you to serenade and Will—”
“Well, how was I supposed to know—”
A gentle tap against his calf drew Mike’s attention, and then Will scooted his chair around to Mike’s side. In between their shouting Lucas and Dustin didn’t notice—and Mike was glad for the short reprieve.
“You okay?” Will asked quietly.
Mike closed his eyes, inhaled, and then offered Will his hand just below the table. Will slid his fingers between Mike’s and gave them a gentle squeeze. And while Mike couldn’t quite shake the apprehension he’d been living with now for over a year, the sick tightness in his stomach had evaporated with just a few words.
“I think so. You?”
“Not quite the reaction I was expecting, but then I’m not sure what I was expecting,” Will said.
They listened to Lucas and Dustin continue to argue for a moment, then shared a smile.
Will dropped his head onto Mike’s shoulder with a laugh. “I think that was it for the day. Those two are gonna need the time to process.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “I did a fantastic job of derailing us, huh?”
Will shrugged. “I think we got everything prepared for the ball so we’re still on track to finish the campaign before the end of the school year.”
Mike hummed, twisting their joint hands so he could play with Will’s fingers, and just sat in the moment for a bit. On the other side of the table, Lucas and Dustin had moved on from the obvious interest King Tristan had had in Will the Wise and what that would mean for the future of the party and their adventures, to trying to decipher the signs of Will and Mike’s relationship that they had dismissed up until now. Mike briefly felt his stomach turn as Lucas tried to predict Max’s reaction to the news, the idea of telling the girls still daunting—especially since El had been one of the main reasons for their secrecy in the first place—and then unable to find any argument against it with Will pressed to his side while the chaos of their friends’ raged around them. Will squeezed his hand again, and Mike pressed a kiss to the top of Will’s head.
And only loud enough for Will to hear him, he said: “I love you.”