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Will doesn’t answer most of Dustin’s calls, which he knows makes him an asshole, but in his defense, Dustin calls a minimum of once a week, every week, and that’s separate from the emails and the texts that cost ten cents apiece and the occasional seventeen-page faxes. When his phone vibrates its way across his kitchen counter at six on a Sunday morning, he mentally runs through the last few calls—sent to voicemail, sent to voicemail, sent to voicemail, answered but he pretended to be on his way out the door, sent to voicemail—and makes himself pick up.
“We’re all going to Hawkins in two weeks,” Dustin says instead of “Hello.”
A part of Will still ices over every time he hears the name of his hometown, but he says in what passes for an ordinary voice, “No, we are not.”
Dustin lets out an extravagantly disgruntled groan. “Will…”
Will rests his head against the counter. His hair, longer than he prefers, narrowly avoids a puddle of jam. He resists the urge to mimic, “Dustin…” and asks instead, “Why are we going to Hawkins?” corrects, “Why are you going to Hawkins?”
“Mike’s getting a divorce.”
“Mike’s been getting a divorce for months. And he lives in Connecticut.”
Mike married his second-ever girlfriend, who he met sophomore year of college when he was getting his stomach pumped and she was waiting out a 72-hour hold. He's the only one of them who never went to therapy, not even the bullshit guidance counseling they were all mandated into. Hawkins High reopened in such disarray and with so many traumatized teens that no-showing three consecutive times was enough to get him dropped from his time slot. Joyce made Will go, and made Hopper make El go. Lucas went to set a good example for Erica. Max had already given in the year before, when her life was a good deal less difficult. Dustin insisted he was just happy to have a captive audience for the theories he was sure were going to revolutionize the field of parabiology. Mike held his ground, went through a genuinely frightening binge drinking phase in college, then met Shelly and settled down.
“Well, it was finalized last week. He was still in the house, but now that everything’s done, and with his dad’s heart thing…”
“His wife left him so he’s moving back to Hawkins?”
“Just temporarily, you know, to help out.”
“Right.” Will allows himself to imagine a kinder world than his own, a world in which he didn’t answer this call and got to avoid this conversation entirely. But it’s just a fantasy; Dustin is incredibly persistent and there was never really any hope for him. “And so because Ted still thinks property values are going to rebound one of these days, we all have to suffer?”
“He’s having a rough time, Will.”
“I obviously know that.” It still hurts Will to think about Mike hurting. They are friends, technically, just in a way where they rarely contact each other directly and are only ever in the same space when someone else organizes everything and gently bullies them every time they try to cancel.
“Come on, you know he shouldn’t be there alone.”
“Sure,” Will says. “And if you go and Lucas goes and Max goes and El goes—”
“Then the whole Party still won’t be there.”
Will groans. He already knows that he’s going to cave, and he knows Dustin knows he’s going to cave, but it would be nice to be putting up a better fight.
“He needs us, Will. All of us.”
“I’ll think about it,” Will says, which, based on the way Dustin cheers, must sound as much like a defeat as it feels.
The cheapest flight gets Will into Indiana a full day after everyone else, which means he spends the whole ride bracing to approach the town on his own, navigate to the Wheelers’ house on his own, ring the doorbell on his own. What happens, of course, is that he steps off the plane feeling creaky and old and terrified in a bone-deep sort of way, and Lucas and Max are waiting for him. Lucas is beaming and holding a sign that says “Will the Wise,” each of the Is dotted with a clumsy wizard hat. Max is slumped low and pretending not to know him even as he leans on the back of her chair in a way only he could get away with.
Lucas pulls Will into a hug the second he’s within reach, holding on when he tries to step back. He’s warm and solid and smells familiar in a way that settles something in Will’s chest. He resists the urge to wriggle free, to hide from the realization of how desperately lonely he’s been. Lucas and Max feel like grown-ups to him in a way the rest of them don’t, maybe because of how quiet and serious their relationship became after Vecna, maybe because Lucas got broad and Max got beautiful and he’s just a shallow, insecure teenager at the end of the day.
Max and Lucas dated until twenty-two, broke up until twenty-five, explored some friends-with-benefits thing until twenty-seven, and called it quits for good at thirty shortly after both coming out as bisexual. Each and every breakup was hard to watch, but Will can’t help being jealous of the lost love between them, which feels real and adult instead of like some childish thing that fossilized at the age of twelve.
“It’s so good to see you, man.” Lucas finally, devastatingly steps back, clapping Will on the shoulder as he lets go.
The right thing to say, obviously, is “You too,” so what comes out is, “You didn’t have to do this.”
“It’s no problem,” Lucas says with an easy grin. “I wanted to see you. And Max kept suggesting we mercy-kill Mike, so I thought it might be a good idea to separate them.“
“Ugh,” Max says with feeling as she accepts the anemic hug Will leans down to give her. “You being here is either going to make him better or so much worse.” Will winces dramatically enough that there’s no hiding it. Lucas makes a face that effortlessly communicates We talked about this in the car.
Will isn’t hurt so much as he’s embarrassed: it’s mortifying to still be this transparent, to know that all the people he loves best can see what a wreck he's made of one of the most important relationships in his life.
Lucas slips an arm around his shoulders and spins him to face the exit. “We’re all glad to have you here. It didn’t feel right without you.”
Lucas lives in Chicago, close enough to drive to this regrettable get-together, and he directs them through rows and rows of cars before finally managing to find his minivan. It’s a deeply uncool vehicle, and Mike and Dustin ribbed him brutally when he bought it, but he coaches a basketball team at a community center and another at the school where he teaches. Half the time when Will gets him on the phone, he’s navigating a drive-through with a pack of screaming kids in the back.
Will slides into the backseat, left foot crunching on a stray fry cup. He clutches his carry-on in his lap. He brought two changes of clothes, a sketchbook, and three extra pairs of socks. He has a one-night booking at a motel well outside the town limits, but he hasn’t committed to a return flight, wary of change fees.
He waits until they’re comfortably ensconced in the stop-and-go traffic of the highway to ask, “How’s he doing?”
Max groans, letting the exhalation stand as an answer.
“It’s not that bad," Lucas says. "Cut him some slack.”
Max scoffs. “You all grew up together so you’re like, Stockholmed in, but I know the two-hour-long fight we had about what movie to watch was not normal.”
“Didn’t we all come here to cheer him up? You couldn’t just let him pick the movie?”
Lucas groans like Will’s walked right into a trap, and Max explodes, “Oh my God, of course we let him pick the movie! He was fighting with himself!”
“Mike is doing—“ Lucas pauses, clearly searching for something diplomatic. “Mike is doing about as well as you’d expect Mike to be doing. But maybe uh. Don’t mention your boyfriend? He still gets weird about you, sometimes.”
Max snorts. Will tries not to react, grateful to be in the backseat where he's less easily observed. He isn’t ashamed of the life he’s built for himself. It is, yes, a little quiet and a little solitary, but it’s basically happy. Even so, almost everything he’s told the Party about it has been a lie. When they were kids, he was the sad, lonely one, the one who got left behind when his friends discovered girls, the one who forever needed rescuing. So he doesn’t always tell them right away when relationships end, and he sometimes blows a handful of dates out of proportion. He used to do it most often with Mike, but now he doesn’t talk to Mike enough to have any “mosts,” so it’s all pretty even.
The boyfriend he’s been telling them all about is some guy he met for coffee twice and never called back. His relationships mostly don’t go anywhere and he mostly doesn’t want them to, but the last time they were all together, really together, he was a wet-eyed kid with a bowlcut and a desperate crush on Mike, and he needs them to know he isn’t that person anymore.
His college hookups with Mike felt like clearing out the lingering remains of a cold, hacking up the last of a cough. It was something he had to do to move on with his life, to have a life at all.
Mike pulled him aside the day after what was not, by any means, their last encounter, tugging him into a corner of the Wheelers’ basement, pressed chest-to-chest like they had been the night before.
“Look,” he said, in what passed for a gentle voice with him. “You know I care about you. You’re my best friend and you always will be. But I’m not gay.”
Will raised an eyebrow and pointedly didn’t touch the hickey Mike had left on his neck the night before.
Mike soldiered on, his face inflamed. “I think it’s just— Everything we went through made things so intense. It’s not about sex, or—or physical attraction; it’s about you and me. They pulled your body out of a quarry, Will! I went to your funeral. I think when I touch you it makes me feel— It’s like proof, you know, that you’re really here. But it wasn’t right of me to get your hopes up. I just can’t feel the way you do.”
Will felt like he was having an out-of-body experience, like he was floating above himself, watching the world’s dumbest, most gut-wrenching conversation happen to someone else. It didn’t feel like being possessed or trapped in the Upside Down: it felt deeply, humanly terrible.
He heard himself say, cold in a way he didn’t feel, “I’m not a kid with a crush anymore. It was never anything but sex for me, but it’s sweet of you to worry about my feelings.”
Mike turned an even brighter red and started stuttering, and after a few minutes of incoherence, Will walked away.
Shelly’s reason for the divorce is simple, straightforward, sympathetic. She and Mike met as troubled kids and settled into an uneasy, codependent courtship. She was in something like crisis for the first few years. The first pregnancy, which Mike has always insisted wasn’t an accident, seemed to settle something in her, but the second spun her out, and there were a few scary years when Mike was always on the verge of collapse, always with two kids in his arms, slowly becoming an expert on psych meds and warning signs. Mike and Shelly got through postpartum depression and an overdose, but they couldn’t make it work when she started evening out.
She told him she couldn’t grow in their marriage, and that was the worst possible thing to say. Fair, honest, undoubtedly accurate, but for Mike, whose self-worth is derived from what he can do for his loved ones, it was devastating.
His parents announced their divorce two weeks after he graduated from college, which felt like they’d been waiting to get all the kids out of the house but forgotten about Holly. He was married by Christmas of that year and had the gall to claim it wasn’t related.
He was a horror in the lead-up to the wedding, micromanaging everything down to the cab company they took from the airport. He developed a nail-biting habit so bad it disrupted his drunken late-night calls to Will about flower arrangements. It was a mistake in a big, obvious way, but as the person who had continued periodically jerking him off several months into the relationship that was now becoming a marriage, Will didn’t feel like the right vessel for this truth.
He knows the rest of them tried. Lucas and Dustin each independently suggested an intervention, but the problem was so foundational that Will felt like bringing it up would be the same as telling Mike he could never be happy, that he was doomed—which at the time he figured they all were, but it still felt cruel to say.
The bachelor party wasn’t much of a party, and included Max and El besides. They sat around drinking and watching movies that reminded Will of being young and only a little bit broken. He’d planned to get deeply, unnervingly drunk, but Mike beat him to it, already visibly inebriated when he opened the door to let them in. They traveled in packs to all the wedding events; Will knows why he didn’t want to be alone with Mike, but he still isn’t sure about the rest of them. Despite his best efforts, he ended up scraping Mike’s hair back from his sweaty forehead as he vomited mostly but not entirely into the toilet. It wasn’t the first time he’d performed this duty, and at the time he’d assumed, with no small degree of resignation, that it wouldn’t be the last.
When he’d emptied himself out, Mike said, staring into the toilet bowl, “Do you remember when we said we’d go crazy together? But then you disappeared on me.”
Which was so totally intolerable that Will disentangled his hand from Mike’s hair and walked out.
Mike asks Will to stay behind as everyone else troops up the basement stairs, and it makes him feel like time is collapsing in on itself, like he’s six and eight and twenty all at once, like when he finally does leave, his bike will be tipped over on the Wheelers’ manicured front lawn—though really, the lawn is one of many things Ted stopped keeping up with as his health went downhill.
“You want a beer?” Mike asks after several minutes of sitting silently in front of the TV, which is itself sitting silently as the credits roll on a movie Will has seen a half-dozen times but still couldn’t follow in the dark, with Mike only a few feet from him. Mike already has a can that he's rolling back and forth between his hands, the same one he's been nursing for most of the night. They never had an intervention about the wedding, but Will knows for a fact that there were some conversations about alcohol.
“I’m good.” He's out of practice being alone with Mike, and he doesn't want to add the complication of alcohol.
“Shelly got the house,” Mike says between drinks, “but she’s not staying in it right now. She and the kids are with her mom in Columbus.”
Will forgets that Mike has kids most of the time. He's only met his daughters twice, and Mike introduced him as “Uncle Will,” which made him nauseous.
“Did you—want to talk about it?” he asks. “Like Shelly or your dad or—“
“Not really,” Mike says, already at the bottom of what is surely not his last beer of the night. “I just wanted to see you.”
Will’s heart stutters, and for a second he feels very young. “Well,” he says, “you’ve seen me.”
Mike lets out a dry pity laugh before refocusing. “Do you ever think about how weird it is we ended up here? We saved the world. Like more than once. All of us, together. And now we’re— You live in California and we don’t really talk and we have all these people in our lives who are never going to understand us. My kids—I look at them and they’re so young. And sometimes I’m so scared I don’t want to let them out of my sight. But then sometimes I just, I hate them because they’ll never go through what we went through. And somehow I’m supposed to—“ The can gives slightly beneath his fingers, and he looks down at it like he’s surprised to see it. “I thought getting married would make me an adult, you know? It was supposed to fix things. But instead it just— Do you ever feel like you stopped growing that first year? It’s like something in me is still stuck back there. Like that’s what’s real, that version of the world, that dumb, scared kid. Do you get that?”
Will’s skin prickles. He resists the urge to touch the back of his neck, to chase away a phantom twinge. “Do I get feeling like what happened ruined us? Yeah, Mike, I do.”
Mike gets up, limbs unfurling from the couch. He disappears to the kitchen and returns with two beers in one hand and the half-full box they came in in the other. He sets a can down in front of Will, the tab already pulled.
“You don’t have to drink it,” he says, an afterthought.
“No, I’ll drink it,” Will says. In his early twenties, he tried to cultivate a taste for fancy cocktails, and when his budget couldn’t stomach that, foreign beers. It turns out, though, that you can take the boy out of rural Indiana, but you can’t take rural Indiana out of the boy, because the first sip of Miller Lite tastes like coming home.
“It’s weird that we don’t talk more.”
“Yeah,” Will says, because it is weird, fundamentally, and because he doesn’t think he can manage more than one syllable without choking on it.
“I miss you,” Mike says, his gaze heavy on the side of Will’s face. “I mean, I broke up my marriage because of you.”
Will knows for a fact that Shelly dumped Mike even as he begged her to go to couple’s counseling, but he doesn’t point this out. He takes a drink, then another, then says, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah!” Mike kneels on a cushion, crowding into Will’s space, one of his long arms on the back of the couch. His eyes are wide and bright, and his knees crunch when he bends them. He’s starting to go grey, a shock of silvery hair at one of his temples, and Will feels like an idiot for thinking he was ever going to get over this.
“Do you remember California?”
Will shuts his eyes briefly, allowing himself a moment’s peace.
“Mike, I live in California. Like, right now.”
“You know what I mean. When we were kids. When I—“
“When you swore you would write me and never did and then when I saw you for the first time in months, you ignored me and treated me like shit?”
Mike rolls his eyes. “I’ve apologized for that a million times. I’m not doing it again. But I’m saying— I did write to you.”
Mike has told him this before, the night before his wedding, drunk and miserable. He said, face hanging over a toilet bowl, “Because I kept sitting down to write, you know, and it was all or nothing. That’s kind of how we always were, right? So sometimes it was like. This blank page just taunting me— I tore up pages and pages of letters. But I just didn’t know how to—because you’d always been there. It didn’t even make sense to be writing to you, to be trying to tell you about things you hadn’t been around for. It was like I wasn’t even a person without you so how would I—“ And then he’d thrown up.
Now, nearly forty, he says in a moony, adolescent voice, “I had the biggest fucking crush on Eddie Munson. You never got to meet him and he died when I was halfway across the country. He was so loud and so weird and no one could stand him outside of Hellfire and he just didn’t give a fuck. He died for nothing, for nothing, but he died trying, and everyone in that town still talks about him like he’s some kind of monster. And he was gay. I think. I’m pretty sure. And it made me feel— Maybe if he’d lived I would have— I just wish you could have met him, you know?”
Will thinks Eddie was smart enough to realize there was no point trying to build a new home in the wreckage of his life, but he knows better than to say this, even with Mike leaning into his space, breath heavy with beer.
He wants to be past this. For years—decades—he’s been telling himself he is past this. But if he stagnated at the age the Upside Down took him, then he stagnated as the person desperately, hysterically in love with Mike Wheeler, and all the relationships in the interim have been about nothing but marking time.
Mike shifts closer. He’s nearly in Will’s lap, but not in a sexy way, more like he’s about to topple over. He’s sort of looming—the love of Will’s life, graceless, awkward, never-grew-into-his-limbs Mike Wheeler.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks, and for all that Will has tried to be better than this, he can’t make himself say no.
Mike kisses exactly the way he did when they were young, frantic and desperate. But Will doesn’t get to enjoy this for long; Mike pulls back and says, words tripping over each other,
“I think I always kind of knew you were gay, you know? I mean, no offense, everyone kind of knew.” Will feels a defensive pang, even though their childhood bullies made the truth of this very clear. “I thought you were so brave when you told us. I didn’t think it was disgusting. When it was you. But my parents— I mean, your mom’s happy as long as you’re not communing with her from an alternate dimension. Anything on top of that’s just gravy. I’m not saying it was easy for you. I know it wasn’t. But it was just—”
“I used to think I infected you,” Will says. The TV has long since gone black, but he trains his eyes on the screen anyway. He can feel Mike beside him, too close, body heat radiating toward him. “My dad knew before I did. He’s been calling me a fag as long as I can remember.” He doesn’t miss Mike’s flinch at the word, and he feels a bitter flash of satisfaction before the guilt floods in. “Whatever it was, it was always in me, but you had crushes on girls. You had El. I thought it was my fault when you first—“ He makes a hand gesture that he means to encapsulate the mess between them.
“So did I. Maybe that’s why I was such a dick to you. You were the first guy I noticed, you know, like that. And it only started after you came back from the Upside Down, when everything was so hard and we spent so much time together. It didn’t feel like something that was coming from inside me. It didn’t feel natural. I was desperate for you to stop me. But you never did.”
“I don’t think either of us was really in a good place,” Will says, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice. He doesn’t appreciate the reminder of how he allowed himself to be treated, how little he was willing to live on.
“I never got over it,” Mike says, eyes wide and gaze steady. “I never got over you.” He doesn’t say it easily, exactly, but like it’s a fact, an incontrovertible truth. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve years old.”
Will reels back like he’s been slapped. When they were younger, Mike sometimes made wild promises, said they could run away together, change their names, disappear, said it had always been Will, but he never used the word love.
“You have not,” he says, both more and less harshly than he means to. “You can’t just say that.”
“Of course I can say it, it’s true! I know I didn’t treat you the way I should have—“
“That’s not my problem!” Will knows by now that love doesn’t promise anything but its own existence. But Mike was not in love with him. His entire adolescence is intolerable if Mike was in love with him. Not because they might have had a happy ending—that was never in the cards for him—but because he can’t, at this late stage, incorporate it into his personal history. The thought has the potential to unravel him, and he simply cannot allow it to take root. “You don’t know what you were feeling. We got so close after everything, and I was the only gay person you knew, and you were having this whole identity crisis you projected onto me. And now you’re looking back and trying to build a narrative because the human brain is built to detect patterns. You think it makes more sense if you were in love with me, so you’ve decided it has to be true.”
Mike’s fists clench and unclench. He really isn’t so close anymore, nearly an entire cushion between them now, but being near him activates something in Will, the desperate, sweaty-palmed teen always wanting to be closer, closer, closer, despite the way he dreaded it.
“You can’t tell me how I felt! I was so in love with you. I used to lie in bed at night thinking about holding your hand. I had dreams about brushing that stupid bowlcut. Tell me you don’t feel the same, tell me it’s too late, tell me I ruined both our lives, but don’t tell me I wasn’t in love with you.”
Will’s entire brain feels like a record scratch. Mike was really only tender with him once, when they all visited him during his first semester of college, which he spent in crisis and in denial about it.
They both got sick two days in, which the rest of the Party undoubtedly exchanged knowing glances about behind their backs, so they were left behind while everyone else went to a movie. Mike had swung a single by being so unpleasant and having so many screaming nightmares that his roommate begged for a transfer. They fooled around in his narrow twin XL, but all the activity made Will’s sinus headache worse, and Mike let out an especially disgusting sneeze at a pivotal moment, so after that they gave up and just lay together, Will’s head on Mike’s shoulder. In the right configuration, Mike was warm and soft despite how relentlessly they all needled him about his gangly limbs and sharp elbows, and Will was foggy with contentment right up until the adrenaline spike of Dustin’s voice echoing down the dorm halls prompted Mike to push him onto the floor.
“Okay,” Will says shakily. “Okay.” He runs a hand through his hair and finds it shorter than he expects. He’s wearing ratty clothes, a flannel that had holes in the cuffs when he stole it from Jonathan a decade ago, jeans he wears for painting, sneakers he should already have retired, but he went for a haircut the day before his flight and he keeps being startled by the ends of it, the new boundaries of himself.
“Well, I didn’t think it was that upsetting,” Mike says snippily.
This startles a laugh out of Will. “God, you’re obnoxious.”
“Forget it," Mike says, his voice wobbly. "Jesus.” He pulls himself off the couch with a creak of his joints.
Despite himself, Will is still sensitive to Mike’s hurts, and the impulse to fix them opens his mouth before he can think.
What comes out, insanely, is, “I actually have been in love with you since I was twelve years old. Sit back down.”
"I was in love with you," Mike grumbles, but he sits with a thump that sends the couch back half a foot. He looks at Will with such an unguardedly hopeful expression that he feels queasy.
Being this close to Mike, his body feels alive for the first time in years. His body never felt like it belonged to him, even before the Upside Down. It was just a thing that caused problems, that pissed his dad off because of its inability to throw a ball in a straight line or shoot a gun without buckling from the recoil. It was just a thing the boys at school could trip and push and wet willie, and later it became a thing that could be taken from him entirely, that could crush him down into a dark corner of itself and harm his friends.
The frantic, furtive sex he had with Mike is the only sex he's ever really enjoyed. He feels like he's acting with the men he dates, trying to express a pleasure he can’t feel because what he really wants, all these years later, is a handjob in a basement with the lights out and his partner avoiding his gaze. He wants Mike’s hand, calloused from practicing the one song he could semi-successfully play on the guitar, and he wants the almost-angry look on Mike’s face when he comes.
“This is stupid,” he says, as much to himself as to Mike. “You just got divorced and you're rebounding.” The words make sense strung together, but he can’t quite say them with conviction. What they had was real, even if neither of them has ever admitted it. It was real and complicated and profoundly psychologically damaging. If Mike wanted a rebound, he still has all of his hair and a severe but not unappealing bone structure—he could get on a dating app or go out to a bar. This might be a horrible idea, but it’s nothing as straightforward as a rebound.
“You don’t believe that," Mike says.
Will leans his head against the back of the couch, eyes shut. He can feel every year of adolescent mess weighing down on him.
“I don’t believe it,” he admits. He could add that the admission isn't necessarily a yes, that there are many, many other ways for this to be a bad idea. There's a split second, even, when he thinks he might, when he could say no and mean it—because they've tried and failed before, because they live on opposite ends of the country, because what he needs, really, is the best friend who never stopped looking for him. He hesitates, slowed by the weight of his past selves and their wants, and the moment passes, flimsy and insubstantial.