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“You could just tell everyone I’m sick,” Mike says as Jonathan leans in to undo his tie for the fourth time. “Like maybe my appendix ruptured or something, but in a super chill way that no one needs to freak out about.”
“You got your appendix out when you were five,” Jonathan says without looking up.
“How do you know that?” Mike’s memories of his appendectomy are mostly secondhand: he knows he cried when he came out of the anesthetic fog because his mom thought it was cute and took about a million photos, and he knows he threw up on Nancy’s favorite dress because she never let him forget it, but there’s nothing he can be sure is really his.
“Will cried every day for two weeks because you weren’t in school.” Jonathan finishes the knot, tugs it tight enough to choke, then frowns and undoes it. Mike tries not to fidget, which he’s already been scolded for a half-dozen times. It makes him uneasy that there are so many people in his life who knew him before he was himself, before he figured out everything he wanted to hide.
“Well, that was just an example anyway. Make it literally anything else. Your mom wouldn’t even care; she hates me now.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She’s just protective. Of Will.” Jonathan says this so earnestly that Mike doesn’t even think he’s trying to be passive-aggressive.
“But that’s so stupid. Will isn’t even upset about—” Mike gestures vaguely to the space between them, rolling his eyes when Jonathan winces. “Yeah, yeah, everything’s weird forever, I get it. But it’s not like he’s just sitting around pining.”
“Of course not,” Jonathan says in the tight voice that means he’s lying, even though Mike knows for a fact that Will is doing just fine in college, better than he ever has, because wounded soul with hidden depths appeals in a way erratic mess who blacks out at every party really doesn’t. He’s prepared to argue the point, and Jonathan must be able to tell because he presses on, “Forget it. My mom doesn’t hate you, and you’re coming to the wedding. So stay still and let me do this.”
“I’m not moving! How are you so bad at this?” This is hypocritical, obviously—he should have learned to tie his own ties years ago, but his mom thought it would be nice for his dad to teach him, and he and his dad both thought that was stupid. The compromise they reached was that his mom helped with his ties for high school dances and college interviews while intentionally not demonstrating anything useful. He could have insisted, which would have spared him this moment in which Jonathan isn’t exactly reminding him of his mother but isn’t not reminding him of his mother, but he sort of liked having an excuse to be close to her, a quiet moment just for the two of them.
“There’s something wrong with this fabric,” Jonathan says through gritted teeth.
“Oh yeah, it’s the fabric’s fault. It’s a trick tie and I bought it for attention. You got me.”
“Look, Mike—“
“Every time I see your mom, she looks at me like I killed someone. She didn’t even want me here.” The words spill out of him, more emotional than he’d like. He wants this to be about logic—Joyce doesn’t want him there, and he doesn’t want to be there, so he shouldn’t be there. But the way he’s said it, it just sounds like hurt feelings, even though it really doesn’t matter that Joyce doesn’t like him anymore. She isn’t his mother, isn’t his friend, isn’t anything to him except a person he’s known his whole life.
“You know that’s not true.”
“Well, I sure didn’t get an invite.”
“Because she knew you’d be my plus-one!”
“Max is Lucas’s plus-one, but they both got their own invitations. She hates me because she thinks I broke her precious Will’s heart. It’s bullshit. This is all at least as much your fault, but everyone’s only ever mad at me.”
Jonathan chuckles in his humorless Jonathan way. “Trust me, she’s not mad at anyone, she’s disappointed, and she’s disappointed in me. But I’m still going.”
“Well, you kind of have to. She’s not my mom.” It’s an objectively shitty thing to say, which Mike knows even as he’s saying it. This is as open as Jonathan’s ever been about what happened when he told Joyce they were dating. The Byers are a closed unit, and Mike, like everyone else, is stuck on the outside.
“Mike,” Jonathan says. Mike has been hearing his name in Jonathan’s mouth his entire life, but it sounds different now, like one adult talking to another in a way he still sometimes finds startling. “My mom doesn’t hate you. I promise. Now can you please not make today any harder than it already is?”
This is the first reference he’s made to today being hard, which isn’t really surprising. Jonathan only talks about himself in unpredictable bursts that are over before he can figure out how to respond. When they were smoking one day a few months into their relationship, he got up to grab drinks and said over his shoulder, lit sickly yellow by the open fridge, “I think like—my mom loves us both, obviously, but if it had been me in the Upside Down, she just would have buried the body.” Then he saw the look on Mike’s face and mumbled, “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” and made up an errand that got him out of the apartment for the rest of the day. About a month after that, when Mike tagged along to drop off some library books, he said with one hand in the return slot, “It’s not that Hopper’s anything like my dad. But going home now, I don’t know, it reminds me of being a kid.” Mike had never really thought, before that, about what Jonathan’s childhood had been like for Jonathan, a blind spot he encouraged by only ever talking about what his childhood was like for Will.
They haven’t talked about the wedding beyond the logistics of getting to it—the mountains of snacks for the road, the massive accordioned map they each thought the other was reading wrong, the room at a motel miles from the one Joyce recommended for out-of-towners. Mike knows that he probably should have pushed for more, but Jonathan seemed happy enough helping Joyce plan, and asking how he felt about his new stepdad seemed like the kind of thing that would bring the Byers’ defensive gate slamming down in his face.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks now, feeling stupid even as he says it.
“Do I want to talk about it? Mike, we’re leaving in fifteen minutes. No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
This is not, Mike notes, the usual No, I’m fine. No, seriously. How are you, though?
“You told your mom not to expect us for another two hours. We have time.” He squints at his watch, swallowing down a complaint about how early it still is. They were supposed to go over in casual wear to help decorate the backyard—yet another of the many tasks Mike has been volunteered for by virtue of dating Jonathan—but when he woke up, Jonathan was already in his suit and antsy enough that he decided not to push.
“Right, but she knows I’ll be early.”
This is so ridiculously, perfectly Jonathan that Mike has to allow himself a minute to recover. If he exceeds expectations, he wants full credit, while Jonathan is walking around feeling beholden to promises he never even made.
“You don’t have to be that early. Your mom’s probably still asleep. Now would you just sit down for a second?”
Jonathan looks down at himself, at his light grey suit and the lilac tie that matches Will’s and Hopper’s, and Joyce’s dress and El’s, signifiers of a family coming together. He slumps, a full-body deflation, and he allows Mike to push him into a seated position on the bed. Mike sits next to him, landing with a thud on the too-thin mattress.
He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say, now that he’s made it this far. The motel room, tight and narrow and rattled constantly by passing trucks, is getting to him, making him twitchy and defensive. Back in Massachusetts, they aren't living together, but Jonathan's lease lapsed at the beginning of summer and couldn’t afford the rent increase without Nancy. They aren't living together, but the job he liked, the one that felt like it could maybe be a career someday, disappeared when the paper collapsed and the owner fled the country. They aren't living together, but classes don't start up again until September, and Mike's parents stopped paying his rent, and everything is cheaper split in two, and neither of them has said it but they wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t at least kind of serious about each other, so it just makes sense. They've been doing okay not-living together in Mike’s one-bedroom, but the motel is unbearable, a tiny box outside of which lurks every person from their shared past.
"I just—“ Jonathan rubs at his eyes. "I just hate being back here."
Back here, even though after Will and Jonathan left for school, Joyce took the last of the government hush money and moved to a town about an hour outside of Chicago that Jonathan has only ever been to on holidays, and not even all of them, since even he had to admit that a good boyfriend would sacrifice a family Thanksgiving or two to keep his girlfriend happy.
"Hopper’s nothing like my dad. And he makes my mom really happy. He was there for us, all of us, back in Hawkins, but. It's just. They fight a lot.” He pulls his hands from his face. His eyes are dry, Mike notes with guilty relief. “God, I know that makes me sound like a little kid.”
In second grade, Mike went home crying from a sleepover and wasn’t allowed to stay the night again until Lonnie left for good. He remembers Jonathan shooing them out of the kitchen even though they’d been promised s’mores made on the stovetop—Lonnie had already started yelling, but it took Mike a second to figure out what was going on, Jonathan moving them along and Will going obediently and him lagging behind because this kind of thing didn’t happen at his house. Jonathan shut them in his bedroom, then went back into the hall. It doesn’t make sense for him to have been audible over the yelling, which was coming from Joyce too by then, but Mike remembers his small, serious voice, not what he said but the fact of it, and an impact, renewed screaming and a door slamming. Jonathan came back with ice on his face and Joyce behind him, red-eyed and saying she thought she’d better take Mike home. Will was crying by then, quiet sniffles that made him feel like he should protest. Jonathan was dry-eyed, as far as he could see past the ice pack. They all piled into the car, and Mike felt guilty but not guilty enough to say he wanted to stay. He didn’t start crying until they were waiting on his doorstep for his mom to let him in. The memory settled inside him heavy with guilt, like he’d done something wrong by being there, because Joyce and Jonathan kept looking at him, panicked like he was the problem, and when Joyce took him to his door, she maintained a grip on his arm just barely too-tight. It’s not something he knows how to talk about; it’s too big, buried too deep.
“Hopper’s an asshole,” he says. It’s deeply, obviously inadequate, but it’s the only thing he can manage.
To his surprise, Jonathan laughs and says, “Thank you,” a fervent exhalation. “He really is. And I have to stand up there and pretend to be happy about it. My dad—he ruined our childhoods. I mean, I was going to elementary school with black eyes. And I do get—“ He presses his knuckles to his forehead, hard enough that the strain shows in the tendons of his wrist. “I know it was bad for her too. I know that. But she was the only one who could have stopped it, and she didn’t. And now she’s— And it’s not the same. I know it’s not the same. But it’s not that different either.” Mike slips an arm around his waist. The movement feels mechanical and insincere, like something he pulled from a checklist on being a good boyfriend. But Jonathan sags at the contact, leaning into him. He runs hot, which Mike was surprised to discover when he suddenly had a reason to be touching Jonathan, something he wouldn’t have guessed from all the years they’d known each other at a distance.
“Maybe we should say your appendix ruptured.”
It’s a joke, obviously; Mike doesn’t need the lifeless laugh that follows to know that. Jonathan’s never met an obligation he couldn’t build his self-worth around. Still, it’s tempting. He likes the version of his life he lives with Jonathan up in Massachusetts. Things are different here, knowing Will and El are staying at the house, that Lucas and Dustin and Max are carpooling from Midway, that his parents will be driving up from Hawkins in an hour or two.
“We could,” he says, meaning it. The offer sits between them, quieter and more serious than his earlier whining. They won’t—for so many reasons, they won’t—but it seems important suddenly that Jonathan knows they could.
“I just— I want to go home,” Jonathan says. Something in Mike shivers at the reference to home. He might just mean he misses being half a country away from all of this, but it feels big anyway.
“It’s just one day,” he says, but that’s not right. It’s not just one day—it’s the rest of all of their lives. “I mean. You don’t live here anymore. We’ll go to the wedding, then we’ll go home.” The words sound insane to him, we and home. They must sound insane to Jonathan too, because he pulls back to look at him, his expression wide-eyed and earnest. He looks like it’s the first time someone’s told him he can walk away from a bad situation. He can’t, really. He’ll be back here for birthdays and holidays, walking the halls of a house that turns him into a stoic little kid.
Jonathan looks at him a second longer, then nods and gets to his feet, leaving Mike chilled where his body is newly exposed to the recycled air of the room.
“You’re right. It’s just one day. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Mike says. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s missed something, left something undone. He wants to try again, to say something more comforting, but he doesn’t know what. Before he can even begin to figure it out, Jonathan presses a kiss to his cheek, then pulls back and smiles at him. It’s unconvincing, but Jonathan’s smiles usually are.
“I’m good, I swear. But we need to get going.” He’s halfway to the door before Mike can even consider responding. Jonathan turns back, and Mike thinks it might be an opening until he says, “Maybe you can get someone to tie that for you at the house?” gesturing to the fabric still hanging from his neck.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, there’ll be someone there I can ask.” An understatement—everyone he’s ever known will be in Joyce’s backyard in a few hours.
“Good.” Jonathan’s hair is mussed, his suit jacket askew. There’s been a manic look in his eyes all day, but he looks more settled now, or maybe just tired. “Good.” He flashes another unconvincing smile. “Let’s get this over with.”