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Mike isn’t quite sure what it is that woke him up, but there is a startled urgency to the way his eyes open, indicative of some contributing force other than his own classically insomniac tendencies. He blinks, eyes adjusting slowly to the blackness around him as the rough outline of shapes start to take form: the high ceiling of the barn, the rotted wood of the rafters. He thinks, then, that maybe it’s a sound that roused him, but a quick glance around the room tells him that everyone else is still asleep, motionless lumps in their own sleeping bags. The thick haze of sleep is enough for Mike to brush it off at first, to roll over in place, and it’s when his hand brushes against a spot that had previously been occupied by a warm, solid body that it hits him — it’s an absence, then, that woke him up, not an intrusion.
He props himself up on one elbow, sleeping bag rustling in the silence. “Will?” he whispers.
There’s no response, which Mike had been expecting. He doesn’t know where in the immediate vicinity Will would’ve gone, doesn’t know why he would’ve gotten up just to go lie back down fifteen feet away. He rubs at his eyes with one hand, then sits up the rest of the way, sleeping bag falling into a crumpled heap around his waist. The barn is just as quiet as before, just as still, but the door is cracked open, letting a thin sliver of moonlight spill into the room, illuminating scattered piles of debris. Mike pushes the sleeping bag away, untangling his legs from the synthetic material, trying to keep the rustling to a minimum. It’s a crowd of light sleepers, through and through, and he doesn’t need the entire room awake and freaking out with him. His shoes are lying a few feet away, and he can’t get his laces up in the dark, but it’s fine, Mike thinks, as he pads across the barn. Hopefully Will hasn’t gone far enough for him to have to lace up his shoes anyway.
It doesn’t take long to spot him once Mike gets the door pushed open. Will is leaning against the hay bales and Mike’s eyes gravitate towards him instantly, a magnetic thing — he’s illuminated in profile, the moonlight silvery and cold along the slope of his nose, and he’s fumbling in his pocket for something, currently unaware that Mike has noticed he’d left at all.
It isn’t until Mike pulls the barn door closed behind him that Will startles, the soft click of the latch echoing in the clearing. There’s a quick movement as something falls to the ground — Will dropping whatever it is he’d just pulled out of his pocket as he turns to look at Mike with wide, surprised eyes.
“Oh,” he breathes, not yet making a move to pick up the fallen object. “You scared me.”
“I scared you?” Mike asks incredulously, squinting against the sting of the oncoming breeze. It’s freezing out, and his sweater isn’t doing much to block out the chill; he shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants, pulling his shoulders up against his ears. If he’d known how cold it was going to get, maybe he wouldn’t have cut his hair. “You scared me. I woke up and you weren’t there.”
Will winces softly, tucking his hands into the pocket of his own jacket. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think you’d notice. I’ve only been out here for a minute.”
Mike shrugs aimlessly, then crosses the distance between them in four swift strides. “I guess maybe I heard you leave,” he offers, even though Will had already been gone when he’d opened his eyes. The alternative is that he’s just become so accustomed to Will’s presence that his body has started to have subconsciously visceral reactions whenever Will leaves the vicinity. It’s such an embarrassing thought that Mike would almost rather Will think he’s taken to watching Will sleep, that he’s just following Will around in the middle of the night and gone full on stalker mode.
“Sorry,” Will says again, shoulders hunched up and mirroring Mike’s own posture. “You should go back to sleep.”
“It’s cool,” Mike says. His jaw is tensing as he fights back the urge to chatter, but despite the cold, it’s a peaceful night — the field surrounding them is desolate, almost eerily silent, and the air is crisp on each inhale. A quick glance up reveals a glittering expanse of stars, spotted along an unseasonably clear midnight sky. “It’s a nice night,” he adds, suddenly feeling more than a little awkward standing in front of Will like this, shoes undone, no jacket, trying not to shiver. “I could just stay out here with you for a minute. If you don’t mind.”
Will’s eyes dart between his own, like he’s trying to gauge whether Mike is being serious or not. “Of course not,” he says, apparently coming to the conclusion that Mike is not, in fact, just fucking with him. “And it smells a lot better out here than it did inside.”
Mike laughs softly. His laces are dragging along the soil of the field a little bit, catching under the soles of his shoes as he shifts, and he bends down to tie them hastily, lest he trip and make a total fool of himself. One messy loop into another, and then there’s a flash of something white in the loose straw scattered across the ground, just a few feet away from Mike’s foot. It must be whatever Will had dropped earlier — Mike reaches for it as he stands up, and it’s not until he’s already holding it out to Will that he realizes what it is.
“Oh,” Mike says, staring down at the box of Marlboros. “Are these—”
Will bites down on his lower lip, slipping his hand into Mike’s, fingers closing around the box. “Maybe,” he says, looking a little sheepish about it, but not enough to come off as apologetic — clearly more so at being caught than anything else. “Why? Are you going to tattle?”
His voice tilts upwards at the end, unquestionably teasing, but Mike wrinkles his nose at him anyway. Mike is a lot of things, sure, but he’s not a snitch. “I’m not five,” Mike points out. Will barks out a sharp laugh, still clutching the box in one hand — not opening it, but not putting it away either. “No, I don’t care, I just— I didn’t know you—”
He waves one hand vaguely in front of him, and the scene at hand suddenly becomes a lot more clear: Will, disappearing from his sleeping bag in the middle of the night and slipping outside, not because of an errant kidnapping or freak possession event, but because of a secret smoke break with contraband Mike didn’t even know he had any interest in. Will shrugs, a little carelessly, and then he does flick the box open. “Only sometimes,” he says, pulling his other hand out of his jacket pocket and tipping a single cigarette out in one fluid, practiced movement.
A discrete glance down reveals the box is a little less than half empty, and Mike wonders how long he’s had it — if this is a new thing, whether Jonathan spent six months in Lenora getting stoned with Will lighting up right next door—
Or maybe this is a more recent development, sometime in the last couple of years, a box of smokes nicked from his mom or Hop or the dilapidated convenience store down the street. Sometimes, Will had said, but maybe that just means less than Joyce, who Mike has seen with a cigarette in hand almost more than he hasn’t. Mike is still staring at the thing, lying there inconspicuously in Will’s palm, and then Will takes it in between two fingers. He pauses for a brief moment of consideration, then holds the box out to Mike.
“You want one?” Will asks, nonchalant.
Mike is sure it’s downright comical just how fast his eyebrows shoot up, but he can’t really help it. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t know, I’ve never—”
He trails off, feeling inexplicably foolish, like he’s admitting to something a lot more stupid than he actually is. Will shrugs again, the casual gesture undone entirely by the genuine sincerity in his eyes. “You don’t have to,” he says quietly. “You just seemed kind of— interested.”
Maybe it’s best to hold his tongue then, about how Mike’s supposed interest probably had less to do with the smokes themselves than it did with Will being the one smoking them. “Sure,” Mike hears himself say, trying not to think about how weird it is that Will is standing there in that preppy fucking colorblocked jacket and his sneakers, fumbling around in his pocket for a lighter. “Why not, right?”
“You’ve really never?” Will asks, finally pulling a box of matches out of his pocket, not the lighter Mike had been expecting. He tips the box of Marlboros out towards Mike again, and this time, he takes one, trying to pretend like the subtle weight of it is not as foreign in his hand as it feels. “Not even once?”
“No,” Mike says, trying to figure out whether he should be getting defensive or not. “Why? Is it that hard to believe?”
“I just figured, you know, it’s easier to bum a smoke off of somebody than it is to get your hands on some booze,” Will says thoughtfully. He tucks the cigarettes back into his pocket and plants both hands on the stack of hay behind him, taking a careful step onto the bale already resting by their feet — and then, when it holds his weight, he hoists himself up, legs swinging. “And you’ve done that, so.”
“Well, it’s not like a lot of places are checking ID right now,” Mike says, craning his neck up a little bit to look Will in the eye. “Whose are those, then?”
Will shoots him a sideways grin, an easy, lopsided thing, and Mike’s heart flips over in his chest. “My mom’s,” he says, confirming about one third of Mike’s suspicions. “She’s got so many that there’s no way she’ll notice they’re missing. Or maybe she just doesn’t care.”
“Not Jonathan’s?” Mike offers, watching Will fiddle with the matchbox. “Or Hopper’s?”
“Jonathan doesn’t really have much interest in cigarettes,” Will snorts, like this is some kind of inside joke between them. Mike grins back at him. “And Hopper only smokes the unfiltered shit — it’s nasty. Even my mom stays away.”
“Ew,” Mike says. Will’s trying to grab a match and for the first time, Mike notices his hands shaking, enough for it to be visible even in the dark, and he wonders what it’s from — the cold, maybe, or nerves, or whatever it was that had made him wake up in the middle of the night to go light up outside, alone. He wonders if Will has ever craved it, if he’s ever itched for a fix, if it’s turned him antsy and restless the way Mike feels all the time these days.
A frustrated divot forms between Will’s eyebrows, and when he does pick up a match, he can’t get a good enough grip to strike it. “Shit,” Will is muttering under his breath, “sorry, hang on—”
“Here,” Mike interrupts, putting a hand out. “Let me.”
Will eyes him for a moment, then passes the matches over. “You know how?”
“Come on,” Mike scoffs, taking it and striking it once, hard, against the side of the box. It bursts into flame instantly, the warmth of it small and contained, but jarring against the cool air. Mike angles it upwards, keeping his fingers away, and says, amused, “I know how to use a match. ”
“Right,” Will says. He might be turning a little pink, but it’s hard to tell under the cover of darkness. He tucks his cigarette between his lips, and Mike copies the motion, both of them leaning in towards the lit match. “I just meant— when you light it,” Will starts, a little muffled, “it’s— like this,” and then the tip of it catches on the flame.
It’s not like Mike is staunchly opposed to the act or anything, but he still probably shouldn’t be as fascinated by this as he is — the slow drag in, the way the tension immediately ebbs from Will’s body as his eyes flutter closed. It feels practiced, vaguely ritualistic, like Will is sharing something special with him, a secret that no one else has been let in on yet. Mike doesn’t love the scent of the smoke when Will exhales a moment later, turning his head to the side just enough to avoid blowing it all up in Mike’s face, but he does like feeling like they’re in on something together, like this is another thing about Will that he gets to know while the rest of the world remains oblivious.
Mike brings his own cigarette to his lips, inhaling deeply then waving the match out. Smoke floods his mouth at once, bitter and sharp, the taste of it a thousand times worse than catching the scent of it lingering around the hallways at school; he recoils immediately, eyes stinging as they fill up with tears, and he opens his mouth to say something — maybe ew, or gross or what the hell, but what comes out in the end is, “Oh my god,” around a raspy, hacking cough. “Oh my god,” Mike says again, for emphasis, because he doesn’t think it really got across the first time— “that’s fucking disgusting.”
Will looks like he’s trying his hardest not to laugh, but one slips through anyway. “Sorry,” he says. “I figured I’d let you find out for yourself.”
“You like this?” Mike asks, incredulous. Suddenly, this unassuming little object between his fingers is the most offensive thing on the face of the planet. He wants to fling it away — far, far away — where it can never hurt him again, and the only thing deterring him is the dry hay scattered all across the ground. Mike has a feeling that maybe setting the barn on fire might not be the most productive use of their time, oncoming potential apocalypse or not.
“You get used to it,” Will says, lifting his cigarette back to his mouth. Mike’s head already feels a little funny, woozy in a way he’s not sure he likes, and he doesn’t know if it’s from the smoke or the way Will keeps his eyes on Mike the entire time he inhales, lips curling softly into a smile as he exhales again.
“I got used to eating canned beans for breakfast,” Mike huffs. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”
“Hilarious,” Will deadpans. He nods towards Mike’s hand. “You don’t have to finish that.”
Mike has no intention of finishing it, but he’s going to give this thing a proper go, at least. Another drag in — shorter this time, more cautious, and—
“Oh,” Mike says immediately, “oh, no. ” Turns out it’s not better the second time around.
“Okay,” Will admonishes. “That one’s on you.”
“I know, I know,” Mike says, laughing through a cough. He definitely doesn’t like the head rush, and he doesn’t know how Will even tolerates this feeling, much less how he actively seeks it out. “I just thought— you said it takes getting used to.”
“I meant, like— over a few tries,” Will says, laughing lightly. “Not over a couple minutes.” He reaches out, plucks the burnt stub of a match from Mike’s fingers, and lets it fall to the ground. He reaches for the cigarette too, then pauses. “You can put it out, you know.”
There is nothing around for Mike to use as an ashtray, so he just drops it, stomping on it immediately with his foot, and grinding it down into the soil until he’s sure it’s gone out. His stomach feels a little strange, like he’s had one drink too many, and he closes his eyes, bracing himself on the bale of hay Will is sitting on. Distantly, he’s aware of how close his hand is to Will’s thigh; more presently, he can’t bring himself to care. The smell of smoke is starting to fill the space around them, not quite stale yet, but watered down by the open air, acrid and weak. Will taps on his cigarette, a few flakes of ash falling off the end, narrowly missing his knee as they flutter slowly to the ground. He’s looking at Mike with a contemplative look on his face, like he could be looking right through him, thinking about absolutely anything.
“Something on your mind?” Mike prompts.
Will bites down on his lower lip again, worrying at it. “It’s kind of stupid.”
“Try me,” Mike says.
“It’s just—” Will starts, then pauses again. “My mom used to tell me, you know, about when she was our age, and she’d skip class to go smoke under the bleachers or whatever—”
“And make out with Hopper,” Mike offers, grinning.
Will pulls a face. “Ew,” he says. “Please don’t say that.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s just,” Will says again, haltingly, as he looks away, “I thought, maybe— I didn’t get to do a lot of the high school thing, because of— well, whatever, you know, but I thought maybe that could be us sometime. Just once or twice, to see.”
Mike blinks, surprised. “Smoking under the bleachers?”
If Will wasn’t turning pink before, he definitely is now. “Like I said,” he says. “Stupid. Forget it.”
“Hey, no,” Mike chides. “Don’t be like that.”
Will gives him a long, exasperated look, then rolls his eyes. “No,” he says, which isn’t a very endearing thing to say on its own, but something about that exasperation feels warm and fond and familiar, and Mike can’t help the way he leans in, just a little bit, hand inching closer to Will’s leg. “I meant, like— quintessential teenage rebellion, kind of. Stuff everyone our age does. I’m smoking one of these, trying to pretend they taste good, and you’re— you’re skipping pre-calc to complain about your teachers and getting all worked up about college applications.”
“And you offer me a smoke to calm me down,” Mike chimes in, “and then I throw up all over the bleachers—”
“Okay, no,” Will says, but he’s laughing now. “No one’s throwing up, okay?”
“I might,” Mike says, all at once enthralled by the way Will’s face has lit up, how different he looks now than he did a few hours ago when they’d gone to bed, now that he’s happy, relaxed. He flushes, warm with the thought: that he did that, just a little bit. And the nicotine, too, but mostly Mike, probably. Mike did that.
It’s kind of a stupid, illogical train of thought to get caught up on, but it’s not like Mike has ever really been rational about Will. “Sorry,” Mike says after a moment, when Will doesn’t say anything else. “That things aren’t working out that way, I mean,” he adds, as Will’s eyebrows go up. “That stuff can’t be normal for us.”
It’s such a mundane thing, so much so that Mike wouldn’t have even expected Will to think about it — or that if he’d been thinking about school at all, it would have been thoughts of insults scribbled over their lockers in permanent ink, getting tripped in the hallways, having a panic attack in the bathroom and failing out of calculus. Not boring, unremarkable things like this.
Will hums thoughtfully, then flicks the remnant of his own cigarette to the ground. Mike brings the tip of his shoe over that too, grinding it into the ground before it can light anything on fire. “Whatever,” Will says, shrugging. “Who cares about the bleachers anyway, you know? They’re boring. I guess it was just more about—” He kicks his foot into the air, letting his heel bounce off the hay and back again, suddenly looking a little bashful.
“What?” Mike prompts.
Will shrugs again. “Well, stuff is never normal for us,” he says, which makes Mike huff an amused breath out through his nose. “I just meant, like” —he looks off into the distance, up at the treeline, the sky— “it was more about you being there with me? If that makes sense?”
It comes out like a question, like Mike is the one saying something Will doesn’t understand. For a moment, the words don’t really register, and it’s just Will sitting there, very intentionally not looking at Mike — and the little pieces of hay poking Mike’s leg through the fleece of his sweatpants, and the breeze blowing the smell of smoke all around the clearing, and the weird taste in Mike’s mouth, and then—
“Oh,” Mike says when it clicks: that Will had been thinking all of these thoughts about these stupid mundane things that no one else would ever think to be nostalgic about — all the stupid parts of high school, like bleachers and calculus tests and college applications — but he’d mostly been thinking about them in the context of Mike. As in, he wanted to do all of them with Mike. It’s kind of a strange thought, but it’s definitely not an unpleasant one, and it’s warming Mike through more than the sweater or the smoke ever could. “You wanted to— sit under the bleachers with me?”
“No,” Will says emphatically. He aims a swift, lighthearted kick at Mike’s knee, which Mike easily dodges, and purses his lips. “Well, yeah, I guess,” he adds a second later, still thoughtful. “I wanted to sit under the bleachers— with you.”
There is an emphasis that hadn’t been there when Mike had been the one speaking — with you, like the focal point of the entire sentence is different now, like Mike is at the center of it, like— Will wants to be with Mike, and the rest of it is all circumstantial.
That feels like confirmation bias, though, like Mike is seeking out something that isn’t there, just because he wants it to be. Does he want it to be? He turns that thought over, lets it settle in as Will shifts in place, one knee coming to bump against Mike’s thigh. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Mike starts. The head rush hasn’t gone away, even though minutes have passed since Mike took that last hit, and it makes him feel strangely dizzy as he meets Will’s gaze. “But— I’m pretty sure there are ways to get me to hang out with you that don’t involve our football field and a pack of cigarettes.”
The weird dizzy feeling intensifies when Will doesn’t respond, only keeps looking at him with an expression on his face that Mike can’t quite place. Mike also isn’t sure when they had gotten so close together, or when his hand had moved from the small space next to Will’s leg to resting atop his knee, palm pressed flat to the fabric. Will glances down at the same moment Mike notices; he moves to pull his hand away, to apologize — it’s only a cigarette, Mike’s not fucking drunk, and there is no reason for him to suddenly be acting like a total weirdo — when Will says, “Yeah?”
It’s so quiet that Mike almost misses it, and something about Will’s tone makes him frown. “Yeah,” he says, and then, a second later, squeezes Will’s knee in what he hopes is a reassuring way. “Obviously— I mean, if you really wanted to, we could sneak out and smoke a stupid cigarette, I wouldn’t mind, but— you know. We could do something else, too. Anything— it doesn’t matter to me.”
Will makes a noise then, something akin to a cough, or maybe a laugh, sharp and startled and unexpectedly dry. “Yeah?” he says again, then looks away. “Like what? Hanging out during the strategy meetings I’m not allowed into because everyone thinks I might be a spy?”
Mike blinks, caught off-guard by the sudden wry, humorless tone Will’s voice has taken on. “Will—”
Will presses his lips together, eyes widening like he’s just as surprised at his own words as Mike had been to hear them. “Sorry,” he says, quieter this time. “I know that’s not fair.”
It’s not fair, not really, and it’s even more unfair that Will is always getting the short end of the stick like this, but Mike doesn't really know what he could say that would make Will feel better. He’s suddenly very aware of just how on Will’s leg his hand is currently located, and the way Will is watching him, gauging a reaction. Mike frowns. “Are you upset?”
Will shakes his head. “No. Sorry. I just— miss you, I guess? You know this” —he gestures between them with one finger— “is the most we’ve hung out all month?
“Yeah,” Mike says quietly. Of course he knows. He wants to say something, maybe — that of course he knows, that he’d pulled his sleeping bag over towards Will’s in the hopes of catching him in time to exchange a few half-awake sentences before the exhaustion of the day caught up to them, that he’s been trying to tag along when they get separated, trying to keep as little distance between them as he possibly can, that sometimes it feels like he can’t breathe when Will is away for too long— but that’s probably too much to put out there all at once. In the end, the only thing that comes out is, “I know.”
“So, like—” Will is saying, picking up speed and a sudden, unknown ferocity with each word that comes out of his mouth, “I know stuff can’t be normal for all of us, but, you know, after everything that’s already happened” —he breaks off, nodding vaguely towards the direction of the barn, the people inside of it, “I guess I thought it would at least be normal for us. Like, me and you. Relatively.”
The ferocity seems to drain out of Will just as quickly as it came, like he’s burned right through his short supply of fuel. Mike’s lost count of just how many times he’s wished for normality again, even if it’s just a momentary, fleeting taste of it — wishes blown out on makeshift birthday cakes and shooting stars spotted against a clear, dark sky — but it hits him that this is maybe the most normal he’s felt in a very, very long time: just talking to Will behind the barn like they’re nothing more than two teenagers sneaking out for the night. It’s a nice feeling — grounding, settling him. Just being around Will has that effect on him, most days.
Will shifts in place as the pause drags on, because Mike can’t guarantee that he won’t slip up and say something supremely embarrassing if he opens his mouth right now — like maybe that thought he’d just been having about feeling settled and grounded in Will’s presence, like some kind of codependent megafreak — and then Will’s hand twitches, a short, aborted movement towards one of his pockets, like he’d been about to reach for his cigarettes again.
Mike wonders, watching Will course correct and place his hand palm-down on the hay again, if that’s why Will came out here in the first place — if he’s also been craving a taste of normalcy like it’s a drug, if he’d been so upset over the lack of it that it had gotten him this worked up, unable to calm down without the rush of nicotine through his bloodstream. And then — a split-second thought, one that feels almost mortifying to even acknowledge — Mike wonders if Will has ever felt the same about him: if being around Mike ever calms him, if it ever soothes him, settles him. It’s upsetting to think about Will ever being sad, but Mike hopes that it’s true — that maybe it’s a good thing that Mike is out here with him, that maybe it’s helping. Making things better.
He squeezes Will’s knee again. “I miss you too,” Mike says. It comes out embarrassingly earnest, even without him trying. “I’m sorry it’s been so chaotic lately.”
Immediately, Will shakes his head. “It’s not your fault. I guess it’s just—” He pauses, glancing away as he gathers the words. “It’s like you said,” he continues, slowly, “I guess things are just never going to be normal for us. But this is nice,” Will adds with a small smile. “I like this.”
“I like this too,” Mike says. “Even if I didn’t like that.” He gestures with his free hand towards the ground, where the burnt remains of their cigarettes have been ground into the dirt. When Will laughs, his eyes crinkle up at the edges, unexpectedly genuine. “For the record,” Mike goes on, encouraged by the response, “I think the Hawkins High bleachers are lame anyway.”
Will laughs again, this time a little unsure, like he’s humoring another one of Mike’s whims. “Yeah? Why?”
“Well,” Mike points out, “there’s always a bunch of gum stuck to the underneath.”
Will purses his lips thoughtfully. “This is true.”
“And you’d still get told off for smoking,” Mike says, “because some teacher would probably smell it on you.”
A hum of agreement from Will, and then Will’s knee is nudging Mike in the side, somewhere between his hip and thigh. Mike stumbles forward, unintentionally caging himself into where Will’s legs are bracketing either side of him, and his grip on Will’s thigh tightens instinctively as he regains his balance. He rights himself, loosening his grip and ready to apologize, in case it had hurt, in case it was too much, but Will is already smiling at him, eyes twinkling with amusement. “Also unfortunately true,” Will is saying.
“And,” Mike starts, then pauses, not entirely sure where he’d been going with this thought. He swallows, throat dry from the cool air and the remnants of smoke lingering all along the inside of his mouth, and something else, too. The proximity, maybe, or the realization that he had only been halfway right this whole time — that Will’s presence is not solely a grounding, calming thing, that now it’s something that’s making Mike’s head swim, rendering his palms sweaty and his heart beating mortifyingly loud in his chest, maybe even audible in the pathetic excuse for space Mike tried to put in between them. The throwaway comment he’d made earlier floats, unwelcome, to the forefront of his mind, that gross, gross, gross thing about Joyce and Hopper smoking together, and whatever else the general populace of Hawkins High likes to get up to in their free time, when illicit substances are involved and no one is around.
He shouldn’t read into any of this, he knows, because Will came out here for a reprieve, to calm down and to think and to very specifically not be burdened by Mike’s specific penchant for reading into things and overthinking and other variations of annoying behavior thereof — but he can’t help it. He’s close enough to Will to hear the soft sounds of every inhale and exhale, and Will’s thigh is warm and steady under his own shaking hand, and suddenly, he gets it, kind of — the smoke and the matches, why Will would seek this out on purpose. He wonders what would happen if he asked Will for a second one, this time in the context of a body overloaded with adrenaline and nerves. He wonders if it would calm him down, if the head rush would feel welcome instead of dizzying, if the nicotine would sedate the butterflies in his stomach instead of tying it up into knots.
Mike still has not continued his train of thought, and Will is still looking at him. “And?” Will prompts.
“And,” Mike continues, trying to remember what he’d been thinking about back before his nervous system started short circuiting. “And, you know— under the bleachers is kind of an infamous make out spot, so—” Mike trails off, suddenly embarrassed at bringing up the topic at all. He doesn’t know why he did it, doesn’t know why he steered the conversation away from the relatively safer territory they’d been treading — dried up gum and pissed off faculty — but that’s what he’d been thinking about before his nervous system short-circuited on him: how close they are now, how they’re face to face, at eye level — how Mike had probably been staring right at Will’s mouth, now that he’s thinking about it, and how he’s still doing it—
Mike tears his gaze away from the curve of Will’s Cupid’s bow just in time to see him raise his eyebrows, like go on. “So,” Mike repeats, because like hell he’s going to say it. “So.”
“Yeah?” Will says again.
Mike clears his throat. “Like— you wouldn’t want to be around all that anyway, probably.”
“No,” Will says, then laughs, soft and amused. “Probably not.”
“So it’s probably better that we just hang out here then,” Mike tells him.
“I mean, I guess,” Will says — definitely just humoring yet another of Mike’s whims. Still, it doesn’t escape Mike’s attention how Will’s eyes dart down, how he tilts his head forward a little, encroaching on the already minimal space between them, millimeter by millimeter, getting all too close to vanquishing it altogether. His eyes dart even further down, to Mike’s hand on his thigh, and then he swallows. “Um— why?”
Is Mike’s hand still shaking? It would be embarrassing if it is, now that Will is actively looking at it. It would be even more embarrassing if Mike had been wrong about everything all along — if his penchant for reading into things and overthinking has finally let him down, and maybe he totally missed the mark in whatever Will had been saying about wanting to be with Mike. Maybe he didn’t mean it like that, and maybe Mike is about to make an absolutely catastrophic mistake. “Well, you know— it’s nice out here, and there’s no dried up gum, and you won’t get detention, and, um. I’m here too. If that sells you on it at all.”
“Right,” Will whispers. Mike had been expecting him to say something about the Mike being here too comment — a teasing remark if he was feeling nice, a vaguely more scathing one if he wasn’t — but for once, Will’s mind seems to be somewhere other than giving Mike a hard time. “And, uh” —Mike watches the line of Will’s throat flex as he swallows— “the other thing?”
“The other thing?” Mike echoes dumbly.
“The— the kissing thing.”
“Oh,” Mike whispers. One of them has leaned closer, and Mike isn’t sure who, but even the little remaining space between them doesn’t fully seem to be there anymore — no longer a cushion to pad Mike’s terrible, horrible, impulsive decisions. As in, if he were to lean forward, just barely; as in, if he just tilted his head a little to the right; as in, if he used the hand on Will’s leg as an anchor to pull himself forward, or if he moved it somewhere else, even — up to Will’s hip, or his waist— “Right,” Mike says, after the world’s longest few seconds have passed, and Will has not prompted him further. “Yeah, there’s— none of that happening here, either.”
“True,” Will says. He pauses, then pulls away, turning his head and glancing around the clearing. Mike doesn’t even have time to mourn the loss of proximity, to kick himself for his own inaction, before Will is moving back in, close as they had just been and closer still. “Definitely don’t see anyone,” Will says quietly, breath coasting warm over Mike’s lips.
The accompanied theatrical display makes it sound like a joke — it should be a joke — but it doesn’t feel like one. None of this feels like a joke anymore, like something Mike can brush off or laugh away. This feels very, very real — Will’s exhales against his cheek, the smell of the hay and crisp night air around them, the fact that they’ve been talking about making out in the hypothetical for fifteen minutes and now Will’s mouth is less than a handful of inches away from his own, and Mike can’t think anymore.
Logically, he knows what’s about to happen, but he doesn’t know how to bridge that gap — how to go from a hypothetical to something very real and very substantial. “Yeah,” he says, voice hoarse and barely audible, “like— you don’t want to be around all of that. Really awkward stuff.”
It’s probably divine intervention that Mike didn’t accidentally say the phrase suck face, but something about it must amuse Will anyway, because Mike can practically feel his lips curl up into a small smile, the resulting huff of breath. “Would that be so bad?” Will asks.
Mike hears a nervous laugh escape him, which only makes Will smile more. “What, watching a bunch of strangers” —and this time, the divine forces seem to be done intervening— “suck face?” Mike winces to himself, closes his eyes and tries his hardest to pretend like he did not just say suck face with Will Byers’ literal and actual face one inch away from his own. “Yeah,” he finishes, and Will hasn’t pulled away or rolled his eyes yet, so it must be okay— “I think so.”
Another exhale across his lips. “Mike,” Will whispers, sounding more than a little exasperated, but still so fond.
Mike’s eyes are still closed when he replies, heart pounding, “Yeah?”
He realizes what’s going to happen a second before it does, but that isn’t nearly enough time to prepare, to even come close to bracing himself for it. Will’s lips meet his, tentative and a little off-center, and Mike’s hand is still on Will’s thigh — probably shaking now, like Will’s had been, and Will’s hair is tickling Mike’s forehead, and he smells like smoke, a little bit, and Mike thinks there’s a good chance he might not be breathing.
Will pulls away just enough to put a hair’s breadth of space between their lips, and exhales shakily, slowly. “Sorry,” Will murmurs, a little tremor in his voice right between the two syllables, “is this—”
Mike’s hand is definitely shaking against Will’s leg — from the cold, probably, and also the everything else of it all — and he moves his other hand blindly up to Will’s side, the small dip of space between his waist and hip. Will startles at the movement, a sudden, sharp inhale in through his nose, and he tenses like he’s about to pull away. Mike can’t think of anything that would be more catastrophic. “Yeah,” Mike gets out, mind still reeling from the taste of tobacco and the heady rush of nicotine, and now this — now Will. He moves his other hand up too, gravitating towards the warmth Will’s body is giving off, and Will shivers at the unexpected touch. The way they’re positioned, Will is a little taller than him, and he’s pulled back enough that Mike can’t lean in the way he’d like to; he can’t say yes, of course, or anything, anything, and then pull Will in, kiss any remaining traces of doubt off of his mouth. All Mike can do is tighten his grip against Will’s waist, tilt his face up towards Will’s again, and pray that it’s enough to erase any trace of doubt that might still be lingering — that it’s obvious that Mike wants this just as much, maybe more than he knew he did, maybe even more than Will does.
Another sharp inhale from Will; hands find the sides of Mike’s face, and Will’s lips find his again — more sure this time, more hungry. Mike feels himself make a noise before he actually hears it, something caught three ways between a gasp and a sigh and a groan, vibrating out from somewhere deep inside his chest. Will’s lips part against his, and for a moment, Mike forgets why he’d ever been against this — the smoking thing, the displaced frustration thing, the unhealthy coping mechanisms thing. Will still tastes like smoke, sharp and bitter against Mike’s tongue, indescribably overwhelming as Will presses into him — wanting and so, so hungry. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, to be touched like someone wants him, to be kissed like someone wants him. Mike gasps, a sharp, stilted thing against Will’s mouth, and Will’s hands twitch against his cheeks in response, slipping backwards to bury themselves in his hair, pulling Mike’s face infinitesimally closer, until Mike’s neck is almost aching with the force of craning itself upwards, until his hands are itching with the urge to move — to grasp at Will’s hips or his shoulders, to brush Will’s bangs out of his face, where they’re trailing against Mike’s forehead and cheeks, to bite at Will’s lower lip until he’s gasping against Mike’s mouth, opening up for him—
Was this what Will wanted, Mike wonders? Was this the thing he was craving all along? Did he try to find a replacement for it with matches and tar-stained fingernails, Hop’s nasty unfiltered smokes and Jonathan’s hasty hand-rolled joints? Will’s kisses have gone slow and deep, but no less hesitant, dragging out long enough to make room for a breath in between. He pulls away after a last, lingering one, lips still touching, noses still pressed together. Mike’s fingertips have found their way under Will’s t-shirt, drinking in the warmth there, leeching greedily off of it. This might be even more dangerous than the nicotine — Mike doesn’t really care enough to pick up a cigarette again, but this— this—
He leans in for one last kiss and Will lets him, their lips catching against each other, slow and lazy, before they pull apart. Will’s hands slide down to the sides of Mike’s neck, thumb stroking soothing circles over the pulse of Mike’s carotid — surely too fast to be normal, too strong, but Mike can’t find it in himself to actually be embarrassed about it. Will’s own breathing has gone a little tremulous, coming out quick and labored against Mike’s mouth, so he’s pretty sure that Will can put two and two together regarding Mike’s current state of mind without needing a pulse reading to do so.
“Okay?” Mike asks him. They’re close enough that their lips brush as Mike says it, and it’s almost enough for him to abandon all pretense of self control, to push Will back up against the stupid bale of hay and kiss him until the others wake up, until dawn takes over the clearing in bursts of watery light, until the late night cold gives way to the early morning chill, until there’s no more plausible deniability as to what they’d been doing out here, holed up against the back of the barn with kiss-flushed lips and mussed hair.
Will makes the decision for him, though. “Yeah,” he says quietly, then leans back, hands moving down from Mike’s neck until they’re resting over his chest, looking unmistakably pleased, even in the dark — cheeks pink and a smile that could probably light up the whole night sky.
Mike opens his mouth to say something — like how maybe Will should just toss his entire box of smokes away forever, and just drag Mike into a corner somewhere and kiss him stupid whenever the urge returns — and then something clatters inside the barn, audible through the wall behind them. It’s a muffled sound, but prominent enough in the silence for them to startle, springing apart the best that the proximity will allow. “Shit,” Mike mutters, straining to listen. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Will says, eyes wide. There’s nothing for another few seconds, and then another sound — quieter, a muffled thump, then a quick, hushed exchange of voices — and then silence again. Will slides neatly off the pile of hay he’d been sitting on, landing by Mike’s feet and brushing stray pieces of hay off his pants. “I don’t know what I’m more afraid of,” Will whispers. “The possibility that we’re about to get attacked by something, or that Nancy’s going to show up and chew me out for smoking a cigarette and defiling her little brother all in one go.”
“Nancy’s not that scary,” Mike says, as if he hadn’t seen her with a shotgun in hand not even twelve hours ago. He winces, then starts to correct himself— “I mean, she’s—” And then the rest of Will’s sentence hits him, a little shrouded at first from the nonchalance Will had said it with. “Okay, hey, come on,” Mike splutters, feeling his face immediately heat up. He tugs at Will’s sleeve. “You just kissed me a little.”
“Hm,” Will hums. He gives Mike another small smile, easy and playful, the same as he’s done a million times over, but it feels different this time, recontextualized by Mike’s hands on Will’s hips, very uninclined to move them, and Will’s hands resting on Mike’s wrists, and it hits Mike that Will is flirting with him — he’s being flirted with, and Will is flirting with him. Maybe Will had been onto something earlier after all, about seeking out normalcy and rites of passages and whatnot, because suddenly, this feels like the most normal thing in the entire world, and Mike can’t get enough. There’s probably nothing more quintessentially teenager-esque than this: to sneak out to somewhere he’s not strictly supposed to be, get caught kissing a boy he really, really likes, and to want to do it all again tomorrow, or right now, or whenever Will lets Mike kiss him again. Screw the Hawkins High gym, Mike thinks, as Will pulls at his hand, leading him back across the debris-laden path to the barn. Screw the track and every set of bleachers in the godforsaken place. He’d follow Will anywhere, of course, even if meant a sweaty corner of their high school gymnasium, smoking cigarettes that Mike doesn’t even like, but he’s more inclined to just let Will keep getting away with this, a habit that Mike’s not a proponent of, per se, but — he thinks about Will’s lips against his, the sharp bite of smoke against his tongue, Will’s hands steady and unshaking against his face — he’s not not a proponent of it either.
“Come on,” Will whispers at last. “Let’s head back in.”