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Robin feels something unfold in her chest, slowly, like thin paper that’s been crumpled ten times and is finally being smoothed flat under a steady palm. It scrapes, it catches in places, it still wants to spring back into a knot, but it’s taking shape again. Her eyes sting, that old reflex she hates, that stupid bodily betrayal where everything threatens to spill the second someone gives her more kindness than her allotted quota. Except this time, it isn’t only sadness. It’s messier than that. A blend of raw relief and bright, dizzy panic, like someone has just told her that her secret hiding place has actually been inhabited by another person the whole time, and that person thinks it’s beautiful.
She inches closer. The comforter wrinkles between them, bunching like a small wave, and their knees bump before finding a more comfortable arrangement, pressed together in the simplest way possible. The bed creaks softly with the shift, a familiar house-sound that feels unreal inside this moment, as if the furniture itself is trying not to startle them. Window light cuts a pale reflection along the bridge of Nancy’s nose. Robin lowers her voice a little, as if what she’s about to say can’t survive the normal volume of the world.
“Do you… not regret it?” she asks. “Kissing me. All of it. Inviting me here, into your bed, into your… pajama-version life.”
She lets the last word drag, because that’s the real question too. Kissing in the parking lot, she can still file that under suspended moment, survival, adrenaline, the fact they thought they might die together. But here, in this room that has seen childhood posters and homework and insomnia and fights with parents, it’s different. Pajama-version life is full access. It’s being there in the morning, at the worst moment, when hair looks wrong and dark circles are honest and humor hasn’t even started up yet. It’s being present when there’s no battlefield to justify anything.
Nancy looks at her with that gentle intensity that destroys Robin precisely because it isn’t aggressive. Her eyes don’t spear her, they hold her. They keep the question from bolting into a corner to hide. Under the comforter, her fingers have drifted back to Robin’s as if on autopilot, as if Nancy’s body has adopted a new habit it has no intention of unlearning.
“Robin,” she says, “if you knew how long I’ve been waiting to be allowed to do exactly this…”
She lets the words hover for a beat, like the rest is too big to pass through her mouth without breaking something. How long she’s wanted to share this bed for something other than sleepless nights spent studying or writing battle plans. How long she’s watched Robin’s hands tap against the Family Video counter, seen them move like a language all on their own, and found herself imagining, quietly, what it would be like to feel those hands finally go still against her waist. How long her brain has written, in silence: if only, if only, if only.
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
Instead, she chooses the language she’s learned to speak best lately. She leans in and, very calmly, as if they have all the time in the world, she kisses her again.
This kiss has nothing of post-trauma panic, nothing of the fevered we-almost-died fervor. It’s quieter, but surer. Nancy’s hands know where to go now, as if they’ve memorized the map of Robin’s body over the weeks without either of them admitting that’s what was happening. One hand slips behind Robin’s neck, fingers spread at the edge of her hair, where warmth gathers and lingers. The other settles flat on the upper part of her chest, right where her heart is hammering like a frantic jackhammer under thin fabric. Under Nancy’s palm, she can feel the rapid, uneven beats that speed up at the contact, like Robin’s pulse recognizes Nancy before Robin’s thoughts do. Nancy’s thumb, almost without meaning to, begins to trace small circles over the T-shirt, brushing the curve of Robin’s collarbone on each pass.
Robin feels each point of contact like someone has switched on lamps under her skin. The weight of the hand on her chest is tangible proof: someone is literally checking that her heart is still beating. The thumb on her collarbone is “you’re here” tapped out in Morse. The hand at her neck is an anchor.
Don’t drift too far into your head.
Stay here.
With me.
This time, Robin responds without hesitation. There’s no micro-pause where her brain scrambles for an entire list of reasons why this is a terrible idea. Her body takes over, as if it has finally decided the person in front of her belongs in the category of allowed exceptions. She lets herself fold toward Nancy, her weight sliding gently into hers. Their stomachs touch, their knees cross, their hips find an easy equilibrium. She molds into Nancy like it’s an operation she’s performed hundreds of times in another life, even though it’s still new in this one. Even though every second of it still feels like stepping onto ice and finding, miraculously, that it holds.
Her fingers slip into Nancy’s hair, finding the base of her neck, catching there gently. Robin discovers there’s a precise point where the skin is warmer, where her fingers fit as if the space was designed for them. Nancy makes a small, muffled “hnnh” sound that is exactly the noise a cat makes when you scratch the right spot, and Robin suddenly feels like she’s discovered a button that flips Nancy Wheeler into “I have forgotten how to be dignified.”
When they part, their noses stay almost pressed together.
Their breathing mixes, fast and uneven, a little too loud for the size of the room. Robin feels Nancy’s warm air against her upper lip; Nancy feels Robin’s broken, choppy breaths tickle her chin. There’s a tiny thread of saliva that refuses to snap right away, ridiculous and undeniable proof that yes, they have actually been devouring each other’s mouths in a Wheeler bed.
“Okay,” Robin breathes, voice scraped raw. “I take back what I said yesterday. I thought my house exploding would be the most intense thing that ever happened to me, but apparently not. It’s you.”
Nancy bursts into surprised laughter that shakes her whole torso, laughter that curls around Robin’s sentence and stores it somewhere between her ribs. It quickly turns into one of those bright little sounds that defy classification, a kind of impossible cooing that Robin wants to record so she can replay it on the days when everything goes bad again.
“I don’t know if I should be flattered or worried,” Nancy says.
“Flattered,” Robin answers instantly, without even thinking. “Very flattered. Terrifyingly flattered. Dangerously flattered.”
She lets herself fall back onto the mattress, arms flung wide, like her ribcage needs more room to contain whatever just detonated inside her. The ceiling suddenly feels much higher than it did before. She stares at it for a moment, but her eyes keep drifting back to Nancy like a broken compass that only wants to point in one direction.
Eventually, her fingers slide blindly under the comforter, animal-instinct searching, like something looking for its burrow. They move, they fumble, they find Nancy’s hand waiting, palm open. Robin squeezes, not hard, just enough to say, it’s me, and Nancy responds immediately, closing her fingers around hers. Their hands lace together with the ease of a gesture repeated a thousand times in dreams before it ever existed in real life.
“We should get up,” Nancy murmurs, even though her body doesn’t move a millimeter. Their legs are still tangled; Nancy’s shoulder is still a pillow; her hand is still pinned between their torsos like it belongs there.
“We should,” Robin agrees in the exact same tone, making no move whatsoever.
Time stretches, lazy and indulgent. The ceiling doesn’t protest, and neither does the house. They stay like that for ten good seconds, maybe more, doing none of the things they know they rationally have to do: put their feet on the floor, face the harsh bathroom light, slide back into the current of a world that doesn’t know yet, that only sees a fraction of what they are becoming.
Then Nancy decides, reluctantly.
She pushes herself up halfway first, propped on an elbow, which gives Robin a perfect view of her hair falling, the curve of her neck, the line of her back beneath a rumpled T-shirt. Nancy sits on the edge of the bed, shoulders slightly hunched with sleep, one side bare where the collar has slipped down. She rubs her hands over her face, then her neck, then through her hair, trying vaguely to coax it into something socially acceptable. Morning light catches a few strands and turns them almost golden, like the sun is quietly conspiring.
Robin takes the opportunity to stare at her like she’s watching a moving work of art.
The way the muscles in Nancy’s back tighten when she leans forward. The automatic little motion where she adjusts an invisible strap, as if she’s still wearing a harness she no longer needs. The dip at the base of her spine, just above the waistband of her pajama pants, right where Robin wants to place a kiss one day without having to ask herself whether she’s allowed.
“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to think I have something on my face,” Nancy comments without turning around, tone falsely light, but the tips of her ears faintly pink.
“You have… perfection, right there,” Robin says. “It’s very inconvenient for normal people.”
Nancy turns, lifts an eyebrow, that famous Wheeler eyebrow that used to announce interrogations and course corrections, and now just frames smiles that are a little too soft. The corner of her mouth gives her away: she’s very far from angry.
“Come on,” she says. “Bathroom, coffee, then… we handle the rest.”
The rest is a lot of things: Karen’s look when they come down glowing like they’ve been plugged into the sun, Mike’s dramatic sigh at seeing them together, casual, as if this is normal, the fact that Hawkins is not remotely ready for the amount of love that has just been produced in this bedroom. But for now, the rest can wait.
Robin takes the offered hand and sits up too. Her bare feet touch the cold wood floor and a shiver runs up her legs. Nancy’s hand tightens around hers like it’s a natural extension of standing. And in that ordinary gesture, in the simple passage from bed to day, there’s everything they still can’t quite say out loud:
I’m not leaving you behind, not even to cross the hallway.
We get up together.
We face the world in pajama-plus-coffee mode, but we do it holding hands.
Robin thinks that if this is what life in Nancy Wheeler’s orbit looks like, she could very easily become addicted.