Chapter Text
He noticed for the first time at the airport.
God, the stupid fucking airport. Even now, he can’t think of that day without wanting to turn on the oven and put his head in. He’d spent a year telling himself that if he just kept his distance and tried hard enough, everything would make sense again, and the feelings he’d started noticing that summer would go away, and he would remember how to be Will’s best friend without feeling insane about it all the time. And then he saw him at the airport, and he knew he was fucked.
Because, like, the thing is, Mike knew he had a thing about strong guys. That wasn’t some kind of government secret. It wasn’t even weird. In every comic book he read, every movie he loved for as long as he could remember, the men had big, powerful bodies, hard thighs and biceps and that, like, line under their abs that pointed down to their—anyway, he knew, and it wasn’t weird. Straight guys were the ones drawing and filming those guys in the first place, for the entertainment of other straight guys, which meant it wasn’t even supposed to be—sexual, or whatever.
Nancy used to roll her eyes at his Conan the Barbarian poster and call it a stupid male power fantasy, and Nancy was annoying, but she knew about, like, society, so she was probably right. It didn’t mean anything about him, except that maybe sometimes he wished he didn’t see a stick bug with hair when he looked in the mirror.
He was a scrawny kid, and Will was a scrawny kid, and they were scrawny little freaks together, going ow when they bumped bony elbows or knees by accident under game tables and sleeping bags. Mike had thought it would probably be that way forever. Never in a million years, not even once thinking about Will’s knees became confusing and inescapable, did he imagine he’d be looking at Will in an airport in California and thinking, he got big.
They always call it a year because it had felt like forever, but it hadn’t even been a full year. It had been, like, nine months. Mike had also grown too much too fast during that time, but mostly just vertically. He was still skinny, but now he was also lanky and kind of pinched-looking, in a way that made him feel like maybe he ought to re-class out of paladin. He didn’t even look like he could lift a sword. He looked like if he put on heavy plate armor he’d just have to kind of sit down on the ground until someone came and took it off of him. He looked like a nerd, and he should re-class to, like, something with books. Wizard, probably, if that wasn’t already kind of Will’s thing.
But Will got big.
Not huge or anything, but—bigger. Strong. Mike’s mom was always telling him he was going to “fill out” eventually, which was so fucking embarrassing, because he did not want to talk to his mom about pubescing, and it reminded him that everyone else could see how his muscles had not managed to keep up with his skeleton, no matter how many growing pains he got in his legs or how many horizontal stripes of stretch marks ticked up the center of his back. He didn’t even really know what “filling out” was supposed to mean, until he saw Will at the stupid fucking airport in stupid fucking California. And Will had filled out.
He hadn’t gotten as tall as Mike, or as muscular as Lucas, but that sort of soft, waifish thing he used to have—that way he used to sometimes still look like the sleeping boy in the hospital gown Mike had dragged around Hawkins Lab—was gone. His shoulders were broad now, his jaw starting to square up like guys in the movies. His shirt was kind of fussily tucked into tight, belted jeans, which was reassuring at first because it meant this was still Will, Mike’s Will, but then he realized that Will’s waist was smaller than his shoulders now, that his body had this new sort of taper to it. And also, tight jeans didn’t really make him look like a nerd anymore. They just made it obvious that his legs weren’t skinny, either.
Anyway, Mike was at the stupid fucking airport in stupid fucking California, holding a stupid fucking bouquet of flowers he had picked for his amazing, beautiful, psionically superpowered girlfriend, because he had needed something to do with himself that morning so he wouldn’t have a panic attack about seeing her.
It had been so easy to be El’s boyfriend from Hawkins, in letters, when he could just write everything he wanted to tell her without having to say anything out loud and worry if it was coming out right, if he sounded like a boyfriend was supposed to, if it sounded like he meant it. There was so much he wanted to talk to her about, like Hellfire, and D&D, and movies and video games and Dustin and Lucas and Max, although she only ever really seemed interested in the last three, which kind of made him realize the person he really wanted to talk to was Will, so then he would try to call Will, and he would always get a busy signal. Then El said there was a girl he liked, and after that every time the line was busy Mike would get, like, convinced that it was because Will was talking to a girl, and that thought pretty much made Mike want to go lie down in traffic for reasons he did not care to examine, so he stopped calling altogether.
And then he was kissing El, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you love your girlfriend and she’s amazing and you haven’t seen her in eight or nine months, and Will was right there, and he hadn’t seen Will in a year, and Mike couldn’t stop feeling his presence in the space next to them because he was taking up so much more of it.
He was pretty sure that if they actually hugged, if he felt Will’s chest against his and found out firsthand if it had filled out too, if he actually looked into Will’s older, squarer face under that same awful, familiar Joyce-Byers’s-kitchen-scissors haircut for more than five seconds, his chances of acting normal this week would be shot before the week even started. And Will was holding something that was obviously the painting El had mentioned, as if he liked this dumb girl so much that he was, like, carrying it around, and Mike felt stupid, so he just sort of. Patted him. On the shoulder. And then wished his plane had blown up.
(Will still teases him about the airport, now that everything is different and it’s just a funny story. Funny to Will, at least. Mike usually pulls a pillow over his face until Will yanks it away, laughing, smiling, leaning in, pressing his lips to the point of Mike’s chin.)
It hadn’t gotten better. After Rink-O-Mania, after their fight, after El was gone and he apologized to Will and they almost got shot to death by a fucking black ops swat team and watched someone die and buried the body together. They were in the back of a van, and Mike had watched someone die, had gotten grave dirt under his fingernails, and he felt insane, because the whole time they were digging, he was trying not to look at Will’s back muscles shifting under his shirt. He was trying not to look at the bunched up sleeves of Will’s flannel and the place where his undershirt came away from his wrists. And that was—that was fucked up, wasn’t it? That was really, really fucked up.
Then they were driving, driving for so fucking long, and Will would get tired and cranky from sleeping curled up on the floor of the van, would get out at gas stations and stretch out his body, and Mike would have to force himself not to watch. It was obvious that Will’s body was no longer as much of a stranger to him as Mike’s body was to himself. He must have been doing something this past year, something more than just hormones and California vegetables.
One time, when Argyle ate a bad gas station hot dog and they had to pull over for him to hurl into a bunch of cactuses, and they were all kind of just standing around on the side of the road, Jonathan held up his hands, and Will started punching them like it was something they did all the time. When Mike asked later—asked Jonathan, not Will—Jonathan just shrugged and said that Will wanted to be prepared, in case something happened. And Mike just nodded, because yeah, something always seemed to be happening to Will.
(Things are still happening to Will, now, but mostly good things.)
The desert had pretty much sucked. When he thinks of it now, it feels so stupid that he spent all those hours practically begging Will let him off the hook with El, to just fucking tell him the thing he secretly knew and nobody else would acknowledge, that it just wasn’t like that between them, and the whole time he was staring at Will’s shoulders. At the fabric of his shirt tugging, strained around the armpits because his arms were getting too big for Jonathan’s hand-me-downs. They both smelled bad, like sweat and pot and dried blood and pizza grease and that stuffy lockerroom teenage boy stink. It wasn’t sexy. He was worried about El. He was losing it about Will’s stupid arms anyway.
(He tells Will, later, about the nights in the motels, lying awake with Argyle snoring next to him, Will and Jonathan in the next bed. About looking at his silhouette in the neon light of the vacancy sight and wondering, if they were in the same bed, whether he’d be able to tell by the indent of the mattress whether WIll weighed more than him now. If he could align their shoulders side by side without touching and estimate how close Will’s frame might come to eclipsing his. If he could put his hand on Will’s chest and feel the muscle through his undershirt and pretend he’d been sleeping.
You wouldn’t have had to pretend, Will tells him. I would’ve let you. I would’ve let you do anything back then.)
Then they were back, and Hawkins exploded, and he was so scared. Scared that he’d lose Will again. That the Upside Down would reach up and take him back. Or—worse, somehow—that he’d fuck up what they’d just barely begun to get back between them. Scared of what it meant that he couldn’t stop looking at Will, scared that Will would notice him looking. Scared that, without Will in arm’s reach every minute of every day, he’d get so in his head again that they’d lose each other in whatever fucked up shit their lives were about to become.
So when the Byers needed a place to live, the words were out of his mouth before he’d even finished thinking them. They can stay with us. Will can stay in my room. It’ll be like a sleepover.
(Like a sleepover, Will says now, pushing his cold toes up the leg of Mike’s sweats. Will loves to tease now. Mike pretends to hate it.)
His mom is smarter than he is, because she said Will had to stay in the basement, and within one week of living together Mike realized he probably would not have survived Will being in his room all the time without doing something profoundly stupid. Because living together in a van for a week was not the same as living together in the house they’d grown up in, indefinitely.
He knew, intellectually, that Will could not just stop having a body. He was pretty sure that Will would have opted out years ago if he could have, back in early ‘84 when things were still raw and he hadn’t liked to let anyone but his mom or Mike touch him. It was actually really good to see him start carrying his body like he owned it after all the times it had nearly been stolen from him, and Mike was proud of him, as his best friend. But as a teenage boy who was constantly waking up with inconvenient hard-ons, who was trying very hard not to have confusing feelings about his best friend, he would have really appreciated if Will could sometimes have just—stopped carrying that body all over his house.
It’s like, sometimes when Mike would watch Indiana Jones as a kid, he would think about taping a piece of construction paper over the bottom two thirds of the TV screen, so he could concentrate on the story without getting distracted by all the sweaty, tan skin under Harrison’s Ford open collar. It would have been so much easier to come down to the kitchen every morning and share a bowl of cereal with Will and concentrate on repairing the damage he’d done to their friendship, if Will hadn’t been sitting there with one of Mike’s old threadbare t-shirts stretched across his chest.
But Mike pushed it down. And it sort of worked
Things got better between them. Everything else was fucked, but they got better. They stayed up late talking on their walkies, Mike in his room and Will in the basement, until Jonathan made them shut up and go to sleep. They made Lucas and Dustin come over for movie nights and sat next to each other on the couch, elbows bumping, knees brushing. They started brainstorming a new campaign, leaning close over Mike’s players manual so they could both read the same pages. Mike was so nervous to pitch his first idea for the crawls to the whole group, knowing Hopper would be primed to shoot down anything if Mike was the one suggesting it, but Will was in the back of the room smiling into his hand the whole time, and three days later, he surprised Mike with this incredible handpainted minifigure of the WSQK van, which was, like—wow.
They were close again. Closer than they’d been in years. So close that Mike didn’t notice that Will had kept getting bigger, until he had no choice but to notice.
The Wheelers’ boiler made it halfway through the first winter of heating water for eight people before crapping out completely. Mike’s dad was pissed about it, got in a whole stupid fight with his mom about how Joyce should have to chip in to replace it because her family was using almost half of the water, which was bullshit when he knew Joyce couldn’t afford it. Until he finally caved, everyone in the house had to shower in the basement bathroom, where the water would occasionally get lukewarm for a few seconds.
That was what Mike was doing when it happened. He’d been out all day in the snow running errands for Nancy, simultaneously freezing his face off and sweating under layers of jackets, and all he wanted to do was peel off his thermal underwear and get his shitty cold shower over with so he could find Will and spend the rest of the day reading comics on his bed together. The basement was quiet and empty, and he didn’t think to check for the light under the bathroom door before he opened it.
Will was there. Will was there, fresh out of the shower. Will was there, not wearing anything.
Will gasped, and Mike swore and apologized and yanked the door shut, but he had seen Will. He had seen Will naked, had seen one bright, wet flash of arms and chest and shoulders and thighs, and he was—he was going to freak out, imminently, so he ignored Will saying his name through the door and ran up to his room and locked the door behind him, and then just, just kind of. Stood there. For a long time.
He stared at the poster over his bed. The dragon guy, with all the muscles. He’d bought it with arcade tickets when he was thirteen. He’d thought it was sick. He didn’t like to think about why.
(I know why.
Will loves to tease now.)
Will wasn’t shredded like the buff dragon. Will’s body wasn’t like that at all. Mike knew exactly what Will’s body was like now, and it was… solid. There was mass to it, meat, but it wasn’t even really an athlete’s body. It looked useful, like the shotgun Will sometimes held when Nancy was making them all do target practice, like something Will could use to defend himself in a worst case scenario, something he’s learned to be comfortable handling.
Mike was standing next to his bedroom door in his thermal underwear, and he realized he was waiting for Will to knock on it. He was waiting for Will to come upstairs so they could laugh about how awkward that had been, so they could push past it and read their comics like nothing had happened, because that’s what Will had done every single time they’d accidentally brushed too close to each other since he’d moved in, because Will was apparently not going insane in all the same ways Mike was, even though they had promised they would do that together.
He didn’t want that to happen this time. He wanted Will to come up to his room with his skin still damp, his hair—growing out now, looking so soft—-still dripping. He wanted Will to call him on it, to tell him he saw Mike looking and ask him if he liked what he saw, to use that body to crowd Mike up against the desk covered in campaign notes and sketchbook pages and—and kiss him.
Until that moment, in all the times he’d thought of Will’s body, of their bodies together, he’d never let himself think of that specific thing. Of kissing. Of Will kissing him. Every other part of it still had some element of plausible deniability, because he’d had his body against Lucas’s and Dustin’s a million times for a million stupid friend reasons, had noticed the ways they’d grown too, and it had never, ever meant anything.
But now it had happened. He had thought it. He had wanted it. For the rest of his life, Mike would be a boy who thought about kissing his best friend.
Will didn’t come upstairs. The next time they were in the same room, he turned pink and wouldn’t meet Mike’s eyes, but they were fine after that, and they didn’t talk about it.
(Will says, I was so not fine after that.)
It was probably for the best that El dumped him not long after, right around New Year’s. She wanted to focus on training, and Mike got it. He really, really got it. He got it so much that he felt this huge, startling relief when she finally told him that she was stronger when they were just friends. Neither of them cried. El didn’t cry that much anymore unless they were talking about Max, and Mike thought Max deserved El’s tears way more than he did anyway. He was so relieved at the thought of her never crying because of him again.
Both times Mike had lost Will, he’d come straight home to his mom. The night El broke up with him, he went straight past his mom in the kitchen, walked down the basement stairs, and told Will.
Looking back, he doesn’t know what he’d been expecting. Did he think Will was going to, like, throw himself into Mike’s arms? Was he that stupid? Why did he just stand there like an idiot waiting for something to happen after he’d said it?
All that happened was, Will went very still, and then he put down his pencil and his sketchbook and asked if Mike wanted to get her back. If he needed help. And when Mike said no, Will asked if El was okay, and if Mike was okay, and if he wanted to talk about it, and Mike felt like a total piece of shit, because Will was being so kind and offering to help him process, and all he could think about was that Will was wearing Mike’s sweatshirt, and it looked good on him.
After the shower, he noticed everything. He noticed Will pulling Hopper aside after a planning session, and he was pretty sure he was asking for tips on building muscle, because after that Mike would sometimes hear him carrying crates of comics up and down the basement stairs after everyone went to bed.
He noticed Will going out of his way to move all the heaviest boxes before Steve could get to them when they were reorganizing the WSQK studio. He noticed Will going next door to help Lucas run drills and biking to places he used to make Jonathan drive him. When Will took off his (Mike’s) sweatshirt and the undershirt came up with it, Mike noticed the strip of taut skin above his waistband. One time he came downstairs and found Will making Jonathan stand on his feet while he did sit ups, and he had to go up to his room and stare at the ceiling for an hour until he calmed down.
And like, Mike got it. Hopper was always on their asses about how El wasn’t the only one who should be conditioning, how they needed to be ready for whatever came their way, and Will had more reason than anyone to take that seriously, but like, what was Will training to do? Put Vecna in a headlock? Choke him to death with his thighs? They had Steve and Lucas for that, first of all, and second of all—second of all, Mike had to live in his house with his best friend who he thought about kissing. That was hard enough without his best friend also becoming hot.
(Oh, so you didn’t think I was hot before? Will says, and Mike tells him to shut up five times in a row, even though he hasn’t said anything else.)
So, 1987. The year Mike was single, and Will got hot, and they lived together, and Mike was totally normal about everything. The government should write him another check for how normal he was, considering he had to listen to the sound of the shower running every day and try to ignore the memory of what Will looked like in there.
Every day, he’d see Will in another slept-in t-shirt, or another pair of jeans from the donation bin that somehow fit him perfectly, and he’d have to just smile and pass him the milk like he wasn’t going to be lying awake that night thinking about the shape of Will’s forearms, begging his own hand not to slide down his boxers.
It was easier, somehow, when they weren’t at home. Outside of the house, Will’s strength was part of this bigger collective, an asset to the team. It was something Mike could count on when he was planning crawls, on the rare occasions that Joyce actually let Will leave the station. It meant Will could clear the full length of the quarantine zone on his bike in under twenty minutes. On the worst days, when Will got goosebumps up the back of his neck and Mike thought about a demo ripping a hole through the floor to snatch Will away from him, he could tell himself that Will was almost as strong now as Steve had been when he’d first picked up his nail bat.
Home was where it got weird, because the only thing Mike could think of for Will to do with his body at home was put it against Mike’s.
So, Mike spent most of 1987 hanging out with Will, and remembering how good it felt to have Will as his best friend, and being extremely careful not to catch Will getting out of the shower again.
It didn’t matter. He still noticed every small change of Will’s body, and he still couldn’t stop thinking about it. He thought about the day with the shower a lot, the fantasy he’d had of Will pushing him against the desk in his bedroom. Will pushing him around—that was something he thought about more than he ever expected. Will pinning him to the sofa in the basement, Will throwing him down onto his bed. He fantasized about things he thought only girls fantasized about, like Will picking him up and putting him on the kitchen counter and kissing him breathless, and he was pretty sure that was a lot gayer than just having a regular crush on Will, which was already—not ideal.
In all of his fantasies, he made himself stop before they got past kissing. It had been hard enough to look Will in the eye after he’d seen him naked by accident, so the last thing he needed was to imagine him naked on purpose. But he couldn’t make himself not think about Will at all. About Will’s body. About how his broader, stronger hands might feel cradling Mike’s jaw. About how the muscles of his back would move when he put his whole body into a kiss. About how he could hold Mike down until his brain finally shut the fuck up for once.
He thought about it so much he had dreams about it, and in his dreams he couldn’t make himself stop at kissing. In his dreams, Will was wet from the shower, and there was skin everywhere, and then he would wake up in sticky sheets and stare at his buff dragon poster and try not to do something even gayer than jerking off to the thought of Will, like crying about it.
It got to a point by the end of that year that Mike felt like he was actually going nuts with a clinically diagnosable case of not jerking off over his hot best friend. He couldn’t focus on crawls, fucked up at target practice. School was already pretty much a joke, but his grades still tanked. Nancy got onto him about acting like an eighth grader in the middle of the apocalypse, and she was right. Something had to give.
He rationalized that maybe all this was just about curiosity, about Will’s body becoming something he didn’t know like the back of his own hand anymore. Maybe if he found out what it felt like, he’d stop obsessing about it so much. And so, in an effort to think about Will’s body less, he started touching Will’s body more.
It wasn’t hard to find excuses to touch Will. Aside from his goosebumps and his dizzy spells, there were the casual things. Handing over a pile of warm laundry, reaching around him for a glass, passing the wrench while they tuned up their bikes, picking a bug out of his hair when it was summer and they snuck out to lie on the hill where they’d set up the Cerebro a million years ago. He learned the weight of Will’s thighs when he pressed his own knees to the side of one during movie night, the shape of Will’s bicep when he reeled him in to whisper a joke at Dustin’s expense. He dedicated entire months to mapping the contours of Will’s back, one casual touch at a time.
For reasons he couldn’t understand, it was harder to get Will to touch him. Which he needed to do, because that was what most of his fantasies were about.
(You don’t get it, Mike, I was suffering! You were making me suffer!)
It all came back around to the same problem.
Technically, the main problem was that he had been probably at least a little in love with his best friend for years, but under that was the other problem, the problem of wanting Will to touch him. To do things to him. Wanting to be under Will’s hands, under his body, at his mercy. There was being gay—which he was just barely beginning to be able to hold in his mind without feeling like he was going to throw up or die—and then there was that.
He always figured that being a guy in a relationship meant, like, having to instinctively know how to lead. To know what he was doing. To be the one who does things, not the one things are done to. That was probably some stupid holdover from his dad’s perspective on men and women, which, gross. But it was there. He couldn’t reconcile that with the thoughts he had about Will, with the idea of being gay and the type of gay guy he could handle the thought of being. He was afraid of what it all made him.
He was afraid of everything, except loving Will. That should have scared him most of all, but it was the first thing he could remember.
Then it was November, and Holly was gone, and Mike was two inches away from being an orphan all of the sudden, and he pretty much dissociated from everything that wasn’t planning or Will, and in the middle of it all, in the field behind WSQK, Will finally touched him. It was just a little push, a flash across the empty air between them, but he felt it. He felt the gentle promise of strength and let it rock him onto his heels. He had to put his head down before Will could see blood flare up his throat.
That night, Will lifted the same hand that had pressed into Mike’s collarbone through his jacket, and he saved Mike’s life.
Mike lost his grip on the rules after that.
It was—sick, probably. It was fucked up and sick and so many kinds of wrong that the next time they had half an hour of downtime, he was in one of the WSQK bathrooms with his hand around himself, thinking about Will. Will standing there like something out of an X-Men comic, sweet kind gentle Will commanding all that power, hands that smudged graphite across his sketchbooks clenched into fists that snapped bones. He thought of the smell of Will’s sweat, Will wiping blood from his lip, and he thought about Will directing all of that power at him, using those hands to touch him, pin him, work him open, and he came so hard he blacked out and nearly smashed his head on the sink.
(Will doesn’t have anything to say about that, because Mike still hasn’t told him. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever bring himself to.)
All he could do was survive everything that came after. The shame was a liability, a weapon to use against him, driven into his ribs like a volley of punches, breaking him open. He let it. It happened. It all happened.
He white-knuckled his way through the apocalypse, nearly lost Will again and again and again, nearly lost himself, but he survived. They survived. They made it through to the other side hand in bleeding hand, and when it was all over, when it was all finished and undone, Will’s spit was in his mouth. Will’s blood was in his nailbeds. Will’s head was on his shoulder. Will was everywhere. Will was everything.
It’s been cleaner, since.
For all of five seconds when the dust settled and everything got quiet again, Will looked at Mike like he thought it was over between them already. Like they were only possible in the Upside Down, and now that they were in the Rightside Up, Mike was going to change his mind. Mike pulled him down into the basement, back where it all started, in the wreckage of his childhood home—the home they’d shared for the past year and a half—and told Will that he loved him. That he had loved him, and he would keep loving him, and he would only ever stop if Will told him to, and honestly not even then. And Will was crying, but he was smiling.
They’re good together. Really fucking good. So good that Mike would feel stupid for fighting it so hard for so long, if he didn’t have Will to tell him he was just as scared all along. More scared, probably, and Mike is still trying so goddamn hard to make up for that every day.
It’s kind of everything and nothing like Mike expected it to be. It’s still Will, but Will has all this new confidence since he and El saved the world, had some kind of self-acceptance epiphany that Mike personally thanked Robin for once he knew she wasn’t trying to, like, rob the cradle or something. Between the two of them, Will takes the lead way more than Mike thought he would. It’s like there’s been this perfect boyfriend inside of that shy boy all along, just waiting for permission to show his face. It makes Mike dizzy all the time.
He still hasn’t seen Will like he did that day in the basement bathroom. Not yet. They kind of can’t keep their hands off of each other, but they haven’t told anyone, so they’ve only been able to fool around as much as they’ve been able to sneak off into some quiet room with a locked door. Mike really thought that would be easier to do, since none of their lives are in imminent danger anymore, but he can’t count the number of times he’s been startled by the squawk of a walkie while his tongue was in Will’s mouth, Lucas or Dustin or Nancy or Jonathan demanding to know where they are. Nobody seems to trust peace enough to let anyone go an hour without eyes on them.
Mike’s eyes are on Will. Before, now, always.
(Will says, Mike.)
When they do have the chance, though, they fucking take it. Thank God it’s winter, because Mike absolutely cannot stop giving Will hickeys like it’s his full-time job. Max keeps asking Will when got so into turtleneck sweaters with this knowing look that makes Mike think they could probably just suck face in front of the whole party and no one would even be surprised, but he kind of likes that it’s just their thing for now. That he’s the only one who knows Will like this, and Will is the only one who knows Mike like this, just like it was at the start.
Sometimes when they’re alone together he still catches himself thinking, what am I doing, what am I doing, I can’t believe I’m doing this. But what he really can’t believe is that he’s doing it like this. Dragging nervous kisses over every line of Will’s chest, pretending to fight Will for dominance just to make him push harder. Batting his lashes, baring his throat. Opening his mouth and putting out his tongue.
He still thinks about Will’s body all the time, even when he’s under it. Still imagines what else he could do with it if Mike asks. Still puts his hands on Will’s biceps when they’re kissing and has to try not to moan at the thought that a guy with arms like that is kissing him, and that guy is Will. He thinks he might be inching closer to not being completely embarrassed about it. Will, with the patience of a saint, keeps telling Mike that it’s okay if they need to take things slow, but that’s not even the problem. He would be fine if Will started taking things faster. He just doesn’t know how to ask for what he really wants.
Still, it’s better every day. The injuries have all knitted into fresh pink scars, and the only bruises are the ones they put on each other. Mike is learning day by day, one kiss at a time, that he’s allowed to want this and no one is going to take it away from him, at least not in any way that matters to them anymore.
His mom is coming home soon, so he and Nancy have cleaned up the house. Holly gets the entire first floor to herself, Nancy and Jonathan take what’s left of the upstairs, and Will and Mike have their own little world in the basement. Mike knows about Castle Byers now, and Will knows about Mike pounding on his door in the rain, so they both know what it means when Mike sneaks away with some of Will’s paints and makes a new sign for the basement door. HOME OF WILL THE WISE.
They bring down a bigger mattress from upstairs and gather all the best quilts they can find to make a bed in one corner, string up Christmas lights, hang up the painting. They rearrange all the furniture—Mike watches Will, obviously, as he lifts what Mike can’t—and make it into this warm, soft, musty cocoon that Mike barely wants to leave most mornings.
One day not far from now, they’ll have to learn to have a normal life. They’ll pack up a car and Mike will drive them out of Hawkins, and they’ll find out together if there’s a place in the world for people like them. If there’s a place for boys who think about kissing their best friends and then become men who let their best friends inside of them.
But right now they have their castle in the basement, and Mike is alive, and Will is alive, and they’re figuring it out.
Mike is figuring it out.