Chapter Text
Billy’s first boyfriend is a lanky cokehead with a nose piercing called Nick, and he gives good head and smokes good weed and after they’ve had sex he ruffles Billy’s hair and says: “Tell me about your life.”
“Fuck that,” Billy says.
Nick laughs. “I’m serious,” he says. “You’re not from Indiana, right? Where were you born?”
Billy frowns sluggishly at him. There are hickeys on his chest, and he’s feeling warm and pleasantly sore. “San Diego,” he says reluctantly.
“Cali!” Nick exclaims, with far too much energy for someone who was balls-deep in Billy’s ass less than fifteen minutes ago. “Awesome! Did you surf? Are the sequoias seriously as tall as they look in the National Geographic? You ever been to Hollywood?”
“Jesus Christ,” Billy mutters.
Okay, so maybe calling Nick his boyfriend is pushing it a little far. They sleep together sometimes, when Billy is done with work and Nick is just high enough not to care that Billy is sober. He doesn’t care that Billy doesn’t really know how to suck cock, and he’s happy to try out all the kinky shit Billy’s spent his teenage years being curious about, and he’ll leave afterwards without needing any promises.
Yeah, he’s basically the perfect lay. Except for the talking.
“Tell me about San Diego,” he says, oblivious to Billy’s complete lack of encouragement. “How old were you when you left?”
Billy shuts his eyes briefly, thinks of Balboa Park and the lines of red umbrellas outside his mom’s favorite Mexican place and the baying of the sea lions at La Jolla beach. “Seventeen,” he says.
“Right, right, so you remember it,” Nick says enthusiastically. “Where did you go to school?”
“The fuck do you care?” Billy says.
Nick just laughs, like Billy said something funny. “You got brothers and sisters?” he asks.
“One sister,” Billy grinds out.
“Cool, cool,” Nick says. God, he’s so high. “Why’d you leave San Diego, huh? Indiana, there’s no ocean here!”
Billy tears agitated fingers through his curls. “Yeah, you’re telling me,” he says. “Wasn’t my decision. My dad’s wife has family out here.”
“Oh, your parents split? That’s rough,” Nick says sympathetically. He throws up a relaxed hand, propping up his head. “Mine too, man. Mine too.”
“Yeah,” Billy says sullenly. Then - and he can only blame the sex for it, the forced intimacy of being naked beside another human being, of still feeling them inside him - he adds: “Mom left when I was twelve.”
Nick reaches out his free hand, patting Billy’s stomach indistinctly. “That’s rough, man,” he says again.
“My roommate will be home soon,” Billy says, and Nick laughs again, a gentle chuckle that rumbles through his bony body and vibrates through Billy’s skin. Nick laughs like nothing in the world could get under his skin.
“Hey, dude, I hear you,” he says. He pats Billy’s stomach again, and then he’s rolling out of bed, stretching his arms above his head without a care in the world. Billy watches his skinny ass bobbing across the room as he collects his clothes from the floor. “I’ll split, man. You want a line before I go?”
Billy declines a line, as he always does, and then Nick leaves. Billy stays in bed, lighting a cigarette and smoking it meditatively in the hot sex-scented room under a pool of untidy sheets.
Later he showers and eats cereal dry out of the packet and then he calls Steve.
Billy’s second boyfriend is Steve Harrington, and they’re not really boyfriends either. They slept together once right after Billy moved out to Indianapolis - Steve had already been living here for a year, sharing an apartment with his friend Robin - and now they’re doing the friends thing.
“You still picking me up this afternoon?” he asks Steve without preamble.
“Yeah, of course,” Steve says. He hesitates. “You okay?”
Billy leans his head against the phone so that he can release his hands to light another cigarette. “Yeah,” he says, echoing Steve. “Of course.”
“How’s Nick?” Steve asks. He sounds like he’s not sure whether or not he really wants to know.
“Same as usual,” Billy says. The deal with being friends is that he’s allowed to talk about Nick. He’s allowed to tell Steve anything he wants, because that’s what friends do.
Being friends was a decision Steve made, although they’re pretending it’s mutual.
“Awesome, yeah,” Steve says. Billy wonders if he’s jealous. He’d sleep with Steve again in a second, if he thought he could get away with it. “Okay, well. See you in a couple hours, okay?”
He hangs up without waiting for Billy to answer. Billy stubs out his cigarette on the kitchen counter, watching the cheap laminate curl and burn under the heat of it, just because he’s feeling destructive.
Steve is there two hours later, leaning against his Bimmer in the late afternoon sunlight with his hair falling in his face and a pair of shades obscuring whatever it is he’s thinking as he watches Billy lugging his duffel bag out the front door and then turning around to lock up. Billy takes a moment to look around at the street, dirty and spotted with dried gum, the garbage bags stacked up behind the fence running along the length of the sidewalk, the unruly dandelions sprouting between the cracks in the paving slabs.
“You okay?” Steve asks, just like he did on the phone.
“Yeah,” Billy says, jamming a pair of aviators on his nose, and they get in the car.
Steve is listening to Tears for Fears, and Billy slides the Songs from the Big Chair cassette case out of the glove box with feigned interest. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith stare judgmentally up at him in black and white, and he slips the case away again, looking out of the window as Steve turns onto the I-70.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” Steve says twenty minutes later, Indianapolis proper in the rearview. “I thought it might be kinda cool if you told me where we’re going.”
There’s a pause. Billy turns his head to look at Steve. They’re not really friends. “California,” he says.
“Yeah,” Steve says, smoothly overtaking a silver Audi in the right-hand lane without even looking at it. “I figured.” He waits a beat. “This is about your dad,” he says, and it’s not a question.
Billy looks back out of the window. It’s a warm day, late summer, the leaves just starting to turn - though soon they’ll be out on the open highway, no trees to be seen. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” he says.
Steve makes a frustrated sound, but doesn’t argue.
It’s taking advantage, really. Billy is aware of that. Three months ago Neil Hargrove died - a heart attack, because apparently constant and unmitigated rage hasn’t done him any favors physically as well as socially - and Steve took Billy back to Hawkins to help him sort through the house.
Billy doesn’t drive anymore. It’s one of those things nobody talks about.
He owns his dad’s house, because Susan divorced him a year before he died and Neil never bothered to actually make a will. It’s on the market. Billy’s realtor is confident of an offer.
Before he could sell, however, he had to clear out his dad’s shit. Steve helped him. Max helped him. He declined all other offers. He didn’t really want them either, but Max refused to be turned away and he needed Steve because of the driving thing. Then he found the letters, and when they were back in Indianapolis with a glossy new For Sale sign out the front of Cherry Tree Lane, Billy asked Steve to take him on a road trip.
“A road trip?” Steve said, confusion laced through his voice. “Where?”
“Just - please,” Billy said, and maybe it showed, how ragged and overwhelmed and fucking full of grief and anger he was, because Steve didn’t push it. Didn’t ask any more questions, just agreed and took time off work and made arrangements.
Now it’s time, and Billy still hasn’t told him anything. What can Steve say? He can’t refuse the guy whose father just died.
Yeah. Taking advantage. But Billy seriously doesn’t want to talk about it.
“You seeing anyone?” he asks instead.
“No,” Steve says with a swift unreadable glance in Billy’s direction, and then they don’t talk until they’re stopping for gas in Terre Haute.
Steve fills up the tank, and Billy picks up some coffee and donuts from the gas station. When he comes back to the car, Steve is leaning against the hood studying a large fold-out map. “I figure we’ll get a motel in St Louis,” he says. “We could go see the arch in the morning.” Another quick glance at Billy, peering over the top of his shades. “I’ve never seen it.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Billy says. He hands one of the cups of coffee across to Steve. “Never left Indiana by car.”
Steve looks at him, sipping his coffee. “You flew from California?” he asks curiously.
Billy snorts. “No,” he says. “As if we could afford it.” He shakes his head. “Rich boy,” he says, though he makes sure his tone is kind rather than mocking. “No, we drove, but we didn’t exactly stop.”
He remembers that trip. It was a similar time of year, right before school started, him and Max cold and miserable in the back of his dad’s shitty car with a moving truck right behind them. They’d done the whole thing in three and a half days, driving almost without pause, bored out of their skulls. He shudders the memory away.
“Right, right,” Steve says. He gets embarrassed whenever he forgets that other people didn’t grow up with money, even though these days he mostly pays his own way. Billy flashes him a grin, moves back around to the passenger side.
“Thanks for driving me,” he feels compelled to say, once Steve is back behind the wheel.
Steve’s mouth twists. “No problem,” he says. A pause. “Where are we going, Billy?”
“California,” Billy says. Steve looks away, turns on the engine, and Lou Reed’s rasping voice fills the car.
“You bring any cassettes?” he asks after a moment.
Billy tugs on his hair, feeling guilty. “No,” he lies. “Your car, your music, man.”
“Okay,” Steve says.
“LA,” Billy says, because he doesn’t like the thick stilted atmosphere between them. Maybe they’re not friends, maybe Steve only helps him because he feels sorry for him - but he still helps him. “We’re going to LA.”
Steve turns to look at him sharply. “LA?” he repeats. “I figured… well, I guess I figured we’d be going to San Diego.”
“Yeah, I wish,” Billy says, and he does. It’s been years since he was in San Diego, since he felt the sea air ruffling his air and took his surfboard out with his mom cheering him on from the beach.
The silence is oppressive. “You’ll have to tell me at some point,” Steve says.
Billy pushes his sunglasses further up his nose. “Yeah,” he says. “At some point.”
More quiet. Then Steve says: “We just crossed the state line.”
“Welcome to Illinois,” Billy says flatly.
Steve takes a deep breath. “How many states do you think you can name?” he asks. “You think we could get them all between us?”
A pause, a beat. It’s obvious what he’s trying to do, and once again a wave of guilt crashes over Billy. He shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t lie to someone good like Steve. He’s using him.
“Illinois,” he says. “Indiana. California.”
“That’s three,” Steve says.
Billy exhales. “Missouri,” he says. “Texas. Arizona.”
“Washington,” Steve says, and they go on like that. It helps a little.
It takes a little under three hours to cross Illinois. Steve tells Billy about a trip to Chicago he and Robin took a couple of years ago, right after they moved to Indianapolis. Billy has never been to Chicago, but the way Steve is describing it makes him feel like he was there. He listens attentively, picturing the glittering skyscrapers, the broad sidewalks, the glistening waters of the Chicago River leading out to Lake Michigan.
He was still wheelchair-bound when Steve took that trip. It’s the reason he can’t drive.
“Yeah, it was awesome,” Steve says, and Billy nods and tries not to look envious.
The first run-down buildings of East St Louis are starting to pop up around them, increasing in density as they drive closer to the state line. Billy rolls his eyes as Steve pushes down the lock on his door. “We’re not even coming off the interstate,” he says. “I think you’re probably safe.”
Steve pushes a hand through his hair, looking embarrassed - but he doesn’t release the door locks. “This place freaks me out,” he admits.
“You’ve literally faced down a fucking interdimensional monster with a baseball bat, and East St Louis scares you?” Billy teases. Steve rolls his eyes and smiles, and Billy feels a flicker of something in his chest.
They cross the Mississippi River without incident, in spite of Steve’s safety precautions, and then they’re in Missouri. There’s traffic coming into the city, and Billy takes the opportunity to look up at the enormous Gateway Arch looming above them.
Steve takes a left onto the I-44 heading south. Darkness is beginning to fall, the sky a radiant array of orange and blue, and for several minutes Billy just gazes out and watches it and tries not to think about the letters.
“I think there’s a motel in Mehlville,” Steve says with a certain degree of diffidence as the car trundles past the gray waters of the river. “It’s not too expensive.”
Billy turns to him with eyebrows raised. “You checked out motels?”
Steve shrugs. “Gotta stay somewhere,” he says philosophically, but this doesn’t change the fact that he’s put such a significant and tangible effort into their trip. Billy doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He turns to look out of the window again.
The motel is large and bright and cheap, sandwiched between Bob Evans and Costco in a corner of the city that seems to be reserved for all the big chain stores without much housing. Chuck E. Cheese, Best Buy, Target and Starbucks all vie for attention with enormous plastic signs around a variety of smaller restaurants and storefronts, and the sidewalks are bustling with people heading out of the stores and into the eateries.
“Anything you want to see in St Louis?” Steve asks, as he pulls into the parking lot of the motel.
Billy shrugs. “What the hell is there to see in St Louis?” he asks.
“Gateway Arch,” Steve says. “The botanical gardens.”
“Jesus Christ, how much research did you fucking do?” Billy exclaims, pissy for no real reason except his own guilt. “It’s a fucking arch. We saw it when we crossed the river.”
Steve is silent for a moment, ostensibly concentrating on parking the car. “Okay,” he says at last. “I guess we’ll just head on in the morning.”
They get separate rooms at the motel, and then they go out to find somewhere to eat, sitting opposite each other in cheap plastic chairs at one of the smaller diners and studying the menus without looking at each other. Billy feels tired and responsible and he wants to fix it, so he says: “Dinner is on me, yeah?”
“Damn right,” Steve says, which thaws things a little, but there’s still tension between them by the time they go back to the motel, and Steve doesn’t look at him when he says goodnight.
Billy shuts the door, lies down on his bed, stares at the ceiling. He thinks about the letters. He thinks about Steve, and hot prickling shame cascades through him. He’s not being very nice.
He’s not nice. He’s never been nice. He’s well aware that Steve is mostly kind to him because he feels sorry for him, because Billy fought the Mind Flayer and lost, because he can’t drive and can’t hear out of his left ear and gets migraines and occasional seizures and there was a long time where no one thought he’d walk again - and now his dad is dead, which Steve probably thinks is a bad thing.
Billy isn’t actually sure whether or not it’s a bad thing, hasn’t made up his mind yet.