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Just like any typical heterosexual, Steve Harrington finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed at two in the morning, staring at the ceiling, thinking, I like boobies.
This is not new information.
Steve Harrington has always liked boobies. He liked them when he was thirteen and afraid of talking to girls. He liked them when he was sixteen and thought that masculinity meant denying that he was afraid. He liked them when he dated Nancy, when he dated Amy, Laurie, Becky, Heidi, and all the girls whose names blur together now. He liked them when he was eighteen and prom king, and he still likes them at twenty-two, teaching gym at the same high school he fears he peaked at. Needless to say, Steve Harrington has built a whole identity around liking boobies, and therein lies the problem.
Henry Creel does not have boobies. Quite the opposite, in fact; his chest is narrow and flat as an Indiana cornfield. Despite this physical flaw, Steve Harrington is very afraid that he likes Henry Creel, possibly even more than he likes boobies.
Steve groans and flops backward onto his bed, watching the ceiling fan spin round and round. There has to be some reasonable explanation for all of this. Probably some kind of trauma bonding thing. Steve is good at that. Stockholm syndrome. Savior complex. Pity crush. Protective instinct. He’s always been the babysitter, after all; caring for others, regardless of whether they deserve it, that’s just his way. So it makes sense that he’s come to spend his time thinking about whether Henry's eaten, whether he’s been sleeping ok, whether anyone’s been unkind to him that day…never mind that his own chest buzzes like a kicked beehive whenever Henry laughs.
“Yup,” Steve says to himself, “Just normal Steve stuff. That’s all this is.”
He closes his eyes and immediately his brain supplies Henry: starched sleeves rolled to expose pale forearms, shirt collar open to display a slender throat, elegant collarbones. His hair is mussed, golden in the light, blue eyes twinkling behind tortoiseshell glasses, mouth curved into that wry half-smile it makes whenever Steve says something dumb.
“Oh my god.” Steve scrubs his eyes with his palms, “I don’t even— I don’t like men. I like women.”
And Henry, adds his brain, traitorous as ever, You really like Henry.
He thinks about Henry’s mouth again. That clever little mouth, too soft for someone so dangerous. The voice that comes out of it, low and quiet, settling warm under the skin. And those lips. God, those lips— full and yielding, opening like spring peonies when Steve teases him pink. He imagines kissing those lips, slow and deep, drinking him in. Color blooms in Steve’s cheeks. How easy it would be to coax his own name from Henry’s sweet, ripe lips, flushed and breathless when he—
Abort. Abort. Think about literally anything else. Bills. Oil changes. Mrs. Wheeler’s tuna casserole. He rolls over and screams into his pillow before his imagination can spiral any further. His face burns; he wants to believe it's from shame but the heat in his loins proves it’s more than that. He glares at the wall.
“What the hell is wrong with you?! Fantasizing about a goddamn psychic supervillain?”
Former supervillain. With sad eyes and impeccable manners. And long, beautiful fingers that would lace perfectly with your own.
Steve lurches upright. “No. Don’t you dare think that way about a murderer! Jesus Christ, he’s hurt people you care about, tried to kill them! Tried to kill you! He’s…He’s…”
Gentle. He’s gentle with things now. Like the world is made of glass and he’s afraid to break it.
Steve squeezes his eyes shut, trying to wrestle his thoughts into submission. His brain wants to think about Henry? Fine. He’ll think about Henry— but not that Henry. Not the polished, handsome man with honey-colored hair. No, he pictures Henry from before, early in recovery, at his worst. Raw, scabby skin. Thin, patchy hair. Sunken eyes in a noseless face that could have belonged to a leper. A face only a mother could love, he thinks, cruelly, as he waits for revulsion to set in. It doesn’t.
Desperate, Steve recalls Henry’s monstrous form: the scarred, slimy skin that oozed like an open wound; the wet rasp of his inhuman voice, like phlegm in the throat; the foul, marshy funk that clung to him even as the vines shriveled and fell away. To Steve’s horror, desire neither curdles nor fades. It only changes shape. Heat folds into something quiet and tender; the urge to nurture and to shield. To reach back in time for Henry’s broken body, to steady him when he’d flinch from mirrors and recoil from touch. To take him out to dinner somewhere quiet, where no one stares. To rebuild the life that was stolen from him and hold his hand the whole way through. Steve realizes, with a sinking certainty, that even if Henry had never fully healed, even if he looked wrong and frightening to the rest of the world, he would still want to touch and hold and learn the careful shape of him. The knowledge sits like an ache in Steve’s ribs, steady as gravity.
He exhales a long shaky breath.
“Shit.”
Then, Steve’s overactive brain concocts a new thought. One that is deeply uncalled for, wildly troubling, and shockingly rude:
Okay, but if I want Henry this way…does that mean I like dick?
“Pull yourself together, Harrington. You teach human sexuality to horny teenagers. You are not about to question your own sexuality because of one guy.” He swings his legs over the side of his bed and plants his feet firmly on the floor, hoping that physically grounding himself will translate to gaining metaphorical ground in this existential argument.
“I like boobies,” he helpfully reminds himself. “This is peer reviewed and well documented.”
The reminder doesn’t stop his brain from providing the very unhelpful follow-up that is: Well you’ve never actually tried liking anything else.
“No. No way. I am not doing a field study. I am not conducting experiments where I walk around Hawkins checking out random dudes just to see if I want any of them in my bed.” He laughs humorlessly, “My sexuality will not be turned into a science fair project on the off chance that I like dicks other than my own.”
What about Henry’s di—
Steve sucks in a sharp breath and flops back onto bed. “Okay. Okay. Hypothetically,” he starts, suppressing his own rising panic, “Hypothetically. If I did like dick— which I don’t— that wouldn’t erase the boobies thing. Right? They can coexist.” He nods to himself, satisfied, “That feels…reasonable.”
It takes him less than five seconds to panic again, because, for Steve, the next logical step in this line of reasoning is, “If I did like both…what does that mean about me?” It’s enough to drive him off the bed again and into pacing.
“I cannot be doing this at twenty-two. I’m an adult. With a job. I pay taxes, I should be getting married, starting a family, I…”
Steve stops pacing. “…Does it make me a friend of Dorothy if it’s just one guy?” He points accusingly at nothing, “Don’t answer that.”
He sinks back onto his bed, exhausted. The alarm clock now reads four minutes past three in the morning. Steve doesn’t know how he’s going to wake up tomorrow. One would think the ceiling fan had answers, with the way he’s staring at it.
“Okay,” he whispers to himself in the dark, “I don’t have to decide anything now. I don’t have to stick a label on…Whatever this is. I can just…feel things. Yeah. Just feel things.”
And, because it feels important to say aloud, he adds, “…I still like boobies, though.”
The ceiling fan keeps turning overhead, indifferent to what Steve Harrington likes.