Chapter Text
On Friday Steve sleeps until noon and wakes up feeling off. There had been beer at dinner, but he’d only had about a mug and a half before switching to apple cider. His mouth is dry, and that’s probably the weed, but that’s not the problem. He’s sluggish, and his stomach aches, and he just doesn’t feel like getting up for his usual morning run. It’s his day off though; he’s blissfully free of any obligations.
He remembers… talking to Eddie about Robin. Because Eddie had called. Probably to talk about a new plan, but Steve had been all high by then. His poor stomach is still churning, and when he shuffles downstairs he realizes it’s because he absolutely decimated the leftovers.
And you’d think, you’d think he wouldn’t be hungry again, but he has a bowl of Cheerios before going back up. Just in case it helps settle anything.
Then he crawls back into bed, buries his face into his pillow, and dozes on and off through the afternoon.
~
By the next morning he’s back to normal and picks Robin up for work on time, albeit wearing sunglasses.
“Can you see in those?” Robin asks as she slides into the Bimmer. “It’s overcast.”
Steve sighs, lets the glasses slide down his nose a bit, and gives her a Look over the top of them while she buckles up. (If asked whether he learned this from the Hawkins Library librarian and has practiced it in the mirror at home, he would deny both until the cows come home.) “I knew your parents would already have the house all lit up for Christmas already. You just got back last night, but god forbid—“
She waves him off, visibly placated when he takes the sunglasses and hangs them from the collar of his shirt now that they’re backed out of the driveway. “Okay okay, Grinch. How was your Thanksgiving, any bites on that ad?”
Chuckling, he says flippantly, “Oh, yeah. I got a boyfriend out of it.”
“You WHAT?!”
“Ow, Robin! Volume! My eardrums, come on!”
He tells her about Eddie reaching out and meeting up to plan introducing Steve as his ‘first boyfriend’—that’s when Robin suddenly smacks him in the arm.
“Ow, I’m driving here! What was that for?”
“You just outed him to me, Dingus!”
Steve grimaces. “So? You’re not going to tell anybody.”
”He doesn’t know that though,” she points out. “It’s a violation of trust.“
“He doesn’t even know I told—“
“Steve,” she interrupts heavily, leveling him with a Look of her own.
Right. This is probably one of those gay things that he just doesn’t get because he hasn’t lived with The Fear. She’d explained it to him once, in vivid metaphor; comparing being outed to, say, if he’d gotten very publicly kicked off all his sports teams for smoking pot, then expelled from high school, and then his dad finding out and getting him behind closed doors, followed by ’Only now imagine it’s not something you did, it’s something you are,’ was surprisingly effective.
“Sorry,” he mutters, fixing his gaze firmly back on the road. “Eddie knows we’re friends. I’ll tell him I told you but that, like, you’re safe. It should be fine, right? I mean, he told me in the first place, and you don’t have… y’know, the same reputation.”
Robin considers this, then pats his arm where she’d hit him. “That’s true. Okay, continue.”
By the time they pull up to Family Video she’s laughing so hard she’s in tears at his utter failure to make a bad impression on Eddie’s uncle.
“Really feeling the love here, Rob,” he grumbles, cutting the engine and climbing out.
She spills out of the passenger side still giggling and trying to wipe her eyes without smearing her waterproof mascara. “You’ve got Uncle Wayne as a fallback, you’ll be fine.”
“It’s not funny.”
“No, it’s hilarious.”
She calms down a bit as they go about getting ready to open the store, scanning and sorting the returns that had been dropped off overnight. Steve tells her the last of it, how Eddie hadn’t blamed him for the plan flopping, given him a couple of free joints, and even called after to check in. How he’d been toasted by then—“It was a really stressful night, okay?”—and Eddie had asked about Robin. He kind of glosses over how much he overate, figuring she got the gist from the thing about unzipping his pants in the Munsons’ living room. Plus, that’s just how Thanksgiving is in general, anyone who watches sitcoms knows that.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do next,” Steve admits, once he’s laid it all out. “Eddie’ll probably have a better idea of what to do, since it’s his uncle.”
Robin shrugs. “I mean, yeah. I’d need way more information in order to form any opinion besides ‘wow, this was a dumb scheme in the first place.’ It sounds like you had a good time though. Got a good meal out of it.” She plops the last of the returns on the counter for him, freshly scanned, and smirks. “Made two new friends. And hey, if things don’t work out with Eddie, there’s always—“
“If you don’t quit it with that, I swear to god Rob,” Steve grumbles toothlessly. It’s still embarrassing, but he’s like… this close from far enough away from it now to find it funny too. He bounces back pretty fast; give him another couple of days and he’ll probably be cracking jokes of his own.
“But also,” she continues, sobering, “accidental outing aside, you’re handling this amazingly well. Being kind of a reformed douchebag is one thing, but even most open-minded straight guys wouldn’t be okay with a situation where they’re presumed gay themselves. You know that right, Steve? Not even to support a friend. And you don’t know Eddie that well.”
Thinking back to when he’d been around Tommy and the other guys on the basketball and swim teams more, Steve remembers how easily fag and fairy had been tossed around at others but quickly became the deadliest insult if turned around. He’d done it too for a while, up until Jonathan Byers kicked his ass for it, but he hadn’t really understood what made it different from calling someone stupid or crazy or a pussy until Robin careened into his life and started tying to explain.
So, like, Steve has learned and grown and stuff, but that feels like a weird thing to accept a compliment about. It’s pretty straightforward once you really think about it though, right? Same as sharing toys in kindergarten; you either learn it or you’re an asshole.
“I guess,” he agrees awkwardly. He takes the tapes, checks the sides, and heads towards the Comedy section, adding over his shoulder, “Anyway, I wouldn’t mind being friends with him, y’know? I could use more friends who are old enough to shave.”
Robin scoffs. “I shave.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Is this about the patchy peach fuzz on your upper lip?”
“Excuse you, it’s a mustache, and it’s coming in!”
The phone rings, and Robin sighs. “Well, here we go.” She picks it up with a grimace but shifts seamlessly to her Customer Service voice, complete with a pained smile. “Thank you for calling Family Video, where the theater comes to your living room. How can I help you?”
Steve tunes out, holding up the last couple tape cases in his hand up to examine them and scanning the shelf, absently mouthing the alphabet to himself as he goes. Once they’re back in their rightful spots he heads back to the register, only to stop as soon as he catches sight of Robin’s deviously delighted face. “… What?”
She shifts the receiver back over her manic smirk and says loudly, “Well, it was nice chatting with you. I don’t know where Steve is just now, Eddie, but I sure will tell him you called—“
He’s doubled over the counter and yanking the phone out of her hand before she can say more. “Ignore her,” he pants into the receiver, winded half from sprinting and half because the counter edge is fighting his diaphragm for space. “I’m here. Hi.”
Eddie’s laugh trickles low and sweet down the line, rich like dark honey. “Hi sweetheart. Don’t worry, all she had time to tell me was your social security number, astrological sign, and where you hide your dirty magazines. Nothing important.”
Steve’s first thought is that it might be a good idea if at least one of them to had his social security number memorized. His second thought is that Eddie has a nice voice. “There’s no way she knows where I keep those. Is your uncle around?”
”Mm,” Eddie replies noncommittally, which Steve figures means yes. There’s no other reason to keep up the pretense right now. ”Hey, you like milkshakes, right?”
“Yeah. Who doesn’t like milkshakes?”
”Great. What do you say to milkshakes after your shift? My treat.”
Steve blinks. “Uh, sure. I’m done at five but I’ve got to drive Robin home, so—“
”Right, so I can pick you up at your house after. When’s good, five thirty? Six?”
“Five forty-five,” Steve says, doing some quick calculations in his head. As long as they both clock out on time, that leaves fifteen minutes from the store to Robin’s to home, and another half hour to shower away the stickiness that always seems to linger on the tape cases and re-style his hair. That should work.
”You got it, big boy. I’ll see you then.”
Then the line clicks and Steve has an earful of dial tone, feeling as though he’d somehow just been winked at over the phone.
“Earth to Steve.” Robin waves a hand in front of his face. “What just happened? What’s with the milkshakes?”
Shaking himself a little, Steve hands the receiver back to her to hang up. “It’s nothing, Eddie and I are getting milkshakes while we talk more about, you know. The situation.”
“Sounds like a date,” Robin says with a raised eyebrow.
“No. What?” He shakes his head, even as he snags a candy bar from the display to settle a sudden wave of nerves. “No. It’s not a date, it’s a… What did he call it… A planning session, like Henderson and the other twerps do for their Dragons and Dorks game. Eddie plays that too,” he explains.
The look Robin gives him says she’s unimpressed, but not going to push—which is good, because right now Steve isn’t very sure what he’d say if he did, with big boy still reverberating in his head.
“It’s time to open up, can you get the door?” Before he has a chance to offer she’s already tossed the store key ring, and Steve is already stretching and lunging for it when she adds, “Catch it if you’ve got patchy peach fuzz!”
He catches the keys, but halfway through a victory fist-pump he stops and plants both hands on his hips. “Hey!”
Once the door is unlocked and the sign flipped, Steve tosses the keys back with a quick, “Catch it if it’s totally a mustache!” Unfortunately, he forgot that Robin is terrible at catching things and tends to automatically duck when things come flying at her head.
~
Meanwhile, across Hawkins, Eddie slides down the wall beneath the phone in the kitchen trailer with a hastily scribbled down outline of how he wanted to ask Steve Harrington on an actual date clutched in one hand. The faces he’d grimaced silently to himself at his own internal awkwardness after every time he stopped speaking, Jesus H. Christ.
Thank god Wayne’s still on shift at the plant. With an audience, Eddie definitely would’ve choked.