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Steve’s filled out since high school. (Since they were together, but Nancy avoids that line of thought for obvious reasons.) It was impossible to ignore on the lake, but at that point—Max’s life in danger, a portal gaping open underneath them, a monster on the hunt—it was also impossible for Nancy to lose herself ogling the muscled slope of his back.
One stare was all she got, uncomfortably long but not too telling, or at least no more telling than the uncomfortably long stare of any other girl who’s just realized that her ex has sprouted into a full-grown man, apparently overnight. Nancy hadn’t exactly allowed herself that stare, but she couldn’t have stopped, even if she’d wanted to. And she hadn’t.
These days, the state of Hawkins is depressingly unchanged—Max’s life in danger, portals gaping open, monsters on the hunt. Nancy has acres of time, though. When the worst has already happened, you hunker down and soldier through and save your plans for only the opportunities that are worth their risks.
In other words, the apocalypse is boring as shit. It’s frustrating as hell. And it leaves Nancy with a wasteland of brain space primed to be overtaken by…just about anything, really. But mostly Steve’s shoulders and the dark hair curling across Steve’s chest and the fresh scars gnawed into Steve’s stomach.
(His stomach’s practically a washboard—it was softer three years ago. She’d rest her cheek against it. One time she trailed her lips across his ribs, using a little tongue. Steve’s breath hitched and she felt it deep in her own stomach and Nancy can’t stop replaying that moment, can’t stop the phantom echoes of its heat, can’t sleep.)
You’ve always been there. She didn’t have an answer then. Serves Nancy right that now Steve is all she thinks about.
“Steady,” says Wayne Munson, right before Nancy’s boot hits a stone or a stick or a bone-fragment or something, and she stumbles and the demodog carcass that they’re about to sling into the back of the Chief’s truck lurches like a sack of slimy bricks.
“Goddammit!” She should’ve been watching her feet. Nancy is so bad at this—and so bad at being bad at this. “Sorry,” she mutters, adjusting her grip. “Ready?”
Eddie’s uncle nods. “On three.”
After the toss, Nancy heaves herself up onto the tailgate and unclips her canteen. She gulps, wipes her mouth. “Sorry,” she repeats. Nancy hasn’t felt the need to apologize this much in years, but…he’s Eddie’s uncle. “My focus is all over the place.”
“Yeah?” Wayne leans against the tailgate himself. When Nancy hands the canteen over he gulps and swipes a hand across his mouth, then nods towards the second carcass, still being prepped. “That your problem?”
By which he doesn’t mean the demodog getting field dressed.
Steve and Hopper are working it together; Steve’s learned fast but Hopper’s the expert. Since it’s currently the middle of what, best guess, amounts to an Upside Down summer, steamy and with a pulpy bad-meat smell carried on inadequate puffs of breeze, they’ve both stripped down to their jeans. Both their backs are turned towards Nancy—both long and muscled and scarred, starting to tan. Steve’s shoulders bunch as he grips inside the chest cavity. Hopper says something that Nancy doesn’t catch, except that it sounds approving.
“It’s stupid,” she says. “I mean—” Nancy gestures to the crabbed black woods, the mustardy sky, “—right now, with all this—”
“Shit.” Wayne hands the canteen back. “It seems pretty natural to me.”
Nancy doesn’t answer.
“He’s a good-looking young guy, you’re a pretty girl,” he continues. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Nothing’s that complicated.” Wayne sighs. “Not anymore.”
Last night Nancy dreamed Max was awake. Also the world was saved, and everyone was packed into a brand-new Winnebago, heading for California. Steve was at the wheel, she was riding shotgun, and the kids were bickering over something vaguely, dreamily D&D-related in the back.
Even Eddie was there, slotted next to Robin and assisting with her dramatic readings of the cheesy tourist brochures.
You know what, Buckley? You should be in the movies.
Steve said, Nah, man, she’s gonna make movies. He grinned at Nancy like she knew as much about Robin as he did. The best of friends, all of them.
Obviously it wasn’t a hot-and-heavy sex dream, the kind she would’ve giggled over with Barb in junior high. It was worse than a hot-and-heavy sex dream, actually. Nancy’s had sex with Steve, but this was completely unattainable.
Twiddling through stations, they picked up Kate Bush and Max yelled from the back, “Shut up, shut up, this is my song.”
Steve shot Nancy a small ‘what’re we gonna do with them’ smile before reaching to crank the radio up. His arm was long and muscled and scarred. Steve rested it across the back of her seat. They weren’t touching but Nancy felt a bolt of pure fire shoot right through her.
Fine. It was sex-dream-adjacent. That doesn’t make it any more attainable.
The cab is cramped for four and the four of them are all too grimy and sweaty to be cramped, so Nancy opts to share the back with the tarp-covered carcasses.
“Hey, Nance. You okay?”
And Steve. He leans against the back of the cab while Nancy slumps against the tailgate. He shrugged his hunting jacket off hours ago. The T-shirt, crumpled and stained with demodog goop, is draped over his shoulder for what Nancy assumes isn’t a totally blatant display of chest hair. But she’s a bad judge; Steve’s general existence has started to feel totally blatant.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Just…tired.”
He tips her a sympathetic smile. “Quite the workout, right?” Steve kicks at the tarp. “Hauling these guys around.”
“Like you need the workout.”
“I know I make it seem effortless, but—” Steve kicks the tarp again. “—a monster-gutting physique? Yeah, Wheeler, it takes work. Lots of it.”
He’s grinning now. So is Nancy. “You must be wiped out, too.”
“Uh-huh. Gotta pick Henderson up once we get back, though. It’s his turn at the hospital tonight and you know that kid is still a menace behind the wheel—”
“And it’s my turn tomorrow.” Nancy’s gut sinks. “Shit. I completely forgot.”
The truck trundles over what used to be an access road out behind the Lab. The back wheels jounce over a pothole, hard, and she bangs the tailgate. “Shit!”
Hopper shouts out the driver’s side window. “What the hell’s going on back there?”
“Uh…scheduling issue!” Steve shouts back. He frowns at Nancy. “What’s the matter? You need a ride?”
“No!” That was too sharp. “I forgot.”
“You’ve got a lot going on,” Steve says. “It’s okay.”
“So do you,” Nancy reminds him, “and you didn’t—”
“Dustin’s up my ass about it, so—”
“That’s not true,” she says. “You never forget, Steve. When it’s your turn or when someone else needs a ride…you’re at the hospital practically every evening, and I…I can’t stand it in there.”
“I know. It’s—”
“And Max? I get this horrible feeling every time that some part of her is awake, just…screaming and screaming. Because that’s what I would do, but I can’t hear her, or help her, and—”
“Nance,” Steve says, “I know.”
The truck jounces again. The trees are thinning out. They’re getting to the main road. Then home, not that Hawkins feels much like home anymore.
“Everything’s broken, and all those bandages make her look so tiny, and she isn’t running her mouth and being a complete shit because she can’t,” Steve says. “It makes you want to crawl up the walls. I get it.”
“But you never forget.” If Steve feels the same about Nancy as he did months ago, he doesn’t let that distract him. “You’re built for this,” she says. “I’m not.”
Steve looks like he’s deciding something. Almost how he used to look when the choice was between studying for an exam on their lunch break or Frenching each other’s brains out. (Nancy wasn’t supposed to let him win, but she did. Plenty of times.) Determined—he’ll make his bed and lie in it, too.
He drives her crazy.
He always has—but Nancy used to be better at hiding that.
“Come here,” Steve says. He tugs the T-shirt off his shoulder.
With that alone, Nancy’s body decides for her. She half-scooches awkwardly on her butt past the tarp, the truck wheels rumbling over churned-up gravel, the carcasses vibrating. Steve offers a hand, she takes it, and when he’s pulled her close enough Nancy curls against him. She rests her cheek against his bare shoulder—Steve’s skin is hot from soaked-up sun, tacky from half-dried sweat. He smells like blood and bad meat.
“I—” Nancy’s eye-level with the freckles dotting his jawline. She could reach over and trace the scars on his stomach. She could bend over and trace them with her tongue. “—I love to watch you,” she hears herself say, and realizes she isn’t embarrassed at all.
Steve shifts a little, clears his throat. “Wow, uh,” he says. She knows exactly what he’s thinking: How am I supposed to take that, Nance? “Thanks. I think?”
Nancy doesn’t know how he should take it—she just knows she had to say it, get the truth out. Even if it’s the kind of truth an ex isn’t supposed to say. “It’s a compliment,” she assures him. “Like earlier when you were gutting that demodog?”
“Yeah,” Steve snorts. “The highlight of my day.”
“But you’re so good at it! You know what to do in this—this weird, shitty, new world, Steve. And I love to watch you knowing what to do. Honestly? It makes me feel like an idiot sometimes.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Steve says. He looped his arm around her shoulders when she leaned against him but it’s only now that he really lets it rest, lets some of his weight settle across Nancy. He clears his throat. “But, you know, at this point I’m used to not knowing what I’m doing, so maybe that’s my strength. All I can do is work on it, right? Slow learner, but a hard worker. You’re a hard worker, too,” he adds after a pause. “Just not so great with freestyling.”
Nancy could argue that wrangling an interview out of Victor Creel, to pick just one example, involved a hefty amount of freestyling, but she gets Steve’s point. He knows Nancy has to have a plan, make a list with headings and subheadings and ticky-boxes, her way forward mapped out.
But there’s no way now, no map. Just forward. And it scares the shit out of her.
Which Steve must know, too. “I’ll get to the hospital tomorrow,” she tells him. “Thanks for reminding me.”
“No problem,” Steve says. His arm’s still draped over her shoulders. Nancy wants to take his hand, lace their fingers together. “Hey, you need a ride or anything, just ask. Okay?”
“Okay.” She wants to mouth the pulse point at his wrist. She wants to palm her way into his jeans. She wants Steve’s hands in her hair and his warm, sweaty weight straddled over her, right in the back of this truck. She wants—
Nothing’s that complicated. Not anymore.
Nancy wants Steve.
And here he is.
The truck rattles out of the trees and onto the highway. A whiff of cigarette smoke threads through the spoiled-meat summer air; Nancy overhears murmurs of Hopper and Wayne’s conversation.
She reaches up, takes Steve’s hand. He doesn’t say a word, just lets her fingers lace through his, then squeezes. Nancy squeezes back.
“I had this dream,” she says. (A dream she’s most definitely added to in her waking hours because dreams don’t stick around like that, hazy but also perfectly, painfully clear. Like a memory.) “Where we all made it to California.”
Steve swallows. She hears his throat click. “Tell me about it.”
Nancy tells him.