Chapter Text
“He did what ?”
Max looked at him oddly. “He said yes.”
Mike looked at her, completely and utterly baffled. Dustin gave a whoop, clapping his hands, and Lucas smiled so big it took up nearly all of his face. “Finally! Will has had girls pining after him for so long, it’s a wonder he’s the last of the party to get into a relationship!” Dustin grinned now, too, watching as Will walked over to them with a notebook tucked under one arm. “Well, if it’s not the man of the hour!”
“Hey, guys,” Will said, breathlessly, as his eyes flicked over to Mike before darting away. “What did I do this time?”
The crowded cafeteria wasn’t exactly the best place to talk about this. With kids talking so loudly, it felt like a wave of sound that would just pick Mike up and wash him away. He stared at Will, and he could feel his heart breaking slightly every moment that passed.
Lucas just laughed, adding to the tide. “You finally got a date! Well done, dude, well done.”
“Oh.” Will’s eyes slid over to Mike, almost accidentally. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but really, who was more uncomfortable here? “Thanks, I guess.”
“Jennifer Hayes has had the hots for you for ages, man! It’s a miracle you guys didn’t get together sooner,” Max said, voice unnaturally chipper, but she watching Will carefully. Mike saw her out of the corner of his eye, blue eyes scanning for his signs of distress. She was trying to be nonchalant about it, but after spending so much time together, Mike knew all her tells. He knew everyone almost better than they knew themselves.
Or, so he thought.
“Yeah, I’m super excited,” Will said flatly, and Dustin and Lucas clapped him on the back the way bros do, nowadays.
El walked up with her lunch tray in her hands. “Hello.” She looked at Mike, and he could feel her eyes searching him. “What’s wrong?”
The table went silent for a moment, before everyone turned to Mike. He blinked. “Nothing.”
El squinted at him. “Friends don’t-”
“El!” Dustin interrupted, and Mike thanked his lucky stars for once that his friend had little grasp of social cues when it came to their friend group. “Will got a date!”
El looked directly at Mike, understanding flashing in her eyes. “That’s wonderful, Will,” she said kindly, voice softer than usual, as she sat next to her new brother. “When is the date?”
“Friday,” Max cut in, because now she knew everything about Will, apparently. Mike closed his eyes.
Did Will tell Max before he told Mike? Was she more important to him, now? Did their years of friendship mean nothing to him?
It felt like it meant everything to Mike. The years he had spent pushing and pulling at Will, their relationship ebbing and flowing nearly as often as the ocean he’d heard so much about from El.
The string that had tied them together had finally snapped, hadn’t it?
Mike had been waiting for this news for ages, it seemed. First, it was younger him, confused him, waiting and waiting and waiting for Will to get a date, to move on and grow up like the rest of them had. That version of himself had been stupid, nearly stupid enough to lose Will, multiple times, but younger Mike had hoped and prayed that if Will would grow up and get a girlfriend like the rest of them, that him being with someone else would make the funny feeling Mike had go away.
Current Mike had been dreading hearing the news. That funny feeling is what a crush is supposed to feel like, he figured out, and that crush was on no one else, but Will fucking Byers . Now it felt as though Mike had wasted so much time, so many years being young Mike, cold and selfish and confused. He wanted Will; he always had, just in different ways. Now, Mike wanted Will all to himself.
But his time was up. Will had finally done what younger Mike had been waiting for and what current Mike had been dreading.
He had moved on.
The conversation had shifted somehow, thankfully, away from Will’s love life, and Mike felt like he could breathe a little bit better. He opened his eyes to find El looking at him, sympathetic in a way only she could be.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” she said, but it echoed in his mind and her mouth didn’t move. Mike looked at her, confused, and she just tapped her temple and wiped her nose. “ We should talk.”
Mike nodded and thought “Later ” as loud as he possibly could, and El smiled at him sweetly.
Mike’s eyes returned to his sandwich, ham and cheese and entirely unappetizing in the wake of such big news. But his sandwich was safe, it was all right to look at.
Because if he didn’t look at it, he’d just end up looking at Will, and that would never end in anything but pain.
But he did, anyways, just a glance up at the boy sitting across from him. Will was like a magnet, and he always drew Mike’s eyes, no matter where he was or how painful it would be.
So Mike flicked his eyes up at his friend , and made eye contact with hazel rings. Because of course, Will was already looking at him.
Mike looked back at his sandwich.
***
“Michael! Get the door!”
Mike rolled his eyes as he slid out of his bed. Of course Karen would make him get the door. She was downstairs doing whatever the hell she did, he was upstairs moping, why wouldn’t she make him get the door?
Why couldn’t he just sulk in peace ?
He rushed down the stairs, socked feet barely touching the steps as he practically flung himself down the railing to get to the door before Ted had to get up off of his chair to stop the incessant knocking. That would never end well, once the company left.
He flung open the door just in time to stop whoever was on the other side from ringing again. “Hel-“
Mike’s voice stopped working mid-sentence. What the fuck?
“Hi,” Will breathed, nearly as breathless as Mike, like he had ran here or something. Mike looked just over his shoulder to see his old bike thrown haphazardly on the grass and realized just how accurate that seemed to be.
“Michael! Who is it?” Karen yelled, but her voice slowly lost its bite as she walked into the hall. “Will! What a pleasant surprise!”
Will blushed. “Hi, Mrs. Wheeler.”
Karen looked between them, eyes lingering on Mike for longer than what made him comfortable. “Is something wrong?”
Will’s eyes bulged and he shook his head quickly. Mike just watched him silently. “Oh, no, Mrs. Wheeler. I just needed to…” Will trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words. He glanced at Mike but quickly looked back to Karen, like looking at Mike burned him. “I just needed to talk to Mike, that's all.”
“Okay,” Karen said, stretching the vowels. She wiped her hands on a towel Mike hadn’t realized she had. “Michael, why haven’t you let him in? It’s getting cold, and you’re being rude!”
Mike blinked, shaking himself out of his daze at the drastic change in his mother’s tone. He stepped to the side, allowing Will to cross the threshold and step out of the cold.
“Thanks,” Will whispered, more to himself than Mike, it seemed, and Mike could almost hear the shiver in his voice.
Karen pursed her lips at them in a final judgemental look before disappearing back into the kitchen.
“Who’s there?” Ted called from his seemingly permanent place in his chair.
“Will, Ted!” Karen yelled back, as Will led Mike to his own basement. Ted grunted in response, and it sounded mildly disgusted, and that was the last thing he heard before Will was closing the door to the basement.
“Mike,” Will began, but Mike felt like he was going to collapse down the stairs, so he shook his head and grabbed Will’s hand to take him down the steps, ignoring how doing so sent lines of lightning through his bloodstream and flushed his cheeks.
Once they were both comfortably sat on Mike’s worn out couch, Will tried again. “Mike, I need a favor.”
Mike gulped and ran his hands on his jeans, suddenly very aware of their proximity and of the copious amounts of sweat cascading from his palms. “Yeah?”
Will looked somewhere just over Mike’s shoulder, then down at his own hands, then over at the wall of his art that Mike has refused to take down, despite Karen and Ted’s relentless nagging. “I um…”
Mike watched as Will licked his lips, eyes following the movement with intensity he didn’t even know he was capable of. Will’s eyelids fluttered slightly, but then they shut, tight. “Can you teach me how to kiss?”
Mike’s world felt like it stopped spinning and fell off its axis. “What?” He asked, incredulous.
Will winced at his tone. “It’s just, I’ve never kissed anybody before, and I’m sure Jennifer Hayes has kissed so many people, and I don’t want to seem inexperienced in comparison? And you and El make out like, all the time, so I thought, why not? What are friends for?” Will’s voice was pretty much squeaking when he finished talking, and he looked back to his hands.
Mike blinked at him. Was he being serious? Was Will fucking Byers, the innocent boy that was an absolute “chick magnet”, as Dustin and Lucas called him, asking Mike to help him learn how to kiss?
Did he know about Mike’s feelings? Was there malicious intent behind this request?
And more importantly, was this really something friends did? Did other boys do this for their friends, to help one another out? He had heard about girls doing it, but that he could understand, because girls were weird. But boys? He wasn’t sure.
Either way, boys who had feelings for the person they were going to teach how to kiss sure as hell didn’t do these sort of things.
Boys weren’t even supposed to have feelings like that for other boys in the first place .
Mike must have sat with his mouth hanging open for much too long, because Will got up from the couch, cheeks red. “I’m sorry I asked. I’ll go now,” he rushed out, and before Mike could gather his thoughts, Will was up the stairs and out the door.
What the fuck?
***
“What did Will want, honey?” Karen asked kindly over dinner. Mike looked up from his mashed potatoes for the first time that evening. “He seemed to leave in quite a hurry.”
“He just had a question about our…chemistry.”
Mike could see Ted frown out of the corner of his eye. “He couldn’t have just used the phone?”
“ Ted ,” Karen chastised weakly, but really, why didn’t Will just call him?
The silence that fell over the dining table afterwards made it nearly impossible to breathe.
***
After dinner, Mike took the phone off the hook, and before he could second guess himself, he dialed the Byers’ house.
It had barely rung before it was picked up. “Hello?”
“Will?”
There was silence from the other side for a long moment, and Mike held his breath.
“Yeah?”
Mike sighed, and he could feel the tension beginning to build in his shoulders. “Just…in response to your earlier question…yeah. Yes. Sure.”
“Yeah?”
That couldn’t be hope in Will’s voice, could it?
“Yeah,” Mike confirmed.
He could hear a sigh from the other end of the line. “Awesome,” Will said, but it was muffled, like he was covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
“Will?” Mike asked, just to get his attention again.
“Hmm?“
“Tomorrow, after school. I’ll help.”
Mike could hear Will’s smile. “See you then.”
Mike hung up the phone feeling weirdly giddy.
He prayed to a god he didn’t believe in that this wouldn’t turn out to be a mistake.