𝐔𝐍𝐑𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃. ˢᵗᵉᵛᵉ ʰᵃʳʳⁱⁿᵍᵗᵒⁿ ²

008

▬▬ 008. 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠.

    𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐋𝐃 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐀𝐈𝐃 𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐇𝐈𝐌. He was always able to do that, make the air around them fluctuate with just his presence— suck out all the air left in her lungs so she struggled to breathe when he was near. It'd happened so often that Lori Philbin should've been used to it by now, but she could never get used to it — not in a million lifetimes. Her grief-ridden body reacted the same way every single time he was near. By some force of nature, Steve Harrington was the only person on earth that could make the world around her melt away with his presence alone, blur out all meaningless surroundings so her eyes focused on him. And the shape of his silhouette in the dark. It seemed to be the only shape she could see, the curve of his shoulders and the swoop of his hair, the only thing across the stretch of pavement that separated her and the Wheeler house. Suddenly, in the snap of a finger, the whole world evanesced and it was just the two of them, staring at one another from a distance. A deep, dark, aching distance filled with baggage and unspoken thoughts.

    She tried not to think about it, but the way her stomach dropped was verging on dangerous. The way her heart lurched into a race could be medically deemed as lethal. The moment her eyes settled on the edges of his silhouette, her body shot into full panic. An aching, poignant, nervous panic that Lori had once crowned herself incapable of feeling— but of course, Steve changed that. He changed everything. Just by the way he stood across the culdesac, hands in his pockets, staring at her. Just that changed everything. She didn't know it at the time, but seeing him for the first time in months shattered her plans on the spot, and the shards of glass trickled to the pavement — to stare back up at her from outside her car. Suddenly, her hands got all jittery and her breathing accelerated, chest rising and falling as she sat in her car, eyes fixated on him.

    Him, and only him.

    For a long moment, she was completely and utterly frozen in place. Every sentence she'd rehearsed, every stupid line she went over in her head completely vanished into thin air— dissipated from her mind entirely. He swept away each and every thought. She couldn't think about anything other than the way he looked right then, standing by the lamppost in the dark, with his hands shoved in his pockets, a different kind of look in his hair, and his eyes staring right back at her. And the emotions swarming inside of her chest, the feelings coursing through her veins at an unbearably rapid pace, and the overwhelming sensation that was seeing him after all this time. She'd seen him at Christmas, but that was a short visit, and it'd been weird then. This, this was something entirely different. Because they hadn't been talking for months this time. He stopped answering, stopped calling out of the blue. She hadn't seen or spoken to him in months.

    And now he was right there.

    Suddenly, their state of limbo became all the more prominent, all the more salient between them in that moment. As they stared at one another for God knows how long, it became painfully clear that they were, in fact, in limbo but neither of them were going to bring it up. But she was here now, and the weight of that fact suddenly swooped down to reside on both of their shoulders, weighing them down almost instantly.

    Lori let out a shaky breath, and reached to pull the key out of ignition, but she felt as though it was not her moving. Like it was someone else pulling the key and pushing open the door, because she, Lori, was in a different world staring at Steve. The only time she tore her eyes from him was when she stepped out and shut the door behind her— and she paused for a second with her hand on the handle and shut her eyes tight before turning back around. The world seemed to shift under her feet when they collided with the sleek pavement of the culdesac, and maybe she was hallucinating it. Or maybe it wasn't the world that had shifted, but rather Steve's gaze as her full body entered view. Jean jacket, turtleneck, loose hair and all. Standing there before him at a distance, across the street, and he couldn't take his eyes off her.