Love Grows: Steve Harrington's Girl Next Door

1985: Clean My Wounds

"Steve?"

"Hey, Rosie..."

The girl's hitch of breath gets caught in her throat as her eyes dance crazily over Steve's, once again, battered face.

Steve clears his throat, somewhere between an awkward punctuating of the pause, and an actual cough from the pain.

This is worse than when Jonathan kicked his ass.

It looks like he's been tortured.

He doesn't even know why, but the moment he got home, reeking of smoke from the Starcourt fire, dizzy from lack of sleep and perhaps a bit of Russian drug-withdrawal, he felt it. A pull. And before he could even properly gather his surroundings, he'd crossed the trellis and was tapping on the glass of Rosemary's window.

She gasped in horror when she drew back the curtains.

And now, with the window slid wide open, she goggles at him like a rabbit in the headlights.

"Who did this to you?" She questions, voice raised in a feat to keep quiet, but unable to suppress the sheer feeling of shock that blares in her ears like an alarm bell.

Steve chuckles in pained response, glancing down and shaking his head. "You wouldn't believe me even if I told you." Then, his gaze flicks back up to her, all wide and sad in dark caramel. "Can I... can I come in?"

He's never asked her before, never been past the threshold of her window. But there's something about what he's been through that's got him feeling pathetic and needy, and for whatever reason it's her he wants to stay close to.

Rosemary doesn't even answer.

She just closes her hand around the collar of his sailor suit, and pulls him in.

Exhausted, he flops into her room like a fish. And she grips him up in her arms.

He succumbs to it without hesitation, breathing in her scent. Clean like a meadow - a beautiful, stark contrast to the copper he tastes on his tongue. So Steve happily burrows his face in her neck.

"S'nice," is the only word he can bring himself to mumble into her skin.

"You smell of smoke," she observes. "Has there been a fire?"

"You could say that."

"Here." She tugs on his shirt again, pulling him to his feet and directing him to sit on her bed. It's soft and radiates comfort just like her, and of course there's an old, bedraggled teddy-bear by the pillows. "Wait right there," she instructs.

He nods, simply obeying, and she vanishes from the room.

When she's gone, Steve uses the opportunity to properly take in his surroundings.

Gazing round, he snuffs out a quiet laugh when he sees Rosemary's natural habitat - fresh and airy in the glow of lamp-light, casting a soft filter on white, ditsy-floral linen, the collection of 60's vinyls, the yellow tulips in a vase beside the framed Polaroid of her Theatre Group friends, and the French posters of obscure movies he's never even heard of.

"So, this is who you really are," he whispers to himself.

Rosie returns as quickly as she left, with a box of First Aid in her trembling hands when she sinks back down on the bed.

She doesn't smile. Not even when she ghosts along his jaw with delicate fingers. That's how Steve knows it's serious. Next, she tenderly turns his face to the side, her gaze roving painfully slow over each cut and bruise, before coming to settle on the swollen socket that bulges in angry purple around his poor, pretty eye.