✓ | 3. soldier, soldier, spy [STEVE HARRINGTON]

sixteen.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
A WORD FROM STEVE HARRINGTON

[ THE BITE ]

❖ ❖ ❖

          "Have...You..." Robin speaks slowly as she thinks of the question, before her voice grows confident from the other stall when she asks, "ever been in love?"

          Steve Harrington thinks of Nancy first. Maybe it's the use of the past tense that's making him nostalgic. "Yup," he says, rolling his head back against the cold bathroom tiles. "Nancy Wheeler. First semester of senior year." He makes a pew noise and shoots an imaginary bullet through his heart, and though Robin can't see into his stall he jerks back to continue his performance.

          His arm is steadied against the toilet seat, one leg bent and the other sprawled out, and he's looking at the fraying edges of his knee high socks and had been thinking of how disgusting his little resting place really is, before she'd asked that. Now he's thinking about that first semester of senior year, and that leads him to Thomas.

          "Oh my God," Robin drawls. "She's such a priss."

          Steve chuckles. He thinks of Thomas, and wonders if that's his type. Prissy, smart, uptight, skinny as anything. But when he thinks of Thomas, and the fact it's Thomas, and not a girl, he wonders if he even has much of a type. Thomas, to Steve, is a real bucket of worms. Pulling at the string labelled Mirkwood unravels a whole load of issues that Steve hasn't unknotted within himself yet.

         "Are you still in love with her?" asks Robin.

         Steve shakes his head and juts out his lower lip in thought, looking like a child. He watches his hand trace a scar on his knee. That March, when Hawkins had been hit with a heatwave, he and Thomas had been trying out Will's skateboard, three sizes too small for their feet, and he'd fallen. Thomas had keeled over laughing, and had still been giggling as he'd stuck a plaster over it and said, "It'll scar over. You'll be such a badass. The talk of the town." That was only soon after they'd first properly became friends, and Thomas was starting to talk more.

          "No," Steve says, "I think I've met someone a little better for me." He chuckles and licks his lip, tasting blood. "Yeah, it's crazy. Ever since Dustin got him, he's been saying, you know, you gotta find your Suzie, you gotta find your Suzie."  He touches his forehead faintly.

         "Wait, who's Suzie?"

        "Some girl from camp. I guess his girlfriend. To be honest with you, I'm not even a hundred percent sure she's even real," Steve explains, adjusting his hair with a small laugh.