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boys like boys
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. ✧ ・゜. +・o ✧
Alina Fairgrieves-Byers sat cross-legged on the top bunk of the room she shared with William Byers, holding a stuffed rabbit out in front of her. It was a small thing, orange as a ripe sunset, with glassy black eyes and a summer sky blue ribbon tied around its neck, and it may as well have had her name stamped on it, too, for how possessive she was over it. It had two floppy ears and a sewn-on smile and was named Han, because she couldn't resist naming everything after Star Wars, and it smelled like Lucas Sinclair.
He'd got it from the claw machine. Twenty-five cents went in, and the silver claw had dug through a pile of stuffed watermelons and walruses and pulled it out, grabbing it by its neck and sending it down the chute. With a flourish, Lucas Sinclair had lifted it up, and placed it in her hands. "For you," he'd said bashfully, in a voice that was so not Lucas that it made Alina smile.
Maybe it wasn't a very expensive gift, but Han wasn't the only gift Lucas Sinclair had given her today. He'd also given her two others, which weren't material things, weren't objects that could be locked in a box, weren't things you could throw away when you were done with them. Lucas instead gave her a memory, a single golden memory, and a cinnamon pretzel kiss.
It was their first date. Well, first real date. Like, this one had been planned out, and confirmed to be a date. Sure, they'd had other moments together—they'd gone to the movies, just the two of them, a bunch of times, had a picnic at the quarry and went stargazing—but this was the first time Lucas Sinclair had gone up to his girlfriend and really spoke the words: "Do you want to go out with me?"
Except it hadn't come out so fluidly. Lucas normally thought of himself as a pretty smooth guy, a lady's man, as he'd been called in the past (by his parents, but still). But when he was around Alina, his tongue just slipped, and all of a sudden he was spouting gibberish. Like when he was trying to ask her to dance at the Snow Ball.
He'd actually said: "Hey, Al... if you're not busy tomorrow, do you wanna... maybe... you know... do a thing? You and me? Like, a thing thing?"
