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July settles hot and humid over Hawkins, as if a giant glass dome had been placed overhead and turned the town into a greenhouse below. The corn and soybeans in the fields along the highways wither and yellow, much to the farmers’ dismay. Every air conditioner in town wheezes and sputters in protest against their overuse. Steve’s house is the single place cool enough to hang out, with its mighty central air system and pool out back, but the heat wave only succeeds in making everyone stir-crazy and yearning to go outside after being cooped up all day.
Building a slip-and-slide was Mike’s idea, but it was Dustin’s idea to set it up at Eddie’s. Without asking, of course. They just show up on Eddie’s doorstep all crammed in the back of the Wheelers’ station wagon one Saturday in late July, demanding access to the hill behind the Munson trailer and permission to use the hose around the back. Eddie puts up a fight, of course, but only a nominal one: while Steve watches, arms folded over his chest, Eddie immediately acquiesces and leads his little herd around to gather tarps and get the hose hooked up. Eddie is nearly twenty-two by then, but he’s also constitutionally incapable of resisting shenanigans. Especially if Dustin proposes them.
Steve is quickly pressed into service, given the task of unrolling one of the tarps and staking it to the top of the hill. The stakes were Dustin’s suggestion: according to his calculations, the velocity of a normal-sized teenager rolling downhill would be more than enough to pull the tarp down behind them. Unless, of course, they staked the tarp into the dirt. According to science, obviously.
“If we don’t stick it to the ground somehow, we’re gonna have to reset the slide every time someone goes down, and that’s annoying as shit,” Dustin explains.
Steve eyes the blue tarp skeptically. He has a vision of Mike throwing himself down the slide and getting all tangled up in the material like a cat getting tangled up in a blanket. He smiles. The mental image is amusing for as long as it lasts.
“Don’t the Wheelers actually have a real one of these? Why are we using tarps?” Steve asks.
Eddie sweeps in out of nowhere, crouching down to wrap his arm around Steve’s shoulder. “You’ve never heard of a redneck Slip-N-Slide, Harrington? Or are you too middle-class for this? I bet you had a real one of these when you were a kid, too. You and your in-ground pool.”
“Fuck off, Munson.” Steve shoves at Eddie, his palm planted directly in his face. “Why don’t you go supervise Mike and watch him run up your water bill?”
Eddie strides off, but not before sticking his tongue out at Steve childishly. Steve is watching him go at the same time Dustin decides to try and hammer the stake in with a rubber mallet, only to whack himself directly on the thumb. He yelps and drops the mallet into the grass.
“Holy fucking shit, that hurts,” Dustin whines.
“For Christ’s sake, what is wrong with you?” Steve rolls his eyes and reaches for the mallet. “Give it here. Jesus.”
“Hey, not all of us have hand-eye coordination.”
“I don’t think you need hand-eye coordination to not mistake your thumb for a nail, Einstein.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what hand-eye coordination is,” Dustin sulks. He holds his injured thumb to his chest and watches Steve drive the stake into the ground. “Hey, what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“On your leg.”
Steve narrows his eyes. “Are you fucking with me, Henderson? If you’re distracting me so you can push me down this stupid slip-and-slide, just know that I’m taking you down with me.”
“I’m not fucking with you,” Dustin insists. “On your thigh. Did you burn yourself or something?”
Looking down, Steve finally sees what Dustin is talking about. On the inside of his right thigh, there’s a deep, curved groove pressed into his skin, like he’s been leaning against something too long and it left a mark on his leg. He rubs at it, thinking it might be a stain or paint or something, but it doesn’t budge.
Steve frowns. “Huh. Weird. I dunno where that came from. Doesn’t hurt, though.”
Dustin makes a face, but his attention quickly turns back to the slip-and-slide. A stone’s throw away, Eddie and Mike have gotten the hose hooked up, and down the hill, Will and Lucas have finished securing the second tarp in the landing zone. On the Mayfields’ stoop, Max and El sit with a family-sized bag of chips between them. Each has a can of soda propped on their knees.
“You’re not joining the fun, Red?” Eddie shouts over at them.
Max scoffs. “On that death trap? I’ve already broken all of my limbs once, thanks.”
“Maybe we will go if someone else goes first,” El says.
“Very wise,” Eddie says.
“If Will survives, perhaps I will try,” she reasons.
Eddie nods approvingly. “You would survive a zombie apocalypse, Jane.”
“That’s cheating. She has superpowers,” Mike scoffs.
“She also has common sense, unlike you hooligans,” Eddie fires back.
As Eddie banters with the kids, Steve stands up and wipes the dirt and grass off his hands on his shorts. They’re an old pair of jeans he turned into cut-offs at the start of the summer, with the help of Eddie’s fabric scissors and a measuring tape from Robin’s mom’s sewing kit. He’d tried to make them a normal length, but someone had changed the measurement of the inseam when he wasn’t looking, so now they’re really short. That someone being Eddie, obviously. Steve can’t wear them around town, but that doesn’t stop him from wearing them around the house when only Eddie’s around, if only to see the way Eddie’s dark eyes follow his ass like a goddamn hawk. Eddie fucks with Steve’s clothes, so Steve frustrates Eddie sexually as revenge. It’s karma. Such a dynamic is essential to their relationship, and also why Robin refuses to be alone in a room with them.
The mark on the inside of his thigh is weird, though. Maybe there was something in Eddie’s bed when he was sitting there earlier? It wouldn’t be the first time; when Steve slept over in Eddie’s bed for the first time, he woke up with a crick in his neck because somewhere there was a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring under his pillow. But he hadn’t stayed in Eddie’s room for long that morning. From the moment the sun rose it was hot as hell inside the trailer, so Steve had decamped to the kitchen, where he’d found ice pops in the freezer left over from the week before and opened one. That’s how Eddie had found him ten or so minutes later, leaning against the counter with a blue popsicle in his mouth. Eddie wasn’t fully dressed yet, still tugging his t-shirt over his head and buckling his belt. He’d frozen when he saw Steve.
“It’s nine in the morning,” Eddie said.
Steve shrugged. “And it’s hot. There a law against eating popsicles before noon that I don’t know about?”
“It’s nine in the morning,” Eddie repeated, sounding aggrieved. “It’s way too fucking early for this.”
Steve didn’t know what Eddie was talking about until he stepped into Steve’s space, crowding him up against the linoleum counter. Eddie’s eyes dropped from Steve’s face to the ice pop in his hand, rapidly melting and dripping blue liquid over his fingers. Steve made the mistake of ducking his head to lick it off his hand, which only made Eddie groan like he’d been shot.
“Why are you doing this to me? I’ve been up for, like, ten minutes. My dick isn’t awake yet. This isn’t fair.”
“Sounds like a you problem,” Steve says.
“You’re a monster. Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not doing this on purpose,” Eddie says.
Steve licks the popsicle slowly, watching Eddie watch him, taking in the blue stripe staining the center of Steve’s tongue. He closes his lips around the top and pulls the popsicle out of his mouth with a pop.
“Doing what on purpose?”
“I fucking hate you,” Eddie groaned. “Get up on the counter, you harlot.”
Any time Eddie says he hates Steve in that tone of voice, there’s about a ten-second window before he gets up in Steve’s space. This time, it took all of five seconds for Steve to hop up on the counter, which was long enough for Eddie to shove his thighs apart and put himself squarely between them. Steve licked the electric-blue liquid sliding down his wrist and watched Eddie’s face. He could feel the heat of Eddie’s body in the cradle of his hips.
“You want something?” he said.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, voice low. “Gimme a taste.”
He leaned in and licked Steve’s hand, his tongue hot and soft over the grooves of his knuckles, and Steve had shivered. He spread his legs further apart and Eddie had crowded even closer, the cool metal of his belt buckle pressing into Steve’s inner thigh, and—
Oh. Well. That would certainly explain it.
Blinking against the midday sunlight, Steve stares down at the mark on his leg. So that’s where it came from. Heat creeps up his face, hotter than the summer sun beating down on him. The deep half-circle pressed into his inner thigh matches perfectly to the shape of Eddie’s belt buckle, glinting now under the harsh sunlight. Jesus. Steve tries to pull the leg of his shorts down to cover it, but they’re just too fucking short, so he has no choice but to stand there feeling more exposed than he has in his entire life. Like if anyone looked at him right now, they’d be able to tell that he’d spent his morning on Eddie’s kitchen counter with Eddie between his legs, like a slut. At that very moment, Robin chooses to emerge from the trailer, wearing a bikini top and her own pair of cut-offs. She strides over to Steve and throws an arm around his shoulders.
“Hey, dingus. Ready to watch our children break some limbs in the name of summer fun?”
Steve mumbles something in response. Robin looks over and studies his face.
“Jeez, Steve, you’re already red. You did put on sunscreen, didn’t you? I don’t care that you were a lifeguard, you have to wear sunscreen. You can’t die of melanoma before me and leave me alone in this cold, cruel world.”
“Fine, Jesus, I’ll put on sunscreen,” Steve says, slipping out from under her arm. “And this world is not cold. Didn’t you notice it’s fucking hot?”
Robin rolls her eyes as Steve ducks under the awning of the Munson trailer, finding sunscreen among the stuff piled up there. He watches as Mike takes the slip-and-slide on a test drive, flinging his gangly teenage limbs down the tarp and whooping as he does so. Dustin follows quickly behind, followed by Will and then Eddie, at which point El decides it’s safe enough for her to try. Max looks bummed out to be left out, so Lucas offers to go with her, and she sits with her back to Lucas’s chest as they slide down together. Their combined weight sends them careening down quickly, but they land at the bottom of the hill suspiciously softer than everyone else. When Steve glances over to his right, he catches El dropping her hand and wiping a small drop of blood from underneath her nose.
“Good save,” he says.
“I do not know what you’re talking about,” she says, and smiles knowingly.
Eddie bullies Steve into going down the slide, which promptly washes off all the sunscreen he just applied, so Robin makes him wait afterwards so she can spray him down again. Somehow during the time it takes for Robin to accost him with SPF, Dustin manages to trip over the mallet still sitting on the grass, which sends him careening onto the slide face-first. He grabs Mike on his way down, who in turn grabs Will, and soon all three of them are falling in a heap of elbows and knees down the tarp. They land in a disgruntled, wet heap at the bottom of the hill, and Eleven does nothing to soften their landing. She’s too busy laughing, holding onto Max for stability as they both cackle at the boys crawling up the hill with grass in their hair and their pride sorely wounded.
It’s such a perfect summer scene that Steve’s breath catches in his chest. It’s the kind of dumb, normal teenage fun that he used to have with Tommy and Carol, back before he knew about flower-faced monsters and dead girls in swimming pools. When he was the age that Dustin is now, he had one summer left before his world turned upside down. Literally and figuratively. In the years that have passed, they’ve all grown up way too fast. Seeing Eleven and Max laughing like kids at the grass-stained boys takes Steve back years, back to when he scraped his knees when he fell and thought that was the worst he would ever hurt.
“Dude, what did you do to your leg?” Robin says.
She’s looking at him with the bottle of Coppertone in one hand and the other covered in sunscreen, pointing at his thigh. Instinctively, Steve tugs at his shorts, trying to cover it.
“It’s nothing,” he says.
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” she says, tilting her head to look. “Jeez, it’s like a perfect circle.”
Steve looks away, his face getting hot again. The mark on his leg is in fact a perfect half-circle, and the missing half is currently holding Eddie’s pants up as he throws himself down his redneck slip-and-slide. He’s an idiot, but he’s Steve’s idiot, which is why Steve had let him lick melted popsicle off his hand just a couple of hours earlier and then kiss him until their tongues were both blue.
The popsicle had fallen out of Steve’s hand as Eddie crowded up against him and put his hands on his hips. While the popsicle melted in the kitchen sink, Eddie’s mouth had covered Steve’s, hot against the coolness of Steve’s lips. When he deepened the kiss, Steve tasted the sticky-sweet of the popsicle combined with the salt of his sweat on Eddie’s tongue. It should have been gross but it wasn’t. Steve groaned and grabbed blindly for the side of Eddie’s face.
“Nine in the fucking morning,” Eddie repeated, voice hoarse. “You’re going to be the death of me, Harrington.”
“Tell me about it,” Steve said, and kissed him again.
With his hands on Steve’s sides, Eddie had squeezed the softness of Steve’s hips where the waistband of his cut-offs dug into his skin. One hand snuck under the hem of Steve’s shirt, skating lightly over the scars and hair littered across his stomach. Steve shivered at the feeling of Eddie’s fingers, calloused from guitar strings and working with his hands, danced across the sensitive skin of his belly. He deepened the kiss, breathed through his nose, tasted minty toothpaste on Eddie’s breath and smelled clean sweat on his skin. When they kiss, their desire becomes a feedback loop: Steve wants Eddie, Eddie wants Steve, Steve likes being wanted and wants Eddie even more because Eddie wants him, on and on ad infinitum. When neither of them have anywhere to be, they’ll spend hours in Eddie’s bed like this, making out lazily and talking in between kisses while Steve basks in the desire of being wanted so openly by another person.
Eddie never finished getting dressed, so his belt hung open, pressing cold against the sensitive skin of Steve’s inner thigh. Eddie loves that stupid handcuff belt, wears it all the time even though his friends give him shit for it, and Steve rags on him about it secretly likes it—or maybe he just likes the sweet, cold sting of the cold metal against his overheated skin. On that morning, he liked the way it dug into his bare thigh, the sharpness of it contrasting the soft eagerness of Eddie’s tongue licking behind his teeth.
Eddie broke the kiss to catch his breath, nestling his forehead against Steve’s shoulder and breathing deeply. Steve glanced over at the kitchen sink, where the ice pop was now little more than a bright blue puddle and a wooden stick.
“You stole my popsicle,” Steve said. “I wasn’t finished with it, you know.”
Eddie turned his face to the right, pressing his nose against Steve’s neck. He likes the way Steve smelled there, a mix of cologne and laundry detergent and sweat and man. His hands crept up Steve’s thighs until his fingertips snuck underneath the frayed hem of his shorts.
“I’ve got a popsicle you can have,” he said, grinning against Steve’s neck.
Steve groaned. “Fuck off, Munson.”
He shoved at Eddie’s forehead, but that just made Eddie cling tighter, holding onto Steve’s hips and laughing as Steve complained. Then Eddie kissed his neck and Steve stopped complaining entirely, letting out a soft noise and curling his hand in Eddie’s hair. Eddie was pretty sure he had just about convinced Steve to come back to his bedroom and stay there for the rest of the morning when someone knocked on the door.
Loudly.
Followed by a familiar teenage voice calling Eddie’s name.
Shit.
Eddie’s plans to spend the morning back in bed with Steve went up in smoke, traded in for several hours of entertaining Henderson and his other various little sheep, because Henderson has mastered the kicked-puppy face and Eddie can’t tell him no.
As the midday sun beat down on the teenagers and twenty-somethings gathered behind the Munson trailer, Steve looked around for any clothes he could steal to cover the mark on his leg. He’d even take a towel at this point. Robin is staring at him, and the indent of Eddie’s belt buckle feels a lot like a scarlet letter, except instead of being stitched on his shirt it might as well be tattooed on his inner thigh.
“It’s nothing,” he repeats.
But he looks away and rubs the back of his neck, which Robin knows is one of his tells that he’s lying. She crosses her arms over her chest.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m telling you, it’s nothing,” he says.
He glances over at Eddie, who’s climbing up the hill after his turn sliding down the tarp. The hose soaked through his shirt so he pulls it over his head, exposing all of his tattoos and scars, not to mention the incriminating buckle at his waistband. Seeing Steve looking his way, Eddie whips his wet shirt at him. His aim is uncanny: it smacks Steve square in the face. Steve pulls it off his face and glares, pretending to be annoyed, because that’s more appropriate than looking at droplets of water dripping from Eddie’s hair down his flat chest. He’s not as subtle as he thinks, though; Robin’s eyes ping-pong between the two of them like she’s watching a tennis match. Her eyes land on Eddie’s stupid handcuff belt buckle, then back to Steve, then back to Eddie. Steve sees the exact moment it clicks. She makes a face like she’s personally offended and grabs Eddie’s wet t-shirt out of Steve’s hand.
“You are a pervert,” she says, and smacks him across the chest with it.
“Hey, knock it off,” he says, and grabs for the shirt.
“A foul, lecherous creature,” she says, emphasizing each syllable with a wet thwack. “How dare you get laid when the rest of us are miserable and overheating.”
“I didn’t get laid,” Steve hisses, “I got interrupted. And stop fucking hitting me, you gremlin.”
“Hey, stop it with your weird mating rituals!” Dustin shouts.
“Ew, gross!” Steve and Robin yell, simultaneously.
“Gosh, you two sound awfully grumpy,” Max says, appearing behind them out of nowhere.
Lucas hums in agreement. “Yeah, it sounds like the heat is getting to you.”
“Wait, where did you guys come from?” Robin says.
A pair of small hands press against Steve's back, and he jerks his head around, seeing El standing behind him. Max is standing behind Robin, her hands pressed similarly between Robin’s shoulder blades.
"Jesus, can you teleport now?" Steve demands.
“I think you are overheated,” El says, smiling. “I think you should cool down.”
“Hey, no, wait,” Steve says, but it’s too late. They’re already being pushed towards the slip-and-slide, their heels slipping on the muddy ground.
“Come on, guys, let’s not do anything hasty,” Robin says, but that doesn’t help either.
As they approach the edge of the tarp, Robin tries to duck over to the right and away from Max, but she just manages to trip herself and fall towards the slip-and-slide. She grabs Steve’s arm and Steve reaches over to Eddie to catch him, but Eddie dances out of the way. There’s a glint in his eye as he watches Steve trip, almost in slow motion, and follow Robin down.
“It's payback,” Eddie says, and grins. “For earlier.”
He gives Steve a cheeky little wave at the exact moment Robin's weight pulls him down the stupid slide. They fall in a tangle of limbs and wet clothing, Robin’s knee in Steve’s face, Steve’s elbow in Robin’s stomach. When they land in a heap of grass at the bottom, Steve lays there for a second, staring up at the sky and thinking about how he’ll get back at Eddie. He’s going to need a whole box of popsicles.