23. Chapter 23
Jonathan, Steve, and Nancy have taken to hovering around Billy at school, pressing into a tight huddle around him in the hallways and following him to his car during lunch. Billy doesn’t think that Harrington told his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend what the circumstances were when he found Billy, but he can’t be entirely sure. Nancy keeps giving him these doe-eyed, sorrowful looks and Jonathan’s even more sharp-eyed than usual. Neither of them, however, have anything on Steve, who has apparently gone full-out mother-mode.
Constant touching, constant questions, tiptoeing and tongue-biting and walking on eggshells around Billy and his apparently fragile state. It’s weird, though— if it were anyone else, Billy would think he’s being pitied, but with Steve it’s… something else.
The guy’s getting ready to have a talk of some kind, probably about Billy’s job, or about Billy’s future, or about something to do with the way Billy ought to treat Max when she comes back. Whatever it is, the guy’s pussy-footing, and Billy is unwilling to prod him into action.
He doesn’t want to have any of those possible conversations.
It all comes to a head when Steve drops off Will from DnD that Friday. Joyce is at work, and Jonathan’s out on a date, so it’s just him when the door opens and Will walks in, Steve trailing behind him.
“Hey, Will.”
“Hey Billy.” Will goes over to give him a hug, a new ritual of his developed since Billy came back from Indianapolis. “I’m going to go do my homework, okay?”
“Whatever you want, bud.”
Will smiles at him, cheeks a little pink, and slips away down the hall.
Now, it’s just him and Steve, and Steve looks like he’s about to say something stupid.
Billy sighs.
“Spit it out, Harrington,” he says. “I’m getting tired of waiting on you.”
Steve’s eyes widen a moment, then he shifts.
“Wanna go out with me?” he blurts out, and Billy blinks.
“What?”
“Not like that— shit.” Steve runs a hand through his hair, cheeks flaming, then tries again. “My mom— there’s a gallery, and they’re doing an exhibition of her stuff. Do you wanna go with me?”
Billy stares. That sounds… if Billy didn’t know better, he’d swear Harrington was asking him on a date.
“Why?”
Steve’s flush deepens.
“Figure you need to get outta the house,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “And there’s gonna be booze, and chicks, and probably a shitload of weed, so… yeah.”
Billy’s not really feeling girls right now, but booze and weed? Sign him the fuck up.
“When?” he asks.
“Tomorrow.” Steve crosses his arms. “It’s in Chicago, though, so it’s like… a six hour drive. We’d have a place to crash, but... are you up for that?”
Chicago? Well, that lines up with Billy’s plans pretty well, actually.
“So long as I can run some errands while we’re there,” he says. “That sounds just fine.”
Steve makes a face.
“You’re not… working,” he says. “This is supposed to be fun.”
“Who says my job’s not fun?” Billy says, arching an eyebrow.
“I can’t imagine getting beat up for money isn’t fun for anybody,” Steve says, and yeah, that part's not great. He's got a point.
Billy sighs.
“I gotta stop by the bank,” he says. “I’ve got some stuff I need to pick up.” Another couple grand, but yeah. Stuff.
“Oh. Okay.” Steve straightens. “Well, if we’re talking about it, I’ve got an errand to run, too. Well, sort of.”
“What do you gotta do?”
“I told El I was going to Chicago,” Steve says. “She asked me if I could pick up her sister.”
*.*
Let it be known that Steve Harrington fucking loves Prince.
Billy’s surprised by this revelation, having dug through the other boy’s reasonably varied cassette collection as Steve drove further and further away from Hawkins. He’s got all sorts of stuff, everything from Led Zeppelin to Tears for Fears to Queen to— well, Prince. At first, Billy had put Purple Rain on as a joke, but apparently, Steve knows every fucking word, and is more than happy to sing along— loudly— to each and every track.
It’s probably the funniest thing Billy has witnessed in weeks, so he lets the tape play, and even does the courtesy of flipping it when they reach the end of side A.
Joyce was a little nervous when Billy told her about his and Steve’s plans for the weekend, even if she was happy he wasn’t going alone. She’s been a little leery about him leaving her sight ever since he got back from Indianapolis, honestly, and Billy doesn’t know how to feel about that. But she’d let him go, and now, two hundred miles away from Hawkins, Billy feels just the slightest bit better, listening to Steve scream along to Darling Nikki with the windows rolled down as they speed down the highway.
It feels… nice.
*.*
Steve’s mother is incredibly tall, incredibly thin, and incredibly beautiful. She stands out in the sterile-white gallery where her exhibition is taking place, dressed in a skin-tight black dress and smoking a long cigarette as she talks idly with a guest. Her long dark hair hangs loose around her shoulders, curling at the ends in an odd, serpentine sort of way.
When she catches sight of them, her maroon lips parts with pleasure.
“Steven, you managed to come up,” she says, gliding across the white floors like the ghost to press a kiss to her son’s cheek. “And you brought a boy!”
Billy blinks. Something about the way she says it is… off.
“Ah…” Steve flushes slightly. “Yeah. Mom, this is Billy, he’s a friend of mine.”
Something in her eyes changes, but her smile doesn’t dim.
“Nice to meet you, Billy,” she says, bending slightly to brush her lips against his cheek. She smells like clove cigarettes and lily of the valley perfume, and Billy doesn’t know what to do.
“Uh, nice to meet you too, ma’am,” Billy says, a beat too late. She doesn’t seem to mind, though, just keeps smiling at him.
“Oh, no, honey, I’ll have none of that,” she says. “Call me Colleen, okay? Oh! There’s Jean-Michael, I promised him I’d get him in contact with a friend of mine— make yourselves comfortable, okay? The bar’s in the corner by my portrait collection, and the cookies at the snack table are the good kind. Have fun, boys.”
And just like that, she floats away towards a dark-skinned man with his hair styled into four great tufts by the door, reaching out to grasp his hands in her own in greeting.
“And… that’s my mom,” Steve says, looking at Billy.
“She’s… did she imply that the cookies have weed in them?”
“She definitely did,” Steve says. “Wanna try them? They’re delicious.”
*.*
Billy is high and carrying around a champagne flute for some reason, but that’s okay. Everything right now is okay, because Steve is warm and giggly as he leads Billy around the gallery, pointing out pieces left and right.
“She did that one about a year ago… see those brown spots? She got a nose-bleed halfway through and thought it looked cool enough to leave it.” Steve, Billy is starting to realize, is very proud of his mother’s art. It’s actually sort of sweet. “And that— oh.”
Steve stops abruptly, staring up at a large square canvas. Billy looks up and—
Oh.
“I didn’t know she finished that one,” Steve says after a moment. “Geez, I look like shit.”
The painting in question is a portrait, specifically a portrait of Steve. Except it isn’t the Steve who’s clinging almost absently to Billy’s elbow, long-haired and okay, but the Steve that Billy saw the Monday after he beat him unconscious, bruised and swollen and angry, eyes focused and brow furrowed with hellfire-level fury.
The portrait is startlingly realistic, in its way— while the colors are a touch too bright, the shading of each purple-yellow-green-black bruise on his orange-tinged face looks painful, the split in his lip (the one that’s now a scar, one that drags down his chin and twists the shape of his mouth just slightly) is open and bleeding, the blood too red and glistening where it’s beaded on his face.
He looks— bad. Very bad. Billy had forgotten the twinge of guilt he’d felt when he’d actually seen the damage he’d done, but that’s okay, because now it’s back, full force.
“... A Beautiful Boy,” someone remarks from behind them. They both turn to see an older man with more white in his hair than blond. He smiles at them.
“That’s what it’s called,” he says. “... A Beautiful Boy. I’m rather taken with it, myself. You’re Colleen’s son, yes?”
“Uh… yeah. I am,” Steve says, and wow, maybe he’s too high for conversations with grownups.
The man grins.
“Whoever thumped you did a right job of it,” he says. “You’re lucky you healed up as well as you did.”
“Oh, thanks for the compliment, man,” Billy says before he can stop himself. “That was me.”
“Was it?” The man looks a little surprised. “Well, I suppose whatever you two were fighting over was handled, then.”
“Something like that,” Steve agrees faintly, glancing over at the portrait again. “I didn’t know my mom was planning on selling that.”
“I actually am not sure she is,” the man remarks. “Sometimes I think Colleen only puts things in her gallery to make the rest of us jealous.”
“That does sound like her,” Steve agrees. “Billy, didn’t you say you wanted another cookie? Let’s go see if there’s any left.”
Billy didn’t say anything of the sort, but he goes with it, because Steve is uncomfortable and honestly, so’s Billy, a little bit. It’s one thing to know you beat a guy up, to know you watched the bruises fade with time and the scars go pale and almost invisible, but it’s completely something else to look up into a portrait ten times the guy’s head and see each mark in vivid, neon technicolor.
“I think it’s time to go,” Steve says after a moment. “Is that okay with you?”
“Sounds just fine, Harrington.”
Steve still hasn’t let go of his arm, still hasn’t really addressed the portrait beyond ‘oh, fuck, that’s me’, and Billy’s not sure if he wants him to or not. Because on the one hand, Harrington seems like the communicative type, the sort of guy who talks about things that bother him. Billy’s not like that— or he wasn’t like that. He’s been running his mouth a lot recently, talking about shit he shouldn’t, so who really knows?
Whatever. If it comes, it comes. Billy doesn’t have the energy to fight it right now, pleasantly heavy and suddenly desperate for a pillow. Maybe a blanket. Maybe neither, he’s not picky.
Steve’s hand is warm through the thin fabric of his shirt as he tugs Billy into a building, then into an elevator, then into an apartment. Billy doesn’t really register any of it, distracted by the way the lights seem too yellow, then too orange. He doesn’t mind when Steve pushes him gently onto a large, soft bed and tugs off his boots before flopping down beside him. Billy is tired, and Steve seems to be more than happy to let him take a nap.
That’s exactly what Billy does.