back at it again with another chapter! I hope you guys enjoy the fluff
When the last bell rang Mike practically jumped out of his chair and three feet into the air. Going through the school day knowing that he would be going to Jane's house immediately after was a kind of torture that should have been classified as cruel and unusual punishment. Mike had spent the whole day glancing at the clock to count just how much longer he had to wait until he would meet Jane at her locker. And every time he looked it wasn't nearly close enough. He ignored the smirk that spread on Will's face as he collected his things, feeling blush start to coat his cheeks.
"Excited?" Will asked him, getting out of his own chair.
"You could say that."
Mike was practically buzzing as they weaved their way through the halls and to his locker, keeping an eye out for Jane. The more time went by the more nervous he became about being in her house. Alone. He had no idea why he was such a mess of anxieties. They'd been mostly alone in his house before. Something about going to her place felt more important. It was her house. The place where she went every day after school. The place where she had (hopefully) thought about him at least once before.
Will leaned on the locker next to his while he put in the combination. "Why do I get the feeling that you left something out when you told them about Jane this morning?"
"Because you're a mind reader." He replied. Whether Will was an expert at reading body language or some kind of mutant who could read minds he wasn't sure. What he did know was that Will knew too much for his own good.
"You wanna tell me or am I gonna have to use my freaky mind powers?"
Mike let out a sigh, shoving his biology textbook into his locker. "I'll tell you." He said, somewhat reluctantly. Mike glanced up the hallway to make sure Jane was nowhere in sight. "So remember how I said I thought she liked me?" Will nodded his head. "Well I know she does. She told me."
He watched Will's eyes go as wide as saucers. "What? When?"
"At the sleepover. She woke up with a nightmare so we went outside for a little while and she just told me."
A wide grin spread over Will's face, likely in satisfaction that he'd been right about Jane's feelings. "So you guys are together now?"
"Sort of." Mike shut his locker and leaned against it. "We're not official or anything. She said she'd dated a friend of hers before and it ended really ugly so she's scared."
"Okay, let me get this straight." Will said. "You guys aren't boyfriend and girlfriend but you're together?" Mike nodded. "Well if you guys are acting like a couple doesn't that defeat the purpose of not being a couple?"
Mike hadn't thought about it that way. He was convinced Will was wired differently than him and that was why he was so much more intelligent when it came to social ques. "I mean I guess." He admitted. "But I don't want to scare her off and get too serious or anything."
"Putting a label on something doesn't change it at all. It just means that you know what to say when people ask about you guys." Will said. "Do you want to be official with her?"
"Yeah."
"Then I think you should push her a little bit." He saw Will's eye catch something down the hall before he straightened up. "She's coming, I'll see you later. Let me know how it goes tomorrow."
Mike felt even more confused than ever as Will walked away. Will and Nancy seemed so convinced that the right thing for him to do was to just suck it up and ask her out. But had they missed the part when he said Jane was scared of making things too official with him? Did they not understand that he could lose her if he pushed her too hard? He was struck with the same frustration he had back when he was trying to convince everyone that he just wanted to be friends with her. Why could nobody listen?
Most of Mike's anxieties melted away when Jane finally reached him and flashed him a smile brighter than the lights above their heads. "Ready to go?"
"Yep."
His hand was itching to hold hers as they made their way to the front entrance. He knew that he needed to practice keeping some distance from her. If he became too dependent on her touch than he was setting himself up for some major disappointment. It helped that she walked close enough to him that their arms touched. Standing so close to her was like a magnetic pull that he struggled to resist.
"Do you want me to help you with English later on?" she asked once they were outside.
"Can you?"
"Yeah of course."
The walk to her house went by quicker than he expected it to. They talked the entire time about anything and everything. For the first time since the kiss at the Halloween party Mike felt in control around her. They were too busy talking for his mind to stray and thinking about kissing her. Though it was still different from before they'd gotten together. The air between them was different. She smiled wider and stood closer to him. There were flirtatious undertones in her voice. When he praised her for the score she'd gotten back on a test her cheeks turned bright pink. Things were just as easy with Jane as they had always been, just better.
Though some anxiety started to bubble back up when they walked up to her front door and she pulled her keys out. When he stepped inside the first thing he noticed was numerous picture frames hung up on the wall in the entrance. He could hear her groaning next to him but he ignored her and inspected each and every picture. Jane and her father sitting in front of a birthday cake with the number 11 written in icing letters. Jane and Max sitting in front of a Christmas tree with hokey looking sweaters. A candid shot of Jane and a girl with much darker skin than her but with similar features sitting on a couch.
"Who's that?" he asked, his eyes still focused on the unknown girl.
"My sister Kali." She answered. "We have the same mother but our birth fathers are different. Obviously."
It was amazing how casually she talked about certain things. Like her mother who she'd been taken from or her sister who she was no longer in contact with. She talked about them as if she were discussing something as simple as the weather. Mike had a hunch that she cared more about things from her past more than she let on. As much as he wanted to ask her more about her life before Hawkins he was scared of opening up an old wound she had been avoiding. So he gave the pictures another once over before following her through the house.
Since there was only one floor he got to see almost the whole house on the way to her room. It had a homey feel that was surprising considering that both people who lived in the house were intimidating in their own way. There were picture frames hanging from a wall in every room of the house and scattered along the hallway. At the end of the hall Jane stopped in front of a door, glancing at him for just a moment before opening it.
Jane's room was perhaps the most surprising room in the house. From the way she dressed he expected something out of a punk rock music video but it was in fact quite the opposite. The walls were pained a blue color so light he had thought it was white for a moment. Posters for bands like Blondie and U2 were hung up on the wall as well as a few movie posters. Next to the door was a desk covered in papers, hair gel, and a few makeup products. She had a bookshelf next to her closet filled with books and movies and even a radio on the middle shelf. For how dark her wardrobe was her room was surprisingly bright.
As soon as she stepped inside Jane hurried over to her desk and started shoving some of the papers into drawers. "You'd think I would have cleaned up a bit since I knew you were coming over."
Mike wasn't sure what she was talking about since her desk was the closest thing to a mess in the whole room.
She moved some of the pillows on her bed to make room for them both to sit. He wasn't at all used to seeing Jane nervous. But as they sat down he could see her uncertain expression and the way she fiddled with her hands. "Do you want me to help you with Gatsby?"
"Please."
She jumped off the bed and picked the book off the shelf, flipping to the chapter he told he'd read last. Jane took a moment to skim through a few pages before glancing at his homework. He heard her mutter about how easy the questions were before she began explaining the answers to him. She explained how the green light was a metaphor for how unreachable things like happiness through wealth and self-reinvention, and how when Daisy was crying about the shirts that she wasn't actually crying about the shirts but at the fact that Gatsby had become wealthy for the sole purpose of winning her over. Mike was admittedly impressed since he hadn't thought anything beyond green lights and shirts being green lights and shirts.
If he needed any more reason to not feel bad about missing class watching Jane talk about literature was certainly a reason. She stayed standing, pacing around the room and waving her hands around as she explained Gatsby's desperation to win over Daisy as if it were her own. Her nerves about being alone with Mike melted away when she told him it was no coincidence that Daisy was named after a flower with gold in it and that what Gatsby needed to win her over was money (or gold). He had never quite been a literature enthusiast but he was enthusiastic about listening to Jane talk about literature.
"Do you get it?" she asked when she was finally done.
"How could I not?" he replied, still scribbling down notes of what she had said on his homework. She laughed and walked back over to the bookshelf to put it back. "How do you know all that's stuff? I had no clue."
She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's kind of like how math is so easy for you and I have to write the Pythagorean thiram on my arm before I take a test."
Mike snorted. "Seriously?"
Jane replied by throwing a notebook from her shelf at him.
"This sweatshirt is too hot." She said before opening one of the drawers in her dresser and digging around. "Turn around."
"Why?"
"Because I'm about to change and I don't wanna go to the bathroom."
Mike turned his back to her and stared at his backpack while he tried not to imagine what was underneath the tank top she had on. But the soft thud of her sweatshirt falling on the floor made it pretty hard to ignore the fact that she was only feet away from him while not wearing a shirt. He heard her dresser drawer open and close again and only moments later she was sitting down on the bed across from him with a black t-shirt.
She opened her mouth to say something but her words were forgotten and she started laughing. "You're so red." She said, leaning over and pinching his cheeks. "You're adorable."
"Stop." He whined, but she only laughed harder. Mike lay flat on his stomach on her bed so his red face was hidden in her blankets.
The bed creaked as she moved closer to him and he then felt her put her knees on either side of his waist so she was straddling his back. He was incredibly glad that his face was hidden since it immediately got hotter. "Aw, are you embarrassed?"
Mike groaned into her blanket which only made her laugh.
He reached behind him and grabbed her thigh before turning over on his side and making her fall flat on her back. Jane burst out into another fit of contagious laughter as she tried to squirm away from him but he grabbed onto her waist so she couldn't get too far away. Mike propped himself up above her and she finally stopped struggling. He held onto the collar of her shirt and pulled it down to check to see the mark he'd left on her only a couple of days ago. It was almost an identical shade of purple that his was.
"You gonna give me another one?" she asked, one of her eyebrows raising high on her forehead.
"Do you want me to?"
She turned her head to check the clock on her nightstand, humming quietly when she saw the time. "Well my dad gets home in half an hour."
"Then I'm not going to." He said before rolling to the side and lying next to her.
He heard her make a disappointed noise before turning to face him. "Buzzkill."
"Sorry if I don't want my only two interactions with your dad to be immediately after giving you a hickey. I'd like to not have a nervous breakdown in front of him."
"Fine." She said, sitting up and grabbing her backpack. "Help me with my math homework then."
Turns out she really wasn't kidding when she told him how bad at math she was. Since everything made such perfect sense to him he struggled to explain it in a way that would make sense to her. For half the questions he ended up just doing the problems for her and explaining it as he went along. Not that he was complaining. The way her eyebrows came together in and angry line and how her bottom lip stuck out was completely adorable. She groaned and complained when she didn't understand something and articulated everything he felt when he did English homework.
They were on the second to last question when the phone on her nightstand started to ring. She leaned over and picked it up, holding it between her hear and her shoulder. "Hello?"
Mike was sitting close enough that he could just hear the voice on the other line. "Hey, kid, it's me. Don't kill me okay? But I have to stay a little later than usual."
He watched a frown spread on her face. "Really?"
"Yeah Callahan can't come in today and Porter was supposed to cover but he's coming in late. I might be another two hours."
Jane leaned her head back and moved the receiver away from her mouth so she could groan. "Yeah, alright. Do what you gotta do."
"Is your friend still there?"
She glanced at him for a quick moment. "His name is Mike and yes he's still here."
"Oh I know what his name is. I'll be home for dinner so why don't you ask him to stay for a little bit?"
The frown on her face turned into a grin as she perked up. "Really?"
"I mean it'd be nice to meet the kid for more than two minutes."
"Okay I'll ask him." They said goodbye to each other and she leaned back over to hang up the phone. When she turned back towards him a small, slightly bashful looking, smile was on her face. "You wanna stay for dinner?"
Mike pushed aside the butterflies that they would be alone in her house for another two hours and were free to do whatever they wanted. He was determined to control himself around her at least once. If he couldn't he was in serious trouble. "Yeah sure."
"We'll probably end up ordering something in." she said as she packed up her homework. "Is that okay?"
"Of course."
She hopped off the bed. "We've got two hours to kill. Wanna watch a movie?"
"Sure."
He followed her on her way back out into the living room. Halfway down the hallway she stopped short and looked at him over her shoulder. "Since we have more than half an hour are you going to give me another hickey?"
He could feel his face getting red again. "If you pick a good movie I will."
Jane ended up picking out Dirty Dancing which definitely classified as a good movie. Though he promised he would control himself around her for the day he had made her a deal and during the Hungry Eyes scene she was sitting so close to him that she was practically in his lap so he decided to make an exception for five minutes. But five minutes turned into thirty when she told him he needed to leave a mark under her shirt before taking it off. He was just thankful he was able to stop himself at all after seeing her in only a bra, an image he tried to memorize for nights when thoughts of her kept him from sleeping.
