As Will walks in the front door, he can tell immediately that the whole house is on alert. Mom is pacing around the living room; her lips flatten, and her eyes go big, and she says, "Will, don't scare us like that. You were supposed to just be going for a walk."
"I did go for a walk."
"You left four hours ago. I know you like to go long distances, but, honey, you can't scare us like that." Mom's voice sounds a little hysterical, but she's stopped pacing, at least, to lunge forward and seize Will by the shoulders. Hopper and El stand up, too; Jonathan doesn't seem to be here, probably because he's at work, Will's guessing. "Where were you?"
He considers for a second telling her the truth—at least the part where he got to the bridge and thought about jumping—but thinks better of it. It's not like anything truly bad happened out there, and all it would do would be to scare her. Instead, Will says, "I ran into Daniel, and we went back to his house for a while. Sorry. I know I should have called."
"You think?" Mom's pursing her lips and shaking her head. "Sweetie, after everything this family has gone through—"
You mean everything I've put us through, he thinks, but he doesn't say this—he's got no desire to make things worse. "I know. I'll call next time, okay?"
He edges past her, nods at Hopper and El, and makes a beeline for his and Jonathan's bedroom. Inside, Will doesn't even make it to his bed or desk—he collapses against the wall and slides down it to crouch on the ground, resting his elbows on his knees and bowing his head.
Shit. What the hell happened to him today?
Now that whatever Jasper did to him has so abruptly worn off, all his memories between getting to the river and now feel so foggy that he's half convinced he imagined it. He sticks his hand in his pocket—pulls out and rereads the scrap of paper with Jasper's name and number on it. It must have been real—parts of it, anyway. He didn't pull that paper out of thin air, and he obviously didn't write it himself: the neat handwriting looks nothing like Will's.
Will suddenly realizes that, for whole minutes at a time while he was with Jasper, he was able to relegate Mike to the background of his brain and concentrate mostly on what Jasper was saying. He hasn't been able to do that since before his exposure therapy began.
Of course, now that Jasper is gone and Will is back home, everything's flooding back—the obsession, the shame, the fatigue. It's like he told Jasper: Will is tired of feeling this way. He just—he needs it to stop. He needs some respite.
He needs Mike, but he can't have Mike, not ever and certainly not like this. But without him—
There's a knock on the door. "Will?" he hears El ask from the hallway.
"Come in," says Will. His voice sounds small and defeated to his own ears.
So El comes in, takes one look at him down on the ground, and then kneels down and joins him there. "They don't believe that you were with Daniel. I don't really believe it, either."
"I wasn't," Will admits. "I just didn't want to tell them that."
"Where did you go?"
Will hesitates. "I was walking down the highway, and it turned into a bridge over a river. I stopped for a while and thought about… but nothing happened. This guy found me there and took me back to his house for a while."
He leaves out the part where he passed out and can't remember getting in the car or driving to Jasper's house. He doesn't even really understand it himself—knows it would sound like a lie.
El lays her head on his shoulder. "What guy?"
"I don't know. He and his family live a ways away from Sullivan. His name was Jasper. He was nice enough, I guess."
"You're not supposed to get in the cars of strangers."
"Yeah, I know. I wouldn't normally. It was… kind of an emergency, I guess you could say."
El pauses. "And you didn't want to just tell me?"
Her voice breaks, and Will suddenly feels like a piece of shit. "I'm sorry. I didn't know I was going to do it until I was doing it, okay?"
"But I thought you were getting better. You said you were getting better."
"I thought I was. I… I wanted to be."
"And how do you feel now?"
He thinks for a second. "I miss him."
"Jasper?"
"Mike."
The corner of El's mouth curls up. "I'm sorry. Should I… can I stay?"
And Will suddenly really doesn't know why he didn't just tell her what was happening—doesn't want her to go. "Yes. Please don't go."
"Will you read to me?"
It's something El's been asking Will to do a lot lately—to read her the stories he's been writing. "I don't really have anything new. I've been sort of stuck lately. Is there an old one you want to hear again?"
"Do the one where time runs slow."
Normally, he'd be glad she picked that one—it's one of his favorite ideas he's ever written. It's about a woman who drops acid and wakes up from her trip with the inexplicable ability to run at inhuman super speeds. However, that power comes with a cost as she begins to perceive the flow of time much more slowly than the people around her. She talks too fast for anyone to understand her, and everyone else seems to be talking so slowly that she can't understand them; by the end of the story, she ends up losing her ability to communicate altogether.
But today, he really isn't in the mood to revisit this one. The very thought of it only serves to remind Will how much he feels like he can't communicate with anyone around him—like he's stuck in time that drags on like molasses. "Maybe not that one today," he mutters.
"Why not?"
"It's too… I just feel too… it hits too close, that's all."
El pulls her head up off his shoulder to look him in the eye. "Isn't that what writing is supposed to do? Be an outlet?"
Will looks away. "For some people—even for me sometimes—it is, but… Carlotta says I live in my head too much. I'm a dweller. I dwell. What I need is a distraction—something to make me forget."
"Then put it on paper where you can—stick it in a drawer after and stop looking at it. Just because it comes out of you doesn't mean it has to keep… hanging around after."
He doesn't answer.
"Will you write me something new? Something that talks about how you feel today? We can put it away after it's out of you."
So El goes and gets the cookbook Will gave her for her birthday last year to peruse while he writes. At first, he just stares at the page and taps the eraser of his pencil against it enough times that El has to actually ask him to stop, saying it's breaking her concentration. He figures, well, better out than in, even if the quality is crap—so he starts writing.
And writes.
And writes.
He tries not to think about it as he does, just lets it bubble over from where it's filled him to the brim. By the time Will gets to the end, he tells El, his voice rough with disuse, "Well, it's done, but I'm not sure you're going to like it."
She looks up from where she's scribbling something in the margins of the cookbook. "Try me," she says quietly.
Will clears his throat.
It's not like his other stories—it's more like a diary entry, really. He reads to her what it felt like to sit on that guardrail and look down at the waves on the river and wonder how badly it would hurt—whether the immediate pain would be worth putting a stop to the kind haunting him in his mind. He tells her about Mike, always Mike, and being cursed and feeling just better enough to also feel guilty for failing so badly. When he gets to the part about feeling better immediately after, he gets too choked up to continue—because what's coming next is that the better feelings vanished the second Jasper drove away in that Ferrari, and he doesn't want to admit to El that he's exactly, exactly back where he started.
She's sitting on his bed, and he's sitting at the desk, but when he stops, she crosses the room to pull him into a hug. She hovers over him and pulls his head against her chest and just—breathes with him.
"Better?" El asks finally.
He doesn't know. Maybe a little.
"Time to put it away?"
"Time to put it away," Will agrees.
There's another knock at the door, and Will wipes his face clean and crumples up the paper as Jonathan pushes inside. El lets go of his head but keeps a hand on his shoulder. "Mom said you went missing for a while this morning, Will. Is everything okay in here?"
"Yeah," says Will at the same time as El says, "No."
They look at each other. "Tell him," says El.
"Tell me what?" asks Jonathan. He pulls the door shut behind him. "Tell me what, Will?"
Will wavers for a second, then holds out the crumpled paper for Jonathan to take. "Don't tell Mom and Hopper," he says.
"Will—"
"Just promise me, Jonathan."
"Okay, okay, I promise."
But Will can tell from the look on Jonathan's face that he's regretting this promise by the time he reaches the end. "Will, why didn't you tell us it was getting this bad?"
"I didn't think it was," Will mutters. "I thought I was handling it. Turns out I just… wasn't."
"Jesus, Will. Has it been like this ever since you and Mike split up?"
"It wasn't at first. I really did think it was going to be okay this time."
"Does your therapist know?"
Will shakes his head.
Jonathan sighs. "Look, I won't tell Mom, but you have to promise you'll tell your therapist, okay? I swear, I'm going to call her up and tell her myself if you don't—"
"I'll do it," Will interrupts. "I have an appointment on Tuesday afternoon; I'll do it then. Can you still take me?"
"Yeah, I can still take you. Look, I'm not… I'm not mad, okay? I just worry so much about you, and when you say stuff like this…"
After all this time, Will knows exactly what Jonathan's talking about. This isn't new; he's lived this a thousand times, watching the people who love him as they watch him fall apart. He's sick of being this person, but he'll do better from now on—take his recovery more seriously. He has to.
He just has to.