It seems like everyone is demanding to talk to Will about why he's no longer going to the Wheelers' house for Christmas. When he tells his mom, she puts on her concerned face and keeps asking him what's wrong between him and Mike, only laying off when Jonathan interrupts the standoff to tell her to back off, but even Jonathan asks him about it later, in their bedroom.
Meanwhile, El sits at the kitchen table and doesn't say anything at all. Will tries and fails to force himself not to wonder whether she knows from Mike what's going on.
Dustin isn't happy with him during their usual call on Monday night. "Why the hell aren't you coming back to Hawkins anymore for the holidays?" he demands as soon as Will picks up the phone.
"I'm sorry. I should have told you. It's just that I'm really slammed over here studying for midterms in January, and—"
"You know how I know that's bullshit? Because I asked Mike the same thing, and he said that your mom is making you go to your dad's house instead. Which is it, Byers?"
Will can feel his whole body blushing. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lied—"
"You know, I was really looking forward to seeing you again, Will, and—"
"It's about me and Mike, okay?"
"Yeah, no shit, it's about you and Mike. What the hell happened between you two over Thanksgiving break?"
Will closes his eyes and remembers what he (barely) can of the fleeting kiss he gave Mike after Thanksgiving, the words he shouted across the chasm that was Mike's relationship with El. He grimaces. "How do you know about Thanksgiving?"
"If I can crack a top-secret code by Russians plotting against our country, I sure as hell can put two and two together what's happening when my best friends are lying to me," spits Dustin.
"Wasn't it Robin who cracked the Russian code?" asks Will.
Dustin snaps back, "Not the point! Look, there's more waiting for you in Hawkins than just Mike Wheeler! What about me? What about Lucas and Max? Even Steve and Robin were upset when I told them you weren't coming—"
Will feels a sudden rush of guilt. "I wish I could just stay with you instead. I really do. But that would be even weirder, because I'd still have to spend the whole holiday in the same party as him with him knowing I didn't want to see him, and I just… I can't see him, Dustin. I just can't."
He refuses to give any more details, not to Dustin or to Lucas or Max, whom he tells the same story about visiting his dad that Mike apparently gave. To Dustin's credit, he doesn't spoil the lie for anyone, even though there's a distinct undercurrent of bitterness in his next phone call.
The night before El is supposed to leave for Hawkins, she knocks on Will's bedroom door while Jonathan is working a double shift at the restaurant. He thinks it's Mom at first, and after answering the door and discovering El there on the other side, he immediately regrets not throwing something on first over his undershirt and briefs.
"Hi," she says awkwardly.
"Hi," Will repeats back, waiting.
"I'm sorry you're not coming," she continues after a pause. "I'm sorry that you and Mike fight."
Will's pulse doubles in pace in the blink of an eye. "Yeah, me, too," he mutters.
"What happened?" El asks.
He steps back from the doorway and sinks down onto his bed, leaving El standing there gripping the frame in her hand. "Mike didn't tell you?"
"No."
Well, that answers that question. A wave of relief passes over Will as El steps carefully into the room, sidestepping textbooks and dirty clothes to take a seat on the edge of Jonathan's bed. "I don't want to talk about me and Mike, okay?" Will says. "So if that's all you're here for, you can just go away already."
El pauses, looking up at Will with a pensive expression. "He misses you," she says finally. "He talks about you."
Against his better judgment, Will asks, "What does he say?"
"Sorry," she answers. "He says sorry."
Will looks down into the face of everything he's been fighting against for the last year of his life and feels like giving up on it all—collapsing down to his stunted, broken core and never coming up for air. El is not his enemy. If Mike is capable of forgetting about Will as easily and completely as he did when El came around, then El was never the root problem—Mike was. And that makes Will feel totally, unequivocally alone.
"If he were really sorry, he would tell me so himself," sighs Will. "I think you should go."
Standing and crossing the room, El twists her lips in something like sympathy and clumsily rests a hand on Will's shoulder. "I miss you, too," she admits quietly. "We can… do something after Christmas? I read your stories?"
Will feels a confused flood of affection for the girl he would give anything to make go away. "Yeah. I'll write you something over the holidays. Have fun with Mike," he adds with a sour taste in his mouth.
El nods and smiles and closes the door behind her with a snap. Will could just scream into his pillow for days, but he doesn't.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rings. He assumes Mom will get it, but when it rings five times, stops, and then starts ringing again, Will rolls his eyes and pads over to the kitchen to pick it up. "Byers residence," he says dully.
"Will?" says a voice that unmistakably belongs to Mike.
Will's whole body runs cold. "Hey. I'll go get Eleven."
"No! I mean—I was just talking to her on her walkie. I wanted to talk to you."
"Oh. Okay," says Will, like a dumbass.
Mike hesitates for what feels like a very long time. "I don't—"
"I know you don't," Will interrupts immediately, not wanting to hear it.
"No, you don't understand," says Mike with a note of frustration. "I was just gonna say, I don't want to fight. And I don't want to lose you as a friend. I know it might be too late for that, but I don't."
"Oh," Will says dumbly.
Mike sighs into the phone. "Please come to Hawkins with El tomorrow. Please. I want you to be here."
And because Will is a sucker, wholly and always tied around Mike's finger, he says, "Okay."
Will gives it a good, hard think in the three-hour car ride from Sullivan to Hawkins, mostly ignoring his mom's attempts at conversation with him and El. Loving Mike Wheeler didn't always hurt. He didn't feel this way about him when they were little kids, and when they got older and Will found himself forming a massive crush on his friend, it felt good at first just to be in his presence, even knowing that all they would ever have together was friendship. It wasn't until El came into the picture that Will found himself overtaken by painful things like jealousy and regret.
He looks over to where El is slumped against the side door, eyes shut, and he groans to himself. Not for the first time, Will wishes they could just go back to before Mike ever met El, before Will had ever heard of the Mind Flayer or the Upside Down, when the worst thing that ever happened was Jonathan coming to pick him up before a campaign was over.
When they first get to the Wheelers', Will thinks it might actually work out okay, staying here with Mike. It's a little awkward when Will first gets out of the car—he says "hey" and Mike says "hey" and they look at each other across the lawn until El goes running up to Mike for a kiss—but then Mike starts telling them all about Hawkins High and his favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone, and it's almost like old times.
Except—the party meets up with Steve, who uses his fake ID to get them all into A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and Will finds himself sitting in between Mike and Max. There aren't a lot of really frightening jump scares in the movie, but Will does feel a jolt run down his body when Lisa drops the knife and Freddy Krueger grabs her face, and he instinctively reaches for Mike's hand and squeezes. Before, Mike would have squeezed back, always quick to play the hero for any of his friends, Will especially—but this time, Mike snatches his hand back and glances over at Will with a sheepish grin. Will doesn't smile back.
It doesn't help that Dustin busts out of the movie insisting, "That was the gayest shit I've ever seen in my life. For Christ's sake, the kid is at a leather bar when he ran into the gym coach. Jesse breaks into Grady's bedroom and crawls on top of him to get help. And that scene where Freddy is freakin'—freakin' stroking Jesse's mouth with the blade? What the hell?"
"Okay, it was gay as shit, but so what?" Steve replies quickly before anyone else has a chance to jump in. "Does that make it any less good of a movie? Personally, I thought the subtext between Freddy and the kid was one of the most interesting parts of the film."
"I agree," says Mike, as though that settles the matter. "It wasn't any less badass just because it was gay."
Will feels thankful that he didn't fess up to Dustin when he asked what's been going on between Will and Mike, and grateful to Steve for the unexpected defense. He can feel Mike looking at him and definitively does not look back.
That first night at the Wheelers', Mike grabs his sleeping bag and a bunch of blankets and moves down into the basement with both Will and El. Will watches him sleep from where he's lying on the couch and wishes desperately that he lived in a world without El where Mike wouldn't let go of his hand.
It's like Mike is trying to make a point of showing Will that nothing's changed and that his feelings for Mike don't have to affect their friendship, only Will's feelings for Mike are obviously affecting every aspect of their friendship. Will doesn't try to touch Mike again, and for his part, Mike reserves the easy affection he used to show Will for Lucas and Dustin and, of course, El. Every time he and Mike make eye contact, Will can feel a blush rising in his cheeks as he replays what little he remembers of the kiss over and over again and then looks away as quickly as he can.
Meanwhile, Mike is making a point of sitting next to Will everywhere the party goes and talking as exclusively as possible to him, all while avoiding any overt physical or verbal shows of affection. El seems conflicted by the lack of Mike's attention on her, glaring at Mike but not trying to break into their conversations, and Will wonders whether El feels jealous of him in spite of having had Mike's undivided attention for the last three months that they've been living in Sullivan.
I'm not trying to steal him from you, Will wants to say to her, even though he sort of wishes he could. I'm just taking whatever I can get.
He doesn't say any of this, of course. For one thing, he's not alone with her again until they're back in Sullivan, after a very uncomfortable and mostly silent car ride home. More than that, he doesn't want to do anything to draw attention to his feelings for Mike, even at the expense of his (admittedly nonexistent) relationship with El.
They fall into an uneasy arrangement: Mike calls El every night on their walkies, and when they're done, he calls Will on his walkie on a different frequency. Mike's conversations with Will are generally much shorter and filled with Mike chattering about the party's shenanigans at Hawkins High while Will sits by and wishes he knew what the appropriate thing to say was. It's certainly not I love you like is constantly on his mind.
It's almost like before, when Will always sat in constant admiration of the way Mike exudes charm and carries a conversation, but Will used to love the way he was number one in Mike's book and the way Mike showed that all the time, and now—Will just feels sad: sad and defeated. It didn't used to matter that Mike surely didn't return Will's feelings, but now that Mike is giving that affection to El, Will's gotten selfish. And it didn't used to bother him that he had to keep his feelings to himself, but now that Mike knows—
Will wishes so badly that he never kissed Mike in the first place, because now that the truth is out of the box, he just feels humiliated every time he hears from Mike, hears the careful way that Mike avoids talking about anything too personal. Worse yet, Will never knows how long to expect Mike and El's conversation to last before Mike calls him, and he finds himself avoiding doing anything much besides wait by his walkie for the one, two, sometimes three hours that Mike and El are talking. It's like his life every evening has become waiting by his walkie, reading a book or doing homework that he prepares himself to drop the second he hears Mike's voice come through the line. Will used to be able to deal with having unrequited feelings for Mike, but Will was never ready to hang off of the very anticipation of every word Mike might say to him the way he has been lately. He resents being this pathetic. He resents a lot of things, lately.
It comes to a head one day in February when a lull falls over the conversation and then Mike says, "Will, I've been meaning to say… I never forgot about you, and I really, really want to stay your friend."
Will's whole body goes hot. "Mike, I—"
"No, just let me finish," says Mike so quietly that Will can hardly hear his scratchy voice over the line. "I know you know that I—I don't feel about you—how you do, but that doesn't mean I don't… and it doesn't bother me. You know? It doesn't bother me that you feel the way you do, as long as you understand that—I'm with El, and—"
"It may not bother you, but it bothers me, Mike," Will says, and for the first time in a long time, he feels himself gaining confidence. "I don't know how much longer I can do this."
"Do what?"
"Pretend like everything's normal when it's not! It was fine at first, liking you without you liking me back, but then El came into the picture, and… it's like every interaction I have with you now is forced, like we don't really have anything to say to each other except all this hurtful shit we don't want to say and keep shoving down, and I don't want to shove it down any longer. I love you, and it hurts. It hurts."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I don't know how to make it better."
"I'm not asking you to make it better. I'm just asking you to—to leave me alone."
"What?"
"I need space," says Will, and he's not planning the words that are coming out of his mouth, but he knows them to be true all the same. "The only way this ever gets better is if I can just move on, and I can't do that with you calling all the time and trying to force a normal friendship that just doesn't exist right now."
He's not thrilled about it. He already misses Mike all the time, even when they're in the middle of a conversation, and that's only going to get worse if they cut contact again like they did when Will first moved to Sullivan. But Will's starting to realize that he doesn't like the way he feels about Mike anymore—that it's not the fun secret it used to be—and the only way that gets better is by getting away from him.
Still, Will doesn't want to do it.
He finds himself dragging out the conversation before they say goodbye, telling Mike he'll miss him, telling him that Mike has always been his best friend, ever since that day in kindergarten when Mike came up to him on the swing-set and asked Will to be his friend. He pictures Mike's face, so earnest and concerned.
He says goodbye, turns off his walkie, curls up in his bed, and cries.