𝐅𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐒 • Steve Harrington

Chapter 25

She rolled her eyes and put the baggie away. "Forget it. It was a dumb idea."

"No, no," Steve sat up suddenly and saved the lunchbox from being shut. "It's the second best idea we've had all night."

"Really? What's the first? Dallas?"

Steve pinched her chin. "Not even remotely close." Then he used the side of his index finger to caress her cheek gently. "But can you blame me if I'm a little shocked? I feel like I learn something so out of left field about you at least twice a day." He rested his hand on her thigh, idly tracing shapes on her skin.

"I never usually did any of this stuff before. It just feels like a way to defy my dad without any immediate consequences."

"Can I ask you something?" Steve asked. "And you don't have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable, just forget I said anything."

She was a little weary of his hesitance, but she couldn't deny that she was curious. "Okay."

"What happened to him?" When her eyebrows knit, he clarified. "Your dad I mean."

The muscles in her face relaxed, but her head still bowed.

"Sorry, was that too much-?"

"No, it's fine," she bares the ghost of a smile. "I just wasn't expecting that." She took a deep breath. "Um..."

Her head tilted as she reeled in all the thoughts of her father. She tried to mentally track where to start. She wasn't even aware of how quiet the room had become for those two seconds or even the feeling of Steve's finger making spirals up and down her thigh.

"You know the Department of Energy?"

Steve tried to swallow back the internal panic in him. "No," he lied convincingly. "I don't think so."

"The labs they have here?"

"Oh yeah," he feigns realisation. "No yeah, of course. What about them?"

"My dad was a research scientist for that," Julie told him and completely missed him swallow. "A head director or something, I don't really know the logistics of it, but he was killed in some freak accident and that's all we were allowed to know."

So much was going through Steve's head. But all he could say, both legally and physically, was, "Wow."

"Yeah, everything surrounding my dad's existence is totally confidential," she tells him listlessly. "Like, you know when someone dies, you have the open casket option. Even if they're a burn victim, they'll make them look less gnarly at least. We didn't get any of that. We weren't allowed to ask questions. We just got a coffin with a body in it and I think that sucks."

"It does suck," Steve states tenaciously. "That completely sucks."

"Yeah. And it's not so much that I'm bothered that I won't get to know what happened to him. That I don't really care about. It's just the fact that we weren't given the courtesy of a choice. We just had to go along with things because the government said so."

With sad eyes, Steve followed the way her head dropped and she picked at the material of her bedsheets.

"It's so fucked up and it just speaks to the kind of man he was." She looked up again with an indifference that Steve wasn't sure she entirely felt.

Then she lowered her voice sombrely. "And I know I don't talk about him a lot but it's seriously for the best. He really was awful."

"He didn't ever hurt you, did he?"

"No," she shut down sharply. "But there were times that I thought he would. He yelled like crazy and was extremely controlling. Not just for me but for my mom, too. He would monitor what we did, how long for and who with. So when he died it wasn't so much a loss for either of us I think, it was just sort of freeing-which you probably think sounds terrible."

"Not at all," Steve asserts.

Julie searched his eyes, uncertain.

"Really. It makes a lot of sense." He stilled his hand, resting the palm of it upon her thigh. "It all does now."

"Finally getting to experience all the dumb teenage stuff I missed out on...it's really addictive."

"Well, which parts do you do because you actually enjoy them and not just because you're not supposed to."

She took her lower lip between her teeth, running her own thoughts back and forth in her mind. "I guess I really hate getting drunk," she considered, cringing. "It's not so much the feeling of being intoxicated I don't like, it's the taste that I find really gross."

"Done. Bye-bye Dad's liquor cabinet."

She smiles with a naughty glint in her eye. "But you know what I do like?"

His eyes briefly flickered to her lips, smirking. "What?"

She waved the baggie between them. "Getting high."