slow ride | STEVE HARRINGTON.

12. wild thing

"You're such a dork!" She squealed with laughter.

"Wild thing, I think I love you," he trailed on, lifting his foot up onto the coffee table and resting his elbow on his knee, "but I wanna know for sure!"

Ringo howled again as he suddenly shot his pelvis forward and removed his leg, the performance made all the more amusing by the fact his face was covered in cuts and lumps.

The song eventually came to and end, and Ringo's sides were almost split from laughing so hard. Her earlier worries and troubles had been well forgotten, and for a moment, she was just a teenager again enjoying the company of her friend.

When the last few notes rang through Steve's ears, he took an overly dramatic bow, which was met with clapping and cheering from Ringo.

"Yeah, sexy lady!" She hollered at him, "shimmy over this way, I have a dollar!"

"How very dare you," he cocked his hip to the side and pouted his swollen lips, his voice ten octaves higher to mimic a woman, "I take fives and tens only."

"You'll take what I give you!" She, in turn, deepened her voice as if she were a man in the fake scenario.

Steve was grinning widely when he moved to sit back down, taking the headphones from his head and passing them and the cassette player back to its owner.

"Here, ass kicker."

Ringo diligently wrapped her headphone cord up before placing it delicately inside her pocket, followed by the player itself. A thought suddenly coming to her as she done so.

"Hey, Steve? Where's your parents?" She couldn't believe she hadn't noticed before, but the house was completely vacant since she arrived, and it was now dark outside.

"My mom's vacationing in Mexico City and my dad's working I guess," he said it so casually, as if it were a common occurrence. Ringo came to realise that it probably was. This was another classic case of rich parents that pried their child full of expensive presents to make up for their obvious absence.

"Oh," she said dumbly, not sure of what else to say.

"But hey, on the bright side, I can do that without getting caught," he gestured with his head towards the centre of the living room, where he had been dancing just moments before.

"I would have covered for you, told them that you had a bee in your panties," she smiled tiredly at her joke, the tiredness she had been trying to ignore was creeping up on her. But she couldn't afford to fall asleep, after all, she was only here for a few hours - not for the night. Just long enough to be sure that the Byers would finally be home, and hopefully Nancy would be with them.

"My dad's pretty homophobic too, so I think he'd freak out and think dancing means I'm gay," Steve muttered, embarrassed of the revelation about his father.

"Fuck him, just for that-" she broke off mid-sentence to yawn, "just for that, I'm going to eat spicy food, use his ensuite bathroom and not flush the toilet."

"Ringo," he belted out a laugh, his eyes closed as his head fell back with mirth, "that's absolutely disgusting."

When silence fell over them again, Steve used to it to truly think about his father. Sometimes he wondered if his desire to be so popular stemmed from his father's push for him to be so. He turned to voice his thoughts to Ringo, knowing that she would listen and offer her opinion, but when his head lifted he saw that she was fast asleep.

Smirking softly at her sleeping face, which consisted of her mouth falling slightly open as her face pressed against the back of the couch, he reached for the blanket that hung over the other couch in the room and draped it around her body to keep her warm.