"Do you think she saw us?" Lucas asks.
"I don't know," Will replied.
Lucas tried to straighten up just enough that he could glimpse across the lawn, but Steve lowly cried, "What the hell are you doing, Sinclair?"
"Checking," he told him.
"Don't move a muscle," Steve pointed warningly.
Lucas' face contorted. "Then how will we know when to get up?"
"We'll know."
"How? Are we waiting on a signal or-?"
Suddenly, Max pounded Steve's window three times.
"That?" Will guesses.
Steve reclined, winding down his window.
"She saw you and she wants us inside," Max explained.
"Us as in us," Steve gestured to himself, "or us," and then the general space of the car including the two boys sitting up in the backseat.
"Oh, you're toast, but all of us, yeah." And without another word, Max turned around and walked towards Julie's house.
Dustin, left behind, bared Steve a weak smile.
"Shit," he cursed under his breath and got out of the car.
Dustin immediately raced to defend himself. "Steve, I swear to you I stuck to the plan but it all just came out-"
"Forget about that," Steve shut down. "Did Jules seem pissed off to you or, you know, did she look regretful or something?"
Dustin looked at him quizzically. "What does regretful look like?"
"Like she shit the bed," Lucas says, shutting the door behind Will and himself.
"No, just... Will walking through that door right now end my life?" Steve asked desperately.
"It was hard to tell," says Dustin. "She didn't really give me a lot to work with."
"Was she happy? Sad?" Will pushes.
"I'm not sure happy is a word I'd use."
"Then what is a word you'd use?" asks Lucas.
"Unimpressed."
"Great," Steve grumbles.
Lucas tapped his shoulder as he walked past him. "It was nice knowing you, man."
"You've never even spoken a word to her," Steve called after him.
"Max is my girlfriend."
And as if proving his point, Max exclaimed from the front door, "Are you shitheads coming or not?"
Lucas sent Steve a pointed look that he couldn't argue with.
They all herded inside Julie's house, Steve closing the door behind them as they started to walk through the arch to the living room.
Max lingered behind in the archway to talk to Steve that hadn't moved his footing from the foyer. "She's waiting in the kitchen," she told him, then proceeded to sit with the others.
Steve glimpsed at himself in the wide mirror hanging on the wall behind a chest of draws with some family photos, a vase of flowers and a key bowl.
But then he found himself turning to really dwell on his reflection looking back at him.
He licked his thumb and ran it over both his eyebrows, then wet it again to fix the single strand of hair he now always ensured was perfectly out of place. Then he postured himself and pulled his navy blue jacket to fix it straight, catching a second reflection behind him: Dustin standing in the archway in his sweatshirt and usual baseball cap.
"You got this," he told Steve.
And Steve wanted to believe that was true. He silently tried to will it to be true.
But with one final sigh, he turned around and headed past the stairs and down the short hallway leading to a joint kitchen-dining room at the end.
Once he walked through the widely open door, he skimmed the room, stopping once his eyes landed on Julie sitting at the table. She was twisting the rubber end of her pencil against the side of her head, her eyebrows cinched as she read something on a notepad laid flat in front of her.
"Hey," he said.
She looked up blankly, her eyes warming once they landed on him.
A promising start.
"Hi," she said, smiling and bringing her pencil down from her temple. She pulled out a seat next to her, "Here. Do you wanna sit down?"
"Yeah. Yeah, sure." He walked over and slipped into the chair beside her. "I'm sorry about them and the watching and-"
"Don't apologise," she shut down softly. "It was sweet."
All the tension in Steve eased itself instantly.
"And I wasn't ignoring you-I couldn't. I was just taking some time to think for a while... by ignoring you."
"Am I allowed to ask what you were thinking about?" Steve held onto the back of her chair, resisting the urge to touch her.
"You don't have to."
His eyebrows drew together with bemusement.
She put the pencil down and picked up the notepad, holding the front-facing side close. "Can I read you something?"
"Anything," he said adoringly. "What is it?"
"It's my valedictorian speech." The second she said it out loud, she felt embarrassed. "I know it's probably going to wind up being Jenny Leiper or even Greg Bradshaw, but I spent the past few days writing and rewriting it and I'm not sure why."
Steve had a feeling he knew. "Does it have anything to do with what happened between us?"
"It's a lot of things at once, but that might have had something to do with it." She fumbled to lower the notepad just enough that she could read from it. "It's not long."
"If it's a speech, you should probably stand."
Julie didn't have it in her to say no to him somehow. Any flame in her had extinguished, but she didn't think twice about it. She just silently stood up, tucked in her chair and postured herself.
Steve trained his eye on her, waiting and listening in anticipation.
She cleared her throat. "Good afternoon. Honoured guests, family, friends, Board of Trustees, teachers, staff and fellow graduates, it is a privilege to stand before you all on this momentous day.
"These past academic years Hawkins has faced some of the greatest tragedies it has ever seen. Our town lost the owner of our favourite local diner, Benny Hammond; our school and faculty lost a smart and selfless student, Barbara Holland-or to Mr and Mrs Holland, a loving and treasured daughter. And in their place, an irreparable hole has been left behind.
"Recently Principal Mullins told me that embarking on new chapters of our lives doesn't have to be seen as moving on, but instead adjusting to change.
"This year, for our class, graduating has become more than growing up and transitioning into a new phase of our life. It's not about trying to cement the hole closed. It's finding closure in tragedies that have mutually shaken us all. Tragedies we will carry with us and never forget."
Steve felt the words at his core. How could she have written something that resonated with him so deeply without knowing the whole story? Was she talking about her experience with her father passing away?
"To every face we sat next to in class, strolled past in the school hallway or spent our free periods with, they're the people that made this period of our lives worth remembering at all. And in the words of the person I spent every free fourth with, 'It's not a place that makes a place, it's the people in it.'
"I see now that he was more right than he knew."
A smile twitched at the corner of Steve's lips.
"When you leave here today, I can only hope that you take the past four years with you, because I'm taking the past four months with me.
"Congratulations Class of 1985," she quickly mumbled the end, her cheeks tinting pink. She found it difficult to hold Steve's eyes that seemed to have a glint in them. "It's not finished."
But Steve didn't care. His side smile could only express his adoration for her so much. So he stood up and took steps towards her to close the distance between them. He extended his hand, hooking it gently against her jaw and planted his lips on her's. And even though Julie was entirely unprepared for it, they still moved in perfect rhythm, recalling the tender sensory memory.
Pulling away within a fraction of an inch, they sighed.
"Does that mean you hate it?" she asked, their hot breaths fanning one another's faces.
Steve held her face in his hands securely and searched every inch of it. The wisps of hair framing her coral skin, her flushed cheeks, her round nose and her full eyebrows.
"When you read that at the ceremony," he says, "I'll be tearing up like it's the first time I've heard it all."
"If I read it," Julie corrects.
"I know what I said."
There he goes again. Somehow he was able to have more faith in her than she did in herself and it made her heart melt into her stomach already tied up in knots.
So she leaned forward, catching his lips feverishly, and without detaching, Steve pulled the notepad from her hands that had been sandwiched between them and tossed it onto the table. He hugged her waist and she wrapped her arms around his neck, moulding their bodies into one.
The feeling of his kiss didn't stop at her lips, it ran down her spine and into her legs, all the way to the tips of her toes. She felt all of him and she felt it in all of her. Once he slipped his tongue along her bottom lip, she granted him access and braced her hand on the back of his head to feel the softness of his hair in her fingers.
They smiled inwardly against one another.
"I missed you, you know that?" Steve said warmly.
"The middle schoolers you sent to spy on me was a pretty solid indication of that, yes," Julie remarked.
He groaned. "The dibshits weren't supposed to say anything."
"I saw you duck whilst you were parked outside of my house."
"Shit," he cursed under his breath.
"Yeah. I'm just glad you didn't go full stalker status with binoculars and a camera."
"It did cross my mind once or twice," he teases.
"Once or twice?"
"Okay, maybe five or six."
She laughed softly, ready to meet him halfway as he slowly leant in.
But a thumping tumble from the hallway sounded, and their heads jerked towards it in alarm.
The quiet pitter-pattering of rushed footsteps immediately followed, growing exceedingly more silent with distance.
Steve rolled his eyes, but Julie was only amused. They shared a knowing look, and she let Steve head to the living room.
When he slipped inside, the kids were distributed around the sofa with Will seated crossed legged on the floor. They were watching a rerun of He-Man.
"Alright, dickheads, get your stuff together," Steve says. "I'm taking you home."
"But He-Man just started," Will laments. "We won't get back in time to watch the rest."
"Yeah, it'll be finished by then and I'm not waiting for another rerun," Lucas adds.
"Right, because I'm sure you perfectly enjoyed the beginning whilst you were eavesdropping at the kitchen door," Steve remarks heatedly.
Max winced. "Based on your bad mood, I'll take it it didn't go well."
"Julie, that was a great speech," Dustin grins, the moment the brunette waltzed in behind Steve, completely ruining Max's faux-obliviousness and making her roll her eyes.
Steve had officially lost his patience. "Yeah, that's it. Up. Come on, get your things and let's go."
All at once the teenagers complained: "What?" Lucas cried; "Dude," Max deadpanned; "Are you serious?" Will's voice broke; and Dustin tried to reason, "There's like fifteen minutes left at least."
"Okay, okay," Julie intervened, slipping beside the aggravated brunet. She laid a still hand on his arm. "Steve, let them finish the episode." When he opened his mouth to dispute, she quickly continued. "They haven't even seen what happens to Crackers The Clown yet."
Dustin's mouth gaped open. "You watch He-Man?"
"Hell yeah," she grins. "It kills time and Skeletor's hot." She passed Steve by, and parked herself down next to Will, whose name she still had yet to know.
Simultaneously, Lucas uttered, "Ew," whilst his girlfriend closely beside him shrugged and said, "Fair."
All the while, Dustin mouthed to Steve, 'Marry her or I will.'
"You're Lucas, right?" Julie said over her shoulder.
"Yeah. That's me."
"Yeah, I remembered from the game. I guess we just haven't really had a one on one yet." Then she turned to the boy with the bowl-cut right beside her, "It's you that's the only delinquent I've had yet to meet. I'm Julie, and your name is?"
"Will."
"Nice to meet you, Will."
"I'm loving this," Steve interjects, all heads turning to him, "really, I am, but Jules, I think I heard the tap dripping in the kitchen." He tried to nod towards it in a discreet attempt at signalling an escape.
Julie read it clearly, but still chose to feign obliviousness. "Oh, if you're turning it off, could you make us some popcorn?"
"Yes!" Lucas exclaims.
"Oh, I could really go for some popcorn right about now," Dustin hums.
"We were literally talking about this yesterday," Max grins and looks at Lucas. "Weren't we talking about this yesterday?"
Lucas grinned, too. "Just yesterday."
"Is it buttered?" asks Will.
"Dude, don't insult me," Julie gently jolts him with her elbow. "Of course it is."
Then there was Steve, straight-faced and unimpressed with his hands on his hips. Julie looked over at him, finding his eyes right away.
She offered him a small smile. "It should be in the cupboard by the fridge."
He sucked in his lips, nodding once. "Got it." Then he begrudgingly turned around and disappeared into the hallway.
Julie held a hand over her shoulder for Max, and the redhead low-fived it accordingly. If there was anybody that was going to get the kind of kick out of teasing Steve Harrington that she did, it had to be a group of middle schoolers.