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Robin never thought she’d see the day: Nancy Wheeler on her doorstep, breath heaving from a mile and a half run, saying the words I think I love you.
She, admittedly, has thought through all the numerous ways this could’ve happened, stayed awake at night thinking of it only to fall asleep and dream about it too. This had never even crossed her mind, although maybe it should have.
It’s like all the rom-coms that are always being rented out from the video store, but missing one key component: the rain. It should be raining.
Instead, it’s devoutly not. It’s the early evening and the sun’s still out, hovering just over the horizon. The sky is starting to darken, only it’s not from any storm clouds—of which, disappointingly, there are none in sight.
(Shame, she thinks. She can imagine telling it to Steve: Nancy fucking Wheeler, on my doorstep, hair frizzy from the rain, telling me she loves me. A momentary frown. Or that she thinks she does.)
(Or maybe she wouldn’t do that. Steve is well-versed in Nancy Wheeler and love, or, rather, the lack of it. No need to rub salt in the wound, even if it’s already long healed.)
Never mind all that. Nancy fucking Wheeler is on her doorstep, hair not frizzy from the rain, telling her she thinks she loves her.
It’s promising. Robin can work with that.
There’s a lot of things she could say. The ones that come to mind: You love me? (stupid—Nancy just confirmed that, kind of); What the fuck is going on? (probably don’t go with that one); I think I love you too. No, scratch that. I do love you. Actually, I’m rather obsessed with you (could work, if a bit creepy).
Instead, none of those things come out her mouth.
Instead, she blurts, “I thought you had a boyfriend.”
Nancy frowns. “I mean, yeah. Well, no,” she quickly amends. “I did. Until about ten minutes ago.”
“And in those ten minutes you’ve already moved on and figured out you love—or think you love me?” Robin asks, rather stupidly.
“No,” Nancy says, frowning again. “We broke up because I love—think I love you.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
(What the fuck? It’s decidedly not cool. Well, it’s cool for her, but not for Nancy, not entirely, or Nancy’s boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, or Jack, or whatever his name is. James? She should probably know this.)
“It’s not cool for you, I mean,” Robin says, before Nancy gets the chance to think too much about what she just said, “or your boyfriend. But I guess it’s cool for me, since, you know, I love you too. Or think I love you too.”
Maybe they should stop circling around the I love yous, Robin muses. At least, she should. Since she’s decisively sure of her feelings for Nancy and all.
“Well, I don’t think I love you, I know I love you, but since you seem unsure I figured maybe I’d say it like that? Just so you don’t feel—uh—pressured or anything.”
Maybe Robin should shut up, actually.
“I’ll stop talking now,” she says.
Nancy’s brow furrows. “I’m not—unsure,” she hedges. “I’m just… figuring some stuff out.”
“Ah,” Robin says, because she’s been there, figuring stuff out, even if she only realised there was stuff she needed to figure out because some girl who sang like a Muppet made her heart flutter in ways it probably shouldn’t have. She does almost wish Nancy had been her lesbian awakening instead. Because, apparently, she has a fucking chance. Although she might not have back then.
What changed, she wonders, to make it so that Nancy is currently at her front door like the hero of a rom-com who’s just realised he’s fucked up big time? Not that Nancy’s the hero of a rom-com or fucked up big time (simply because there’s nothing to fuck up). But the question still stands. What the hell happened that—
Oh. Well. Robin should’ve got to this point sooner. She happened. Clearly, it’s the only feasible explanation, as evidenced by Nancy fucking Wheeler, on her doorstep—
She won’t go into that whole spiel again.
Holy shit. She was someone’s lesbian (maybe?) awakening. And not just anyone’s. Nancy’s.
What the actual fuck is her life? She always thought she was the only gay person her age—maybe person, in general—in Hawkins, only to now find out that she isn’t, and that Nancy, of all people, is too.
This is almost as baffling as finding out there’s a Russian base operating underneath Starcourt Mall dedicated to opening a rift in space and time to access an alternate dimension where monsters reside. Maybe. No, most definitely.
It’s almost as baffling as the fact that her best friend is Steve Harrington.
Who would’ve thought her life would turn out like this? Go back and tell twelve year old Robin Buckley all of that and she’d pass out from disbelief. Hell, she’s still tempted to.
“You wanna come in?” she finally says, attempting some smooth gesture that is definitively not, because nothing about Robin ever is.
“No, I think I’d better go,” Nancy replies, a little sheepishly, Robin notes. And, well, she’s not wrong to be sheepish—because who the hell does that? Turns up on someone’s doorstep, drops the bomb that they love—think they love—said someone, and then just leaves?
“I’ll… call you?” Nancy carefully asks, as if Robin’s going to say no.
Nancy Wheeler may be an enigma, but Robin’s not a fool. She couldn’t deny Nancy anything, really.
Later that evening, Nancy calls. Robin picks up. They stay on the phone for an hour, somehow, until Nancy’s kid brother shouts at her to get off of it because he wants to talk to one of his friends.
That’s how it goes, for a while. Nancy calls. Robin picks up. They talk forever.
Somewhere in the midst of it all, they start meeting up regularly. Like, every couple of days, when neither of them have anything on after school. There’s kissing. A lot of it. Robin feels like she’s going insane.
They start going on dates, discreet as they may be. No sharing of milkshakes, no holding hands, no playing footsie under the table, and definitely no making out at the back of the movie theatre. It’s Hawkins. They’re trying to be inconspicuous.
Nancy spills everything. How she dated Steve, how that didn’t work out—which Robin already knew all about anyway, but it’s nice to see the other side of that shitshow—and then how she dated Jonathan (Robin is very sure of his name now) for two long years. How she thought she loved him. How when he moved to California everything started going well and truly wrong.
How—and this is the most strange of all, to both of them—she couldn’t get Robin out of her head. She’d made herself right at home in there, and Nancy wasn’t even sure she wanted to kick her out.
She’s recounting all of this to Steve one slow day at the video store, when he nonchalantly shrugs and says, “Sounds like she’s your girlfriend.”
She stops in her tracks. “What?” she chokes, hastily pivoting to face him. “Sounds like—what?”
Steve looks up at her from his spot behind the counter where he’s fiddling around on the computer. His eyes widen. “I said, it sounds like she’s your girlfriend. What, did you not know that?”
“No, what the fuck, Steve, I clearly didn’t know that,” she says, rethinking everything she’s ever done. With Nancy and just… in general. “I think I’d know if I had a girlfriend,” she adds, frowning slightly.
“Clearly, you wouldn’t,” he chuckles, turning his attention back to the computer.
“Dickhead,” she mutters under her breath, turning and walking away from him.
“I heard that!” he calls.
Robin flips him the bird over her shoulder. “I intended you to.”
She can’t stop thinking about it from then on. It follows her everywhere—haunting her as she reshelves all the tapes, playing on the radio in Steve’s car the whole ride home, echoing in her bedroom even when she shoves her pillow over her head—until it feels like she’s playing hide and seek with her own thoughts.
What the fuck is a pretty constant saying in her brain now, a mantra she can’t get rid of.
Is Steve right, for once? Does she have a girlfriend? She supposes he’d know; even if he’s a loser now, he wasn’t always. Plus he did date her maybe/maybe-not girlfriend.
God, what’s she thinking, actually listening to anything Steve Harrington says? All his friends, aside from her, are middle schoolers. What would he know?
She gets the answer only a couple days later, when all the aforementioned middle schoolers pile into the video store. Probably looking for some shit horror movie they’re too young to rent out, but Steve will let them take anyway, because even though he still acts like an asshole half the time, he’s got a (not so) secret soft spot for all those kids.
It’s as she’s laboriously wheeling the tray of returns to start reshelving them that one of them pops up in her line of vision. It takes her a moment to recognise him: Mike, the one Steve’s always affectionately calling an asshole. And, maybe conveniently, maybe not, her possibly girlfriend’s brother.
Things might’ve just gotten a whole lot more complicated. Robin wants to bang her head into the shelving units.
“You’re Robin, right?” he says. She doesn’t get a chance to even nod the affirmative before he’s leaning in and lowering his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, like they’re fucking partners in crime or some shit, and saying, “And you’re dating my sister, right? You’re her girlfriend?”
And there it is—that word again. The one that’s been tailing Robin since Steve first said it.
“Um,” she says, intelligently. “Maybe?”
“Maybe?” he repeats, confusion crossing his face. “Do you… not know?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “We haven’t, like, really talked about it. Haven’t talked about a whole lot, really.”
“Ew.” He pulls a face. “That was unnecessary. I don’t want to know what you and my sister get up to.”
Robin gapes. “Not—not like that! I didn’t mean it like that—” she protests, but Mike seems to have already gotten over it.
Kids these days are weird, she thinks. And then that makes her feel old, and she’s only eighteen, for fuck’s sake.
“Maybe you should talk about it,” he suggests. “She’s not, like, said it or anything, but it’s obvious she thinks of you as her girlfriend.”
“How do you know that?” Robin demands. “You’re, what, fourteen? What do you know about dating?”
Mike doesn’t get a chance to answer, because at the same time one of the other kids calls his name, Steve’s there, saying, “Buckley, stop harassing the children. Especially the Wheeler kid, he’s always up to no good.”
Mike rolls his eyes before setting off towards the others at the opposite end of the store. Robin doesn’t fail to notice it’s where all the horror is located. Haven’t they already gotten enough of it, considering their lives have been horror films?
Steve raises an eyebrow at her. “Don’t tell me you’re up to no good, either.”
“You know me, Steve. I’m always up to no good,” she retorts, but her mind’s elsewhere.
It’s obvious she thinks of you as her girlfriend.
Are they? Have they been this whole time? Is she the only one too blind to see it?
She thought Steve was the oblivious one.
“Am I an idiot?” she blurts out, before she can think better of it.
Steve just stares at her. “Yes, usually,” he says promptly. “I’m going to need some elaboration though.”
“Okay, so, you said about it the other day, and now Mike’s just said it as well, and it’s got me thinking—is Nancy my girlfriend?”
Steve only starts laughing, which is very, extremely helpful. “What the fuck, Robin, are you serious?”
“Deadly.”
He stops laughing for a moment. “I thought you were making some, like, weird joke the other day—I didn’t actually think you—” He breaks off into another peal of laughter. “Oh my God. You’re so stupid.”
Robin’s mouth sets into a grim line. “Yeah, okay, thanks, you’re very helpful, Steve.”
“I answered your question,” he says. “You asked if you’re an idiot; I told you.” He pauses. “Have you considered asking Nancy this?”
“What?” She must look a picture, really: eyes narrowed, nose slightly scrunched, cheeks probably flushed. “If I’m an idiot?”
“No, Robin, if you’re girlfriends,” he tells her, a hint of incredulity creeping into his voice.
“Oh,” she says. “Right. That makes more sense. I’ll do that.”
She does, the very next day. Nancy laughs at her too. It’s all okay though, because she says, as she’s rubbing a circle onto Robin’s upturned palm with her thumb, “You’re an idiot. But I love you.”
Then she kisses her, soft and slow, like that isn’t the first time she’s uttered those words since that day at Robin’s door. Robin’s said them in her head every day since—I love you, Nancy Wheeler—but she never plucked up the courage to say them aloud. She wanted to move at Nancy’s pace, as slow or as fast as that was.
It’s as Robin’s kissing her back, feeling her heart settle into the place where it was always meant to be, that there’s a tentative knock at the door. They ignore it.
At least until the door flies open and they jump apart to see Mike standing there, face scrunched up in disgust. “Oh, ew,” he says, shouldering past where Nancy’s gotten up to shut the door. “I just wanted to see if you’ve got any money I can steal. I was hoping you weren’t here.”
“Get out, Mike!” Nancy scowls. “Waste your own money at the arcade.”
“We’re not going to—” he starts to say indignantly, but Nancy’s already shoving him out the door.
She turns to see Robin laughing behind her hand. “Shut up,” she mutters. “Be glad you don’t have an asshole younger brother to contend with.”
“You love me,” Robin says. “You don’t want me to shut up.”
Nancy smiles softly. “I really don’t. It’s a curse.”
“I guess it’s a good thing I love you too, then, because then you’d not have me at all. I wouldn’t be your girlfriend.”
“You were the one who didn’t even know we were girlfriends,” she says, mimicking Robin’s inflection on the last word. She pushes Robin back onto the bed, murmuring, “But, yeah, I guess it’s a good thing,” right before she kisses her.
It’s infinitely better than all the rom-coms.