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The A/C has been out all day when Steve arrives to pick her up, but Max can tell from one look at his face that that’s not the only thing that’s wrong.
“What?” she asks, squinting at him suspiciously, and his frown deepens.
“Thought you said the A/C was busted when you called? That that’s why you wanted to use the pool?”
“It is,” she says, rolling her eyes and climbing into the passenger seat. He doesn’t take the car out of park, though, just stares at her more closely, elbow on the console.
“Dude, are you okay?” he asks, and she frowns right back at him, because he fucking knows she hates that question, has promised to cut it out, but he keeps going. “You’re not sweating.”
Oh. Is that all? Robin and her preoccupation with all things bodily function must be rubbing off on him. Max shrugs. “Must not be that hot.”
“No, it definitely is,” Steve says, the furrows between his eyebrows becoming impossibly more pronounced. He holds the back of his hand to her forehead like he’s checking for a fever.
She doesn’t feel feverish. She feels—well, okay, yeah, hot. Not the internal, damp flush of a fever, though; more like concrete, dry and painful to the touch.
She has about two seconds to think Oh, great, he’s catastrophizing before Steve kills the ignition and ushers her out of the vehicle and back through her front door, and then she’s just kinda standing there in her tank top and board shorts with her arms crossed while he rummages through their freezer.
“Don’t leave that open too long,” she says. “The air—”
“I know, geez, who do you think I am, Dustin?” He shuts the freezer door firmly and stands back up, holding out two ice packs. “Armpits.”
Max stares at him. “No, thanks.”
“Do I look like I’m asking?” Steve asks, and moves like he’s going to put his hands on his hips before he remembers he’s currently freezing his palms off and expects her to, what, shove that shit under her arms with no complaint? The skin is, like, thin and sensitive there. Plus, he hasn’t noticed yet that she’s stopped shaving, and she really doesn’t want him to disappoint her by having something to say about it.
“I’m serious,” Steve insists again, “it’s what you’re supposed to do when shit like this happens.”
“Says who?” she asks, and she knows she’s being petulant, but she isn’t sure what else to do with his concern. Is kind of scared of the way she wants to lean into it, clutch it in her fists and hold on.
“Says the mandatory first aid course for Hawkins Community Pool lifeguards,” Steve retorts, and oh, that’s his scared-bitchy tone. He’s—he’s really freaked out, like, monster-fighting freaked out, not skateboarding-without-a-helmet freaked out.
“Fine,” she mutters, and grabs the ice packs from him and shoves them under her arms. “Happy now?”
“Thank you,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair. It’s damp at the roots, falling out of its style.
Huh. Maybe it is that hot.
“You have a bathtub?” Steve asks, and she shakes her head.
“Just a shower.”
“It’ll do in a pinch, but it’s not ideal, especially with no A/C… C’mon,” he says, and just like that, he’s out the door again.
Max wonders when it stopped occurring to her not to follow.
Steve crosses the street at a jog and has been banging on the door for a socially unacceptable amount of time by the time she gets to the neighbor’s trailer. The door opens, and it’s not the man she vaguely remembers introducing himself when they moved in—he works nights, she thinks he told her mom. She hopes Steve isn’t waking him up.
“Jesus,” the guy at the door says, and she bets he’s not gonna get a lecture from Steve for wearing a denim vest and long pants, black ones, in the middle of August. “What is—uh.” He seems to process the fact that a very frazzled Steve Harrington is standing on his doorstep with a fourteen-year-old in a swimsuit with ice packs in her armpits. At least she isn’t wearing a fucking bikini.
“Hi,” Steve says, rushed to the point of only barely not qualifying as panicked, “Medical emergency. Do you have a bathtub?”
“Uh, yeah, it’s—” the guy says, jerking a thumb behind him, and he moves enough to the side while doing so that Steve takes it as an invitation and hustles them right in.
“Sorry,” Max says, smiling tightly.
“No biggie,” Impractically Dressed Dude says, trailing after them with a somewhat dazed expression. Max wonders if he’s high. She knows he, like, sells drugs and shit, or at least she’s heard, but the trailer doesn’t smell like weed right now. Maybe it’s just the effect of a concentrated dose of Steve Harrington in full mother hen mode with no preparation.
Damn, Max wishes she could get high off that. It’d probably solve a lot of her problems.
Steve’s got the tub half full when she gets there, waves her in with an impatient—and slightly shaky, she notices, and wishes she hadn’t—hand. “Fucking hell, that’s cold,” she says, and he nods.
“That’s the point. Be grateful we didn’t have to resort to spraying you with the hose.”
Denim Guy clears his throat slightly, more like he’s nervous than like he’s trying to get their attention. Max wonders if he owns any hair ties, and if so, why he isn’t making use of them. His trailer’s A/C may be working, but that doesn’t mean it works well.
“So, uh, what’s the,” he flutters a hand in her direction, rings glinting in the yellow bathroom light, “situation? Like, should I—should I call an ambulance?”
Steve presses his lips together hard and looks at her. “I don’t know. I thought it was heatstroke, but—I’m not sure if it’s there yet.” He crosses his arms over his chest. Max can see one thumb digging into the flesh of the other forearm, the skin around the nail blanching white.
“You feel nauseous?” he asks. She shakes her head. “Dizzy?” No. “Headache?”
“You’re gonna give me one if you don’t stop asking so many questions,” she says, and he scoffs, which does nothing to hide his relief.
“I swear to God, if you’re lying to me…” he says, and then stops. Sighs, something long and deep and brutal. Drops his hands to his sides and then lifts them again, honest-to-God wrings them like some movie damsel. “Listen, Max, it’s just. This shit can be life or death, okay? And I know that’s… I know that can be complicated, believe me, but. I want you to be okay. As—as okay as you can be, and we don’t need to deal with anything beyond that, yeah?”
She nods at him. “I’m not lying.”
Steve exhales hard and drops to sit on the closed lid of the toilet, like that conversation took it all out of him. “Good,” he says, resting his hands on his knees and hanging his head a little. “Good.”
“Uh. Is that a no on the ambulance, then?” the guy asks, still lingering in the doorway like he’s not sure how to fit all of his limbs there, and Max snorts.
“Yes,” Steve says. “I mean, correct, that’s a no. Thank you, uh…?”
“Eddie,” the guy says, and Steve nods. He looks like he’s physically restraining himself from shaking his hand, like he probably already would’ve if it didn’t mean leaving Max’s side. Fucking dork. “Surprised you didn’t know that,” he adds, a weird expression on his face, like he’s almost relieved Steve didn’t.
“I don’t know a lot of things,” Steve says, and something about that makes Eddie smile. “Uh, I’m Steve. The teenager winning the race to give me a heart attack today is Max.” He’s smiling at her when he says it, though, small and soft, like he doesn’t even mean to.
Eddie nods, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Um, should I get, like. I don’t know, some water, or…?”
“That’d be great,” Steve says, and then he’s turning that little smile on him, and Eddie is scampering off to the kitchen like he’s the one on fire. Max rolls her eyes; it kind of aches, a little, but it had to be done.
Eddie returns balancing three glasses of ice water, and then they just sit and sip them, Eddie cross-legged on the bathroom floor and Steve on the toilet seat and Max in the bathtub. It’s not the worst afternoon she’s had this summer.
“Next time I tell you I want to cool off in the water, it’d better be the actual pool,” she tells Steve once he’s deemed her clear to go home, drying off with one of Eddie’s old towels.
“You got a pool, Harrington?” Eddie asks, and then makes a face, a little half-wince like he didn’t mean to say that.
“Yeah,” Steve says, looking at him, and he, on the other hand, is being totally deliberate. “You can come use it sometime, if you want.”
Eddie doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, just nods a bunch and says a bunch of shit that Max thinks amounts to maybe, which is totally actually a yes, because Steve’s nothing if not persistent. If the shit he’s witnessed today wasn’t enough for him to figure that out, he’ll learn.
The A/C is back on when she gets back home, which doesn’t stop Eddie from saying his uncle will come take a look at it tomorrow when he’s off work, and it should annoy her, having two young adults or whatever who think she needs looking after, but. But Steve looks so fucking relieved at that, she can’t help but be kind of happy about it.
Steve’s the one to take her to the doctor, too, for the first appointment and the tests and the one where they say what it is that’s wrong with her and he misspells it three times until the doctor writes it down for him, then keeps taking way too many notes about how to keep her from boiling her organs inside her body or whatever. He stops at his house on the way back to the trailer park, celebratory-slash-conciliatory ice cream melting to a soup in the bowl in her lap, and darts inside, re-emerging with a mini spray bottle.
“To keep you moist,” he says, and spritzes her in the face. “Like a houseplant.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “Did you use that for your hair?”
“Shut up,” he says, and drops it in her lap. He’s checking the mirrors before backing out, then, so she figures it’s safe to smile around her spoon.