complexfemalecharacter | (no subject)

"I wouldn't dream of it," Steve says with a laugh, once again relieved at how easy this all is. He doesn't have to be such a try hard with Maeve, doesn't have to be the cool guy. She probably wouldn't even like the guy he tried so hard to be, but she does like who he really is when he's just being himself.

"I'll prep the rest. Just hold my stick and try not to let the main ingredient catch fire," he says with a grin, holding his own stick out for her to take. After glancing at the marshmallows and deciding that they're out of danger, he opens the graham crackers and the chocolate, breaking both in half and assembling the s'mores on his knees.

"Okay, reel them in." When Maeve draws the sticks in close enough, Steve sandwiches one of the marshmallows between the graham crackers while it's still hot enough to melt the chocolate, then hands to to Maeve in exchange for the other stick. Once he has his own s'more, he sets the sticks down and drops back into his chair, looking at her excitedly.

"Okay, now take a bite," he tells her happily, pausing to await her reaction before biting into his own. "And then you'll have officially had the American camping experience."

"I feel like I'll have to pee in the woods before it's properly the American camping experience," she answers as she takes the creation from Steve, all toasted marshmallows and melting chocolate between the crackers. It's going to be a mess, she can feel it, but she's mellow enough now that all she does is lean forward so she doesn't get the chocolate all over herself as it melts.

She takes a big bite, getting chocolate on her lips, the corner of her mouth, then looks over at Steve with her eyebrows raised.

"It's good," she says through a mouthful, then laughs. "It's really good."

"Oh, now you're gonna tell me that British people never pee in the woods?" He jokes, watching her with interest as she bites into the s'more. Maeve isn't really one to emote when something makes her happy, but he thinks that he's getting to be able to read her pretty well by now. Her eyes widen the slightest bit when she bites into it, like she's pleased, and Steve grins at her before taking a bite of his own.

"Told you," he says with his mouth full, smiling with slightly bulged cheeks as he reaches for Maeve's face. "You've got chocolate on you."

What he means to do is wipe it away with his thumb, but what he doesn't realize that there's a glob of chocolate on his thumb, and all he manages to do is smear it across her chin. He swears under his breath but can't help laughing a bit as he looks at her, rushing to chew his bite and swallow. "Oh, I didn't help at all."

"British people are much too refined to piss in the woods," Maeve agrees, then makes a face when Steve smears his thumb over her chin. She can feel it, the sticky chocolate, and she licks her lower lip, all the while knowing it isn't going to help at all.

"You've made a mess," she complains, half-hearted, sounding mellow and stoned. "Now a bear is definitely going to eat me. I'm all covered in chocolate. What bear could resist?"

“Definitely not this one,” Steve replies, baring his teeth and holding one hand up like a claw before leaning over to drag his tongue across Maeve’s chin, biting gently at it while making nom nom nom sounds. Laughing, he takes her chin between his thumb and forefinger, holding her still as he licks the chocolate and marshmallow from her skin, only sitting back once it’s all gone.

“There’s a joke to be made about eating out of your honey pot,” Steve tells her, also sounding mellow and a little horny, but that’s sort of his default setting around Maeve anyway. “Sweet, sweet honey.”

"You're fucking ridiculous," Maeve answers, sprawled back in her chair and trying to glare at him, all while she attempts to hide her smile. It turns out to be significantly more difficult when she's stoned.

She stretches her leg out and kicks Steve's foot lightly, feeling lazy and comfortable. She's also pretty sure she's still sticky, but isn't especially inclined to do anything about it.

Unless. "Is there a lake?" she asks suddenly.

“Yeah, but I make you laugh,” Steve breathes out lazily, leaning over to gently poke his fingertip at the upturned corner of her mouth. “Even though you try so hard not to.”

It isn’t a criticism, and he doesn’t say it like one. He isn’t teasing, either. He knows that Maeve keeps her emotions guarded, and she has good reason to do so. Steve does the same, to a lesser extent, but he wants to make Maeve laugh. She deserves to laugh, so yeah, he’ll go to ridiculous lengths to make it happen. He’s happy to do so, because he— well, he’s pretty sure that he loves her.

Well, that’s something to analyze when he’s not stoned.

“Yeah.” Steve pops the rest of his s’more into his mouth and chews, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he swallows. “It’s a ways over there,” he says, gesturing vaguely towards the East. “But I picked this spot because it has a neat lagoon type thing that the lake feeds into. Less crowded.”

He pushes himself to his feet and looks around, figuring out what they’d need to do before leaving the site. Put the fire out, probably. “Did you bring a suit?”

"No," she answers, then pushes to her feet and stretches. "Show me."

It's not that warm out, though she's comfortable right now. Getting into the water is going to end with her cold, she's certain of that, but at the same time, she doesn't care at all. She wants to get in the water, she wants to wash the chocolate off her face, and she wants to get a little cold if that's what happens.

It turns out, camping is sort of fun.

"The exact answer I was hoping for." Steve watches Maeve stretch and then picks up his beer to chug the rest of it before getting up to join her. He's pleasantly high, just relaxed and a little horny, and when he takes a deep breath, he appreciates the freshness of it in his lungs.

"Just a sec," he says as he gathers their bags. After zipping them up in the tent, he takes a stick and pokes at the fire, smothering the logs in the dirt until it's just smoldering. He grabs two more beers from the cooler and then joins Maeve, looking over at her with easy smile. "Let's do this."

It's getting a little late, with the sun just staring to set, so hopefully any families will be back at their campsites. There is a clear trail leading into the woods and Steve leads them along it, stepping forward to push aside a few overgrown branches for Maeve. When they get to the lagoon, there's a small group of people about their age on the opposite side, but they seem to be packing up.

"Looks like we got lucky," he tells her, turning to lift his eyebrows a few times and hand over the second beer to her.

"Looks like," she agrees with a small smile. She takes the beer from Steve, then sits down on a rock nearby and begins to unlace her boots. She's in no rush and she takes her time with them, then pulls off the socks she's wearing and shoves them inside. By the time she's done this, the group has started to wander back to their own campsite, laughing and talking as they go, and Maeve watches, waits until she can no longer hear them, then peels her shirt up and over her head.

She has no idea if they have towels, but she'd walked through Moordale's halls soaking wet before. She doesn't care if she has to walk back to their site the same way.

Standing, she shimmies out of her shorts and her tights, setting them all aside, then looks back at Steve, standing there in a black bra and a black pair of knickers.

As the group passes by, Steve gives them a lazy salute and takes another sip of his beer before wedging it upright into some gravel. He steps out of his sneakers and undresses down to his black boxer briefs, laughing a little when he turns to see Maeve standing there in her own black underwear.

"Look at us, matchy matchy," he teases, sauntering over to her as he looks her over, putting his hands on his hips as he leans down to give her a lingering kiss on the mouth. He keeps one hand on the curve of her hip and slides the other slowly up her back, dragging his fingertips along the line of her spine until they slide under the band of her bra, lifting to tug at the hooks a little.

"Can I?" He asks quietly against her ear, glancing around the space before pulling back to look at her with a bit of a heated gaze, coaxing her with his eyes as he bites his bottom lip.

"Well, I don't want to swim in it," she answers with a little grin, shivering at the warmth of Steve's breath against her ear. She would have without question, just jumped straight into the pool in her underwear, but there's no one else here. And if anyone comes by now, they're going to be in for a bit of an eyeful.

Which will certainly help Maeve's reputation.

She shifts her shoulders back and forth a little. "Get on with it, Harrington," she teases.

“Someone’s eager,” Steve says with a grin, but he quickly undoes the hooks with one hand and then puts his palms on her shoulders, hooking his thumbs under the straps to pull them down off of her arms. His gaze falls immediately to her exposed tits as he drops the bra on top of his clothes, but he can’t be blamed for that. They really are spectacular.

So spectacular, and Steve is so stoned, that he can’t resist ducking down to bury his face between them, kissing the swell of one before pulling her nipple between his lips to give it a gentle suck. This is all two-fold, because Steve loves mouthing at her tits and also it distracts her enough for him to suddenly bend down and wrap his arm around her knees, lifting her into a fireman’s carry as he walks towards the water.

“Getting on with it!” He laughs, sliding one hand up the back of her thigh as he steps into the water. It’s cold where it laps around his ankles, and he quickly surges forward to dunk them both, feeling the cold prickle at his skin before he starts to adjust.

"Jesus Christ," she blurts out as Steve picks her up, then sputters out another expletive as the cold water hits her, even though this was exactly what she wanted. They're both going to be shivering by the end of this, but at the same time, it's everything. It's perfect.

She unwraps her arms from around Steve's shoulders and pushes away from him a little, moving into the water and then ducking under, getting her hair wet. When she comes up again, she pushes it back from her face, shivering a little.

"It's colder than I expected," she admits, even though she's smiling.

Steve laughs happily as she pushes away from him, dunking himself and tossing his hair back before swimming more towards the center of the lagoon, where his feet can’t touch the bottom. It makes him the slightest bit uneasy in a way that it wouldn’t have before the Upside Down, or Darrow. There are monsters lurking everywhere, and he just has to try not to think about it.

“Think about how good the fire will feel after we’re done,” Steve tells her, turning his thoughts away from monsters to smile at his gorgeous girlfriend instead. “Or I could always warm you up.”

He gives her a playful wink and then takes a deep inhale so he can float on his back, watching as the purple-gray sky starts to give way to a blanket of stars.

Sometimes, he would do the same thing in his pool back home. When his parents were fighting or when he was anxious, he’d go out there and float, letting the water cover his ears and block out all other sound.

“This was a good idea,” he tells Maeve, spreading his arms out to the side. “Even if it is cold.”

"I'm very smart," she answers before she then tips onto her back as well to look up at the sky. It is cold and her skin is prickled with goosebumps, never mind the fact that the cold is killing her buzz just a little, but it's peaceful, too. The sky is dark and bright at the same time, the stars no longer blocked by the light pollution of the city.

Without moving, without sitting up, Maeve reaches out in the water blindly until her fingers find Steve's. She takes his hand, tangling their fingers together, then continues to float on her back as she exhales slowly and closes her eyes.

"There was a pool at Moordale," she tells Steve. "Most of the kids who went there had a decent amount of money. We had a swim team. I used to sneak in there after hours and go swimming."

Steve doesn't know if he believes in Heaven, but if it does exist, he hopes that it's something like this.

Maeve takes his hand in the water as they float and Steve stares up at the stars, feeling stoned in a mellow sort of way. He looks over at Maeve floating in the water, pale skin dappled with moonlight as her breasts just barely break the surface of the water, nipples hard from the chill. He feels turned on in a lazy sort of way, without any urgency to it, and he hums as he listens to Maeve speak.

Once again, he realizes just how good he had it. He could swim whenever he wanted, without any trespassing involved.

"If we had gone to school together, I would have tried to get you to come use my pool," Steve drawls out, imagining how that might have gone. "God, you probably would have hated me."

"Probably," she agrees. "But you can't hold it against me, I hated everyone in secondary school."

Not Aimee. Not Otis either, in the end. It turns out she actually hadn't hated many people at all, even though they had been cruel to her, even though she'd been a social pariah. But Steve was popular, like Ruby and Olivia and Anwar, and even though she knows he isn't anything like them, that's also the group he would have hung out with at Moordale.

"You would have been one of the Untouchables," she says, sounding amused. "They were the popular kids."

"Probably," Steve agrees, not sounding too thrilled about it. He doesn't have to ask for more details, because the Untouchables explains itself. They exist at every high school in every time, without question. For so long, that's what Steve thought he wanted;; the popularity, the power, the smugness in thinking that he was better than everyone else.

But he was wrong. So totally, completely wrong.

"Hopefully they'll also come to learn that it's all bullshit before it's too late," he says, twisting in the water so that he's treading instead of floating, ghosting a hand along Maeve's side before turning his head to kiss the inside of her arm once she's close enough. He noses at her shoulder and then at the side of her breast, letting his bottom lip rest against her skin as he looks up at her with big, earnest eyes. "I'm glad that you like me now. Like, really glad."

"I doubt it," Maeve answers. She's fairly certain Steve's change of heart is a rare thing. People who look like Ruby and Olivia don't change because the world never requires it of them. They have money and they have beauty and they have the right clothes, which all equals power.

Maeve doesn't think she's gross, not by any means, but she doesn't look like them. And she has the bad reputation to boot.

"Yeah, of course you are," she answers, grinning at him. "You're getting laid because I like you."

The comment makes Steve huff out a laugh, and maybe if he were feeling a little more insecure, it might worry him, but it doesn't. He knows that she cares about him, and wants him around for more than the fact that he's a fantastic lay.

She might not be able to talk about it yet, but that's okay. Steve isn't sure that he's ready yet, either. But he feels it, and so does she. That's good enough for now.

"You say that like I don't give as good as I get," he teases, sliding his hand along her body as she floats and cupping her between her legs, pressing his palm up where she's always so insanely warm. "I really want to drag you up into the grass and fuck you," he tells her, ducking under the water and resurfacing with his head between her legs, grinning as he tosses his wet hair back. "But I didn't bring a condom."

That hasn't always stopped them before, and he knows that she's on the pill, but he always leaves it up to her. Whatever they do is up to her, always, because he wants her to be safe and happy above all else.

"We'll freeze our arses off," Maeve says, laughing, hooking her knees over his shoulders, suddenly aware that she really is quite cold. The water hadn't felt as cold for a little while, but now that she's spoken, she can feel it again, prickling like little needles against her skin.

"But we could probably get warm back in the tent," she offers, eyebrow arched, one heel pressing into the skin between Steve's shoulder blades. "Where there are blankets and towels and a fire. And condoms, I assume."

She's on the pill, but she doesn't like taking risks more than she has to. One abortion is enough for Maeve.

"You would assume correctly," Steve murmurs as he takes Maeve's hands in his hips. She's practically weightless in the water, and while it's cold, Steve is perfectly content with the insides of her thighs brushing his ears. He leans over to kiss the curve of her ribs where they crest the water, and then he turns around and shifts Maeve's legs around his waist.

"Climb on, I'll swim us back." Once her arms are around his neck, he swims them back to shore and lifts her out of the water. The air prickles their skin and Steve hisses, laughing as he sets her down and scoops up his t-shirt, dabbing water from her naked body before scooping up his flannel and pulling it over her shoulders, helping her arms into it and smiling as he buttons it up with chilly fingers.

I love you, he thinks, but he doesn't say it. Maybe it's obvious by the look on his face, and once he's done with the buttons, he leans in to give her a soft kiss before turning away to grab his jeans and pull them onto his wet legs.

"All the shit I packed and I forgot towels," he says with a laugh, pushing his wet hair back from his face before scooping up the rest of their clothes. "You good to walk back?"

Maeve takes a moment to shove her feet into her boots, even though they're still a bit wet. Everything will dry by morning, she has to figure, and she'd rather not walk back barefoot. That would be worse than all the rest.

"Let's go," she agrees, teeth chattering a little as she shivers.

It's nice, though. Refreshing. Even though she'd been a little stoned earlier, she feels alert now and awake, like she hasn't in a long time. Everything about the air around them feels sharp, the starlight like pinpricks coming down through the trees.

"It really is pretty out here," she says as they walk back to their spot.

"Yeah, it really is," Steve agrees, looking up at the blanket of stars as he walks behind Maeve, holding a hand out to let it hover near her lower back just in case she slips, though he's careful not to let her see him doing it.

Once they get back to the campground proper, they pass a site where the people they saw at the lake earlier are sitting around a roaring campfire. One of them wolf whistles at the site of Maeve's bare legs and Steve's shirtlessness, but it's a good-natured, happy sound.

"Come have some beers with us later if you want!" One of the girls calls out, and Steve gives her a lazy salute as they pass. Once they're back to their own site, Steve curls his hand around Maeve's hip from behind and leans in to kiss her temple.

"Why don't you go in the tent and put on something dry," he offers, kissing her again before stepping away. "And I'll build the fire back up."