New Fic: Reading Comprehension

[jackwabbit]

Reading Comprehension

Fandom: Stranger Things
Rated: PG
Category: Double Drabble. Steve Focus. Steve and Robin Friendship.
Time Frame: After season three, before season four.
Spoilers: Season Three, “The Bite.”
Summary: Steve educates himself. And his mom isn’t quite as bad as we think.

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For once, he had nothing going on.

There were no monsters or mind-controlled high school students demanding his attention.

And Dustin hadn’t called. Not in a few hours, anyway.

So he had a minute.

Which is why Steve Harrington was frantically digging through the boxes in the back of his closet.

He knew it was back there – somewhere.

Finally, he found it, wedged between an old baseball card price guide and a yearbook.

His first Playboy.

He opened it immediately. He flipped past the pictures that had so tantalized him when he’d first traded Johnny for it years ago, searching each page intensely.

And there it was.

A half-remembered article, titled “When Love Doesn’t Go the Way You Think.”

He bent the cover back, sat back against the wall, and started reading.

When he finished, he read it again.

Then he got up, tossed the still-open magazine on his bed, and left the house for a long walk.

When he came home, he’d come to terms with the fact that Robin was a lesbian.

And if his mom, on a rare day she actually checked in on him, wondered why her son was reading about homosexuality, she never mentioned it.

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A/N: I’ve written before about Playboy teaching Steve about homosexuality. And I’ve done the deep dive to find out when Playboy first started covering it (long before the eighties).  But I used the creative license I got out of a Cracker Jack box when I was six for the article title, etc, here. And I’m okay with that. As for Steve reading this in an actual closet, and anything else he might have learned from the article, I leave that to your imagination.