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She's not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point during the middle of their second year of high school, Mike Wheeler's mouth became one of her favorite things in the world.
She's always liked kissing him, always wanted to kiss him after that first kiss, especially after seeing more kisses on the tv. They'd shared plenty of kisses after closing the gate, but most had at first been short, sweet kisses. Pecks here and there. Lovely little touches of lips that would still make her face hot if she thought about the kisses even days or weeks later.
But as time goes by and they both grow, the kisses grow too. They grow longer and hungrier in a way that makes her entire body hot if she thinks about the kisses on her own later on. They make her crave more, worse even than her now infamous sweet tooth.
What she's learned from Joyce about relationships and growing up and cobbled together from textbooks and movies, she knows kissing can lead to other things and that the kissing is supposed to feel nice.
But nothing could have prepared her for really how nice it is to have her hand in his wonderful thick, dark hair, how much she even enjoys how his nose fits snug against hers while his lips capture hers again and again.
Nothing could have prepared her for how nice it is to have her other hand on his chest, feeling how fast his heart is beating under her fingers, and knowing hers is beating just as fast.
Nothing could have prepared her for how nice it is to kiss him all sorts of different ways in all sorts of different places, all over his face, tracing the lines of his freckles, or his neck, or...
She was not prepared for this. As his hands rest on either side of her shoulders, she thinks it's so much better than "nice".
She's just starting to think brilliant might be a word that gets at least a bit closer to describing what she's feeling, when she shifts and the hem of her shirt shifts up a bit, exposing a bit of bare skin and his hands, which have been traveling down her arms to her waist brush her back.
He stops abruptly and she's ready to groan. She knows they've got time before first period starts, since he started driving them both to school in his mom's old station wagon, he's always insisted on getting there early. Biology is his first class of the day, and Nancy hadn't been kidding when she'd warned them that the Biology teacher was impossible. She's ready to launch into yet another round of teasing him that he won't get extra credit for being early. But then she quickly realizes what his finger is resting on.
It's the tip of a long, ugly scar scraping along her skin from just a few inches above her shirt hemline to the tip of her left shoulder.
The concerned look on his face coupled with the memory of what the scar is from crash into her like icy water on her previously feverish skin. All the lovely bliss of their previous kisses and touches washes away.
"I'm sorry," he says, pulling away from her. "I didn't, I wasn't trying to stick my hand up your shirt or anything."
She smiles a little ruefully, grateful he's giving her the chance to simply pretend they were stopping because they didn't want to get carried away, and not because her body bears physical reminders of the horrors of her past.
But she knows things work best between them when they're open. That she fell in love with him over those 353 days because he'd been completely honest with her, and that she feels most loved when she lets him see all of her and he stays with her anyway too.
Friends don't lie.
She takes a deep breath. "The isolation tank," she says.
"Huh?"
"The scar. I got it from the isolation tank."
"O-oh."
"The first few times they tried me in it, just to, um, see if it would work. But the third time, it, well, I - I don't, I don't know what it was called, but the tanks had... sort of little metal platforms that would lower me into and, um, pull me out of the water." She's talking faster now, remembering and trying to explain without really having words for so many of the things in the lab. She just wants to get it out and get it over with. "The platforms, they weren't very big, just like the size of a rung on a ladder, anyway, the third time I didn't have a good grip on the side handles, and I slipped off but the platform just kept going up and..."
He winces. She winces too remembering how the metal sliced into her back unevenly, ripping her suit, the salt water stinging the wound so badly she saw stars.
They hadn't taken her to the tank again for a long time after that, even after the wound had fully healed. Not until Papa had brought her that picture of the man he'd wanted her to find and repeat his words.
"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." Oh he's so, so good.
"No, it's-it's ok, that's all, that's how I got the scar."
His eyes look so sad and a little angry, the way they always do whenever she tells him about the lab. She can tell he's simultaneously torn between disbelief that people could be so cruel and anger that they are and were to her.
Sometimes having a boyfriend who was so good was hard. She can tell listening to her stories breaks his heart a little bit each time. Of course he always insists that his anger and hurt is peanuts compared to what she must have gone through, and he's right, but that's not the point. She's already lived through it, there's no taking that back, but if she could sheild someone else, especially Mike from even the small pain of realizing how terrible the world can be, she would do it.
But she can't. He already knows some anyway, and he's made it clear he would rather fight any threat to her well-being, whether it's interdimensional or internal demons, alongside her as best he can. And besides, friends don't lie.
She thinks back to his D&D class, paladin, lawful good, like a holy knight. Strong moral code.
She knows he'd blush about a million shades of red if she told him he really kind of was her knight in shining armor. Which, she idly thinks is maybe a really good reason to tell him, maybe even in front of the others. She knows he doesn't exactly come riding in on a big white horse to save her, but they save each other, which is even better she thinks.
(Years later, he would confess to her that he'd chosen that class because he'd always liked to imagine himself rescuing a beautiful princess. And that almost immediately after meeting her, he'd started even more vividly imagining being rescued by a beautiful princess.)
Still, the strong moral code and at times brutal honesty sometimes means the mood is totally ruined when El just wants to make out with her adorable, dorky boyfriend like a normal teenager.
They hurt her enough in the past, it's not fair that they get to fuck up her present sometimes too.
"Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and just dropkick all those assholes to the moon," he says fervently.
She smiles a bit, in spite of the tears threatening at the corners of her eyes. "You can't even dropkick a football," she points out. His athletic abilities, minus running from bullies and demo-dogs, are pretty much nonexistent.
"Look, if I can figure a way to travel back in time, I think I can figure a way to learn how to dropkick some evil scientists."
She laughs. "Okay. Sure."
He pretend glares at her unconvinced response for a moment before softening into sadness again. "I just hate that they did all of that to you. I wish I could make it so it never happened to to you, to anyone."
"You can't though." She's wished the same thing enough times to know there's no changing it.
Heavy sigh. "I know. Maybe I just want things to be better for you."
"They are now."
"Yeah?"
How can he not know this? He and their friends and family - Dustin and Lucas and Will and Max and Nancy and Jonathan and Jim and Joyce, they have all made her life infinitely better in almost every conceivable way.
"Yes," she says emphatically, her hands on his neck now, trying to angle his face toward hers, trying to get his eyes to look into hers. "So much better."
She'd been thinking before that she just wanted to be able make out with her boyfriend like any normal teenager, but now she's thinking she wants to grab him up and kiss him until they're both breathless because she loves how wonderful and deeply caring he is and she loves how much he cares for her and she loves how he looks at her with those dark eyes of his, even when they're filled with concern and...
For having the mood ruined for her before, she thinks it's really quite remarkable how quickly a look from him can get her so stirred up again.
She kisses him, hard.
"So much better," she insists. He kisses her back with equal enthusiasm, apparently at least somewhat convinced. "So much better now, I promise."
They wind up being quite late for first period after all.