The first semester of college is always the most difficult, for an innumerable amount of reasons. Not only is it nerve-wracking to be thrust into an entirely unfamiliar situation such as college, but it is a momentous change in one's personal life...
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For Steve, it wasn't some treasured memento from home.
Thankfully, the basic courses that every college student must take allowed you to share almost all of your classes with Steve. He was more than grateful for it as well. Despite being the former King of Hawkins, he was now essentially insignificant – and he didn't quite know how to handle it. He had grown accustomed to everyone in his school knowing his name, to recognising him as arguably the most popular person at Hawkins High. But here, no one – save yourself – knew him at all. He felt insignificant, and that constant, sinking feeling pushed him even closer to you, made him even more desperate to be with you always.
If he had to guess, that would likely be the primary factor in why he fell in love with you.
Steve had always cared deeply about you. You had been his friend since elementary school, when you'd punched a kid in the throat for stealing his crayons. (You'd gotten in loads of trouble, of course, but it was certainly a fun memory to look back on.) Even when you'd both gained attractiveness with the onset of puberty, neither of you felt any different about one another. You were still just best friends, and absolutely nothing more.
This was what made it even more to Steve when he found himself staring at you much longer than usual, eyeing the way you held the end of your pen between your lips when you were deep in thought, or the way you'd rock up to class with messy hair and a coffee after a long night of studying. He found himself positively enamoured by you – and it was absolutely mortifying.
The situation with Nancy had hurt Steve far more than he'd ever admitted to anyone. Sure, you knew all about how much he'd cried over it, how long he'd been heartbroken and downtrodden from it – but you didn't know how irreparably it had damaged him. You didn't know that he often lied awake at night, staring up at the ceiling as he wondered if she'd ever actually loved him? And if she hadn't – if she'd never loved him in all the time they'd been together – how could he possibly tell if anyone else was feigning their love for him? Was he doomed to spend the rest of his life clueless as to whether or not he was a burden, an obstacle for the people in his life to overcome? How many people were only in his life because they felt obligated to be? You, Dustin – hell, even his own mother? Were you all only there because you felt trapped, spending every day working yourself up to leaving him? Were any of you there simply because you wanted to be, because you really did care about him?
