Steve "Patch" Earl Johnson and Dr. Kayla Caroline Brady are a supercouple on the American soap opera Days of Our Lives.

He had a vendetta against his former best friend, Bo Brady (Kayla's brother) who had gouged out his eye during a fight long ago.

His bad boy image and criminal actions were no match for the beautiful good girl, Kayla Brady.

One night, he rescued her from a street gang and left a note with his number on her car, and eventually, the two fell in love.

When he did, he shunned Kayla, hoping she would end up with Jack so his brother would have someone special with whom to spend his seemingly final days.

Jack (now played by Matthew Ashford) recovered, but Kayla rebuffed every one of his attempts to consummate the marriage, unable to let her love for Steve go.

Kayla wanted to get out of her marriage, but Jo and Steve begged her to wait until Jack's political election had passed.

A few weeks later, Jack won the political election and an unscrupulous reporter gave him the compromising pictures, intending to blackmail him.

A pregnant Kayla thought it was the best thing to do in the hopes Marina would grant Steve a divorce so they could truly be married.

Kayla escaped prison and she and Steve followed the kidnapper to Australia where, along with Bo and Hope, they were able to recover their baby.

It was no accident; the explosion was meant to kill Bo and was planned by the evil oil baron Lawrence Alamain.

He was awaiting death, and refusing to let his wife Jennifer, daughter Abigail and mother Jo know he was still alive, hoping to spare them the agony of losing him (yet again, as he has 'died' more than once).

A caring orderly tried to see if he wanted anything to eat or drink and a delirious Jack was shocked to see that it was his brother Steve Johnson!

The shock of seeing her long lost love caused Kayla to faint, but when she awoke, her wildest dreams were confirmed: Steve has returned.

Kayla and Steve have spent a lot of time together trying to stir up memories, she explained to him why the sky was blue and the meaning of e=mc2, but upon a visit to Cincinnati, Ohio - Nick Stockton's old stomping grounds - it appeared as though Steve was giving up on those missing memories and on Kayla.

Steve's daughter Stephanie also proved to be a great draw for him, as the young woman joyfully welcomed her thought-dead father into her life.

At the same time, his brother Jack made a complete recovery and left with wife and son to head up the London Spectator news office.

Before John and Marlena could get back from Canada with the antidote for Kayla, she flatlined, and Steve became hysterical; he lifted her up and gave her a long kiss, and miraculously, her heart started to beat again.

After Kayla was released from the hospital, Steve remained by her side, but was distant; because of her fragile, still-recovering state, he was hesitant to tell her that his memory had not really returned.

To find out for certain, she asked Steve to take a trip with her to the bungalow where they had hid from Victor Kiriakis nearly two decades earlier; she wanted to 'test' his memory there.

Once at the bungalow, Steve decided to tell Kayla the truth: his memory did not return— and he remembered a life with a separate family, a different wife and daughter.

Waking up in the middle of a dream, he thought that he and Kayla were on the run from Victor Kiriakis, something that had happened nearly 20 years prior.

After more desperate pleas from Steve to believe in him, and after he signed 'courage' to her as he did on their wedding day, Kayla relented; they reunited passionately.

With some convincing, Steve agreed that they would become the foster parents of the baby boy, nicknamed "Pocket" by Kayla.

Steve and Kayla then had to deal with the rape of their daughter, Stephanie, by Ford Decker, who afterwards died in an accidental fall.

Steve and Kayla were part of a growing "supercouple" phenomenon on Days of our Lives, largely starting after Luke Spencer and Laura Webber from General Hospital took the daytime world by storm and enthralled viewers with their adventurous and romantic storylines.

Many fellow actors and co-stars have praised the magic of their partnership, with one writer from Soap Opera Update quoting that "There was Bogie and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Scarlett and Rhett.

In the book No End to Her, Martha Nochimson notes that the Patch/Kayla storyline reverses the usual male-focused narrative of the Beauty and the Beast story: The Beast in fact goes through some specific change, the root of which is Persephone's transformative encounter with Hades, not Oedipus's destructive encounter with his mother.

Steve's resumption of his original name suggests that he no longer feels alien to the human community because of his missing eye -- rather an interesting reversal on the Freudian relationship between the love of women and mutilation.

Kayla helps Steve to a sense of his wholeness by creating her own strong feminine identity through a series of encounters with the Oedipal dyad, beginning with her intervention in the Patch-Kiriakis alliance.