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Stiles will admit that he’s missed a lot the last six years. When he enrolled at NYU for college, he knew that meant he’d be out of the Beacon Hills loop for a while. Such that the Beacon Hills Loop was, consisting primarily for him of his dad and Scott, with the occasional input from Lydia, when she deigned to acknowledge him.
He knew when he took the leap and continued on in grad school out there he’d be missing even more. It was hard, and it sucked as much as it was awesome. But it was always a given he was going to come back.
Besides, Beacon Hills has always been a sleepy, stagnant town. The only thing that ever changes there is the leaves. Stiles’s dad is a firm and comforting constant himself, and as far as Scott goes, well, Stiles had figured that no one really accomplishes much in their early twenties, so he wouldn’t be missing much.
Of course, Scott had to prove Stiles so spectacularly wrong that even his genetic makeup changed.
On top of being stagnant and sleepy, Beacon Hills is apparently also deeply supernatural. A few weeks into Scott’s freshman year at Beacon Hills Community College, he went and got himself bitten by a werewolf. Because why the fuck not?
To Stiles’s credit, when Scott called him to tell him about it, he only thought it was a joke for about three minutes. To further cement his Awesome Best Friend status, it only took him another two minutes to offer to come home and help him figure it out.
“Nah, man,” Scott had brushed him off, about eighty percent too calm for the given situation. “You just got there. Besides, I met a guy. He says he can help.”
And it’s not that Stiles was jealous, per se. Shocked, maybe, considering he and Scott had built their friendship on the basis that they were both losers who didn’t just meet guys—and so what if the way Scott was “meeting guys” was a lot more innocent than Stiles would personally like to “meet guys?” Those were “guys” who weren’t Stiles, who had been with Scott through tears in the sandbox, Coach Finstock’s mortifying version of Sex Ed, and every dateless high school dance BHHS had to offer. Who was this “guy” Scott was suddenly “meeting” that got to take Stiles’s place when next level cool shit like lycanthropy was happening?
Suffice to say, this was not the best introduction to the enigmatic force that is Derek Hale. And while Stiles has never had the apparent honor of meeting His Royal Werewolf personally, he’s certainly had to hear about him ad nauseam.
“Derek says he’ll teach me how to control myself.”
“Derek killed his uncle, so he’s the alpha now.”
“Jackson’s a giant lizard, but Derek says he thinks he can fix it.”
“Derek was dating this hot teacher, but she turned out to be super evil.”
“Derek got kidnapped again, but I can probably find him.”
And on and on and on. Derek is like the father Scott never really got to have. Except only a couple years older, with lots of money and a really cool car. So, like a brother, maybe. A brother who, instead of buying Scott beer, keeps him from getting murdered by creatures of the night.
Derek is like a best friend who is inextricably bound to Scott. Because even though Scott is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed True Alpha, that doesn’t mean he really wants to be. So playing second fiddle in a werewolf pack that’s growing alarmingly fast is pretty cushy for him. And Derek is so smart, and resourceful, and apparently knows everything about anything.
Well, except—from what Scott has described—how to date anyone who isn’t trying to kill him at least a little bit. Not that Scott is any better.
Oh, and that’s another change altogether. The girls. Scott gets bitten by a manic victim of a werewolf hate crime, and suddenly he has a revolving door of girlfriends. A slow revolving door, but still. In high school, the only person of the opposite sex who would have been able to pick him out of a lineup was his mother.
First there was Allison, who Scott was physically incapable of shutting up about, even when Stiles was trying to talk about things like his suspicious rash and the pizza guy he might want to have sex with. Allison, who sometimes wanted to kill Scott, and other times wanted to kill for him. Who loved him, broke his heart, put it back together, and broke it again when she moved away to Paris.
Then there was Kira. Scott was a bit more sensible about her, even if he could never fully figure out where they stood. Stiles greatly appreciated his new ability to focus on other people’s problems, since at the time Stiles needed frequent advice on how to break up with the Abnormal Psychology T.A. he never should have hooked up with in the first place, considering she had a direct line to his grades. But as sweet and charming and badass as Kira was, nothing could keep them together when she lost control of the malevolent fox spirit inside of her, and ultimately had to move to the desert to learn how not to commit senseless murders.
Then came Malia, and really, Stiles doesn’t even know where to start with a brief summary of her issues, beyond the fact that she generally wants to kill everything, though she usually doesn’t. But. Scott is centered with her. Calm and certain and happy.
“And we’re getting married!” Scott shouts over the line as Stiles fumbles a handful of books into a box. “I asked her. It just fell out of my mouth—I didn’t even get her a ring yet.”
Stiles is in a state of shock, standing in the middle of his empty, half-packed apartment. “And she still said yes?”
“Dude,” Scott scoffs. “She spent a third of her life as a coyote. A diamond wasn’t exactly the first thing on her mind.”
From what Scott’s told him about Malia’s history of loss and unfairness, Stiles can probably guess what was on her mind. Family. Permanence. A chance to lay new roots and pray that they’ll last.
Stiles gets that. Too well, sometimes. And he’s happy for Scott, even if Stiles personally hasn’t had the will to go on a date himself in over a year. Scotty was never the one he was jealous of. Not that, you know, he’s jealous of anybody.
“This is great, man,” he sighs into a smile. “Give me the when and the where, and I’ll be there ugly crying.”
“You better. The Best Man can’t go and ditch the wedding.”
Another handful of books slips through his fingers to thunk into the pile in the box. It’s not like he’s ever doubted that Scott loves him. But the reaffirmation that Scott still loves him the most is nice.
Stiles sees this opportunity for what it really is. Which, yeah, duh, obviously it’s a time for him to support Scott through a major life change. Whatever. But it’s also a chance for Stiles to swoop back home and reassert the fact that he’s the one that knows everything, and he’s perfectly capable of being the one to come up with stupid plans that save the day. Even if he can’t pull off a leather jacket or afford a Camaro.
With every evil passing through Beacon Hills while Stiles was away, Derek undermined Stiles’s title as the Coolest Person Scott Knows. Every time Stiles would rush home during Summer or Winter breaks, the awful evil that was plaguing the town was mysteriously wrapped up just hours before his plane landed. It seems both bad guys and Derek alike have no regard for the amount of research Stiles had done while crunching on airline peanuts.
Stiles would gawk at the sudden “fortunate” turn of events, and Scott would shrug and happily mutter, “Derek is a good alpha.” Even Stiles’s dad would get on the Derek praise train, and his dad hates guys with leather and sports cars—mostly because there were a few too many magazines in Stiles’s room growing up with men like that on the cover.
But.
That’s all over. It’s done. Because Stiles is moving back home, and he’s moving back in on his old territory. He’s going to be the best damn Best Man any guy could ask for, then he’s going to take a victory lap and be the best damn Best Friend.
And Derek Hale can kiss his human ass.
*******************************
Stiles is running late to Scott and Malia’s engagement party, and it’s definitely throwing a wrench in his plans to prove he’s the Go-To Guy. When the party had been sprung on him last minute, he had rearranged his whole schedule (and flight plan, which cost him a considerable fee, thank you very much) to arrive home in time. With time to spare, in fact. But a massive technical delay in his connecting flight in Colorado sends his careful planning up in flames.
By the time his plane touches the tarmac in San Francisco, he knows he’s well and truly screwed. If he takes an Uber straight to the party, he’ll be able to arrive fashionably late. But he’s wearing sweatpants and smells like stale sweat and the fussy baby he sat next to for three hours. It’s not exactly projecting the aura of a guy who grew up and got his life together.
So he sets his destination to his dad’s house—Or his house? They never really discussed the longevity of his stay—and urges his driver to break traffic laws enough that he’s almost certainly going to get a one star passenger rating. He tips exorbitantly and barrels into his house, up the stairs, and directly into the shower. He changes into a crisp, light blue button down and a pair of jeans he likes to classify as his Casually Competent look.
Then he’s tumbling into his jeep and praying that she starts after years tucked away in the garage. His baby never disappoints.
The party is at the renovated Hale house—a veritable mansion tucked as creepily into the woods as possible. Both the location and the suddenness of the event were at the father of the bride’s insistence. Peter, who has an on-again, off-again relationship with death and several evil plots under his belt. Stiles has his doubts about the Hale family as a whole if they’re willing to forgive and forget this easily…
Stiles parks behind the long line of cars littering the clearing in the woods surrounding the house. He takes a moment to check his hair in his rearview mirror—messy and a little too long, but there’s not much he can do about it now. He pops a breath mint, feeling a bit like he’s about to walk into a high school reunion.
And so what if he is? Back then he faded into obscurity, sinking down into the depths of loserdom weighed down by the anchor of Lydia’s distaste for his burning infatuation. Now… He thought something encouraging might come to mind, but it doesn’t.
“Fuck,” he breathes as he climbs out of the jeep. The only thing that propels him toward the house is his grim determination to prove he’s better than Derek fucking Hale.
The evening is clearly in full swing when he slips through the front door. Despite Scott’s insistence that it was going to be a “low-key family thing,” Stiles is glad he opted for the button down. “Family” seems to mean upwards of fifty people, and “low-key” is underselling the inherent charm and glamour of a house full of supernaturally hot werewolves.
Stiles is willing to admit that he has a particular weakness for a pretty face (among other things). And if he’s honest, his focus is shaky on a good day. As he pads further into the house, can he really be blamed for being driven to distraction by all of Scott’s friends? It’s like he’s stumbled onto a runway.
Hm. Suddenly this feels like one of the recurring nightmares Stiles had back in high school. Just to be safe, he glances down to make sure his clothes haven’t evaporated into thin air.
Which is, of course, precisely when he slams full force into a solid wall of muscle. The shock of the broad firmness rounding the corner is only heightened by the lukewarm splash of wine tumbling out of the stranger’s glass. It catches him mostly in the neck, specks splashing up over his lips and long lines of it streaming down to stain his collar.
Well. So much for good impressions.
He takes a step back from the man who seems to be frozen in some early stage of mortification. It makes sense—it has to be utterly humiliating to be a clumsy werewolf. His lycanthropy is, of course, an assumption Stiles is making based on the fact that holy Christ is this the hottest man he’s ever seen.
He’s of a similar height, but what feels to Stiles like double the width. Smoothly muscled and softly tanned, he looks like the very image of what you’d find in the dictionary under Tall, Dark, and Handsome. With a jawline that could cut diamonds and dark, prominent eyebrows arched over shockingly soft kaleidoscope eyes—Stiles is having a little trouble breathing.
Dumbly, he flicks his tongue out over his lips. The remnants of wine there blossom with flavor over his taste buds, making him hum. “Pinot noir?”
“Gamay,” the stranger corrects, voice rough as if from disuse.
Stiles breaks out into a grin, and the stranger blinks slowly. “S’good.”
Mr. Clumsy’s mouth falls open, and it looks like his brain is doing a detailed impression of an old internet dial-up tone. Stiles lets him take the time to formulate a response. It’s not really a hardship to hold his intense and razor-focused attention.
“Really? You’re hopeless.” A curly-haired blonde interrupts before the man can seem to string a word together. Her cherry red lips are quirked up in a smirk, and her killer rack is pushed halfway up to her ears by a bra that must’ve been a gift from the gods. Really, if Stiles wasn’t so swept up in the first guy, she’d win his attention at the drop of a dime.
As it is, she cuffs the stranger on the back of the head, making him jerk and twist his lips into a scowl. “Take him to the laundry room, dork. Like six different people live here—I’m sure you can find him a shirt that’ll fit him while you throw this in for a wash.”
She stalks away as abruptly as she came, hips swaying like she knows Stiles is glancing after her. When he slides his gaze back to the man in front of him, his handsome face has rearranged itself into a carefully blank mask. But Stiles doesn’t miss the faint dusting of pink over his cheeks.
“Did you want…?”
Stiles is hardly going to pass up the opportunity to sneak away from the party with a handsome guy. Scott’s joyous and impending nuptials be damned. “Yeah, thanks. Red isn’t really my color.”
The guy guides him forward with a large palm on the small of his back, heat prickling along Stiles’s spine. He snorts softly at Stiles’s quip, muttering a contrary, “I find that hard to believe.”
Excitement tumbles in Stiles’s guts like they’re the ones thrown into the wash. He’s not exactly a pariah, but he’s never been the smoothest on the dating scene, either. The stranger’s warm, simmering interest tugs at Stiles like a kite string. He feels like he’ll lift off his feet and take off for the sky any minute.
Once they’re tucked away in the laundry room in a quiet corner of the house, they both hesitate. Neither knows the appropriate first move to make. Or, more accurately, the inappropriate first move to make.
The man reaches for Stiles’s shirt buttons, but pauses his hands in mid-air before dropping them back to his sides. He clears his throat. “Sorry, I— I mean, I could leave you alone to—”
Stiles slips the first button through the hole slowly, holding eye contact. But the stranger doesn’t hold it for long, dropping his gaze to the deft workings of Stiles’s fingers on the long line of buttons down his torso. The more pale skin that’s revealed, the hungrier he looks. By the time Stiles slips the button down off his shoulders, the guy’s practically vibrating, like a puppy waiting to pounce on rawhide.
Stiles takes the man by the wrist, bulldozing all his hesitation by pressing his hand to his side—hot skin to hot skin. The man takes his cue and runs with it. He hooks his arm around Stiles’s back, tugging him forward until they’re pressed flush together, and then takes Stiles’s lips in a soft but determined kiss.
On a graph of the best kisses of all time, this one definitely obliterates the fucking curve. Stiles can’t help but sigh into it, wrapping his arms around the stranger’s shoulders and sliding his long fingers into his hair. The man shifts the exchange into exploratory with the slip of his tongue, playful with a nip of teeth.
In his excitement, Stiles tugs a little too enthusiastically at the man’s hair. But he seems to like it. He growls in the back of his throat, shifting forward to slam Stiles against the front of the washing machine with more force than strictly necessary.
Stiles meeps at the collision, more shocked than upset by the bruise that’ll surely be blossoming on his shoulder blade later. But the man rears back, hair a mess, lips swollen, and face twisted once again in mortification.
“Fuck. Sorry. I don’t usually— I just—” Stiles is beginning to wonder if this guy is even capable of full sentences. The man takes a deep breath and schools the embarrassment off his face, his new expression drawing his dark brows together to make him look stern. “I think maybe one of Isaac’s shirts will fit you.”
Stiles rolls his eyes. Like one overexhuberent shove is going to pry him away from all that. The first time Stiles came home for break after Scott got bitten, his best friend play-shoved him through Ms. McCall’s freshly painted drywall. Stiles can take a little rough housing, especially in the name of boning.
“I’m more interested in getting into your shirt,” Stiles drawls, tongue literally in cheek. It’s a line that’s quite possibly directly out of the many pornos flooding his laptop with viruses for company lately, but it makes the stranger smile. When Stiles slides his palm under his olive sweater to ghost across his well-sculpted abdomen, the man’s smile shifts from soft at the edges to a sharp, predatory flash of teeth.
By god, this guy knows he’s gorgeous. He may be essentially pre-verbal, but he seems to know what to do when his body’s involved. Arrogance is solidly at third place on his list of turn offs. This should have Stiles sprinting in the other direction. But maybe Stiles can make an allowance in this case, since is it really arrogance when he’s right? Isn’t it just self-awareness?
The man whips his sweater over his head and Stiles’s list of turn offs erupts into flames, alongside his loyalty to Scott and his special day, any hesitation about voyeuristic werewolf ears, and reservations about sticking his hand down a stranger’s pants.
Because he’s definitely on his way to doing that.
Stiles’s mouth finds the man’s pectoral like an opposite-poled magnet. He drags his lips across the muscle as his hands fall between them, making quick work of the man’s thick leather belt. He bites softly around a nipple as he jerks the button of the jeans open, and when the man smooths his hands down the plane of Stiles’s back until he cups the swell of his ass in two greedy palms, the moan that falls out of Stiles turns into a mewl as he darts his tongue out to taste warm skin.
He’s just dipping his fingers beneath the waistband of the stranger’s snug black boxer briefs when he hears a familiar strangled laugh.
“Dude,” Scott bites out, shaky with amusement. “I hope you weren’t expecting this kind of welcome home from everybody.”
Stiles jerks away from the stranger like he’s spontaneously combusted. “Scott! Buddy! We were just, um…”
“Shirt,” the other man grumbles. He clenches his jaw, like he’d punch himself in the face for the response if he could. “A new one. He needs— I was just getting him one of Isaac’s shirts.”
Scott’s eyes go wide and innocent, a sure enough sign for Stiles that this is going to be approximately a Level Seven Best Friend Humiliation. “That makes sense. I see how Stiles might think the bulge in your pants was Isaac’s wardrobe.”
Before Stiles can snap back with something, the man beside him rumbles with a full body growl, eyes flashing red. “I’m going to send you head-first through a window.”
“Get over yourself, Derek,” Scott snorts. “I haven’t been scared of you since—”
“Derek?” Stiles croaks, wanting suddenly to use a cheese grater on every inch of skin the other man touched. “You’re Derek?”
The other man—Derek, apparently—shrinks back into himself a little, eyes darting carefully over Stiles’s expression. “I… assumed you knew.”
“Of course not!” But apparently Derek knew exactly who he was, which is… interesting, to say the least. “I assumed I was casually hooking up with a supernaturally hunky man I’d see maybe once at the wedding before he evaporated into obscurity forever. Not, you know, the most ubiquitous pain in the ass I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting.”
Derek scowls, and Scott shoves himself between them, grabbing for the first sweater he sees and shoving it at Stiles. It is, ironically, a deep wine red. “I can take you around to meet everyone, man. Just dial it down.”
“It’s a little late for formal introductions!” Stiles screeches, doing the precise opposite of dialing it down. “And apparently a meet-and-greet was only necessary for one half of the equation. Which. How?”
Over Scott’s shoulder, Stiles can see Derek turning a shade that rivals his borrowed sweater. “I could… smell.”
“Smell? Smell?!” Stiles flails, managing to backhand Scott in the face as collateral. “And how would you know enough to recognize my smell?”
“He’s been in your dad’s house, dude,” Scott explains, trying to rein in his best friend’s unruly arms. “He’s crashed in your old room.”
“And he what? Went sniffing through my dirty laundry? It’s a-a violation. And rude. And definitely on the list of top ten creepiest things to ever happen to me.”
Derek, apparently fed up with their ineffective mediator, easily shoves Scott from between them. His eyes go flinty and hard as they bore straight into Stiles. “It’s not creepy. It’s how wolves protect themselves—familiarizing themselves with the environment. And you’re awfully indignant for a man who stuck his hand down my pants without even knowing my name.”
Stiles flushes hot with embarrassment and righteous rage. “I didn’t see you complaining about the big ol’ slut when it was getting you laid.”
“Enough,” Scott commands with his alpha voice.
Both Derek and Stiles remain unimpressed.
Scott sighs. “Can we put a pin in this at least? There will be plenty of time later for you to put your feet up each other’s asses when we’re not at my engagement party.”
Oh. Right. The whole world-not-revolving-around-Stiles thing.
Stiles and Derek each begrudgingly take a step away from each other. The tension is still taut and electric between them, and Scott looks like he would rather roll around in the garbage of a daycare center than still be around them. But they all seem to be in agreement that the impending brawl is tucked away on the shelf.
“Come on,” Scott starts, flashing a dopey, beaming smile. “Come meet my fiancée.”
He lets Scott lead him away from the laundry room, but his attention is on his borrowed sweater all the while. It’s warm and fresh and clean, but too big by at least a size, hanging floppy at his wrists. He wonders whose he ended up with. If it’s Isaac’s, like Derek said. Or maybe Derek’s own. Maybe another weird wolfman waiting to jump his bones and infuriate him...
“This is Malia,” Scott tears him away from his fantasies. “My future wife.”
Malia looks both entirely pleased and deeply uncomfortable following her introduction. She scrunches her face up, and Stiles immediately sees the Hale in her. “I hate waiting. I’m not patient.”
Scott laughs, stepping in closer to sling an arm around her waist. Looking at them together, Malia is everything Stiles could have wanted for Scott, and nothing he would have expected. Scott’s always had an affinity for terrifyingly strong women, but there’s a softness in Malia, too. A softness she doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with, but it’s there, sparkling warm in her eyes when she looks back at Scott.
It’s sickening. Really. Short on air, he has to look away to catch a breath.
Again, it’s not like he resents Scott. But he can’t deny the loneliness that comes hand in hand with his best friend’s happiness. Stiles has been gone for six years, living it up in the most populated city in America. No one there wanted him, how good were his odds in the town he grew up in, where everybody already knows him and thinks he’s one big, obnoxious nuisance?
He tries to subtly seek out an exit. A back door to escape for just a couple of minutes. It’s stuffy in there, suddenly. Stifling.
In his search, his gaze lands on Derek. He’s across the room, standing between the busty blonde from before and a towering dark-skinned man packed with muscles. Derek’s already looking back at him, scowling like it’s his job.
The nerve of him. To dislike Stiles. Stiles is the one who dislikes him. It makes him stand up a little taller, posture a bit more. He looks away from Derek as if he’s nothing more than a smudge on the wallpaper. Because he’s not. Even if he’s handsome. And really fucking good at kissing.
“He’s not listening,” Malia mutters flatly. “Is he stupid?”
Stiles jerks, turning back to the couple to catch Scott’s smirk. It’s the smirk he gets when he thinks he knows exactly what’s going on. Except he never actually does. Ever.
“Only sometimes,” Scott answers, failing at reining in his amusement. “And Derek’s got his panties in a bunch.”
Malia frowns like she never wants to hear Derek’s name and panties in the same sentence ever again. Stiles can’t relate, but he can pretend to. “What for?”
Scott rushes to answer before Stiles can get started on his hateful diatribe. “Stiles has been bad at sharing since kindergarten. Especially when it comes to people.”
That ruffles Stiles’s feathers. As if he’s the one who sucks in this situation. “I can share perfectly fine. But Mr. Alpha over there needs to learn some boundaries. Including the boundary of my childhood bedroom.”
“Oh boy.” Malia turns to face Scott like Stiles isn’t even there. “Is he going to be able to handle spending so much time with Derek, or is he going to ruin everything?”
“Woah. Wait. What? Why am I spending time with Derek?”
“You’re the Best Man,” she says slowly, as if she doubts how easily he picks up on simple concepts. “And Derek’s my Man of Honor.”
*******************************
“Why am I even here?” Stiles asks, slumping down in the uncomfortable wooden chair in the swanky little bakery he’s always been too intimidated to even breath in the direction of. “Not that I don’t love to be around you, buddy, but I feel like the cake is a very personal decision.”
Scott just smiles, as good-natured as ever. “We can’t make a decision. We’ve been here four times already, and everything just tastes too good. You have the second biggest sweet tooth out of everyone we know, so I figured you’d kind of be an expert.”
“Second biggest?”
And really, he doesn’t know what he expected. Malia already gave him fair—if not unnecessarily blunt—warning that he and Derek would basically be attached at the hip throughout this process. And Derek is apparently already better than Stiles at everything else, so why not eating cake, too?
But somehow looking up at Scott and seeing Derek’s sour face behind him pulls the rug out from under Stiles.
“Christ. For real?” Stiles feels himself becoming the unruly teenager his dad never knew what to do with, but he can’t help it. Derek makes him want to act up. “This guy? He doesn’t look like he’s experienced a second of pleasure in his life, and you want him to help you pick out your wedding cake?”
Derek sits stiffly in the open chair next to Stiles, clearly assuming the one next to Scott is reserved for Malia. “Ninety percent of my family is dead, and one of my remaining relatives is Peter. Cake is pretty much the only pleasure I get these days.”
Stiles narrows his eyes, torn between deep, horrific discomfort and an inappropriate, giddy humor. “Was that… a joke?”
Grunting noncommittally, Derek drops a shirt down onto the table. Stiles’s shirt. The blue one from the party. Sans wine stain.
Scott glances at the garment before wrinkling his nose and giving Derek an odd look. Derek steadfastly avoids making eye contact with anyone. But all Stiles can do is gape.
“Dude, how did you get the stain out?”
“Don’t call me dude,” Derek grumbles. “After all the blood I’ve scrubbed out of clothes, wine was nothing.”
Stiles blinks. “Is that… another joke?”
“Stiles,” Scott warns, an indecipherable edge to his voice.
“What? I can’t help it if his stick-up-the-ass humor is hard to recognize.”
Derek’s lips thin as they press together, his foreboding brow creasing in the center like storm clouds rolling in. “Oh? After spending so much of your life being a joke yourself, I would have thought any attempt would be familiar.”
Before Stiles can snap back with a scathing retort that is definitely better than Derek’s, Malia stomps over to the table and slams down a tray full of samples.
“I like cake,” she says with a severity that fails to match the pleasant collection of words. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
Derek jerks upright in his chair like a scolded school boy. His face goes soft and contrite, expression shifting so dramatically that he looks like an entirely different person to Stiles. Huh. Is this guy whipped or what?
Well. If Derek can play the good boy, then Stiles can play the even gooder boy.
“Sorry Malia,” he apologizes, looking up at her through his lashes. He ignores Scott’s trembling, flat expression—the one that indicates he’s doing everything he can not to laugh in Stiles’s face. “My mouth is at your service.”
Derek’s knee jerks up and bangs against the table, upending a glass of water. Scott loses the war against his laughter.
“At least it’s good for something,” Scott grins.
With a grunt, Derek sinks deeper into his chair. “Cake. We should… Cake.”
“We should definitely cake,” Stiles mocks, but in an effort to be agreeable, he shifts his focus to the overflowing sample tray. “So what’s the deal? There’s like eighty different cakes here.”
“There’s seven,” Derek corrects him primly. It’s only because he’s an adult that Stiles doesn’t sneer it back at him in a nasally echo. But it’s a near thing. “I’d imagine a mouth as big as yours could handle it.”
“Okay, big guy. Try to keep your mind off all the things you wish you knew my mouth could handle.”
Malia flicks her fingers through the puddle on the table, sending flecks of water splashing over Derek and Stiles. “Flirt later. Eat now. Most of the flavors have started to blur together for me, and I’m one more tasting away from hunting down a deer in the woods and tossing that down on our banquet table instead.”
Derek reaches across the table and brushes the tips of his fingers over Malia’s wrist. He whips out puppy dog eyes sappy enough to rival Scott’s. They might be better. But Stiles would never admit that.
“We’ll figure this out. I promise.”
“Of course we will,” Stiles rolls his eyes as he uses his newly stain-free shirt to mop up the mess on the tabletop. He ignores how Derek’s sweet look drops into a severe frown. He doesn’t care. At all. “Stilinskis are natural problem solvers. Give me the rundown.”
Scott leans forward, pointing along as he explains. “Lemon raspberry, pistachio with rose buttercream, maple pecan, chocolate peanut butter cup, orange blossom, amaretto with apricot filling, and earl grey.”
Stiles blinks, processing the laundry list of flavors. “Um. Okay. Interesting selection.”
That earns him a Look from Scott. They’ve known each other long enough to tell when the other is holding back, and apparently the one time Stiles is trying to employ tact, the gesture isn’t appreciated. There’s nothing worse than Scott’s disappointed face. Not even his dad’s.
“Fine. Alright. Can I be honest here? I don’t know you very well yet Malia, but some of these flavors? They’re so not Scott. I mean, earl grey? Are you kidding me? Amaretto? I don’t think he even knows how to spell that one.”
Derek stifles a laugh from beside him. For some reason that eggs Stiles on. Like he’s finally bested him at something, and Derek’s humor is acknowledgement of that. Like Stiles wants to take a victory lap, or something.
“Rose buttercream? Orange blossom? What kind of palate do you think this guy has? He’s been eating garbage long before he actually turned into a dog. Keep it simple.”
Malia smiles—an unrestrained, wild thing—and it’s beautiful. She’s always beautiful, Stiles knows that objectively. But when she throws herself into joy, she does so as deeply and intensely as she does everything else. If Stiles was confused how she ended up with Scott before, he certainly isn’t now.
“I like simple.”
“Could’ve guessed that when you picked Scott,” Derek jibes, but by the warm rumble of his voice, Stiles can tell he’s pleased. Like the brightness of his cousin’s smile has taken him by just as much surprise.
Malia rolls her eyes. By the jerk of Derek’s body and subsequent twitch of his smile, Stiles can only guess she’s nailed his shin under the table. But the levity dims a bit as she leans in, dipping her voice to a conspiratorial tone.
“I like the chocolate peanut butter cup best.”
Stiles arches a brow, giving a quick glance around the table. “Then why are we here? I mean, I’m happy to help, but that sounds like a decision, to me.”
Malia’s cheeks flush a deep pink. Her mouth purses until it falls short of a scowl into a pout, and she folds her arms across herself as her shoulders hike up around her ears. Somewhere at the back of his mind, Stiles wonders if this particular expression of disgruntlement is genetic. The possibility of seeing Derek emulating a moody hedgehog is suddenly very important to him.
“Peter said it’s a tacky flavor,” Scott explains. “Not up to par with a wedding of this caliber, or whatever.”
“Who gives a fuck what Peter thinks?” Derek snaps with a ferocity so sharp it sets Stiles’s heart to pounding. He wouldn’t have thought he’d be weak to the instinct to fear a wolf, but his sweating palms and dry mouth suggest otherwise. “Say the word and I’ll kill him again.”
A whisper of Malia’s smile returns. “I know it’s nothing fancy. But it reminds me of my mom and sister. We used to make our own peanut butter cups—experimenting and tweaking until we got them just right. The first time I tried a bite of this cake, it put me right back there in our kitchen.”
Stiles knows that, of the people around the table, Scott has the simplest family baggage. And that’s really saying something. Something pretty bleak. And while Stiles certainly doesn’t take home the award for Most Tragic Backstory, he’s guessing he might at least be in the running for Most Capable of Dealing With Personal Trauma.
“I think that’s the perfect reason to pick a flavor,” Stiles says, voice soft with the gravity of the situation. “That way it’s like a reminder that they’re there. Or that they’d be there if they could, at least. That no matter what, they’d want to share all that happiness. It’s a way to lean into the love.”
Malia goes soft at that, dropping her posture so abruptly Stiles is surprised he never picked up on how rigid she’d been holding herself. Her expression gets melty and watery, relieved and hurt all at once. Scott reaches over and threads his fingers through hers, and there it is.
That pang. It lances through the center of Stiles’s chest like a molten knife. It’s that not-quite-left-behind feeling. Because it’s not like Stiles feels like Scott fell in love and moved on without him. He just feels like… like he dug his own heels in while the world whipped by, and while he fucked around and made dumb choices, he missed his chance at finding his person. Like he’s always going to be on the outside looking in, because he wasted too much time.
Derek clears his throat, and it sounds like a bucket of nails poured down the garbage disposal. “So. That’s that?”
“Yeah,” Malia grins. “We’re going with the peanut butter cup.”
Pushing his chair back loudly and with all the manners of a preschooler, Derek just shrugs. “Okay. But these are a lot of samples to waste. The pack might appreciate your cast offs. I’ll go get a—” He glances sideways at Stiles, as if baiting. “—doggy bag.”
Stiles gapes as he strides off. “Was I supposed to laugh at that?”
When he glances back at Scott and Malia, neither seem to be amused by his confusion. In fact, while Scott seems to be deep in contemplation, Malia looks downright predatory. It sets his skin crawling.
“You should fuck him.”
“Uh.” Stiles nearly chokes on his own tongue. “Say what?”
“Derek,” Malia clarifies, as if that were the perplexing part of her statement. “You should take him to bed and make his head spin.”
“Um.” He shoots a furtive glance at Derek waiting by the front counter. “We should maybe stop talking about this.”
“He can’t hear us,” Scott promises. “Well. He could. But he’s not listening.”
Stiles narrows his eyes suspiciously. “And how do you know that?”
“Because if he was, he would have launched himself out of a window.”
“Right.” Stiles nods. “And that’s the behavior of a man you think would be receptive to— Well.”
“We’re werewolves,” Scott drawls. “The fact that you guys mutually want to bone is a secret to no one.”
Huh. Stiles still feels the need to protest. “My body doesn’t speak for me! I can’t stand the guy. He pushes all my buttons. And not the sexy ones. Okay, some of the sexy ones. But mostly the infuriating ones.”
“So bang it out of your system,” Malia suggests. “Please. For all of our sakes.”
Scott purses his lips. “I don’t know if that’s the solution.”
“Solution?” Derek asks, sauntering back over to the table with a freshly packed bag of samples in his grip. “Is there a problem?”
“Isn’t there always,” Malia waves him off. “We were just talking about how you and Stiles should spend more time together.”
Clever, Stiles thinks, even as he’s dying inside. It’s not technically a lie.
Derek’s face does that terrifying shift into blank neutrality. “Why?”
“You’re going to be helping us a lot,” Scott jumps in. “Especially since it’s us against Peter with all the planning. A united front is better, so it’d really help if you guys were on the same page.”
“Besides,” Malia starts, eyes gone wide in a way that’s so transparently manipulative Stiles wants to quake out of his skin with laughter. But Derek seems to be falling for it hook, line, and sinker. “Since he’s back in Beacon Hills for good, Stiles is pack now. And pack is important. Right?”
An odd, out of place blush burns at Derek’s cheeks. “You plan to be… ours?”
Stiles feels himself start to sweat at the look on Derek’s face. It’s not unlike the look he wore as he was leading Stiles to the laundry room the other night. “What?”
“Pack. You want to be part of our pack?”
He can’t help bristling at that. “Excuse me, buddy, but I’m already part of Scott’s pack, with or without your stupid alpha approval. He’s my brother, and I’m part of things now. A vital part, in fact! I think you’ll find I’m really good at the bump-in-the-night stuff. I mean, I am in theory, at least. And—”
“Stiles,” Derek cuts him off, teeth grinding and shoulders making their way up towards his ears with tension. And yeah, he does look like a moody hedgehog. “Stop talking. I would like that. You being a part of things.”
“Oh.”
Derek is definitely still an asshole. But he’s an asshole who’s opening his family to Stiles, for better or worse.
And Malia is right. Stiles should definitely fuck him.
*******************************
Stiles is usually so much better at picking up on a trap. His dad hasn’t been able to trick him into doing chores since he was thirteen, and thanks to Lydia’s brutal training, he knows how best to navigate the “How does this outfit look?” inquiry without encouraging bloodshed or ire. The Save the Whales and climate change petitioners that loiter around malls and sidewalks have even learned to avoid Stiles, or else risk being pulled into his own unexpected spiel.
But Scott. Scott has always been Stiles’s weak spot. Damn him.
Meet up at the Hale house at 7pm. Scott had texted. Mandatory wedding party talk.
Okay. Stiles had readily agreed. Liike an idiot.
It’s not until he’s already at the doorstep that he realizes, besides the sleek Camaro, his Jeep is the only car in the driveway. “Oh fu—”
The door swings open, and Derek stares back at him with his eyebrows raised practically to his hairline. He’s sweaty. Glistening and covered in… sawdust? Gone are the muscle-hugging sweaters that frame his body so nicely, replaced with a tank that clings and leaves very, very little to Stiles’s already overactive imagination.
“What are you doing?” Stiles asks, before Derek can even open his mouth to voice his confusion.
The raised brows lower over Derek’s deep and broody eyes to knit together ominously. “Excuse me? This is my house. What are you doing?”
“Visiting. Obviously. I meant with the whole—” he gestures ambiguously to Derek’s fine figure, trying to settle on an appropriate word. Don’t say dirty. Don’t say sweaty. Dirty and sweaty can lead bad places. Bad, bad, delicious places. “The whole gross thing.”
“Gross?” Derek recoils, shifting his weight enough that Stiles can slip through into the house without his invitation. “I just got home from work. I know you’re not familiar with the concept, but some of us have jobs.”
Without an audience to keep him on his best behavior, Stiles can’t resist spinning on his heel in the foyer, throwing back a sneer. “Yeah? Well some of us expended the effort to get an education.”
There’s a beat of silence after the words fly out of Stiles’s mouth where he wonders if he’s gone too far. It’s not unheard of. He’s prone to pushing boundaries when his temper is tested. But too far is too far—after all, it’s not like Derek has much ammunition in return besides the grim truth of Yeah? Well some of us had our entire family burned alive in high school and became incapable of functioning normally in society.
But instead of lunging for Stiles’s throat, Derek just narrows his eyes. “Funny, you have both those fancy degrees and you’re still a fucking moron.”
The laugh is shocked so forcefully out of Stiles it feels like a punch to the gut. But Derek’s not funny. He’s not anything. Besides maybe handsome and annoying. But so what? A lot of guys are handsome. He’s not special, so long as you ignore the fact that he’s literally inhuman.
Hit with a burning wave of shame at finding literally anything Derek does pleasant, he turns his back on him and heads deeper into the house toward the kitchen. Stiles had assumed a big group meeting meant snacks, and he’d skipped out on dinner. Now that he’s stumbled into spending time alone with the big barbaric lug, he’ll be damned if he does it on an empty stomach. Werewolf refrigerators have to be pretty well-stocked, right?
“Where do you work?” Stiles asks over his shoulder as he helps himself to opening the fridge. “Some kind of incredibly dusty strip club?”
Derek snorts, and Stiles can feel the heat of him from where he props his hip on the counter beside him. “That sounded a little hopeful there, Stiles. Looking for a show?”
“Sorry, allergies. You’ll have to keep the dust bunnies in your g-string for now.”
He can practically feel the force of Derek’s eye-roll. “Me and Isaac started up a construction company about a year ago. Sometimes being the boss means doing the labor yourself.”
“Christ,” Stiles mutters into the overflowing shelves. “Alpha werewolf, big company boss man. Always gotta be in charge, huh?”
“Not always,” Derek drawls.
Before Stiles can read too much into the playful lilt of Derek’s tone, his eyes land on a familiar paper bag. He snatches it out of the fridge with a gasp. “Dude! It’s been like four days. How did you keep your mongrels from gobbling these down?”
He slips the cardboard baker’s box out of the bag and pries open the lid, seeing a good quarter of the cake samples left behind. Derek scowls, half-heartedly batting Stiles’s hands away from his bounty.
“They know better than to touch what’s mine.”
Stiles throws his head back in a cackle. “You said you were taking all this home for them! You totally lied, and Scott and Malia let you get away with it.”
Derek glowers. “I shared a little.”
“They know better than to touch what’s mine,” Stiles mocks in a put-on growly voice. “Oh my god. This is the kind of thing you use your alpha sway for?”
“Shut up.”
“Are you kidding me? You’ve got the broody sexy stubble and the troubled leather jacket, and I think, okay, he’s probably all this is my turf and don’t touch my car—”
“Don’t touch my car.”
“But no! Of course the big bad wolf is covetous of his basket of sweets.”
“Don’t be racist.”
Ha! No. Not funny. “You realize you’ve lost all of your supernatural street cred, right? You’re not intimidating at all.”
Derek rumbles a growl deep in his chest. “Wanna bet?”
Stiles just snorts. “It’s like talking to a vicious little chihuahua!”
“Enough.”
“Why? Are you gonna start quivering and pee all over the floor? You’re such a softie, Derek. I bet—”
Stiles couldn’t finish the thought even if he wanted to, because between one word and the next, Derek plucks up one of the cake samples and shoves it in Stiles’s mouth. It’s the maple pecan. It’s delicious. The sweetness is offset by the salty shock of the thumb and forefinger still resting against his tongue.
They lock eyes, and the temperature of the room ratchets up to a thousand. Derek slips his index finger out of Stiles’s mouth, but hooks his thumb over his teeth. As if by instinct, Stiles purses his lips around the appendage, sucking lightly. Derek hauls him in with a hand on his hip, slipping a thigh between Stiles’s to get in closer, and—
“Oh,” Stiles breathes, on the verge of hysteria. “Not such a softie after all, I guess.”
Derek presses his face against the pale line of Stiles’s neck, muffling his laugh there. The rumble of it shivers through every muscle and bone, lighting up Stiles’s nerves like a Christmas tree. It sets him revving like an eager engine at a start line.
But Derek doesn’t seem to be looking to race ahead. No, as he pulls away, the grin he’s sporting looks like that of a cat toying with its food.
He lifts Stiles up and plops him on the lip of the counter before edging back in between his spread thighs. In a stroke of genius, he selects another small square sample from the cake box. This time, instead of pushing it past Stiles’s lips, he sets it carefully between his teeth, like bait. He tips his face toward Stiles, waiting.
And really, how is Stiles supposed to resist that?
He leans in, pressing his lips to Derek’s as his teeth close around the other half of the cake. Orange blossom explodes across his taste buds, and he can’t help the moan as Derek’s tongue slips in alongside it. Quickly swallowed, the cake is an afterthought, playing second-fiddle to the slick, hot slide of desperate kisses. Though Stiles is happy to catch Derek’s bottom lip between his teeth, sucking a last bit of frosting away.
“You taste so good,” Derek breathes, nose tracing an intimate line across Stiles’s cheek bone as they pant for air.
Stiles flushes with delight, raking Derek’s shirt up to pet his hands over the hard muscles of his back. “Better than the cake?”
“Better than anything.”
Stiles pulls away, only to whip his t-shirt off over his head. He fists a hand in Derek’s hair, yanking him down until his face is pressed against his clavicle. He arches into him, urging him to taste more. Take more.
Derek obeys, mouth falling open to drag soft and wet over Stiles’s collar bone. He sucks indulgently at the base of his throat, bites wickedly at the join of his shoulder and neck. Stiles can feel the ache of blood rising to the surface under Derek’s mouth. Normally hickies—love bites, his giddy mind supplies at the parade of worship being worn into his skin—make him wilt with embarrassment. But fuck if it’s not burning him up from the inside out right now.
“Yes,” Stiles gasps. He feels half useless, palms brushing practically chaste over Derek’s flanks. His mouth gropes for where it can reach, dropping dazed kisses to Derek’s hairline and the dusty curve of a shoulder.
Derek attacks Stiles’s button and zipper with enough gusto to almost tear his pants in two. With his jeans open enough, he tugs them and the boxer briefs down beneath the curve of Stiles’s ass in one fell swoop. He hunches down and buries his face in the tight curls at Stiles’s groin, inhaling with a vibrating groan that sends shocks of pleasure up and down Stiles’s spine.
“Derek,” Stiles begs, on the edge of gripping the man’s hair so tight a clump of it tears out. Because Christ, he seems determined to always be frustrating Stiles in one way or another. “Please.”
In response, Derek mouths sloppily at the base of Stiles’s cock—something that’s better than nothing, but not quite enough. It’s just the beginning of a not-so selfless exploration, an intimate journey that seems to be getting Derek well and truly worked up. He drags his lips up the length of him, more a caress than a series of kisses. His nose nuzzles at the flared head, and Stiles would complain about the ridiculousness of the act if Derek didn’t simultaneously take his shaft in hand for a firm pump.
The slide of his palm is a tinge too dry, but Derek doesn’t seem to need any feedback on the matter. He hovers close, parting his lips to let saliva drip down and pool on the crown of Stiles’s cock. He twists his palm around the head to collect the spit, letting it ease the measured strokes up and down the length.
Stiles has to look away from the whole production or risk exploding. Maybe colloquially, maybe literally. He doesn’t know. He doubts science knows. He doubts any one genius researcher has ever taken record of sex so good.
When Derek takes him in his mouth, Stiles clenches his eyes shut so hard supernovas burst behind his eyelids. Derek’s tongue flicks under the sensitive head as he pulls back, and as he sinks back down, the hand that’s not meeting every sinful slide of his mouth sneaks around to massage at Stiles’s balls. With every bob Derek’s cheeks hollow hot and tight around Stiles, and Stiles can’t resist pressing a thumb there, feeling himself sliding through Derek’s mouth from the outside.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Stiles chants, trembling under the fevered attention of Derek’s mouth. “I’m gonna come.”
Derek doesn’t heed his warning. Or, he does, but instead of pulling off he seems to double his efforts. He presses forward, and as Stiles’s cock hits the back of his throat he swallows.
Stiles bows his back, letting a near-pained groan rip out of him as his orgasm hits him. Derek sucks at him until the pleasure passes—until he’s over-sensitive, twitching, and pushing tiredly at broad shoulders. Mountains move. Stars shatter. Gravity collapses. Or something like that.
With nothing left to focus on but his own untamed desire, Derek struggles out of his clothes. His tank is hiked up around his armpits, and his jeans aren’t quite as lucky as Stiles’s, splitting at the zipper in his haste to get them undone. Bared and painfully hard, Derek tugs Stiles forward off the counter. He holds him up with one hand on the small of his back and the other gripped bruisingly around one thigh, rubbing himself off against Stiles’s abdomen with single minded purpose.
Stiles holds on to Derek’s shoulders for dear life, so turned on by the frenzied display of strength and want that he dimly wishes he still had the frankly ridiculous refractory period of his high school years. Derek spills over his stomach with a triumphant growl so deep it rattles and echoes through Stiles’s skull. For a long, drawn out moment, they stay standing pressed together, close as though they have plans to melt and merge into one.
“So,” Stiles drawls when he gets enough of his breath back. He doesn’t let go of Derek, letting him bear the brunt of his dead weight. “Your stingy cake rules clearly don’t extend to sex.”
Derek hums a laugh, nudging his nose up along Stiles’s jaw. “I’d break a lot of rules for sex like that. I’d fuck you on the hood of my car, too.”
Stiles feigns a gasp, pulling back enough to hold eye contact. “No take backs.”
And for a second he just lets himself be happy. Lets the moment be warm and simple and light. Lets himself see Derek as someone unburdened and soft. Someone more of an ally, maybe, instead of someone who’s competition. But it’s when he’s considering Derek as the beautiful, passionate possibility wrapped around him that the thought slams into him and past his lips before he can help it.
“Why don’t you ever date anyone normal?”
Derek frowns before he twists it up into a smirk. “Is this you admitting you’re abnormal?”
Stiles scoffs, stepping out of the strong, comfortable circle of Derek’s arms. “We’re hardly dating.”
“Right…” The well-humored creases of Derek’s face smooth out into a blank mask. “It’s just…” He works his jaw, like the words are a wad of gum sitting sticky and unmanageable in his mouth. “Just sex.”
“I mean, obviously.” Stiles is uneasy with the sudden mood shift in the room. It figures that Derek Broods-A-Lot Hale rides a shorter high off the post-orgasmic glow. “We’re just, you know, banging it out of our systems.”
Derek stiffens, and the casual set of his expression turns positively glacial. “What?”
“Banging… it out?” Stiles swallows, tugging his pants up as he squirms, feeling like his skin is three sizes too small. “It was Malia’s idea.”
“Malia.”
“And Scott! He totally tricked me into swinging by. He made me think everyone else was gonna be here, and— Yeah.”
The explanation only seems to outrage Derek more. His nostrils flare as he squares his shoulders. “So you didn’t just want to see me.”
“What?” Stiles scrambles for a paper towel, suddenly self-conscious about the fact that he’s covered in werewolf spunk. “Dude, what would I want to see you for?”
“Wow. Got it. Okay.” Derek scoops Stiles’s discarded t-shirt up off the kitchen floor, tossing it back in his face. “Get the fuck out.”
Stiles struggles into the armholes as Derek storms out of the room. He stumbles dumbly after him. “What’s your problem?”
Derek’s footsteps only falter for a brief second before he continues on toward the back door. “I don’t have a problem. Besides the uninvited guest in my house.”
“Jesus. Can you unclench for like, five whole minutes? You know you don’t actually have to be a dick, even if you’re all wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Wait. No. I’m a guy. Um. When you’re pumping and dumping?”
Derek finally turns around, if only to glare. “Pumping and dumping is for breastfeeding mothers, moron. And there’s nothing to dump, remember? We’re not together.”
“Is that what this is about?” Stiles throws his hands in the air. “Derek, I can’t stand you. Why would you want to go out?”
“I don’t know, Stiles. If I’m so intolerable, why did you want to hook up?”
Stiles gapes. “Because you’re… you know.” He gestures vaguely at the whole of him. “Hot enough that I can ignore the fact that you’re an insufferable asshole for ten minutes.”
It’s meant mostly as a joke—a way to maybe lighten the tension-taut air—but it seems to strike a sore spot. Derek growls, eyes flashing red. He whips his tank off over his head and steps out of his pants, and before Stiles can question it, he’s darting out the back door toward the woods, shifting down to all fours as a sleek, black wolf.
“I—” Stiles doesn’t really know what to say as Derek disappears through the trees. He knows he spectacularly put his foot in his mouth, but he doesn’t know why Derek is so sensitive about the whole situation to begin with. He sighs. “I’ll lock the door on my way out.”
*******************************
Lydia comes home that Friday, two weeks after Stiles got back into town, late in the evening and as gorgeous as ever. The pack is huddled across several booths in the local dive bar—The Feisty Bean—though god only knows why. Most of them have to sneak sprigs of food-safe wolfsbane in with them to make the alcohol any use, and with the frankly intimidating number of them—Isaac and Liam and Ethan and Parrish and on and on and on; Stiles has trouble keeping them all straight in his brain—it just seems like they’d be better suited to prowling around Derek’s woodsy estate.
Then again, Stiles can’t imagine he’d want to clean up after the lot of them, either. And The Feisty Bean does make a mean Old Fashioned.
Derek is sitting as far away from Stiles as possible when Lydia walks in, but just as Lydia strives for, every pair of eyes in the bar flickers over to her as she enters. Stiles can almost feel the considering gaze Derek darts between him and Lydia. A pebble of guilt plunks down in his gut, and he’s not really sure who it’s for.
Lydia slides into the faux leather booth beside Stiles as casually as if the two of them never spent a minute apart. She’s different than when they were in high school. Calmer, warmer, more sure in her power—supernatural or otherwise. But she’s also very much the same.
“You missed the engagement party,” Stiles chastises, handing over his fresh and untouched drink. “It’s not like Lydia Martin to pass up a soiree.”
Lydia arches a brow, sniffing the whiskey primly before pushing it back toward him. “There’s no party wild enough to hold me back when NASA comes looking for favors. You should know better, Stilinski.”
Stiles grins and does his best to keep his heartbeat level under her familiar attention. He’s sure he fails. Sure Derek knows all about his pathetic pining by now. “What kind of emergency did they call you over for? Alien attack? Flaming asteroid? Solar explosion?”
“NASA tends to like to keep their secret projects a secret.”
“It was totally aliens.”
Lydia rolls her eyes. “I’m a mathematician, Stiles. Not a superhero.”
“Same difference,” he offers with a goofy, too-wide smile.
“I missed you,” she says, blunt and to the point, not overly warm, but with enough honesty that it still surprises Stiles. “You should have visited more.”
Stiles shrugs, tracing patterns on the tabletop with the pad of a finger. “It was too far. Too expensive.”
“Sure. Plus you resented Scott for getting the bite, whether he wanted it or not.”
“No,” Stiles insists. “That was never it.”
She settles back against the booth, considering. “Okay. So you resented the fact that you didn’t feel like you were part of the club.”
“The pack,” Stiles corrects with mocking seriousness, downing what’s left of the whiskey Lydia rejected. “But yeah. Something like that.”
“You were, though. Part of it. Always, even when you weren’t here.”
“An honorary member, sure. But I never contributed anything. Real wolf packs don’t have honorary members, Lydia.”
“Real wolf packs don’t congregate in bars, moron. They’re— We’re not a bunch of animals. We’re a family. A weird and deeply disturbed family, but my point stands. A place with us isn’t something you have to earn. It’s something you’ve always had.”
Stiles huffs out a breath, trying to distance himself from the welcoming words of a woman he never thought he’d shy away from. “Maybe. But I don’t exactly… fit. I’m not very good with authority. And authority doesn’t seem too pleased with me, either.”
Lydia glances across the bar at how Derek is none too casually staring at them. Stiles’s cheeks burn red. “You slept with him.”
“Jeez.” He shrinks down in his seat. “I thought you predicted death, not ill-advised sex.”
“Le petit mort,” she jokes dryly, and Stiles can’t help that he adores her. “But no. I’ve been around wolves long enough to know when they’re listening to a conversation across the room, and Derek’s certainly never been that fixated on anything I’ve had to say.”
“Fine,” he concedes. “We hooked up. But it didn’t go so well.”
Lydia arches a brow.
“Okay, the sex went exceedingly well. It was the after that was a disaster.”
Reaching over to lay her hand over his, Lydia drops her voice almost too low for even Stiles to hear it. “Be kind to him.”
“Me?!” He clears his throat and drops down to a whisper too. “Why are you assuming I’m the one that messed everything up?”
“I’m not. I’d tell him the same thing if he were sitting next to me. You should be kind to each other. You both get prickly when you’re upset, and you’re both more sensitive than you pretend to be.”
Stiles scoffs. “Yeah, I bet Alpha Hale is a real teddy bear under all those teeth.”
Lydia taps him less than lightly on the cheek. “You like all those teeth.”
She leaves him there spluttering in pointless denial to swan over to another booth and drop down on Parrish’s lap. For someone who had been waiting so patiently for Lydia’s attention to turn to him, he doesn’t waste any more time in pulling her into a deep and prolonged kiss. Stiles wonders if bitter jealousy is a scent the wolves in the room can pick up on.
Stiles moves to slip out of his seat and head to the bar for another drink, but he finds Derek looming over him as he turns. “Holy bejesus,” he gasps, clutching a hand to his chest. “I just lost nine years of my life.”
“Outside,” Derek demands, scowl carved deep into his features. “Now.”
Stiles doesn’t find it necessary to do more than respond with a slow arching brow.
Derek sighs, tipping his head back like a petulant teenager denying a tantrum. “Please.”
“Sure,” Stiles offers magnanimously, if not a hair too cheerfully, just to watch Derek’s eye twitch. “I could use some air anyway.”
As he stands, he waves off Scott’s questing look from a few tables over. Derek may be preferable only to a lobotomy—and even then, it’s a questionably close margin—but it’s not like Stiles thinks the guy is going to take him out back for a maiming. And truth be told, it’s not oxygen Stiles really needs, but a reprieve from the sight of his first and ever-burning true love enthusiastically tonguing a hellhound. Hey, maybe Derek will maim him, and he’ll be lucky enough to never see such a travesty ever again.
Derek shoulders his way through the back door like he owns the place and drifts toward the shadows of the alley like the darkness is a second home. Stiles follows him unquestionably, like every fairy tale warns him not to.
“The pack is big,” Derek starts, eyes flickering red through the dark like he can’t help it, like a lamp with a shorting circuit. “Which means we’re strong. It’s growing, which means we’re fragile.”
“Okay? Is this some kind of riddle? Because I’ve got to tell you, I’m not in the mood.”
Derek growls, not in aggression, but in frustration. “What I mean to say is, we’re on our way to something really good. We have a lot of special people coming together.”
Something foreign and dangerous stutters in Stiles’s chest. It might be the alcohol, or it might be the potential in the words, but Stiles’s cheeks glow with an abrupt flush. “Whoa there big guy, is this where you get sappy and tell me I’m special too?”
“What?” Derek’s head jerks back, as if Stiles spit in his eye. “No.”
“Oh.” The unauthorized ball of hope swelling in Stiles’s chest plummets like lead to his feet. “Right. Of course not.”
“I mean, you are. Obviously. You know?”
Stiles rolls his eyes. “Don’t strain yourself to compensate for my feelings.”
“I mean it!” Derek half-shouts. He shrinks back after the outburst. “I mean, I said as much before, didn’t I?”
“When?”
“When I said I wanted you to be a part of things. The pack. I don’t know why you’re still questioning it.”
Slumping back against the brick wall, Stiles concentrates on the noxious smell of garbage to keep himself grounded. “Come on, man. Scott’s your second, and like I said, he’s my brother, so I’m always going to be here. But I’m not, like, a part of it part of it.”
Derek furrows his brow. “Are we speaking the same language?”
“I don’t know. Should I speak slower? Use smaller words?” At another flash of red in Derek’s eyes, Stiles continues. “Look, I know you were eavesdropping on me and Lydia. You know I think it sucks that I’m not useful.”
When Derek tilts his head to the side, it uses up almost all of Stiles’s self-control not to crack a dog joke. “Useful?”
“Yeah,” he shrugs. “Lydia is the brainy type. Scott is all heart. Undead Peter has that crazy yet morally ambiguous viewpoint every good group needs. And Erica is redefining the word sexy every time she leaves the house. Everyone’s got a role.”
“Erica’s a lot more than sexy,” Derek murmurs. “And Scott’s more than just heart these days. Peter you got pretty spot on, though…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Stiles waves him off. “I’m just simplifying.”
“And I think you’re sexy, too.”
A jolt of pleasure dances up Stiles’s spine. He snorts over the dizzy emotion, hoping Derek missed that little detail. “Is that why you dragged me out here? To flirt?”
The heat glinting in Derek’s eyes goes cold. “No.”
“So?”
“I… It’s like I was saying, with so many moving parts, the pack is in a precarious place right now. Scott and Malia getting married is good. It’s really good. Solidifies bonds. But other bonds aren’t so secure. You get me?”
Stiles sighs, pushing off the wall. “No. I don’t.”
“I want you to leave Lydia alone.”
“Pardon?” He balks. “Just ‘cause you insist I’m in the pack doesn’t mean you’re my alpha. You don’t get to boss me around.”
“That’s exactly what it means,” Derek snarls. At Stiles’s frosty look, he pauses, sucks in a deep breath, and tries again. “I’m not bossing. I’m asking. For the good of everyone.”
Stiles jabs a finger into the middle of Derek’s chest, not unlike an amateur circus performer sticking his head into the mouth of a lion. “Look, I’ve been in love with Lydia since the third grade. My endless pining hasn’t gotten anyone killed yet, so I think we’re fine.”
“She’s with Parrish now. They’re good together, Stiles. For each other and for the pack. You don’t need to swan in after six years away and… and break a bunch of hearts.”
“What? Whose heart am I breaking here exactly?”
Derek bares his teeth, an animal backed into a corner. “Oh don’t be so purposely obtuse.”
“Seriously! Lydia pays more attention to gum on the bottom of her shoe.” Stiles gestures self-deprecatingly at the whole of himself. “I have the sex appeal of a coat rack, Derek. I’m the last guy you need to worry about.”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?!”
Derek plants a palm on the brick beside Stiles, caging him in against the wall. “I don’t make a habit of sucking off coat racks, Stiles. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would drop everything for you.”
Stiles swallows, steadily meeting Derek’s gaze. “Lydia’s taste begs to differ.”
“I’m the alpha,” Derek rumbles. “My word is law.”
Heart pounding so fast people on the other side of town must be able to hear it, Stiles drifts closer to the solid heat of Derek’s body. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Derek dips in to flick his tongue along the shell of Stiles’s ear. “You come here in your jeep?”
He can’t help the short silence as his eyes flutter shut. “Yeah. Yes.”
“Lead the way.”
His eyes snap open as he jerks away from the nip at his earlobe. “Huh?”
Derek shrugs, grinning as he slips a hand between them to squeeze at the bulge in the front of Stiles’s pants. “Or we could do it out here. I don’t mind.”
Stiles’s knees go weak, slipping him down the wall enough to slip free of Derek’s hold. He uses his newfound freedom to book it toward his car, hoping Derek is following close behind.
He opens the driver’s side door with enough force that he’s actually worried about the integrity of the handle. Climbing in, he glances over at the passenger’s side, expecting to see Derek slipping in over there so they can speed to the creepy Hale house or whatever by-the-hour motel they’re going to roll around in.
Instead, Derek doesn’t hunker down and buckle in as he crawls inside. He continues on to scramble over the seats, narrowly avoiding kicking Stiles in the head. Which, with werewolf agility and grace, just seems pointed.
He stares back at Stiles, brows raised. “Are you coming?”
“Buh— Wha?” Stiles splutters.
Derek rolls his eyes, dipping his hand inside the pocket of his leather jacket to pull out a travel-size packet of lube. “I can always get started without you.”
Stiles hauls himself up and launches into the back seat, landing half on top of Derek. Derek presses his face against Stiles’s neck, smothering a laugh against his skin. Stiles can’t help but smile at the rumble.
“You always carry lube around?”
“Only when I’m hoping to use it.”
Stiles smirks, skimming his hands up Derek’s firm and warm sides. “Hoping, he says, as if anyone ever turns you down.”
“Right. Apparently not even guys who can’t stand me.”
Sighing, Stiles tugs pointedly at the hem of Derek’s henley. “Should we be talking? I feel like this might go better if we just hook up in manly silence.”
“Sure,” Derek agrees easily, shifting Stiles off of him so he can drag his shirt off over his head. Half-naked, he leans back in, muttering close enough to Stiles’s lips that every word might as well be a kiss. “But I seem to remember you being the one who’s loud, so we’ll see how long that lasts.”
Stiles wants to object, or complain, or something, but the words are stolen off his tongue as Derek kicks off his boots and wiggles out of his too-tight jeans. What seems like miles of golden skin is put on display, and Stiles wants to put his mouth on every inch. He whimpers in the back of his throat, unable to decide where to start—and yeah, okay, Derek might have had a point about the noise.
“Fine. Okay. You win. Talk about whatever you want. Just let me touch you.”
Derek smiles, wide and beautiful and only slightly evil. “Knock yourself out.”
Though his brain is still reeling from the options stretched out in front of him, Stiles’s mouth seems to know exactly where it wants to go. He dives in, catching Derek in a kiss. It’s quick and chaste and absolutely gives Stiles pause, because why the fuck would he do something like that. He gives himself a shake and dips in again, catching Derek’s mouth in a filthy tangle of tongue and teeth.
His first blunder sorted and swept under the rug, Stiles sets about taking the scenic route across Derek’s body. He smooths a broad palm down the line of his throat, trailing the path back up with the hot flat of his tongue. He bites down on a pectoral—perhaps a bit harder than strictly necessary, but, well, werewolf, and besides, it draws a stuttering groan out of Derek, so no one is complaining.
Stiles is sucking fast-fading marks down Derek’s abdomen toward the crease of his thigh when he’s distracted by the slow rocking motion beneath him. He pulls back, just enough to see that somewhere along the way Derek has torn open the lube packet and holy Christ. He has an arm tucked between his legs, two fingers inside of himself pumping away.
“Oh.” Stiles blinks hard, the sight alone a challenge against his own stamina. “Um. I don’t have a—”
“Werewolf. Don’t care.” Derek twists up onto his knees and pushes Stiles back against the seat, pausing. “Unless you care?”
“I totally don’t care,” Stiles rushes to assure. “I don’t care about anything right now. Like, at all. The car could be on fire right now and— Wow, you are the last person I should bring up fires around, huh? I mean—”
“You’re the fucking worst,” Derek mutters. He cups Stiles’s face with his clean hand and dives in for a quick nip at his bottom lip. Then he’s tugging Stiles’s pants down to his knees, swinging a leg over his lap—broad back pressed to Stiles’s heaving chest—and pressing himself down achingly slow over the length of him.
Stiles sucks in a painful chestful of air, hands flying to Derek’s hips. “Christ on a cracker. You’re unreal.”
Derek preens as much as a mid-coitus man can manage, reaching forward to grip the shoulders of the front seats for extra leverage as he rolls up slow and slides down quick. It’s tight and hot and Stiles’s eyes are already crossing. He curls forward to mouth at Derek’s shoulder blade, tracing the shape of it upward and getting distracted by the perfect line of his neck curving out from his broad, beautiful shoulders. He darts in teeth first, biting recklessly at the side of his throat.
In a chain reaction, Derek clenches tight around him, and at the jolt of pleasure Stiles bucks his hips up hard. The wild thrust takes Derek off guard, and without bracing himself he’s arching up until the top of his head smacks against the roof. He darts a glare over his shoulder, which does nothing but stoke the fire in Stiles’s veins higher.
“Sorry, sorry,” he stumbles to apologize. “I’ll just— I’ll leave the work up to you.”
Derek hums in contented agreement, practically melting on top of Stiles. He reaches one hand back to tangle in Stiles’s hair, holding him firm and still within kissing distance, keeping up a consistent slick slide of tongue and lips as he leisurely circles his hips. His other hand reaches out to grip the roll bar as he curls his legs up to plant them on the edge of the backseat.
The casual power Derek’s body exudes as he bounces eagerly on Stiles’s lap is intoxicating. All that strength, all that energy—it’s all focused on Stiles. Focused on... well, practically using him. And that thought shouldn’t be so hot, either. This unstoppable, gorgeous creature taking exactly what he needs, and taking it from Stiles.
And true to Derek’s estimation, Stiles is burying helpless moans into the curve of his throat, between bites and kisses and open mouthed pants. But as Derek fucks himself down onto Stiles, he can’t hide his own full-body shivers and his quiet, punched out grunts.
Stiles puts himself back in the game by hooking an arm around Derek’s waist, taking the length of him in his hand so every thrust of his hips pumps him through his fist. “You look so good,” Stiles sighs, breath ghosting cold across the sweat beading across Derek’s golden skin. “I want to see you come.”
Another stuttering quake tears through Derek’s body. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Stiles drags his lips from Derek’s shoulder to rest them against his pleasure-clenched jaw. “What do you need?”
“Just talk to me,” Derek gasps, like the admission gores him.
“Oh. You like that? You like hearing how much I want you? How you drive me crazy?”
A strangled sound dies in Derek’s throat, like that’s exactly what he wants to hear. Stiles can’t help but feel a little smug.
“God, Derek. You make me feel so good. You take charge like you’re racing to get off, but it’s all for me, isn’t it? You’re putting on a whole show to make me feel good.”
The grip Derek has on his hair curls almost painfully tight as he whispers out a short, clipped, “Yes.”
“Then come. I want to feel you squeeze around me. I want to know I make you feel good, too.”
Derek slams down hard to seat himself fully in Stiles’s lap. His back bows so sharply Stiles is shocked he doesn’t hear it crack and break. The orgasm slams into Derek so hard and so suddenly he loses his grip on his control—hands flying out to grip the seat upholstery as his claws pop out and a howl vibrating the whole jeep as his fangs drop. His release paints long stripes up his own torso, and the onslaught of all his senses is enough to send Stiles tumbling into climax after him.
In the afterglow, a humid, heavy silence falls over the jeep. Save for their unsynchronized, ragged breathing, neither seem of a mind or will to utter a peep. Derek, Stiles knows by now, is a man of few words. But for his own part, Stiles can’t help but wonder if the adoration for his voice is rescinded post-orgasm.
With more dignity and grace than anyone should be afforded, Derek levers himself off of Stiles and settles next to him on the seat. Suddenly, Derek shrinks into a disconcerting shyness. He avoids Stiles’s gaze as he promptly gathers his clothes, blushing as he uses his discarded boxer briefs to wipe away some of the mess between his legs.
Thrown by the unexpected shift in energy, Stiles opens his mouth and lets the first thing in his mind fall out. “You don’t have to worry about Lydia.”
That gets Derek’s attention. His eyes snap up, intent and strangely hopeful. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like that with her.” Stiles shrugs and back tracks a bit, bending down to yank his pants back up. “Well, yes and no. It’s— Nothing is ever going to happen, even if I love her. And I do. But I don’t. Not like— But also kind of—”
“English,” Derek barks with a scowl twisting at his mouth. And Stiles had just gotten used to how handsome he is when he’s pleasure-soft. “String some words together in that brain of yours before you blab them all over the place.”
“Look, it’s like I spent years building her up in my head, right? I collected every little scrap of information I could dig up about her, and I pasted it together to create this magnificent woman who didn’t really even exist. But the big kick in the head of it all is that, when I really got to spend time with her and get to know her, she was better than all that. The stupid, desperate crush I had is just… It pales in comparison.”
Derek looks like he’s about to throw up. “Oh.”
“But my point is, I’m not going to try and break anybody up. That’s not me. And even if it were, I mean, I lack the confidence dude. ‘Cause how am I supposed to be worthy of a person who’s better than something even my fantasies can cook up? I don’t know. It’s complicated. And I’m sure the whole situation isn’t something you can really relate to, so.”
An unhappy little laugh puffs past Derek’s lips. “You’d be surprised.”
“Oh,” Stiles echoes in a hollow parody of Derek’s own words. But while Stiles’s brain slowly grinds to a halt, Derek just looks like his nausea has doubled. “Are you going to elaborate?”
“... No.”
Stiles balks at that. “No? I pour my whole pathetic heart out to you, and you can’t offer a smidgen of clarification in return?”
“I—” Derek stops himself, gaze darting helplessly around the jeep as if it will spill the answers for him. “Well—”
His mouth clamps shut, a rumbling, frustrated growl sitting heavy on the back of his tongue. Without trying to grasp for another word, Derek wiggles back into his jeans, clambers into the front, and slips all too gracefully out the passenger side door.
Stiles watches him disappear into the night, sitting there debauched and stupid with his jaw hanging open. Every kind thing Stiles’s brain afforded Derek while they were fumbling around together turns sour. The hot rush of Derek’s mastery over his body turns sick and cheap.
Derek lured him in with smoldering hot promises and left him cold in the dust without an ounce of explanation. Because of course there’s someone else Derek wants. Because Stiles is just—what? Easy?
So maybe he is. Good for Derek and his ego—he nailed a guy with criminally low standards. Why should Stiles give a shit if he doesn’t want to stick around for pillow talk? He’s just some uptight, self-important, scheming little wolf boy. He’s not half as handsome as he is annoying, and for all that he may be good in bed (or counter or car…), his interpersonal skills are about as pleasant as a surprise root canal.
God he fucking hates him.
*******************************
That’s it, Stiles tells himself after a little over a week of resolute fuming. Just the one time. Well, the two times, but only the one time really counts, right? The first time wasn’t even all the way, and— God, is he fifteen years old? The first time doesn’t count because… because it was an accident. So that’s not his fault. The second time was a little deliberate, though not planned. So it’s fine. He’s off the hook. One deliberate and smoking hot sex romp with your mortal enemy is totally fine.
He just can’t do it again. And he won’t.
The gut-churning humiliation of the fact he let Derek lay a hand on him, however, isn’t helped any by the fact that his presence is required today at the Hale house. Malia had insisted on keeping the wedding small, intimate, and comfortable for her less than sociable sensibilities, which resulted in the rebuilt ancestral home acting as the venue. Lydia, of course, could never let even a small wedding be anything less than grand, which resulted in all hands on deck being required to construct a romantic gazebo and plant lush new flora.
Stiles is neither a capable carpenter or a useful gardener, but he knows better than to try any excuse—true or otherwise—on Lydia when she has her mind set on something. So his options are either show up and get berated all day, or bail and risk the loss of his testicles. It speaks to how little he’s looking forward to seeing Derek that he’s actually weighing his options.
He gets there a couple minutes ahead of the noon start time, but things are already in full swing. Lydia is looming on the porch like the goddess of war and party planning, barking orders to Liam and Theo who are lugging around heavy bags of soil. Parrish and Boyd are elbows deep in the dirt, arguing softly over the placement of the foxgloves. Isaac and Erica flank Derek on either side, murmuring coolly over the gazebo specs.
Derek is in another tank top, sweating already even in the late fall sun, like he’s been at work for hours by now. He’s authoritative and playful as he reviews the plans. The smirk tugging at his lips is unfairly handsome, and when he hooks an arm around Isaac's neck to explain something a second time, Stiles can’t help but wonder—for the smallest of secret seconds—what it’d be like to be on the other end of that casual affection.
But Erica catches sight of Stiles standing there gawking on the lawn. She leans in to whisper to Derek, and as his gaze lifts to Stiles, all the ease and warmth in his expression withers away. Clearly they’re not going to pretend like nothing happened.
“Stiles!” Lydia shouts from the shade of the porch. And bless her for trampling over their silent, drawn out stalemate. “Your hands have all the finesse of a wrecking ball. You’re not gonna lay a finger on my flowers. Go help with the gazebo.”
It never does well for Stiles to forget that, while Lydia may be a saint fifty percent of the time, the other fifty is devoted to pure villainy. “You want the klutz to play with power tools?”
Lydia smiles venomously at Stiles’s hesitation. “If you get a boo boo, Derek can kiss it better. Gossip around the pack is you did plenty more than that last Friday.”
Stiles’s cheeks burn hot with mortification as muffled laughter titters around between most of the wolves. Derek doesn’t laugh, though. His whole body coils up with tension as he bends down to scoop up a hefty stack of lumber.
“What’s wrong with you?” Stiles hisses at Lydia under his breath, crossing his arms under the full knowledge that their hushed argument is anything but private. “One week you’re cooing about my delicate emotional state, and the next you’re dragging me over the coals in front of the entire pack?”
Lydia’s lips purse briefly in what looks like regret, but she wouldn’t be Lydia Martin if she admitted wrongdoing so easily. “You’re an adult, Stiles. If you’re too embarrassed to be talking about it, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”
And Stiles wouldn’t be Stiles Stilinski if he didn’t argue. “Seriously? You’re advocating for all our personal business to be out in the open? Because I have a few of your stories from high school that—”
“I will scream so loud your head explodes,” Lydia seethes as she stomps down the stairs. They butt heads like this sometimes, too alike for their own good, but never with this flash of real, genuine anger in her eyes. “You’re the only one making a big deal out of this. In fact, your little drama queen routine is more embarrassing than any of your stupid hook ups.”
“Leave him alone,” Derek snaps, words ringing with finality as his stack of lumber is dropped gracelessly in the gazebo plot.
Stiles doesn’t know if he’s more surprised by Derek speaking up in his defense, or by Lydia listening to his command. Any smugness he might feel from Derek’s ruling is dampened by the bit of resentment he has for Lydia bending to the man’s will so easily. She doesn’t listen to anyone. Never has. And Derek is apparently just a man of impossible feats.
Well, Stiles will certainly concede he’s impossible.
Lydia heaves a heavy sigh and storms back up the porch and into the house. Stiles takes note of every pair of eyes looking pointedly away from him and shuffles meekly over to Derek and the wood pile.
“Thanks, I guess.”
Derek just shrugs, setting about laying out the shape of the gazebo base. “She was being rude. And I don’t like them talking about it, either.”
Of course. Because clearly between the two of them, Derek is the one who actually has something to be embarrassed about. “Right.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Derek insists, glancing up at him as he swipes at his sweaty brow. For a second, Stiles thinks he’s talking about the implied rejection. But no. He’s stuck on Lydia. “Everyone’s been snappy because of the wedding stuff. Besides, Lydia is… moody.”
“Moody?”
“Moody,” Derek agrees. He tosses him a tight smile and returns to his work.
Stiles rolls his eyes. “Do you care to elaborate this time?” He doesn’t add or are you going to run away again.
“Moody,” he echoes again. But he glances up, checking to make sure no one else is listening. “Pregnant.”
Stiles half stumbles until he’s plopped down on his ass, sitting on the grass. “What? She— How long?”
Derek gives an uncertain hum. “Two months along, maybe.”
“Was she not planning on telling me?”
“She hasn’t told anyone.” At this, Derek actually stops what he’s doing, kneeling next to Stiles in the grass. “I figured it out a couple of days ago. Peter’s probably the only other person who’d recognize the smell, and he’d only care if the information got him anything.”
Stiles’s entire world has tilted upside down and started spinning the opposite way. “Right. And you told me because…?”
“Well, she just aired your dirty laundry, didn’t she?” Dirty laundry everyone clearly already knew, but he has a point. “And…”
“And you thought that I would react badly if she surprised me alongside everyone else. So you wanted to give me time to get used to it.”
Derek nods, glancing up through his lashes at Stiles like he’s waiting for an inevitable explosion. Which, fair enough. Part of Stiles is grateful for his careful consideration. Another part resents it, which is ludicrous. If Lydia had made the announcement over sparkling cider in a room full of everyone he knows, Stiles would have had to lock himself in the bathroom and fight not to punch a mirror. But the thought of Derek assuming he needs to be handled with kid gloves sets the blood in his veins to burning.
An unnecessarily cruel dig is balancing on the tip of Stiles’s tongue, but before he can lower himself to serve it, the shattering of glass cuts him off.
The stress of the wedding, it seems, is definitely getting to more than just Lydia and Stiles. As Stiles looks up toward the gaping hole in the front window of the Hale house, Peter stands beside it, shocked just the same. Stiles slides his gaze across the lawn to Malia’s adoptive father, Henry, who’s huffing and puffing and red in the face.
Peter must come to the same logical conclusion as Stiles—that Henry is he who cast the first stone—because he narrows his gaze and seethes back, “Are you crazy?”
“Would’ve thought you spent enough time in the basement of Eichen to recognize like minds,” Henry sneers back.
Peter reaches beside him and jerks an axe out of the top of a tree stump. He hurls it full force at Henry, thankfully catching the base of a tree behind him rather than the man’s scowling face.
Henry doesn’t seem all that ruffled by the display. “If you think I’m going to let some deadbeat, prissy, zombie-dog walk my daughter down the aisle, you should go ahead and turn yourself right back in.”
“My daughter,” Peter corrects, stalking forward with a predatory grace. “Isn’t going to get walked down the aisle by some backwoods, ill-bred cretin.”
Stiles flaps a hand out to smack Derek in the bicep. “Hey. Do something.”
“What?” Derek scoffs. “No.”
“What do you mean ‘no?’” Stiles balks. “Dude, you’re the alpha.”
“So? I don’t like to get involved in personal battles.”
Stiles tears his eyes from the impending brawl to pin Derek with a glare. “That’s not true. You literally just stepped into the middle of my argument with Lydia. And you butted in to warn me off making a move on her. A move I wasn’t going to make anyway!”
“That’s different,” Derek sighs long sufferingly. “You’re— Look. Henry has a truck full of shotguns and Peter is just looking for an excuse to sink his claws into something. That’s not the kind of thing you try and mediate.”
“Um, that’s exactly the kind of thing you try and mediate? They’re going to kill each other.”
“No. They won’t. Malia means too much to them. They’re just blowing off steam.”
Stiles rolls his eyes, pushing the sleeves of his hoodie up to brace himself for facing the situation himself. “Trust an alpha werewolf to scoff at the idea of diplomacy.”
“Stiles,” Derek warns as he’s already marching off toward the men. “Stiles!”
“You didn’t even know she existed for half her life!” Henry argues as Stiles shuffles up beside them.
Peter’s eyes flash a dangerous blue. “And for half of that she was living wild in the woods, so I don’t know why you think a few insignificant years of infancy make you better than me!”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Stiles soothes, stepping in between them like he has a death wish. “It’s not really a competition here. You’re both her dads. In different ways! And that’s great. It’s not something to fight over.”
Henry levels him with a glare. “And who the hell are you?”
Peter shoves him aside as if he’s as weightless as an empty plastic bag. “He’s irrelevant. Much like you.”
Erica sidles up next to Stiles, draping an arm around his shoulders protectively. “Cool it with the pushing. Stiles is right—you guys are being stupid.”
“Right,” Isaac agrees, walking up and sounding, for a brief second, as if he’s going to be helpful. “Besides, you tried to murder the groom once, Peter. Not exactly an ideal memory to have walking down the aisle.”
“To be fair,” Boyd interjects from where he’s still pushing around dirt. “Henry tried to kill the bride once.”
“Oh, right,” Parrish snaps his fingers in recognition. “With the traps.”
Lydia crosses her arms from her perch on the porch. “He didn’t exactly know the situation, though. But I’m definitely biased here. I’m never going to side with Peter.”
“There are no sides!” Stiles shouts over the murmurs and counterpoints sprouting up all around him. “This isn’t a public forum! I’m just trying to—”
“Butt into other people’s business?” Peter snarks. “Nobody asked you. Go back to swooning over Derek.”
“There’s no swooning,” Stiles mutters.
Henry reaches out and shoves at Peter’s chest. “What, are you threatened some kid is taking my side?”
“I’m definitely an adult. And there are no sides!”
Peter doesn’t dignify either of their retorts with a response. His face shifts quickly into blazing blue eyes, a ridged brow, and extended fangs. And as he lunges forward to grapple Henry, both men topple over to the side—landing with their full weight on top of Stiles.
The air is knocked out of his lungs. As they writhe and wrestle over all of his delicate organs, it feels like he’s been run over by a monster truck, which then had the mind of reversing over him a couple of times.
An errant elbow catches him in the cheek as the rest of the betas pile in on top of the fight, trying to pull the dads away from each other. The added weight makes his bones creak. He’s going to suffocate under a pile of very sexy werewolves, and it’s not even going to be any fun.
Spots are starting to dance in front of his vision when a loud roar rips through the air so violently it makes the ground beneath him shake. Everybody on top of him freezes in mid-motion, and a large, clawed hand wraps firmly around his ankle to drag him across the grass and out of the tangle of danger.
From where he lies beneath the protective crouch of Derek’s body, Stiles looks up and loses what little oxygen he regained from the rescue. Derek’s sharpened teeth are bared in a fierce snarl, eyes a violent red flashing with unquestioned authority. His broad chest heaves with heavy, animalistic panting, and his claws pierce the earth on either side of Stiles’s shoulders.
He’s a glorious, terrifying beast poised over him like a great defender. He’s man and wolf and pure and utter mind-melting sensuality. The blood leaves Stiles’s brain so quickly to flood south that he has a whole new reason to worry about fainting.
“Peter. Henry.” Derek’s voice is cold and sharp, rumbling with the grit of his shift. “Get out of my sight. Kill each other elsewhere. I don’t care.” His gaze flickers to the others, only marginally less scathing. “The rest of you: Grow up. Mind your business. Get back to work.”
There’s a tense beat of still silence, but at the vicious snap of Derek’s jaws, everyone jerks and rushes to follow orders. Stiles will admit that now there’s some swooning. He might even whimper a bit.
Derek peers down at him, features immediately smoothing away into humanness. “Are you okay?”
“Up,” Stiles wheezes. “Off.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” he grits, scrambling to his feet as Derek gracefully slides to his side. “Get up. Come on.”
Derek just blinks, but hesitantly trails after Stiles as he grabs his wrist and starts tugging him toward the house. “What’s going on?”
“Sex. You’re having sex with me. Right now.” He twists to look over his shoulder, calling out to the others who are at least pretending not to eavesdrop. “Leave or don’t, I don’t care. We’re having sex!”
At that, a fine dusting of pink blooms over Derek’s cheeks. But he picks up his pace behind Stiles nonetheless.
The front door isn’t even fully shut behind them before Stiles is whipping around, throwing himself into Derek’s arms. He half-climbs him, hooking a leg over his hip and fisting a hand in his hair as his tongue snakes past his teeth. Derek moans into the kiss, a little helpless, a lot turned on.
Derek palms Stiles’s ass with one hand and uses the other to hike up Stiles’s other leg around his hips. They don’t break the kiss as he stumbles blindly towards the stairs. Not until he trips and jerks away from Stiles’s greedy lips to take a peek at what’s in the middle of the floor.
A hammer, surrounded in a spray of window glass that crunches under Derek’s foot. Huh.
As if Henry’s weapon of choice has reminded Derek of how they got here, he turns back to Stiles, brow raised. “I told you not to get into the middle of it.”
Stiles tips Derek’s head back by the tight grip on his hair. “You can be right, or you can fuck me.”
“I’m so wrong,” Derek groans, continuing on up the stairs. “I’ve probably never been right in my entire life.”
Stiles snorts a laugh, planting kisses along the sharp line of Derek’s jaw. “You’re sexy when you’re agreeable.”
A growl rumbles through Derek’s chest—rumbles through every inch of Stiles’s body plastered against him, going through his nerves like an aching hot jolt. He gasps, making a liar out of himself. Because Derek agreeable? Sure. Sexy. He kind of always is. But Derek growly? Stern? Authoritative? Molten. Fucking. Hot.
Derek sits on the edge of the bed, Stiles cradled in his lap. Their chests are pressed tight together, Derek too warm and too firm and making Stiles’s nipples go tight and sensitive, even through his shirt. Stiles chokes back a whine as Derek licks a long stripe up the side of his throat.
“I want you like before,” Stiles pants, grinding his hips down into Derek’s and shivering at the friction.
A hand slips up the back of Stiles’s shirt, burning a path up his spine. “You want me to ride you?”
“No. Not before like at the bar. Before like outside.”
“Outside?” Derek blinks, trying to puzzle the pieces together. When realization hits him, his eyes flash red. He rolls them so Stiles is spread out on his back across the width of the bed, and Derek stands between his bent legs, chest heaving. “Outside.”
Stiles bites his lip, tucking his hands into the front of Derek’s waistband. “Yeah. I want that. I want you to fuck me like—”
“Like a werewolf?” Derek drawls, arching a brow as he stares down at him. He tips forward, planting a hand on either side of Stiles’s head. “Like an alpha?”
“Yeah,” he breathes. He tugs desperately at Derek’s shirt until the other man shifts his weight enough for him to yank it off all together. After tossing the damn near offensive article of clothing across the room, Stiles lays a greedy map across Derek’s bared skin with his palms. Until he stops abruptly, eyes going wide as they flick up to meet Derek’s. “That’s okay, right? It’s not weird? Not… too kinky or something?”
Derek snorts, punctuating his amusement by ripping Stiles’s shirt clear in two. Stiles would be mad if he had any blood left in his brain to conjure any other emotion besides horny. “It’s only kinky for you, Stiles. I’m a werewolf, so fucking like a werewolf is just fucking.”
“Good. Then get to it.” His words fizzle and slur out as Derek swipes a tongue over a nipple. As he reaches out to roll the other between a thumb and forefinger, Stiles bucks helplessly against him.
Luckily, Derek is kinder to Stiles’s pants than he was to his shirt. When he gets impatient with tonguing and tweaking Stiles’s nipples, he unbuttons his jeans and pulls them and his boxers off in one quick tug. It slides Stiles to the very edge of the mattress, ass half off the side, pressed flush to the swell of Derek’s erection.
“Come on,” Stiles whines, popping open Derek’s pants. “I don’t need the foreplay. Just mount me, big guy.”
Derek rolls his eyes, stretching toward the bedside table to nab a near-empty bottle of lube. “You know, for a guy who wants to get fucked by an alpha, you’re shit at submitting.”
Stiles’s skin goes hot and tight all over, just as aroused as he is embarrassed. He squirms against Derek’s hips, spreads his legs wide and eager. “Maybe I want you to make me.”
“Fuck,” Derek whispers under his breath. He presses two fingers into Stiles, chilly with the slick of fresh-out-the-bottle lube. He works into him quick and sloppy. Perfunctory. Only as thorough as he needs to be to avoid injury. “You’re gonna feel it tomorrow,” he promises, voice low and dark. “Maybe for days.”
“Yes!” Stiles gasps as Derek’s thick fingers twist inside of him before pulling back out. Derek pushes his jeans down to his knees, presses up hot and close against the back of Stiles’s thighs. “Wait, wait, wait, wait!”
Gentle concern wars against impatience as Derek drags wide palms down Stiles’s ribs. “What is it?”
“I’m just curious. What is kinky for werewolves?”
Derek straightens up, glaring down at Stiles. “Really? You want to have this conversation now?”
Stiles flashes a shit-eating grin. “Could be relevant.”
“It’s not,” Derek mutters with enough insistence that Stiles’s interest is doubled.
“Well now you have to tell me.”
With a groan, Derek tips his head back, wrapping a hand around himself to give his length a few conciliatory strokes. “Stiles. Most of the stuff that’s kinky for humans is still kinky for werewolves. Okay?”
No. Not okay. As not okay as Derek resigning himself to masturbation instead of just answering the question so they can have sex. Stiles pouts, swatting Derek’s hand off himself as he hooks an ankle around his hip to reel him in closer. “Come on. What, specifically, is a werewolf kink?”
Derek sighs, and, as if it pains him, answers, “Chasing.”
“Chasing?”
“Hunting.”
“Hu— Oh.” Realization slams into Stiles like a wrecking ball. His heart starts pattering away in his chest like a rabbit on a greyhound track.
“Catching.” As he says it—husks it, really—he tips forward again, bracing himself on his elbows. The tips of their noses brush, their lips push and pull air between them. Derek is a burning, solid weight on top of him, and though there was no chase, Stiles has never felt more like prey.
He tips his chin up, caressing their lips and baring his neck. “The chasing—do you like that?”
Derek reaches down to grip his cock, teasing the tip at Stiles’s entrance. “Do you want to get railed, or do you want to talk about what may or may not turn me on?”
“Both, preferably. I—Oh my god. Fuck.”
Derek presses into him in one swift motion, teeth bared in a sharp grin. An ache crackles up Stiles’s spine, simmering back down in bursts of pleasure. He opens his mouth to complain, or neg, or demand more—whatever—but the words fall out of his brain as Derek pulls almost all the way out before snapping back in.
Stiles keens, arching his back to sink further down around Derek. With every quick thrust, Stiles pushes back, flesh meeting flesh hard enough that the rounds of his ass will surely be bruised by Derek’s unforgiving hip bones. The thought just makes him moan, jaw hanging open in lax pleasure.
Derek readjusts, putting weight back on his feet so he can grip Stiles under the knees and spread his legs up and out. Stiles grunts at the stretch but goes hot all over as Derek sweeps his eyes over his body, looking his fill. When Derek’s fangs drop and his eyes bleed into a steady red, Stiles’s whole body starts to quake.
“Oh fuck,” Stiles gasps, ready to blow when they’ve barely even started. “Derek. Derek. God, you’re so good at this.”
A self-satisfied rumble reverberates through Derek’s chest. He rocks his hips faster—faster than any human would be able to maintain. And Christ, how is Stiles supposed to go back to fucking regular dudes after the nirvana of werewolf sex?
He reaches down to start pulling himself off, but the second his hand curls around his length Derek growls, snapping his teeth. Stiles’s head lolls to the side, dizzy with another rush of arousal. But his hands curl into fists around the sheets above his head, obedient.
“Please,” he pants, voice stuttering with the slam of Derek’s hips. “I need to come, Derek. Make me come.”
“Like this,” Derek commands, voice thick through his elongated teeth. His nails inch out into sharp-pointed claws, and his grip around Stiles’s knees goes more delicate, even as the rocking of his hips picks up an impossible intensity.
Stiles shouts, loud enough that he sincerely hopes the rest of the pack had the wisdom to leave the property. Loud enough that he kind of hopes half of Beacon Hills evacuated to save him the embarrassment. But the thin haze of momentary shame at his raw pleasure just stokes the desire hotter. It tangles up with his helplessness to the sensual roll of Derek’s body. It nearly chokes him.
He comes hard—harder than he ever has before, with a wail that makes his own ears ring. He makes a mess of his chest, and his fingers are stiff from their white-knuckled grip on the sheets. His eyes roll up in his head as Derek pumps his hips another dozen or so times before spilling inside of him, curling around Stiles in a greedy full-body embrace.
The world spins, or crumbles, or ceases to exist all together. Stiles is too high off of sex most people wouldn’t even be able to dream up to try and trace the fraying threads of the universe. A smile stretches across his face, dumb from the heady rush of endorphins. His brain is quiet in this moment in a way it rarely is.
And it’s probably bad news that the sex is so good. Life-ruiningly good, when attached to such a sour package. But it’ll be fine. Because once Stiles collects the shards of his shattered mind, he’ll be able to find a way to gracefully extricate himself from this vicious (and delicious) sex cycle.
He just needs to get in control of the situation.
*******************************
Stiles quickly loses control of the situation. But it’s like Derek was created in a lab for the sole purpose of driving him out of his mind. As they’re endlessly shoved together over the next couple of weeks, Stiles becomes intimately acquainted with all forms of frustration.
And if they’re not trading barbs back and forth, they’re trading orgasms.
When they’re supposed to be collecting old high school pictures for a cheesy reception slideshow, they hook up in Stiles’s bedroom at his dad’s house. Stiles is on all fours digging around under his bed when Derek can’t resist draping himself over his back. As Stiles exhausts his entire repertoire of doggy-style jokes, Derek pretends he’s not smiling as he drives into him from behind.
During a pack brunch, they sneak away to the cramped bathroom of the diner. They kiss the taste of over-strong mimosas back and forth, until Stiles sinks down to his knees. He sucks Derek off like a hoover, but Derek fingers him while stroking him off fast and dirty, so they both leave a little jelly-legged.
In the driver’s seat of Derek’s Camaro, every thrust honks the horn until they have to pause for laughter. When they scramble out of the car, Derek makes good on his old promise and bends Stiles over the hood.
At the tailor’s, Stiles slips into the dressing room as Derek pulls off his fitted suit. Derek’s cheek is pressed to the mirror as Stiles rolls into him agonizingly slow. Every ragged puff of air fogs up the glass, and Derek’s palms slip-slide around the frame as he begs Stiles for harder, faster, now.
One night, Stiles feels particularly vindictive and shows up unannounced at the Hale house with a prostate massager he uses on Derek until he howls and grips his bed frame so hard the headboard splinters clear in two. Stiles has the gall to laugh until Derek flips him over and eats him out until he cries.
When Stiles’s dad is on a double shift at the station, they roll around on the floor of Stiles’s living room. Pants tugged down to their knees and rutting against one another until they come, they actually manage to have an argument while they’re having sex. So. It’s pretty evolved stuff.
It’s too good for Stiles to have the strength to stop now. Maybe after the first time he could’ve walked away. But every time they touch, he feels more and more compelled to come back. To invent a reason to fight, so they can invent a reason to vent their frustrations with their bodies.
It’s not the most conventional of arrangements, but it’s better than either of them snapping and murdering the other.
*******************************
Things begin to shift following the Great Florist Meltdown.
It’s a week and a half until Scott and Malia’s big day, and Stiles and Derek just happen to be making out on the couch when the call comes in.
“Ignore it,” Stiles mutters against Derek’s lips, tugging on the hem of his sweater to hold his attention. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
Derek groans, flexing his grip on Stiles’s hips and stealing another kiss before admitting, “It could be important.”
“This is important.”
He hums in helpless agreement, but the phone buzzes on from the end table. “I’m waiting on a call back from—” he glances over to peek at the caller ID, and seems to see it’s exactly who he’s expecting: “the florist.”
Stiles slumps back against the cushions with a drawn out groan as Derek lifts the phone to his ear.
“This is Derek. Yes, I just wanted to check in about the details for delivery and set up next Saturday.” He pauses, shifting to sit forward at full attention with a frown growing darker and darker on his lips. “Well can you just enter it into the system now?”
Oh god. As the days until the big day dwindle to fewer and fewer, Derek has only coiled tighter, like a venomous snake poised to spring. If something is genuinely going wrong, it might as well herald in the beginning of the apocalypse.
Stiles scrambles closer to Derek’s side so he can catch the quiet murmur from the other line.
“Unfortunately, we need at least a month to properly prepare for a large or complicated order.”
“Really?” Derek’s tone is sharper than a guillotine. “Well, you would have actually had a month to prepare for an order of this size if you actually entered it in your system correctly in the first place.”
A nervous silence crackles before the woman hastily shatters the last of Derek’s calm. “I understand that, Sir, and we’ll of course offer you a full refund for the inconvenience.”
“No. I don’t want a refund. A refund won’t get me floral arrangements in less than two weeks. I want you to do the job you already agreed to do.”
“We can’t—”
“I don’t want to hear about what you can’t do.” Derek rises to his feet and starts to stalk around the living room like some kind of apex predator. Stiles trips over himself to trail after him and keep up with the conversation. “I want to hear about how much time you’re going to spend making it happen anyway.”
“We don’t have the resources to—”
“Listen to me. I don’t care if I have to pay you double what I already put down. You’re going to make it happen.”
“Derek,” Stiles mutters, reaching out for his shoulder to try and deescalate the situation, but Derek just shrugs him off.
“Doubling it isn’t going to make the timeline possible.”
“Triple, then.” Derek’s voice takes on a subtle growl, the steel behind his words enough to send a pack of alphas pissing themselves, if another one ever dared to come back. “And if I have to, I’ll stomp over there with the best man and help you arrange the fucking things myself. Because if I don’t get what we agreed on, I’m not only going to make it impossible for you to book a single event with anyone within a hundred mile radius, I’m going to hunt you down, rip out your intestines, and make you wear them like a scarf. Are we clear?”
“I don’t respond well to threats, Mr. Hale.”
“I’m sure you do when you know they’re not empty. I have a lot of money to blow, and if I have to put up six dozen billboards just to drag your name through the mud, I will absolutely do it. As for the disembowelment—Google my name. I’m sure you’ll find enough speculation about my criminal record to give veracity to my claims.”
The woman gives a shaky exhale over the line. “...I’ll make it work.”
“I bet. Thanks.”
Derek tosses his phone onto the couch and throws his head back in a literal roar of frustration.
A slimy, uncomfortable feeling quivers and quakes in Stiles’s stomach at the palpable distress pouring off Derek in waves. Like a man possessed, Stiles wants nothing more in that moment than to make him feel better. To soothe all his hurts.
He sidles up to him, stroking his palms down his broad chest. “Say what you want about threatening a bumbling small business owner, but when a man throws around words like ‘veracity,’ it always gets me hot.”
“Are you serious right now?” Derek bats him away. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“I got that,” Stiles shoots back a little too tersely, feathers ruffled by the brusque dismissal. “I’m just trying to lighten things up.”
If looks could kill, Stiles would have a more interesting relationship with death than Peter. “Some things don’t need to be light, Stiles. Some things are just heavy.”
“Dude, unclench. The important thing is that Scott and Malia are getting married, rain or shine. A little hiccup in the roses isn’t the end of the world.”
“If I want to act like it’s the end of the world, then I fucking will.”
Stiles knows he shouldn’t, but he laughs. He can’t help it. “And the award for Miss Pre-Teen Drama Queen 2021 goes to Derek Hale.”
Unexpectedly, the anger drains from the tight posture of Derek’s body. He seems to curl in on himself then, his scowl giving way to a soft, plaintive, and aching expression.
“I just want things to be perfect for Malia. Better even than she could have imagined for herself. And if that means I have to throw all my money away, or strong arm some vendors into cooperating, or god forbid, even spend long, excruciating hours with you, then I’ll do it. Our family doesn’t come by a lot of happiness these days.” He huffs a self-deprecating laugh, as if every ailment of his bloodline falls on his shoulders. “I want that to change for her, even if I don’t get the same cozy ending. Scott is good, and he is kind, and he’s the only person I would ever trust to take care of her—heart, body, and soul. I just want to honor that. Can’t that be enough? Does everything have to be a game, or a competition, or a… a fucking joke?”
Stiles swallows the lump in his throat, taking a half-step forward. “I… I didn’t know it was like that. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need you to be sorry. I just need you to take me seriously once in a while.”
“I do!” Stiles argues, heart suddenly pounding in his chest. He knows Derek must hear it. He wonders if he knows why his pulse is going crazy. If he knows, it’d be great if he could let Stiles in on it, too.
“You don’t. You—” Derek stops short, pushing a hand through his mussed hair. “I don’t have it in me to fight tonight. There must be someone else you hate in town to keep you entertained.”
Stiles has to bite his tongue against the immediate reassurance of I don’t hate you. Because when did that happen? And also what the fuck? And how?
Because it’s no secret Derek is handsome. It doesn’t take a man with taste to recognize that. But he always has a response to one of Stiles’s snappy retorts. Which is annoying, but just goes to show that he’s smart, too, without ever feeling like he needs to prove it. He’s infuriatingly prickly. Sharp and dangerous, but in a way that would never, ever hurt someone who didn’t have it coming. In a way that promises there’s a softness hiding under the surface if you knew where to find it. And maybe not everyone goes looking. Stiles didn’t, really. But it’s been shown to him.
That counts for some kind of trust. A miracle after the life Derek has lived. In fact, every joyful thing about him is a shocking little thrill. The way he laughs sometimes like he can’t even help it. The way he takes care of people and refuses to accept the gratitude it earns. The way the passion pours out of him like he’s holding a deep and endless well of it inside.
Oh fuck. Stiles always knew that his body liked Derek’s body, but apparently his heart likes him too.
“Uh.”
Derek rolls his eyes, swinging an arm out toward the door. “Just go, Stiles.”
His jaw hangs open for a beat, brain whirring for a single thing to say in light of this earth shattering revelation. Instead he just clicks his mouth shut and half-jogs toward the door.
He sits in his jeep for a long moment, too scared to attempt driving with his head spinning.
Fuck.
*******************************
It’s four in the morning, and Stiles hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep.
Fuck.
*******************************
He drags his body down for breakfast at a little past ten. To say he got even three hours of sleep last night would be generous. But he’s still somehow wired, body come alive from every nerve to every atom with the knowledge that… he has feelings for Derek?
Even the vague admission is rattling.
“You look like hell,” the sheriff observes as he trods in from the living room. He plinks a mug down in the sink and gives his son a more critical once-over. “You have a late night?”
Stiles groans, dropping his forehead down to the table next to his soggy bowl of Cocoa Puffs. “The latest.”
“Hm. Well you weren’t out partying with Scott last night, because he stopped by Melissa’s after dinner.”
“No,” Stiles confirms, straightening back up to go back to pushing around his cereal with a forced air of casualness. “I was with Derek for a bit.”
His dad’s face doesn’t change, but Stiles knows better than to take that as a comfort. He’s not sheriff for nothing, and after decades of dealing with Stiles’s chaos, he knows how to play things close to the chest. “Oh? Word around town is you two are spending a lot of time together.”
“Word around town. You mean your girlfriend told you, which means her son told her, which means he’s no longer my best friend.”
Noah huffs a laugh, a little embarrassed, as he always is, to have attention brought to his relationship with Melissa. “No need to burn bridges, kid. I think it’s… nice.”
“Nice?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Derek’s a good kid. A good man. May not have been the normal guy I always dreamed about you settling down with, but you’re not exactly a magnet for normal yourself.”
“Settling down with...?” Stiles almost chokes on his own tongue. “No! We’re not— Derek and I aren’t dating. There’s no relationship. I mean. There’s a— What I mean is, there’s nothing romantic.”
Noah blinks, as slow and calm as ever. “Ah. So you’re just—”
“Don’t say the word sex. I don’t like to believe you know the word or the concept.”
This time Noah gives in to rolling his eyes. “So you’re just physical.”
Stiles scoops up the biggest spoonful of Cocoa Puffs he can manage before stuffing it in his mouth, muttering around it with, “I plead the fifth.”
“Jesus Christ. Only you could come home after six years and fall into a casual relationship with the least casual person I know.”
“Least casual person you know?” Stiles echoes. “What does that mean?”
The sheriff shakes his head, turning on his heel and heading back to the living room. “I’m staying out of it.”
“But what does it mean?!”
*******************************
On Saturday, Stiles arrives at the airport at ass o’clock in the morning. Scott’s bachelor party is a weekend of debauchery in Las Vegas—an idea thought up by Isaac and disapproved of by everyone but Scott. But as it’s his big day, a group of wolves and loners who are decidedly not party animals are packed up and prepared for a wild time.
But for Stiles, the promised endless cycle of booze hasn’t even started yet and he already feels like puking. Since his great big awful revelation, his brain has been a constant loop of Derek Derek Derek. Because of course Stiles would go from a complete and total infatuation with goddess upon the earth Lydia Martin to having a crush on the somehow even more unattainable alpha male poster boy Derek Hale.
Which, sure. Stiles has definitely attained Derek more than he ever did Lydia. In every possible position and configuration, really. But his dad said it himself: Derek doesn’t do casual. Which means that their days of wasting time together are numbered. And in the back of Stiles’s jeep Derek had implied he’s no stranger to pining, which means he’s got his eyes on someone he intends to be totally and completely serious with, and how can Stiles do anything but stand by and watch?
And now, as they sit a few seats apart at the gate, the guy won’t even look at him. He’s been trying to catch his eye for the past forty minutes, but any movement—sudden or otherwise—just makes Derek clench up tighter and tighter. Stiles wouldn’t be surprised if he popped his claws any minute.
Is he really still mad about the other night? Was it that big of a deal?
As boarding starts, Stiles artfully insinuates himself behind Derek, angling to nab the seat next to him before anyone else in the pack goes for it. Derek rolls his eyes at the display that maybe isn’t as subtle as Stiles thinks, but he doesn’t object. That’s something, at least.
Derek slides into a window seat, and Stiles doesn’t hesitate for even a second before practically throwing himself down in the aisle seat next to him. Derek grunts, jaw clenched so tight Stiles wouldn’t be surprised if he finds some loose teeth later. “Can I have one minute of peace?”
“Look,” Stiles begins, sucking in a chestful of air. “I can be an insensitive asshole sometimes. I know that. But I don’t mean to be. Always. I don’t always mean to be an asshole. I do occasionally, but you can be, too, you know. And my point is, I’m sorry if you think I don’t take you seriously. And maybe I don’t always. Maybe that’s a super special Stiles defense mechanism. But I’m taking you seriously now. And if you’re mad at me, I want to know what I can do to fix it. I mean, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together the next couple of days, right? And feasibly the rest of our lives. We’re practically family now, and—”
Derek slides a palm over Stiles’s flapping mouth, glaring over at him incredulously. “Is this supposed to be a two person exchange, or just a flight-long monologue?”
“You make me nervous,” Stiles admits when Derek drops his hand.
“What?”
Stiles licks his lips, mouth gone suddenly dry. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re pretty intense. And we fight and we— Well. You know. We do other things. Sometimes while fighting. But I— I never thought you hated me before.”
“I don’t hate you,” Derek says wonderingly.
“Maybe hate is extreme. But you’re mad, right? Your face is all grr and your mood is all avoidy.”
Derek rolls his eyes, slumping down in his seat. “I’m not mad at you either, Stiles. It has nothing to do with you.”
All of Stiles’s internal organs clench and tangle. Of course it has nothing to do with him. Derek’s probably all messed up over whoever he’s got a big ol’ heart boner for. But that’s fine, because Stiles knows how to take what he can get. He can still be a friend and let Derek talk it out.
“Is it… I mean, if you’re…”
“I’m scared of flying,” Derek grits out. “I’m— Do you know what would happen if a werewolf had a panic attack in a plane 6 miles off the ground?”
Slashing claws. General hysteria. Surprise skydiving. “Have you tried, like, a valium?”
Derek models the definition of a bitch face. “Werewolf metabolism, Stiles. That would be about as useful to me as popping a tic tac.”
“Right.” Stiles glances back at the row behind them, where Boyd has his earbuds in and Scott is somehow already asleep as the stewardess starts her safety spiel. He turns back to Derek, as earnest as he can be. “Well, you’re going to be fine. I promise. And I can always distract you from your nerves.”
“I’m not looking to join the Mile High Club. But thanks.”
Stiles punches him in the arm, doing more damage to his own knuckles than anything. “No! I mean with conversation. We can talk, right?”
“Us?”
“Yeah,” he can’t help smirking. “It should be possible in theory.”
Derek tips his head, conceding. “In theory. But in practice it still might end up with a giant tin can plummeting from the sky.”
“True. Or your initiation into the Mile High Club.”
Snorting, Derek relaxes into his seat. “Or that. I guess that’s a risk worth taking.”
Stiles hates the warmth that sears through his stomach. “I wish that you’d told me you hated planes before. I would have driven over with you.”
Derek’s eyebrows peak to his hairline. “Right, because the two of us would fare better all day alone in a car together.”
A hazy fantasy collects like dust in Stiles’s brain. Elbows brushing for hours between the seats. The breeze whipping through their hair, nothing to do to while away the time but confess things they’ve never uttered to another living being. Stopping at greasy drive-throughs to share french fries. Arguing over directions until they have to pull over to kiss away the tension. Pausing at the Nevada state line to savor a few more minutes alone. Taking the plunge and asking if they could be something real…
Stiles clears his throat and shifts in the seat as the plane takes off the runway. Derek’s grip tightens around the arm rest, and Stiles smooths a palm over the back of his hand. Maybe it’s not ten hours and an epic romance, but it’s still time.
“I think we’d do okay,” he smiles, aching a little in all the best ways for the movie playing in his mind. “Unless you think you wouldn’t be able to share radio rights.”
“I can share,” Derek insists a shade indignantly. “Even if your taste in music is predictably gauche.”
“You sound like Peter,” Stiles accuses, just to watch the way Derek’s mouth twists into a sneer. “And I bet you wouldn’t make it through one chorus before your alpha instincts kicked in.”
Derek gives him a sharp look. “Alpha instincts? What do you think those even are?”
“Your control issues!”
“My what?”
Stiles scoffs, readjusting in his seat to face Derek head-on. “Are you kidding me? Everything you do has a particular little Derek way, and you bite everyone’s head off when they don’t abide. I watched Isaac shift some spices around in your cabinet and you almost broke his arm.”
“Wh— I— That has nothing to do with being an alpha!” Derek’s spluttering draws a few stares and quirked brows. He leans in closer to Stiles, dipping his voice quieter. “That’s just how I am. I’m just… picky.”
“Picky? Picky is what you call a toddler who only eats chicken nuggets. You’re positively neurotic.”
Derek’s scowl looks more like a pout as he crosses his arms over his chest. “Fine. I’m a mess. So what? You want an award? It’s not hard to figure out.”
“Hey,” Stiles’s voice is soft with laughter. “It’s not a big deal, Derek. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all kind of a mess. Besides, it’s kind of cute sometimes.”
Derek looks up through his lashes, biting at the corner of his lip like he’s trying not to smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. That dorky little planner you have? With the sticky tabs? It kind of turns me on.”
“Stop,” Derek huffs through a laugh, palming at his own face. “It does not. It drives you crazy.”
It drives Stiles crazy that he wants so badly for Derek to block off large sections of his day with Stiles’s name. “Like sexy crazy, though. Whenever I see highlighters now, I think of you color-coding your planner and spontaneously pop a boner.”
“A gentle breeze makes you pop a boner.”
Stiles blinks, taking a minute to process the fact that Derek Hale actually said boner. “Uh. Well. That’s a fair point. But your Big Man in Charge schtick isn’t all bad, is all I’m saying. I mean, you could definitely still learn to delegate. Your whole lone wolf thing pisses me off sometimes.”
“An alpha is the literal opposite of a lone wolf.”
“Okay, sure. You take care of people. Of everyone. But you do every damn thing yourself. Like, I would always rush home from school when shit hit the fan, and by the time the plane even hit the tarmac, it was like bing, bang, boom—crisis over, don’t even drop by to say hello. Which, obviously, great. Less dead people. But do you know how many fucked up things I Googled in airport terminals trying to be prepared? I’m surprised the FBI hasn’t seized my hard drive.”
Derek furrows his brow, looking back at Stiles like he’s lost at sea in this conversation. “Stiles, I… I never did everything on my own. I was always following your advice.”
“What?”
“You’d text Scott what you were researching? He’d debrief us in pack meetings while you were in the air. Your leads were— Well, most of them were good.”
Stiles’s jaw falls open like a mailbox with a broken hinge. “So you what? You stole my credit?”
“Your credit? No. Everyone knows you researched that stuff. I just—”
“Bulldozed in to play hero and made me feel like a worthless idiot?”
“Stiles,” Derek grits out. “I was… I rushed ahead because I was trying to impress you, okay?”
At that, the world ceases to make sense. Stiles heard the words, but they don’t go together. Two plus two no longer makes four. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Look, you said I make you nervous. You made— make me nervous, too. You’re really important to Scott, and he wasn’t always the easiest to deal with when he was first bitten. All he ever did was go on and on about you, like you were some genius who put the stars in the sky. So I just… I wanted you to think I was a good alpha. I wanted you to like me.”
A half-crazed laugh bubbles out of Stiles’s throat. “I despised you for leaving me out of everything.”
“I know,” Derek mutters, flush darkening his cheeks. “You despised me for a lot of things. Everything I did only ever seemed to make it worse.”
“I—”
The rattle of turbulence cuts Stiles off. Derek’s claws pop, but instead of sinking them into the arm of the seat, his hand curls around Stiles’s in a tight grip. Their fingers lace together like a perfect fit.
Stiles squeezes Derek’s hand back. “I blamed you for a lot of things, and I was shitty about that. I was an idiot. You were also a huge idiot. But… I guess it’s nice that, if we have to be idiots, we’re idiots together.”
Derek turns his face away from Stiles, as if he can’t contain a reaction he’s not ready for the world to see. He doesn’t say anything else. But his claws recede, and to Stiles that’s enough.
*******************************
The club is sensation-overload for Stiles, and he’s not even a werewolf. He doesn’t know how the others are handling it so well, let alone having a good time. Well, the others except for Derek. He up and vanished half an hour ago.
The first night in Vegas had been pretty good. After shuffling off the plane, the group of them had immediately taken an extra large cab to their hotel and passed out for a couple of hours. Manly naps out of the way, they ate like kings at the hotel buffet. Following that, they of course drank like kings—with the werewolves using some Deaton-approved herbal assistance on that front. Then, as all sensible drunk men do, they gambled the night away, until they all either broke even or lost so badly they refused to talk about it in any tangible amount.
Today had been full of more booze (obviously), sharks, roller coasters, a cringe worthy magic show, a helicopter, Elvis, and gentlemen’s entertainment which they’ve all sworn to never mention outside of state lines. And now the crowd is pulsing at some slick dance club with bright pink lights, and all the girls shaking by are wearing sparkly barely-there tops, and it’s nice, yeah, but it’s also giving Stiles a headache.
Scott is in the middle of—doing a body shot off of Isaac?—when Stiles grabs him by the arm to pull him aside. It’s for selfish reasons, but also probably for the best. Boyd looked like he was itching to take a picture, and pictorial proof would either give Malia some very dangerous ideas or a new blood feud.
“Scotty!” He yells over the thumping base. “Do you know where Derek went?”
“Huh,” Scotts brow furrows for a second before his whole face blooms into a grin. “Well that’s a change in tune.”
“What?”
Scott rolls his eyes, shuffling closer to practically shout directly into Stiles’s ear. “You and Derek. You’re friends now?”
“Some approximation of that, I guess,” Stiles shrugs. “Why? Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It’s great!” Scott rushes to assure. “Definitely preferable to the whole World War III thing you guys had going on. It’s just. You know. You’re friends. Who are having sex. A lot of it, from the stories I hear from Isaac.”
Stiles scowls, tucking in closer to Scott as a drunk girl flings her body past him. “What does he know about it?”
“He shares a wall with Derek, dude. He knows more than anyone probably wants to.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.” He rolls his eyes, but the full effect of the attitude is probably lost to the cotton candy lighting. “It doesn’t matter. The sex friends situation is temporary.”
“Oh?”
Stiles darts his gaze around, affecting an air of nonchalance. “Yeah. Derek has… feelings.”
Scott’s body goes stock-still, his distracted swaying to the beat coming to an abrupt end. “He told you that?”
“No, of course not. It’s Derek. But, I mean, we were having a conversation. Which we do sometimes. A conversation of a personal nature. And he kind of implied I’m, like, a placeholder. Not in so many words. Just that, you know, he’s been pining for someone. But I could catch his drift. I’m not an idiot.”
Scott tosses his head back in a laugh, and Stiles begins to wonder if he’s more drunk than he assumed. “I’m kind of thinking you might be.”
“Dude!”
He shakes his head, gesturing vaguely to the exit. “Derek cited alpha duties and went back to his room. He wasn’t all uptight or anything, so it’s probably nothing too important if you want to go bug him.”
“I might,” Stiles mutters noncommittally.
He shuffles his feet a bit, pretending he’s not counting up to a sufficient amount of time spent enjoying himself. Scott arches a brow before ditching him to probably hunt down more of Isaac’s skin to suck tequila off of. It’s a good enough exit excuse for Stiles.
Stiles rides the elevator up to the eighth floor, anxious and fidgety the whole way. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. He doesn’t even know what he wants. He just knows that the more time he spends with Derek, the less time he wants to spend away from him. He is so in deep shit.
Derek’s room is three doors down from where Stiles is shacking up with Scott—room 819. He’s the only one that got his own suite, a splurge that has less to do with his alpha status and more to do with his persnickety nature. Despite the fact that he lives with six other people in the rebuilt Hale mansion—Isaac, Erica, Boyd, Cora, Peter, and Malia; difficult roommates even on their own, let alone together—rooming with Derek in a claustrophobic hotel room is a trial no one is looking to tackle.
Except Stiles, maybe. If he had the courage.
As he approaches the door, the soft sound of music drifts under the door. It’s soothing, slow, and lilting. It’s… Josh Groban?
It’s pure confusion that has Stiles rapping on the door. The music abruptly cuts off, and in a matter of seconds the door is jerked open just enough for Derek to peek his head out. His cheeks are flushed hot, eyes darting cagily around the hall.
“Stiles. What do you want?”
“For the world to make sense again?” He raises up on his tiptoes, trying to peer over Derek to survey the room, which only appears to be empty. Which is honestly even more confusing. “Did you ditch all those strippers trying to get into your pants to mope alone to Josh Groban?”
Derek glares, tugging Stiles into the room before slamming the door shut behind him. “First of all, I don’t think any of them were strippers. Second, I was under no circumstances interested in the strangers putting their hands inside of my pants. Third, I’m— I didn’t pick the song.”
“You are only making this whole thing more confusing. What do you mean you didn’t pick the song?”
Slumping down on the edge of his bed with a sigh, Derek peers warily up at Stiles. “Malia picked it. We figured out the aisle drama. Peter and Henry are going to walk her down on either side. But she… Well, she wants to turn the father-daughter dance into an alpha-beta dance, I guess.”
Stiles almost swoons at how cute that is. He has to sit down, pressing his shoulder firmly against Derek’s. “And she picked You Raise Me Up? Has she heard any new music in the last twenty years?”
“Don’t say anything about it to her,” Derek warns. “Isaac made one joke and she crushed his trachea.”
“Noted.” He waves his hand vaguely at Derek’s morose expression. “It’s all very sweet and sentimental. Why do you look like someone kicked your dog?”
A growl rumbles in his throat. “Because I’m a shit dancer, Stiles. I practice for like an hour every night, and I’m still so… It’s awkward.”
“You’re a werewolf.”
“And?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be naturally graceful?” Stiles is struggling to wrap his head around the fact that Derek could be bad at anything. Besides smiling, relaxing, and generally expressing his emotions. “When you stalk across the room you practically float on air.”
Derek glares, but the lingering heat in his cheeks speaks more to embarrassment than any real anger. “Grace isn’t a universal skill. Predators don’t dance.”
“Right, you’re a regular killer.” Stiles rolls his eyes as he stands up. “You’re so dramatic. You just don’t know how to let go and live in the moment. And you’re definitely not going to get better if you only practice alone.”
Now it’s Derek’s turn to fumble through confusion. “What?”
“I’ll help you,” he smiles, softer and warmer than he should. “It’s easy with a partner. I promise.”
“I don’t know,” Derek mutters, but he rises to his feet anyway. “I’ve seen you trip standing still.”
Stiles clicks his tongue in annoyance, strolling as elegantly as he can over to Derek’s phone on the side table to cue up the music. “That’s because when I’m standing still my head is all over the place. There’s no place for brains in dancing.”
The music starts and Derek reluctantly shifts closer. Stiles does his best to stifle his grin at Derek’s complete hopelessness.
“Here,” he offers, sliding in to grip Derek’s shoulder. “Malia’s hand will probably rest like this. Yours will fall somewhere on the middle of her back. And your other will take her free hand in yours.”
Derek obediently gets into position, concentrating hard as if his hand placement is as delicate as the wiring of a bomb. His eyes flick back up to Stiles’s. “Okay. And then?”
“Then follow the beat, Derek. You just sway.” Stiles starts to rock them in time with the music. “It’s not going to be a professional waltz. It’s about the moment, remember?”
Derek glances down at his feet like he’s never been less aware of his own body. “What if I step on her dress?”
“You won’t. But Malia hardly wears clothes as it is. I don’t think she’s going to be all that precious about it if you do.”
“It’s her special day. What if I embarrass her?”
Stiles slides his hand up Derek’s neck to cup his jaw, tilting his head up until their eyes meet. “Hey. Listen to me. I know you want everything to be perfect. But she asked you to share this dance with her for a reason. She loves you. It’s not about being good at this. It’s about the connection. So just connect.”
“Connect,” Derek whispers, his tongue flicking out after to wet his lips.
Stiles isn’t perfect. He’s only human. His eyes track the movement of his tongue, skin suddenly prickling with heat from head to toe. A soft sound hums in his throat at the thought of kissing Derek—as if he hasn’t done it dozens of times before. As if he’s a dying man in a desert and Derek’s mouth is a lush oasis. Christ.
But the sound that escapes him piques Derek’s interest. His eyes darken and he presses in closer, hand dipping down to Stiles’s lower back as their hip bones brush. He releases an unsteady breath, lashes fluttering as Stiles uses the hand still cupping his jaw to sweep his thumb over Derek’s moist bottom lip.
“I don’t think I can dance with my cousin like this.”
Stiles exhales a laugh, feeling light in the head. “Ah, no. I wouldn’t.”
“Probably shouldn’t do this, either.”
Derek leans in, dragging his lips across Stiles’s. Stiles’s brow crumples like the tenderness of the gesture physically aches. His other hand flies up so Derek’s neck is cradled between both palms, as if Stiles is scared he’ll pull away. He’s not ready to let go. Not now, not ever.
“Do you want—”
“Yes,” Stiles interrupts, making Derek laugh into a kiss. “Yes to anything,” he mutters between desperate pecks. “I want whatever. I want you.”
Derek wraps both arms around Stiles’s waist and lifts him like he’s nothing. When he spreads him out across the bed it’s with a careful eagerness. He crawls up over him like a man starved, sinking down over Stiles to grind their bodies together from chest to thigh.
Stiles hisses as Derek bites a kiss into the side of his neck. He arches up against him as he sucks a bruise to the pale skin. Scrapes his nails up his back to get things rolling along.
“C’mon,” Stiles groans as Derek doubles down on his hickey masterpiece. “I want you in me.”
Derek pulls back only far enough to peer down at him. “I didn’t bring any lube.”
“To Vegas? Jesus, Derek. It’s called Sin City for a reason. And if you didn’t plan on hooking up with a stranger, you still knew you were going to be down the hall from me.”
Despite the edge in Stiles’s tone, it still pulls a smile from Derek. “You saying you’re a sure thing?”
“Always,” Stiles breathes, the word coming out too serious. Too intense. It feels like an eighteen-wheeler has crashed into his chest.
The way Derek kisses him is unlike anything he’s ever felt. Like every moment in his life has been leading up to this one sweetly desperate, incomparably passionate kiss. It feels like light is filling him up from the inside, sneaking out through every pore. He could die for this feeling.
“I have some,” Stiles gasps, tearing his mouth away to speak. “Lube, I mean. In my bag.”
Derek growls playfully, rolling them so Stiles is splayed on top. He swats sharply at his ass. “Go get it.”
“Right. Yes. I’ll be two minutes. One minute. Ten seconds tops.” He half-flails off the bed. “Get to work on being naked!”
He almost runs headfirst into the wall watching Derek slip his sweats off his hips instead of watching where he’s going. But he’s a man on a mission. If he just gets this done, he can do a whole hell of a lot more than look.
Stiles flings the door open and bolts into the hall. He’s three doors down and fumbling with his keycard when he sees the drunk woman out of the corner of his eye. She’s all the way down at the end of the hall, alone and laughing to herself as she trips over her own feet. After one particularly precarious step she staggers hard, slamming against the wall and sliding to the floor on her knees.
“I hate being a good person,” Stiles sighs under his breath, tucking his key back in his pocket to hurry over to the woman on the floor. The last thing he needs on his conscience is a woman dying from choking on her own vomit—or worse, getting scooped up by some creep. But she really does have the world record for worst timing.
As he gets closer, he spots the plastic tiara sitting crooked in her hair and the wrinkled sash proclaiming Bride To Be. He can only hope Scott’s groomsmen are doing a better job taking care of him than this girl’s bridesmaids.
He crouches down to her level, keeping his voice gentle. “Hey, excuse me. Are you okay? I—” As she tilts her face up to look at him, it’s not the fact that she has mascara streaking down her face that stops him short. It’s that he recognizes her. “Heather?”
She blinks up at him through big, bleary eyes. “Stiles? Stiles!”
“Whoa,” he falls over to the side as she throws her arms around him in a too-enthusiastic hug. “Um. Hi.”
“I’m not supposed to be awake,” she mumbles against his throat, smearing sticky lip gloss all over the hickeys Derek meticulously patterned out. “Danielle would kill me if she knew I snuck back out.”
Stiles pushes her back a bit, moving to cradle the back of her head as she goes too limp in his grip. “We should maybe get you back to her then, yeah? What room are you?”
“I’m getting married,” she slurs, waving her little sash around. “Did you see?”
“I sure did. Do you have your phone on you? I could maybe call Danielle.”
“I don’t know if I want to be marrying him, though. He’s… He’s kind of boring. I don’t know why I said yes. I just did, you know? Felt like I had to. Like it would be rude not to.” She strokes a clammy palm down Stiles’s cheek. “You got so cute. I should be marrying you.”
Stiles scrambles to his feet, carefully pulling Heather up with him. With as much caution as he can muster, he carefully checks her pockets for a phone. “I think, uh… I think what you just need is some sleep, maybe. And water. Definitely water.”
Heather dissolves into giggles, knees giving out so she sinks forward against Stiles’s chest. “Your hands are so big.”
He bites his tongue against a scream of frustration. It’s like the universe is conspiring against him. But he’s known this girl his entire life. It’s not like he can just leave her.
“Here,” he starts firmly, using his best impression of Derek’s alpha voice as he scoops her up in a bridal carry. She flops in his arms like a rag doll. “We’re going to go to my room, okay? I’m going to call the front desk and see if we can find your friends.”
She hums against his jaw, making Stiles pick up his pace in nerves. He props her up against the wall as he hunts for the key to his room, missing a good half dozen times as her hands start stroking over his sides.
“You’re warm.”
“Okay!” Stiles squeaks as he throws the door open, flicking the lock to keep it from latching so he doesn’t have to fumble around again on their way back out. “Inside!”
He picks her up by the waist—far less gracefully than Derek lifted him—and half-tosses her onto the closest bed. Before he can dart over to the room phone, Heather hooks a finger in his belt loop and tugs him back.
“What if we had one wild night together, Stiles? Just one. No one would ever have to know.”
An anxious sweat breaks out over his temples. “Oh. Well. Um, that’s nice and all, really. But you’re kind of barely conscious. And I’m sort of in the middle of something, so…”
Heather tugs at his waistband, knocking him off balance so he has to brace himself with a knee between her legs on the mattress. She wiggles until she shifts her thighs up to hug around his hips, eyes darting down to the bulge at Stiles’s crotch. “You seem happy to see me.”
“Um, that’s definitely not for you,” he mutters, half-impressed he’s still roaring to go for Derek after everything that’s happened in the last ten minutes. “Look Heather, I—”
She cuts him off with a sloppy kiss, smudging more of her bright pink gloss over his mouth. He moves to pull away and she tangles a hand in his hair, leading him back down.
“Heather,” he tentatively mumbles around her teeth. When her free hand rubs over the curve of his erection, he jerks back, taking her wrists in his hands to pin them carefully against the mattress on either side of her head. “Heather.”
“Stiles?”
He whips his head around to see Derek standing there in the doorway, wrapped up in a hotel robe and an expression of utter disbelief. “Derek!” He can only imagine what this looks like: him sprawled over Heather’s eager body with traces of her make up all over him. All over Derek’s marks. “I can explain!”
“I don’t think I need you to,” Derek grounds out. His eyes flicker red and the doorknob creaks ominously in his grip.
“We know each other!” Stiles rolls off the bed onto the floor to get away from any incriminating positions. “From, like, way back, I mean!”
That only makes Derek’s expression darken further. “Right. Well, don’t let me interrupt.”
“Derek!”
Before Stiles can even get to his feet, Derek is gone from the room. His own door slams behind him, hard enough it seems to rattle all the doors in the hall. Stiles spares a glance for Heather, whose eyes are shut now as she drifts off on the bed, before taking off after him.
“Derek,” he calls again, softer now that he’s in front of his door. He knocks, trying to convey urgency, remorse, and innocence all in a few quick raps. “Come on. Just talk to me. Please?”
He’s met with a long stretch of silence. But just when he’s about to call out again, You Raise Me Up flares up again from inside, volume raised to a pointedly ear-shattering volume.
“Derek!”
“Stiles?”
He turns back toward his room, where Heather is meekly peeking her head out of the door. “What?”
“I threw up… on the bed.”
Stiles drops his head back in a groan. He stomps back over to his room, thinking that if he can just get through tonight, things at least can’t get any worse.
*******************************
Somehow, in the morning, it is even worse.
It took Stiles an hour and half to get the front desk to cooperate in tracking down Danielle, and for the first hour of that he was also stripping down his bed and trying to arrange new sheets. Once Danielle finally came for Heather—giving Stiles the most suspicious of evil eyes as she did—Scott came stumbling back to the room. Where he promptly threw up on the other bed. Cue another round of the Great Sheet Hunt.
He didn’t get to sleep until around four in the morning, and when he had to rise five hours later, it was with a splitting headache. Which didn’t seem all that fair, since he drank considerably less than probably anyone else in the entire hotel. But very little was fair when one chose to surround themselves with werewolves.
Which, speaking of.
“Where’s Derek?” Stiles asks—a sorry echo of last night’s curiosity—as they all gather at the curb with their bags.
“Oh,” Scott starts, considerably less amused than he was the night before. “He, uh… He actually caught a bus home earlier this morning.”
“A bus? That’s crazy! That’s like a sixteen hour trip.”
Scott shrugs. “He said it wasn’t safe for anyone if he got on a plane today. Didn’t seem like he really wanted to talk about it.”
Stiles’s heart sinks like a stone. If Derek had asked, Stiles would have suffered through the bus ride with him. Then again, Derek probably wouldn’t have needed to take the bus at all if Stiles hadn’t— Well, what did he do, really? Nothing in actuality. Nothing wrong, anyway. And sure, it looked bad, but why is Derek so pressed, huh?
Unfortunately, Stiles’s attempt to stir up some of that old anger falls flat. He just feels sick to his stomach. Cold and numb beneath his sternum. They’re back to square one—probably less than that—and he doesn’t know how to make Derek stop and listen to the truth. What’s worse, he doesn’t know how to make Derek want him in the right ways.
The plane ride is fine. Stiles sits in a row with a stranger, and if she’s discourteous, he hardly notices.
He makes the drive out to the Hale house the next morning, but though the Camaro sits in the driveway, no one answers the door. The lights are out and the house is quiet. Nobody seems to be home. But there are impressions of fresh paw prints trailing through the mud away from the porch.
Stiles calls several times, but they all go to voicemail. He starts texting—pleas to meet up at first, and then a definitive explanation of what happened that night. But the way they linger undelivered on his screen gives him the impression his number has been blocked.
He has the thought to reach out to someone else for help. Scott. Isaac. Hell, even Peter. But Scott is in a blissful bubble Stiles isn’t looking to pop, Isaac’s loyalty to Derek can’t be traded for anything, and the price Peter has in mind would probably be too high.
In the end, Stiles decides to respect Derek’s obvious wishes. He stops trying all together.
*******************************
Stiles doesn’t see Derek again until Friday night at the rehearsal dinner. The sight of him nearly takes his breath away. These few days without speaking to him have felt like missing a limb. Stiles knew his feelings for Derek snuck up on him, but he hadn’t known how addicted he’d become to the way Derek made him feel.
And he looks good. Too good. He stalks in in a pair of charcoal slacks and a subtly patterned lavender button down, hot enough that he makes Stiles wish his own shirt was a darker color to hide his sudden pit stains.
He sits down hard in the seat next to Scott. The chair opposite him is the only one left empty. He’d kept tight-lipped about the drama between them, determined to protect Scott’s special day. But now as he stares down the barrel at an evening filled with chilly silence and cool stares, he wishes he had been a smidge selfish.
When Derek sits across from him, it’s like the rest of the room goes dark. Bam. Tunnel vision. And he doesn’t mean to stare, but by the way Derek’s shoulders get tighter and tighter with tension, he knows he must be.
“Hi,” his voice cracks on the word. He clears his throat, fumbling foolishly with a napkin. “You look— I mean, it seems like you’ve been good.”
“Well as long as it seems like it,” Derek drawls, taking a long sip of water as he angles himself away from Stiles.
And okay. Message received. He swallows down his embarrassment. Blinks back tears. He plasters on a fake smile and turns to face Scott, who’s looking back at him with an eerily accurate impression of a dog confused over where the ball went.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Stiles lies, knowing damn well ninety percent of the table picked up on it. “Just nervous about tomorrow. Is that weird? That I’m nervous? I’m not even the one getting married.”
“You’re being weird,” Malia offers. “You’re sweating. And you smell pathetic.”
Derek snorts, and the callous reaction smarts more than it should. Stiles grabs the closest bowl and starts shoveling food onto his plate—macaroni, lovingly prepared by Melissa. It probably doesn’t do anything to make him look—and smell—any less pathetic.
“No. No, I’m totally normal. Good. Great. I—” His hands start to shake and he carefully sets down the bowl. He turns to Scott, desperate for a lifeboat. “Did I tell you I finally applied to the police academy? Basic training starts in the summer.”
“Really? That’s great, man. I—”
“How’s your girlfriend?” Derek interrupts. His words are sharp and dripping with venom, loaded like he can’t keep them inside any longer.
Scott darts a glance between Derek and Stiles. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
“He means Heather,” Stiles clarifies, heart picking up a galloping pace in his chest. “Who is definitely not my girlfriend.”
“Dude,” Scott leans in to whisper, as if that shields their conversation at all. “I didn’t know you two were talking again.”
Derek slams his water glass down onto the table, drawing the eyes of everyone at the table. “They’ve been doing a whole lot more than talking.”
Christ, the drama of it all. Stiles sinks down in his seat, cheeks flaming red. His own father facepalms at the other end of the table, reaching to refill his wine glass. So much for keeping a low profile until after the wedding.
“Oh,” Scott blinks, looking over at Stiles like he’s caught in the middle of a bear fight—too scared to move and draw the attention of their ire. “You’re in trouble.”
“Thanks, Scotty. I noticed. But I didn’t do anything, Derek. Seriously. She was drunk and I was trying to get her to stop. I was worried she was going to get hurt.”
The severity of Derek’s expression crumples like a damp piece of paper. His eyes flash with hurt, lips pursed like they’re holding back a flood of humiliation. “You care about her.”
“Of course I do! Our moms were friends way back when. That’s all.”
Derek clenches his jaw, dropping his gaze to the table. “Right. Sure.”
Stiles smacks his palm against the table top, making all of the silverware rattle. The wolves around him perk up as if on alert for an attack. “God Derek, and what the fuck do you even care?”
“Stiles,” he mutters softly, the tips of his ears flushing red. “Calm down.”
“No. You started it. You started everything! And now you’re pissed because, what? Of a perceived slight against your ego? Are you that hard up to get laid? Really?”
“Stop it,” Derek snarls, pushing back from the table to leap to his feet.
Stiles is quick to mirror him. “You don’t even have the guts to finish a fight you picked! What right do you think you have to react this badly to something that’s not even happening?”
Malia snorts, cutting into her steak like it’s an average family dinner. With a father like Peter, it might be. “I assume it’s because Derek is totally in love with you.”
Time skids to a screeching halt. Stiles’s heart drops down to his toes. “What?”
“Malia,” Derek strains out, like he hasn’t had water in years.
“What?” She shrugs, popping a bite into her mouth and talking around it as she chews. “Doesn’t everybody already know? It’s obvious.”
Derek squeezes his eyes shut, as if that truly makes the rest of the world disappear. “Thanks.”
“Oh my god,” Scott moans, twisting a hand in his hair as the night falls apart around him.
“What?” Malia echoes again. “What’s the big deal? Stiles is in love with Derek, too.”
Stiles stumbles backward, sending his chair clattering to the kitchen floor. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t deny it. Knows it would be useless. With the pounding of his heart and the stricken look on his face, he knows everyone knows it’s true.
The sheriff stands, clapping his hands together to command attention, voice taking on the precise tone of when Stiles and Scott were sixteen and he found beer in their backpacks. “Alright boys. Maybe you should take this conversation elsewhere. Anywhere else. And then actually have it instead of pussyfooting around everything.”
Stiles flounders like a fish, but Derek just nods, steeling himself as if he’s about to face a firing squad. “Yes, Sir. You’re right. If that’s okay, Stiles?”
“Uh, wha— I mean, sure. Yeah. Let’s— Uh-huh.”
He follows Derek out to the front lawn. The front lawn he’s come to visit thousands of times as he grew up alongside Scott. Running around playing tag until Scott began to wheeze. Dousing each other with water guns in the blazing summer. Puking behind the bushes after their first high school party. But standing there under the stars with Derek, it feels like completely new territory.
“Stiles, I—” He stops abruptly, tilting his head to the side with a scowl. He turns to glare back at the house, and Stiles follows suit only to see the curtains conspicuously fall back into place over the window. Derek grabs him by the elbow, dragging him over to the Camaro. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” He asks, as if it matters. As if he wouldn’t follow Derek anywhere.
Derek opens the passenger side door for Stiles. Waits for him to climb in. Buckles the seat belt for him, as if he can’t keep himself from taking care of him. “I don’t know. Just… away from people listening. My house, maybe.”
“Okay,” Stiles mutters in agreement, chest blooming with warmth as Derek—smooth, sexy, graceful Derek—trips over his feet to hurry around to the other side.
Silence hangs ripe with anticipation between them as he backs out of the driveway. Stiles knows Derek can hear the slamming of his heart, the way he struggles to even out his breathing. But he can see the way Derek’s hands are clenching and readjusting around the wheel, how his lips keep rolling into his mouth.
“Is it true?” Stiles asks as they pull out onto the main road. The words crashing past his teeth like a battering ram, refusing to stay down one second longer. “What Malia said. You’re in love with me?”
“Yes,” Derek says, and it’s not weak or shy. It’s half-defiant. Proud. A dare to suggest anything else might be true. Then his face softens and he darts a quick look at Stiles out of the corner of his eye. “Yes. I was half-gone from the start.”
Stiles can’t help the scoff. “That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“Be real.”
The severe look falls back over Derek’s face, disgruntled from every atom of the wolf to the core of the man. “I am. Why else do you think you made me so nervous? Why I wanted to impress you?”
Stiles shifts awkwardly in his seat. “You said that was because of my connection to Scott.”
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t be able to hear the difference in my heart beat. And maybe, at first, that was kind of why. He was a pain in the ass, for sure. But then I— There were pictures. Of you. And you were so... You know.”
“What?”
“Beautiful,” Derek mutters. “Alive. Hard to look away from. And then I visited the sheriff to talk over some cases. And the smell. I could track it all the way to your room. Like grass and rain and honey and dark chocolate. And just… skin. And you. It was like I was addicted.”
Stiles bites his lip, tamping down the butterflies rioting in his gut. “To my smell?”
“To everything I could find about you. And there were some years there, in the beginning, that were pretty rough for me. Your dad let me stay over in your old room a few nights. And the more I did, the more my smell tangled in with yours. And I knew that if I ever met you, ever saw you in person, all I would ever want would be to make you mine.”
“You hated me when you met me,” Stiles whispers.
“No,” Derek denies. “That’s not true. Think through how it all happened again.”
Stiles glances up at the ceiling, as if he’ll find the memory recorded there. “You barely said a word when you saw me.”
“Because the first thing you ever saw me do was spill wine on you, Stiles. And then you spoke, and fuck. Hearing your voice was the nail in my coffin.”
“But then after we, um. After we kissed in the laundry room, I pissed you off. You hated me then.”
“I was embarrassed. Disappointed. I thought everything I ever needed just walked into my life with open arms, and the second you found out who I was you looked at me like I was the enemy.”
“I thought you were,” Stiles murmured.
The road stretches long and empty in front of them, and Derek chances a longer look at Stiles. “That sweater Scott gave you. At the engagement party. It was mine. You were right, I don’t share well, but I let you take it. It marked you as mine and everyone there knew it, and I— And I felt guilty. Ashamed of myself, because you made it clear I wasn’t what you wanted, and I was still snarling at people to keep them away.”
“Like Lydia.”
“Like Lydia,” he concedes, voice dropping even softer. “And when I gave you back your shirt. The one with the wine stain? I… I had slept with it after I put it through the wash. I scent-marked it, hoping I’d see you the next time you wore it. So I could smell us together again.”
Stiles goes hot all over, equal parts heady arousal and embarrassment at being the subject of such naked desire. “When you told me you could relate to how I feel about Lydia, you were talking about me.”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t get it,” Stiles frowns. He wants to. He wants to trust it, to fall into it, to let himself have it. But logic is spitting in his face.
“What do you mean?”
He huffs a short breath, turning to face Derek as well as he can in the car. “Come on. You have to see how this is a little ridiculous. Like, if Lydia is out of my league, you render the whole competition obsolete.”
“You can be so stupid sometimes.”
“And you have no reason to look twice at me!”
“You’re the only one I ever look at!” Derek pauses, loosening his death grip on the steering wheel. He softens his voice, sincere and pained and raw. “You’re the only one I ever want to see.”
“Derek…”
He pulls the car over on the side of the road, tucked away on the shoulder amongst the looming trees that stretch out into the dense forest. “Do you love Heather?”
“No. I told you I didn’t.”
“Do you love Lydia?”
“Not anymore. No.”
“Do you love me?”
Stiles wishes he had one of Scott’s old inhalers lying around. Or a top-notch medical team to fix what feels like a collapsed lung. “Derek.”
“Do you hate me?”
“No! No, okay? I never did. Not really. I was just jealous.”
“I never wanted to—”
“Not of you,” Stiles cuts him off sharply, hands shaking hard enough to measure a seven on the richter scale. “Of… of fucking everyone, okay? Because I left, but I’m the one who got left behind. Life went on without me, and everyone found their happy ending. But no matter what I do, I’m always alone. Because people want me at first, Derek, but that fades. The shine of me wears off real fast.”
Derek leans forward, cupping his hand around the back of Stiles’s neck. “I fell in love with the idea of you from three thousand miles away. And when I finally got to meet you, I knew you were it for me. My whole life stopped. Stood still, just waiting for you to choose me. So I’ll ask you one more time, because I can’t… I can’t keep circling the drain like this. Do you love me?”
Stiles’s hands curl into fists around the front of Derek’s shirt. “Yes.”
They toss off their seatbelts, leaning in to meet in the middle in a searing kiss. It’s just as electric as the first time. Just as desperate. Maybe more. Maybe better. Because knowing Derek, wanting Derek, knowing he’s wanted by him and for more than just the passing moment—it’s everything.
Stiles pulls back, just enough to catch his breath, and his eyes drift over Derek’s shoulder. Gazing out the window, he stares up at the fat, round moon, hanging heavy in the night sky. It’s not quite full, won’t be for another two days—set to reach its peak on Scott and Malia’s honeymoon, setting a certain tone for their private celebrations that Stiles really doesn’t want to think about.
But he wonders how much the pull of the moon is already affecting Derek, how much it tugs the wolf forward to simmer just below his skin. If that’s what pushed him to be so confrontational at dinner. If it’s what made him speak so honestly and raw. If that’s what made his kiss so frantic.
Stiles grins, pulling further away to pop the passenger side door open.
“What are you doing?” Derek asks, a hint of panic-laced confusion wrapped around his words, like he’ll incite a riot if Stiles gets too far away from him now that he has him. Perfect.
“Come on,” he softly commands, reaching into the glove box for Derek’s trusty bottle of lube before slipping out of the car.
Derek follows, despite having a very tenuous grasp on what’s going on. “Stiles? I don’t think— I mean, out here? I’m pretty sure there’s not a deputy in Beacon Hills that would hesitate to tell your dad you got scooped up for lewd behavior.”
“We’re not gonna do it out here,” he promises, slowly flicking open the line of buttons down his shirt.
“What do you—” Derek stops suddenly as Stiles takes one careful, cautious step backward. His eyes widen, color snapping into a glowing, hungry red. “Stiles.”
Stiles blows him a cheeky kiss before turning quickly on his heel and darting off through the trees. The wild howl that tears through Derek’s throat as he dashes through the woods makes him laugh. He hops over roots and rocks, trying to keep his pace and gain as much ground as possible. Just to make it fun. It’s not like he could ever really outrun Derek. It’s not like he wants to.
There’s a rustle in the branches to his right, and Stiles takes a quick turn to the left to put Derek back behind him. The rustle picks back up on his other side. Derek’s toying with him. It makes Stiles’s heartbeat ratchet up higher—which Derek seems to like, judging by the low rumble coming from far too close.
Stiles slips through a thin gap in the trees—not so thin that Derek can’t follow, but enough that his bulkier frame will have more trouble. It buys Stiles an extra couple of seconds. If the sound of snapping wood means anything, it also irritates Derek.
But before Stiles can really settle into a good gloat about it, a massive weight slams into him from the side. He crashes to the forest floor and—no. He crashes down on top of Derek, protected on top of his broad chest as the other man’s back slams down against jagged sticks and sharp stones.The impact still takes the breath out of Stiles’s lungs, as strong and hard as Derek is.
Speaking of hard…
Stiles squirms on top of him, flashing a beaming smile down at Derek at the feeling of the hot line of his erection pressed to his hip. “So you do like it.”
“Shut up, Stiles,” Derek groans, rolling Stiles over so he’s on his side facing away from Derek. Derek presses in close behind him, cradling Stiles’s head on his bicep. His hand strokes down Stiles’s chest, reverent like a jeweler with a precious stone.
“I’d have thought you’d be more desperate,” Stiles admits. “Wild. Like a lion chomping down on a gazelle, or something.”
Derek huffs, pressing his nose to the side of Stiles’s throat. “You’re not a meal. You’re a prize.”
“Oh.”
He can feel the smug grin bloom across his skin. “I won you.”
“You did,” Stiles laughs, arching his back and grinding his ass against Derek’s groin. “I’m all yours.”
“Mine,” Derek sighs happily. His hand slips down to tug open the button on Stiles’s slacks, dipping in below the waistband and into his boxer briefs to curl around his cock. “And I’m yours.”
“I know. I know that now.”
Stiles wiggles his pants down his hips and reaches over for the lube that bounced out of his grip when Derek tackled him. He tries to reach behind and between them to get things started, but Derek doesn’t give any ground. He pulls his hand out of Stiles’s underwear and nabs the lube.
“I’ll do it,” he promises, voice rough and eager, like it’s an honor he can’t wait to enjoy again. He toes Stiles’s dress shoes off at the ankle and manages to shuck his pants down too, with nothing but one deft tug at the seat of his pants with a foot.
“Jesus,” Stiles mutters, shivering in the sudden cold of the night air for only a brief second before Derek’s too warm body compensates for the weather. But then Derek presses two fingers inside of him, and he’s shuddering all over again. “How are you so good at this?”
The tips of Derek’s fingers rub over Stiles’s prostate, just as he nips at his earlobe. Stiles squeaks, making a laugh rattle through Derek’s answer of, “It’s easy to remember your body. Easy to want to make you feel good.”
“Oh, you’re a romantic around the full moon. Okay.”
“Not the moon. S’you.” He twists his fingers and Stiles gasps, throwing his hand back to grasp Derek’s hair. “Don’t worry, I can still make you scream.”
“Oh my God,” Stiles groans. He tips his head to bite playfully at the bicep under him. “So do it. What are you waiting for?”
Derek’s fingers leave him, and the only thing that keeps Stiles from complaining is the jostling which implies he’s working free of his pants. After an agonizing stretch of seconds, Derek is pressed flush against his back again, pushing into him in one too slow glide. The arm not tucked under Stiles’s head hooks around his waist, palm sliding up the twitching plane of his stomach, over his heaving chest, and up to rest on his throat. Not applying pressure, just resting there, as if the flutter of Stiles’s pulse under his fingertips is a sacred gift.
The barely there weight of Derek’s loose grip is heady as he swallows. “Move.”
And Derek does. Slow like torture. Body rolling like a lazy creek wearing away at rocks over hundreds of years. It’s so different than how they usually are—the now now now frantic burning rutting. It’s a simmer. A tension thick enough to choke.
For one harrowing beat, Stiles is afraid he’s going to cry. His chest constricts in an ache. A good ache. The kind of ache you get looking at beautiful landscapes or paintings in a museum. No one has ever touched him quite like this. Like love is the word and this is the action.
“Derek,” he breathes, overcome with the emotion rippling through him.
“I know.”
The hand not still anchored in Derek’s hair wraps around the one curled around his throat. He slips his fingers between Derek’s and drops their knuckles to rest over his heart. He’s sure Derek feels it more keenly than another human would, the thump thump thump. I want you, I need you, I love you.
The smooth rhythm of Derek’s hips stutters before picking up faster. He smears kisses over Stiles’s shoulder, the back of his neck, his jaw. He drags their entwined hands lower to wrap around Stiles’s cock, stroking him off together.
But Derek comes first, a broken-and-born-again sound tearing out of his throat. He hooks an ankle around Stiles’s, breathing a satisfied sigh over the kiss-damp skin of his shoulder. Their grip around Stiles’s length tightens, their speed pulling faster.
Stiles’s orgasm rushes over him like a pot boiling over. It feels like it lasts for hours, curling through every inch of his body. And, true to Derek’s promise, Stiles screams.
Derek seems reluctant to let him go in the afterglow, like he’s going to dart off and instigate another chase. Stiles snickers and peels Derek’s arm away—just enough so that he can roll over to face him. He drops his cheek on Derek’s chest, burrowing in tight and content.
“So. That was kind of a whole new level of spectacular.”
“Kind of?” Derek mutters incredulously. His face is a little dazed, like Stiles would be able to find the pieces of his mind scattered across the forest floor if he went looking. “I want to quit my job, barricade us up in my house, and do nothing but that for the next year.”
“Tempting. But not all that feasible.” Stiles looks up from where he’s tracing patterns over Derek’s hard pectorals, a slow grin sweeping across his lips. “Hey, I have this wedding to go to tomorrow.”
Derek’s brow crumples in confusion for a second before it smooths away into amusement. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” He drops a kiss to Derek’s collarbone, just because it’s there and he can. “If you’re not busy, maybe you could be my date?”
“I could find the time.”
*******************************
The wedding goes off without a hitch. With Lydia and Peter watching over every beat and element like a hawk, how could it not? Stiles cries through the whole ceremony. But that’s okay, because so does Scott’s mom. And also Scott.
Derek laughs at him after, but it’s sweet. Muffled into the side of his neck, palms warm through Stiles’s shirt where they rest against his sides. “You’re a dork,” he whispers, as soft as if it were another three words.
Stiles just grins. “I know. But you’re the dummy that chose me.”
Peter cries when Malia and Derek share their dance at the reception, and if Stiles didn’t think it would end in his immediate and gruesome death, he would record the moment for posterity. But Derek only steps on Malia’s toes twice. Which is more than can be said for the warpath of Malia dancing in heels. Thank god for werewolf healing.
But the champagne has been flowing and the cake has been cut, and as couples sway together on the small dance floor set out on the grass, Derek sits sprawled out in a chair, brooding as only he can manage. Stiles is in the middle of wrestling another glass out of his dad’s hand when he notices. He smiles a little to himself. Let’s his dad have the extra drink—it’s a special occasion, after all. And he makes his way over to his boyfriend. Boyfriend.
“Why the long face?” Stiles murmurs, draping his arms over his shoulders from behind. “It’s a happy day.”
Derek tilts his head back against Stiles’s chest, inhaling his scent in deep in a way that definitely hasn’t lost its novelty yet. “It is. I am happy.”
“But?”
“But nothing. I’m happy.”
Stiles slips around to the front to plop down on Derek’s lap. “They’re married. The day has been perfect. You’re allowed to be a person again, Derek. You’re happy and what?”
“Nervous,” he admits quietly, arms wrapping around Stiles like the most natural thing in the world. “Scared. To be alone.”
“Hey, you’re not alone.”
“No, I know that. I do.” He heaves a weary sigh. “But Malia is moving out of the house to be with Scott. Obviously. And Boyd and Erica are talking about finding their own apartment. Isaac’s getting serious with that weird girl from the morgue, so it’s only a matter of time before he goes too. Cora doesn’t like staying in one place for too long, and Peter— Well. Who the hell knows what Peter’s life plan is?”
Stiles presses a kiss to Derek’s temple, wishing he could leech all the deep emotional hurts from him like werewolves siphon physical pain. “They’re not leaving you. Not really. They’re just growing up. Growing better. And it’s thanks to you. Thanks to all you gave them as an alpha. They’ll still be around. Probably more than you want them to be.”
“Yeah. I just… I don’t know how well I’ll handle that place if it’s empty again. It deserves noise. A little chaos. Life.”
“Well,” Stiles drawls, dragging the pads of his fingers down the line of Derek’s silk tie. “If it’s noise and chaos you want, that I can definitely do.”
“What?”
“I can’t kick around at my dad’s place forever,” Stiles shrugs. His heart is beating about a thousand pumps per minute, but his thoughts are serene and dead certain. “And maybe it’s soon. Maybe it’s crazy. Or maybe it’s not, considering everything. But nobody fills a space up like me.”
Derek’s grip tightens around Stiles as his pupils double in size. “You mean that?”
“I do. Think of how nice it’d be to have our scents mixed, huh?” An excited growl rumbles in the back of Derek’s throat, and Stiles smirks, doubling down. “Plus, we’ll definitely fight while we’re learning to share the same space, and think of all the make up sex we’ll have.”
“How soon can you move in?”
“Hmm. Well, I think we should test out the bed first. To see if there’s the room, and all.”
Derek stands up with Stiles still wrapped around him, weaving through the partygoers without a care in the world. He ignores the catcalls and ribbing that follows their exit, marching right through the front door of the Hale house. Stiles’s house. His home.