Give Me Back My Bones (maybe then we'll talk)

by kariye

Summary:

Derek meets Stiles on a Wednesday. He comes in for his usual cup of coffee and somehow walks out with hot chocolate, cinnamon on the top, and no idea what just happened there.

Notes:

My most sincere thanks, as always, perverse-idyll for beta reading. For existing, really. And to stillane, who graciously and very helpfully offered to character beta for me. This fic is much improved because of both of them.

The name of S3 character is mentioned once. No other spoilers for S3.

ETA: Title taken from Mountain Man's "Dog Song."

He’s not paying much attention the first time he sees Stiles. It’s just past nine on a cold December night, and he’s shoving his phone back into his pocket, opening the door to the coffee shop, and trying not to get bowled over by a trio of laughing girls at once. Out of habit, he glances at the counter to see how long the line is.

There’s a boy behind it, another student most likely, since everyone who works here seems to be one – but that’s what happens when the edge of NYU’s a handful of blocks away. Derek looks at the board above his head on the wall, as though he doesn’t always get the same coffee every day, black with a drizzle of caramel that melts into sweet liquid, and then his brain catches up with his eyes and drags them back to the barista.

It’s ridiculous the way the rest of the shop seems to fade out for just a second and then come back clearer and louder and brighter. The barista could be any other college kid. Stupidly messed-up hair, clothes that in no way match and yet somehow make him look like he just got off the L from Williamsburg, and these crazy, haphazardly placed moles that dot his face and neck. The only thing he’s missing is a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.

Derek looks down at the counter in self-defense.

The kid’s fingers are long and quick on the cash register, moving with an easy grace that doesn’t seem to extend to the rest of him when he trips backwards over something. His body jerks quickly as he catches himself with a snorted laugh. The cash register pops open and he slides the bills in. There’s a startling dusting of hair on the back of his hand, over his wrist when his sleeve rides up. The tightness of the bones under the fragile skin there, the way his veins stand out in relief, they make him seem older than his face would indicate.

Derek forcibly tears his eyes away. No one else seems to have noticed the stutter of the barista’s body. It was such a small movement.

He’s never seen this kid before, and he’s been coming in here almost every week day for nearly a year. This is his coffee shop. He used to come before, too, but then he didn’t for a while. Given the way the staff changes with the semesters, he should be used to seeing new faces. Anyway, he almost never stops by at night. It’s rare that he gets a craving for coffee at the end of the day. When he gets off work, he just wants to go home and shut out the world for a few hours. So he shouldn’t be surprised to see a new barista working.

He’s next in line. This close up, he can read the name on the tag pinned to the kid’s shirt: Stiles. His mouth is open slightly, as though words are ready to fall out of it. “Go on break, man, I’ll get this,” Stiles says to Robert. Derek’s seen Robert around before, filling in on some morning shifts. Without Robert, Stiles has to take orders and fill them, but it’s just the lady in front of Derek and him. He uses the machines like he knows them, patting the milk steamer on the side as he makes the lady’s cappuccino. Derek tracks his movements, the surety of them making his flesh tighten under his clothes with something hot and edgy.

“Dude, what, do I have something on my face?” Stiles looks at Derek, amused and impatient, as it’s his turn at the counter. “Is my shirt on inside out again? Are you having a moment where I need to pause in respectful silence, like I’m your long-lost sixth cousin who you’ve been tracking down through Facebook for the last five months, only to find me here in the very coffee bar where you come every morning on your way to work? Bummer!” Somehow he manages to infuse that one word with something less than sincerity.

“Because you’ve been staring at me since you walked in the door five minutes ago.” Stiles makes some sort of gesture with his hands and eyes that probably translates to a request for Derek’s order, and Derek’s going to tell him what he always tells the barista – Jane most days this semester, a petite blonde with cropped hair – black, caramel drizzled on top, not a shot – yet what comes out of his mouth is, “You’re not new here.”

“Whoa, way to be accusing,” Stiles says.

Derek forces his eyes away from those lips, which is even worse because now he’s looking at Stiles’ eyes. They’re flecked gold; there’s a spark in them that seems to leap out and flick mischievously against Derek’s skin, vibrant and easy. It’s such a cliché that he can’t believe it happens to him, but Derek’s breath catches.

“What. You think because you come here all the time you know everyone? Every morning, I bet, on your way to some shiny big office where everyone’s walking around in oxfords and pressed suits. Dress down Fridays mean loafers and no tie, right?” Stiles’ mouth quirks up.

In Derek’s bag is his tie. He took it off while he walked to the train from the office. “I’ve got loafers on now,” he tells Stiles. “It’s Wednesday.”

Stiles blinks once, slowly, at him. Then he plants his hands on the counter, hops forward, and pulls himself halfway over it until his torso’s sliding across it and he can see past the edge to Derek’s feet. Derek refuses to move back, because what? He crosses his arms over his chest and watches Stiles’ eyes roll up past his arms to his face.

“Well, come on, then” he says, “show ‘em here.”

“I’m not sure what to say in the face of your overt hostility,” Derek tells him.

“Common reaction,” Stiles says cheerfully as he hauls himself backwards and begins straightening the bags of coffee for sale that sit on the scarred wooden counter. He’s messed them up with his body. They’re foil bags inside larger burlap ones with cream paper labels on them. They make a crinkling sound under his fingers. “See, there’s a look. A coffee-determined look that says you come here a lot, the way you glanced at the menu but not like you were paying any attention. You must not come at night very much. I’m here a lot, so yeah, totally not new.”

Over his head, there’s a chalkboard menu with all the drinks that can be ordered listed in red and green and blue and orange; over that exposed, gleaming steel beams support the walls and ceiling. The appliances on the counter are bright metal, and the walls are a crisp, cool grey with black-framed pictures here and there. Different sized barrels full of coffee beans sit haphazardly around the shop. Derek’s always thought that the place can’t decide if, yes, it really is catering to all the urbanity of New York or if it should be decked out in red gingham and daisies on the tables.

The barista’s still talking. Derek gets the feeling Stiles does this a lot. “It’s been over a year, isn’t that crazy? Picked up the job in the middle of my first semester here. You must see Andy a lot. And Jane, the goddess Jane.” He heaves a sigh. “She reminds me of Lydia, who’s in Boston, which is only like five hours from here, which I totally did not look up a few years ago when we picked our schools.” There’s a pause, and he slouches down. “Also, you’re still staring at me.”

Derek sets his hands on the counter. Maybe it’s his imagination, but the wood seems to carry the heat of Stiles’ body where he had pressed himself over it. There’s about a foot between his hands and Stiles’ elbows where he’s leaning down on them. He’s got his head propped on his fists and is craning his neck up at Derek. It’s kind of absurd, and Derek really is having a hard time looking away.

“So … you want that drink?”

It’s his voice, Derek decides. Or not his voice exactly, but the way he talks, mostly friendly and casual, uncaring because what the hell does it matter what Derek orders, but with this little edge of something else, something demanding and sharp that Derek wants to test.

“Yeah,” Derek says. It comes out a little rough. Stiles waits. His lips are still parted. They’re wet where he’s licked them.

“Let me guess. You drink your coffee strong, no cream. Right?” Stiles looks unimpressed.

Derek narrows his eyes at him, totally ignores the fact that of course he’s come in to order his usual, and says, “Hot chocolate,” the words falling out of his mouth without his conscious thought. He has no idea what just happened.

Stiles’ eyes glint under the artificial lighting and a smirk plays around the edges of his mouth. Derek can’t help but frown. Stiles’ frustrating little smile spreads across his face.

“Awesome. Whipped cream, right?”

+++

When Derek leaves the shop that night, after lingering to sprinkle cinnamon on his damn hot chocolate while Stiles laughs with the next customer, he’s surprised to see that his hands aren’t shaking.

It feels like they are.

+++

The biggest decision Derek has to make most mornings before 8 o’clock is whether he’s going to cut the wrong way west down Spring Street or head east across Grand Street for his jog. He gets up at 6 a.m., splashes water on his face, throws on some beat-up clothes, runs for an hour, showers, stops at Cups to fill up his tumbler, and hops on the F or D or whatever train comes first to get to midtown.

It’s not that he minds his job, exactly. After all, he went to school for this, mostly. He always figured he’d be more into the finance or business side of things, so econ pretty much fit the bill without threatening to turn him into as much of a suit as a major in management or finance would have. Besides, they’d always known that Laura was better qualified for the management side of things.

When he gets into the office, Melinda chirps from behind her desk, “Good morning, Mr. Hale.” The pungent smell of fresh nail polish wafts towards him.

He raises his eyebrow at her. “What, no wave this morning? Hands not free?” He always gets a wave. Laura hired Melinda because she’s endlessly and terrifyingly sunny. They have a thing – she greets him every morning and he silently toasts her with his cup of coffee, caramel-licked, as he heads toward the elevator. She tilts her head, birdlike, and keeps her hands below the top of her desk.

Derek lets himself hum a knowing sound in her general direction and shoves a wide grin back at her when she smiles happy daggers at him. Beneath his feet, the carpet is plush; the wall is smooth and grey like the fabric of his suit. Satisfied, he gets in the elevator.

+++

Derek finds himself checking to see who the barista is each morning when he stops into Cups on his way to the subway. It’s never Stiles, though, Stiles with his wrists and hands that don’t belong to a boy at all but to a man fitting into the spaces of his body. Derek isn’t sure if he’s relieved or disappointed, but mostly he tries to push thoughts about him away. He has no business thinking about him at all.

Jane smiles at him and swirls caramel into his coffee without him asking for it.

He spends the next two weeks reminding himself that he doesn’t drink coffee at night and forcing himself to take the 1 home so that he doesn’t get off at the F stop two blocks away from Cups.

+++

Most nights when Derek gets home, Isaac’s already there. “I ordered Thai,” he says. Some nights, “Felt like Indian.”

Derek glances at him as he tosses his bag on the couch next to Isaac’s book bag. “You should be hanging out with your friends. Or working with your study group.” He feels like he has to say these things.

Isaac shrugs. “We messed with our project all afternoon after class got out. Put stuff up on Prezzie. I think we’re good.” He shoves a curry puff in his mouth. “Got time to go see a movie?”

“No,” Derek says, and Isaac watches him steadily. Derek frowns. “Got work to do.”

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Isaac heads to his bedroom.

+++

Derek’s pretty sure he needs to stop thinking about the guy in the coffee shop.

He thinks of his cousin Mike flopping out on the lawn in front of Derek’s house and saying to Laura about some girl at school, “I just wanna be around her all the time.”

Laura had scoffed and said, “You’re such a girl, Mikey,” just as Mike seemed to realize this and failed at nonchalance with, “You know, she’s, uh, she’s cool.”

There was the sound of scuffling. “It’s called a crush,” Laura told him breathlessly as she rolled him over into the withering grass and dry leaves.

Derek remembers looking out his window. Above them the autumn sun was blinding in a blue sky.

+++

“Smaller buildings should have lots of windows,” Uncle Peter had told him and Laura once when their parents had left them at the office for a few hours. “The buildings block out the sky, the sun and the moon. Your grandfather picked this office because it does have windows. So at least we have a bit of brightness.”

Laura squawked, “Stop that, Derek!” and Uncle Peter cuffed the back of his head without having to turn all the way around.

“Give your sister back her doll.”

Sighing dramatically, Laura said, “It’s not a doll, Uncle Peter,” and he smiled down at her. “Too big for dolls, are you, little miss?” Laura wrinkled her nose at the nickname but pressed into the side of his leg as he looked out the window. On his other side, Derek did the same.

“There’ve always been Hales in New York,” Uncle Peter said. Derek and Laura’s childish giggles mixed with Uncle Peter’s deeper, smooth voice as he swatted their backsides and said, “Now scram to the first floor. Laura, don’t let Derek get lost on the way down. Your cousins are here and Aunt Maria’s going to take you all for gelato.”

“I won’t get lost,” Derek had exclaimed indignantly.

+++

Derek took Peter’s old office. It’s the 3 o’clock slump, and Derek’s practically seeing double from staring at the reports in front of him. He’s got a meeting in half an hour with the head of the Citibank Team to talk about their progress on the project.

“Don’t growl at them,” he hears Laura say. “Put on your nice face.”

“Why don’t you eat my face,” he tells her.

“Sorry, babe. Incest was never my thing.”

Derek presses his palms into his eyeballs. “I think that’s more like cannibalism.” He can picture her pout, the way she’d draw out an “Oh, use your imagination,” and scritch her nails over the back of his neck. Just, Derek never thought he’d end up being the one to have to deal with people. They’d planned for him to sit and crunch numbers in some little office somewhere, one with a window. Handle some compliance stuff. Maybe draft the occasional release for industry magazines.

He decides to grab a coffee on the way home, and then thunks his head down on his desk. In the quiet of his office, it makes a dull sound.

Probably it’s not a night Stiles works.

Derek thinks about the possibility that it is all afternoon anyway.

+++

The wind’s biting down the cross streets tonight. Derek pulls his jacket tighter around him more out of habit than anything else when he gets out of the subway a stop before his apartment. The lights inside Cups have a warm, yellow glow to them. Derek likes that because harsh white light makes him want to squint.

There’s no one in line before him. A tired-looking woman is sitting against the wall reading a magazine. A group of teenagers laughs on the bar stools in the wide front windows.

Stiles is behind the counter, wiping it down with a rag. He seems bored. When he hears the door, he looks up. Something flashes across his face, and then it smoothes out. “Hey man.” For a second, Derek thinks – hopes he remembers –

“Stiles,” he says in return.

Stiles’ grin is delighted. “You know my name.”

“It’s on your tag,” Derek points out.

“Oh. Right.” Stiles clears his throat and his eyes flicker down. When he speaks next, his voice seems a little different but is still basically friendly, so Derek decides he’s imagining things.

“So, what can I get you? Nice night for some hot chocolate. It’s freezing out there.”

He looks at Derek expectantly. Derek raises his eyebrows. “Coffee, black. With some of that caramel Erica keeps stashed on the side shelf.”

Stiles’ mouth drops open. “Holy shit, you’re the caramel guy. You’re Derek,” he crows. “I didn’t think you actually existed, like you were just some name Erica made up to keep me from eating all the caramel with a spoon. You know she keeps it around just for you?” He squints suspiciously at Derek. “Why have I never seen you before?”

On the plus side, Derek didn’t freak Stiles out by calling him by his name. On the down side, well, Stiles has seen him before and clearly doesn’t remember it, because he just said so. It’s totally irrational, of course, for Derek to have this curdled milk feeling in his belly.

“I stop by in the mornings,” Derek says finally.

Stiles shakes his head. “Obviously. Because you keep taking all the caramel. Because you get the same thing every single day. You should try the hot cocoa tonight. I make the best ever. You liked it the last time.”

It’s not even a question, and Derek’s chest kicks in on him a little when Stiles says this. “I thought you’d never seen me before,” he can’t stop himself from pointing out because he can already predict the expression that’s going to overtake Stiles’ face, the way it shows everything, and there it is – indignant and affronted.

“Please, like I was going to forget you and your judging face and stupid loafers. Don’t take everything I say so literally, dude.”

“Don’t ‘dude’ me,” Derek says.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Derek. I’ll get you that cocoa, then?”

It was really good the last time. But it’s that little edge again, the way this kid pushes, either fearless or uncaring or just plain stupid because Derek’s well aware that he doesn’t exactly come off as the friendliest guy out there. It catches at him and he can’t just let it go. “Who’s judging now? There’s nothing wrong with caramel coffee. ”

Stiles jerks his hands around in the space over the counter between them. “Please. Let’s be clear about this. I’m not judging your silly coffee. I’m judging you.” A faint flush slinks up his neck. “Not to be a dick, but I mean, the hair? The—” He makes some sort of sputtering gesture that seems to encompass Derek’s body, but he ends up with, “The suit and … all. It’s practically ten at night and you’re not even rumpled. How do you do that? I put on jeans in the morning – jeans! – and by noon it looks like I slept in them or something. It’s probably some sort of superpower. Like Superman. Clark Kent rips off his suit and miraculously manages to get it back on without even looking wrinkled. Which, admittedly, way cool. Not that – I’m usually a Marvel guy.”

He looks like he’s waiting for something back from Derek, who basically has no idea what to do with all that. After a few seconds, Stiles’ expression falls ever so slightly, and Derek’s stomach does something funny.

“So you wanted coffee, right?” Stiles says, just as Derek says, “Fine. X-Men. I always liked the X-Men.”

Stiles perks up. It’s ridiculous the way his whole body expands. There’s a mole on his cheek. More closer to his jawline, a few dotted where his neck angles into his ear. Derek’s eyes keep being drawn back to them, even as Stiles exhales a long breath. “Mmm, Magneto? A jerk, but Michael Fassbender’s hot.”

“I’m more of a Wolverine guy,” Derek finds himself admitting. He hasn’t thought about this in a long time. Laura used to mock him endlessly for it.

“Awesome,” Stiles says, like it really is. “I’ll get you that hot chocolate now.”

+++

It’s possible Derek lurks around the coffee shop several times in the next few weeks. Stiles definitely recognizes him now. He stops by on a Saturday after his run, and Stiles wolf-whistles mockingly at his sweat-covered body. “Sexy, dude. Stop dripping on my floor.” Derek scoffs at him. It would take more than a jog around downtown to make that happen.

On a Thursday night, Stiles charges him double for his coffee and fills his cup with hot chocolate. He holds it out in his hand instead of putting it down for Derek to pick up. His fingers are warm. “You owe me for Saturday,” he says with a shrug. “I paid for your coffee since you didn’t have anything on you. And I’m just a poor college kid, so.”

Derek doesn’t have a problem with that, but he does with his drink. He takes a sip and frowns down at it in surprise. Stiles is watching him with an impish expression on his face. “I ordered coffee,” Derek says slowly. He looks from Stiles to his cup and back. “This is not coffee.” He holds up the cup up reproachfully at Stiles.

“Oh?” Stiles says innocently.

“Yes, oh,” Derek grits out. “Why would you mess with my coffee?”

Stiles assumes a contrite expression. Derek might almost believe it if, one, it weren’t so laughable and, two, Stiles wasn’t watching him from under his eyelashes. “I’m a horrible person.”

“How do you sleep at night?”

“With great difficulty,” Stiles tells him mournfully. “Oops, I’ve got a customer. Enjoy your hot chocolate!” He waves brightly at Derek, and Derek just glares at him for a long moment and walks out. It’s about all he can do. The other things he would do, wants to do to him – he can’t. But his pulse quickens at the thought of them.

Stiles winks at him from behind the counter when Derek turns around and gives him one last dirty look.

It’s not that he doesn’t try to stay away, to be better than he is. He knows he shouldn’t be doing this. He doesn’t have time. He has a company to deal with. There’s Isaac to worry about. He’s too old for Stiles, who’s just a guy who doesn’t deserve all the shit Derek – he can’t even begin to explain what – just, no. But he goes anyway, even though he’s going to catch so much shit from Erica when she finds out, and he hates himself the tiniest bit more each time. He tells himself it’s because Stiles makes it impossible to stay away, yet the truth is that Derek just doesn’t want to. Not really, not when it comes down to it. Stiles challenges him in a hundred ways without even knowing it, and it’s driving Derek nuts.

+++

Derek doesn’t like meeting with the fiduciaries. With the exception of David Roffe, who’s the son of his grandfather’s accountant, they all look at him like they know something or like they’re waiting for something. Rebecca’s the worst of all, but he stands anyway and nods his head to her each time she comes in and each time she leaves.

After the meeting, she walks over to him. He stiffens. She ignores that. Her hand is hot on his arm. “Our offer is still open, you know.”

He looks away, pretty sure he’s grinding his jaws loudly enough for the whole room to hear. He nods, once, without looking at her.

“Derek,” she says, this time with a thread of steel in her voice. He drags his eyes back to hers. “Your parents would be proud of what you’ve done with the company, but you were not meant for this.”

He laughs, short and hard. “I earned this.”

Rebecca’s hair is metal grey. She shakes her head at him but leaves it. “We’ll expect to see you next week at the house.”

+++

Derek continues to not stay away from Cups. He’s got Stiles’ work schedule stuck in his head. “Oh, babe,” Laura would say if he told her this. “You’re such a freak.”

Stiles talks to him. Or Stiles jabbers at him. Whichever it is, he doesn’t try to kick Derek out of the shop when he’s clearly finished his long-cold cup of coffee or, yes, hot chocolate.

In the shop, pinned by the dual weight of Stiles’ easy chatter and Derek’s uneasy want of him, Derek doesn’t have to do anything other than press back into the hard wooden slats of his chair, the one sitting closest to the counter.

He reminds himself that to Stiles he’s just another customer, even if he is a frequent one, and he ends up wondering how Stiles’ skin would taste, if his fingers would carry on them the bittersweet of cocoa when drawn into the heat of Derek’s mouth.

He wants to be more than just another customer. He knows that other people find his body attractive. Teenage girls giggle with their friends when they see him, sleek men and women in suits scan his body down to his ass. He ignores them all; they don’t know him. And Stiles doesn’t either, not really, but maybe he knows enough to want to stay away from Derek, in that way. Maybe he can see that Derek’s bad news. Thinking that doesn’t stop Derek from wanting him. If that were all he could have, if all Stiles wanted was a quick blowjob in the back room, he’d take that and try to be satisfied with that, with the heady fullness of Stiles in his mouth, the sweet grab of his hands on the back of Derek’s head.

But what he really wants to do? He wants to shove Stiles to his knees so he can slide along the edge of him, that frustrating, tantalizing spark that lights him up. He wants to rub the head of his dick over his lips until Stiles opens his mouth for him. He wants to hear the slick pop as he pulls out so he can bend Stiles over his bed and open him up with his own mouth. He wants to learn the dark, hidden places of his body, to bury his face between his cheeks and his tongue in his ass until Stiles cries out.

He gets up from his desk and goes to splash water on his face in the bathroom at the end of the 14th floor.

+++

The 14th floor is really the 13th floor, except that like most old buildings in the city, there is no floor 13. Hale & Hale has been operating out of the same building in midtown for almost fifty years; the building itself dates from 1898. Peter, who ran the company before Derek and Laura came in, had told them that they could have grown out of the office a long time ago, but that the family made the decision to stay small, to keep things in-house.

They’re not a large consulting firm, but they do good work and keep accounts with some of the largest corporations in the city. Small accounts for those conglomerates, large ones for Hale & Hale. The business itself isn’t incorporated. It was set up as a partnership, which these days is held in trust. Derek runs the firm on a day-to-day basis, but he leaves the trust the way it is. Rebecca and the rest of the fiduciaries of the trust meet with him quarterly.

Derek works hard. He takes home a lot of profit, spends little of it because it’s just him and Isaac, adds to his family’s too-large portfolio, and generally tries not to fuck it up too badly.

+++

Every once in a while he walks home from the office, or part of the way. The wind slices across his back; the skyscrapers slice through the wind as it hits the island. If he looks directly up, craning his neck back, he can see the moon, sometimes, but almost never the stars he seeks. There’s too much light around.

If he stops in an open space, though, usually Bryant Park because it’s not too far out of his way, he can look at the gap in the air between the ground and the buildings lit up in the dark and imagine that the office windows with the lights still on are the city’s own stars.

He usually feels a bit stupid when he does this, so he doesn’t do it very often.

Even less often, he pulls out a hot pink hoodie from its bag in the back of his closet. He buries his face in it and breathes into its softness.

It doesn’t smell like very much these days, but if he really concentrates he thinks he can pick up something familiar.

+++

That’s not true.

It doesn’t smell like anything at all, anymore, and it hasn’t for a long time.

Sunday when he can’t block the thought – this knowledge – from his own head any longer, he slams out of the apartment and over to the coffee shop. The sound of the door probably wakes Isaac up.

+++

Sunday when he comes in sullen and silent, Stiles tells him that his semester break’s almost over. His best friend’s been back home with his girlfriend so he’s had their room to himself, but a few of their other apartment-mates have hung around. He shifts his weight back and forth between his feet, and then tells Andy that he’s taking his break. Not that Derek’s secretly watching him out of the corner of his eye as he sits and pretends to read while sipping the hot chocolate that Stiles made him.

“Um,” Stiles says, and he sits down in the chair across from Derek. “It’s my break time.”

“Okay,” Derek says. Something inside him turns over with a small flutter that he doesn’t recognize as Stiles joins him.

Stiles runs his hands through his hair and tips his head to the side – Derek wants to lick that fragile skin – and then, as though deciding that Derek’s not about to boot him from the seat, starts telling him some story about the high school lacrosse team and an asshole named Jackson and about Lydia, the goddess Lydia, and how she became instant best friends with the new girl their sophomore year of school, and Derek isn’t really listening to every word. He focuses on the way Stiles’ foot is right next to his on the floor beneath the table, how his lips move and his eyes laugh with his words, the delicate and broad strength of his wrists. Derek would pin those bones high above his head and place his mouth on them so that he could work his way down the curve of Stiles’ arm to the sweet bitterness of his armpit.

He’s never been so close to Stiles, and it makes his senses sing. It teases him out of his heavy mood, for now.

In the space of fifteen minutes, Stiles covers a range of topics. He had a crush on Captain America when he was younger but is seriously, totally, completely over that, Chris Evans notwithstanding. He wanted a dog just so he could name it Fido (or maybe Rex, “hello, ironic!”) but his dad wouldn’t let him because he didn’t think Stiles would actually take care of it, which was obviously unfair and age discrimination because in a contest between him and Scott, Stiles has always been the responsible one, even if when they were sophomores in high school his dad did handcuff him to his squad car after he caught him snooping around a murder scene in the woods. He loves French fries in all forms, curly ones especially.

Derek learns a lot of other things about Stiles as well, but really – “You’ve never been to Pommes Frites.”

“Nope.”

“I don’t understand that,” Derek says flatly.

“I know, right? I’m a fry-lover, they serve the best fries in the city. Belgian waffle fries.” He moans as he says it, and Derek fists his hand against the leg of his pants. He wants to swallow that sound out of Stiles’ mouth.

“You don’t even have to get on the train from here to get there, and it’s practically obligatory for all students to hit up at 2 a.m. after playing too much beer pong,” Stiles exclaims. “I am so distressed about this.”

Derek wants to say, “Let’s go.” He doesn’t.

After a beat, Stiles says, “My break’s up,” and he stands and goes back behind the counter. He smiles, open and cheerful, at the girl who comes in and asks for a latte. Derek leans on the table and lets the sweetness of the hot chocolate wash through him while he watches. The shop smells good, comforting and a bit familiar from all the time he spends there. He watches the angles of Stiles’ body as he moves and, for just a few moments, doesn’t think about much other than the way his shoulders shift under his shirt and the way they’d look naked.

There are probably moles across his back.

+++

A few nights later, Stiles makes some sort of complicated face at Derek when he comes in and gets in line. Derek considers this a win because Stiles looks all the way to the back of the line as soon as he comes in just to make a face at him.

Derek is so pathetic.

It’s Thursday night, so the shop has a bunch of slightly awkward not-quite-couples doing the “let’s grab a cup of coffee” thing. In the middle of the shop, sitting at one of the battered round tables with the mismatched ceramic mugs and saucers that Erica loves so much, is one couple that looks like things are going well. Derek eyeballs them.

When he gets to the front, Stiles slumps across the counter and shakes his head into his arm. “You’d better get the hot chocolate tonight,” he tells Derek. “It’s all about to come to an end.”

His words are muffled by his flannel shirt. When Derek sees flannel, he usually thinks of woods and deep, rich odors and pinpricks of light in a dark sky.

Here and now, alarm flares under Derek’s skin, and he rolls his shoulders back to relax himself. “Are you quitting?” He makes his voice stay level. His gut churns.

Stiles’ head snaps up. “What? No!” He huffs and polishes a spot on the counter with particular vigor. “Professor Schultz is trying to ruin my life, that’s what. He refuses to let me switch into his section of Chem 311 so I’m stuck in the evening session. Some crap about a waiting list of fifteen people, blah blah blah, and not playing favorites. He knows I have to take that class because it’s a prereq for all the upper level chem classes. And if I want to keep all my hours, I’m going to need to switch to a morning shift twice a week. Fucking seven a.m. Ruining. My. Life.”

He must read something on Derek’s face, which confuses Derek because he knows his face is fairly blank most of the time – “No one’s going to make fun of you, honey, for showing us how you feel,” his mom had said when he was sixteen, and Natalie, lurking in the kitchen doorway, had snorted, “Yes, we will.” Mom had leveled a look at her. “Sorry,” she’d said and ducked away snickering. Mom cupped the back of his neck and told him it was fine. “I know anyway. A mom always does.” Derek remembers feeling guilty, because she didn’t know everything.

So Derek’s pretty sure he isn’t showing Stiles the amusement he’s feeling right now at his antics over his class schedule, but Stiles points at him and says, “No judging, this is serious! I’m so not a morning person.”

The problem is that Derek’s having a hard time feeling bad about this because if Stiles switches to morning shifts, Derek could see him morning and night. He bites down on his lower lip so that he doesn’t smile. Stiles shoots him a suspicious glare anyway and says, “You suck.”

+++

He goes to his monthly meeting at Rebecca’s house. She owns two entire floors right on Gramercy Park South; they’ve been in the family forever, and her family has more money than Derek’s ever did. He takes his check, as always, and gives it to Rebecca. She huffs, as always, but accepts it and tells her nephew to deposit it into the fund, and then wraps her hand around the back of his neck and digs into his skin there. It doesn’t hurt, exactly.

Before he and Isaac leave in the morning, he approaches her again and tells her that next month he’s planning on taking Isaac out of the city up to one of the parks a few hours north.

“Why do you pay her?” Isaac asks as they walk slowly to the train. “She doesn’t want it. Doesn’t need it.”

Derek throws him a look. “That’s not the point. I prefer to have a business arrangement with her, and this allows us to do that.” He watches a man walk his poodle past them. “They use the fund to rescue strays.”

“Like us.” Isaac’s tone isn’t quite a question.

Derek shrugs. “We’re not, quite.”

Half a block later - “I still don’t get it.”

The trees dotting the sidewalks are thin and bare. There’s so much Isaac doesn’t get, and Derek doesn’t know how to explain it. Isaac wasn’t part of the plan.

When Derek was a kid, he didn’t have a plan because kids don’t. And then he and Laura – mostly Laura – made a plan because they had to, because it was the only thing they could do, and Derek’s tried to stick to it as much as he can because he’s seen what happens when he’s left to make his own choices. But Isaac wasn’t part of it. Neither was a lot of other shit.

+++

Stiles wasn’t part of the plan, either.

As January turns into February, Derek has mixed feelings about Stiles working morning shifts. On the one hand, he gets to see him more frequently. On the other, he’s on his way to work and Stiles is still pretty much asleep, so the most Derek gets is a bleary-eyed smile and some extra caramel in his coffee before Stiles is on to the next customer and Derek’s going down into the subway.

He walks over to his usual table near the counter. Since it’s almost closing time, Stiles is wiping down the tables. He must not be paying any attention at all because he turns and runs smack into Derek. His hands fly up to brace himself against Derek’s chest, the first solid surface he finds, and there’s a wet rag hanging down Derek’s front from one of those hands and the other is curled into Derek’s shirt. Derek freezes because that pressure from his hands, it feels amazing and he wants to lean into it, except that before he can even think of how awkward that would actually be, Stiles snatches his hands away and looks at him with wide eyes.

“Oh my god, sorry, please don’t eat me,” he says in a rush of air that brushes across Derek’s face.

“This is new,” says Isaac when he gets home. He brushes close by Derek. “Hot cocoa again and you being all, you know. But who’s the guy?”

Derek tells him to mind his own business.

“I am.” Isaac slouches his hands into his pockets. “I want to meet him.”

“There’s no one to meet.”

“Stop being a douche.” He glares. “You’re meeting him at the coffee shop. You always come home smelling like coffee and hot chocolate these days. Come on, Derek.”

“No. It’s my job to look after you, not the other way around.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might just want to make your life miserable by teasing you about him or embarrassing you in front of him or something? Not everything is life or death.”

Raising his eyebrows, Derek says nothing. He grabs a glass of water.

“Whatever,” Isaac says.

+++

The depressing thing is that there really is no one to meet. Because, sure, Stiles chatters at him and sometimes takes his break with him and always has a grin for him, but that doesn’t mean anything more than that Derek comes in toward the end of the night when things are slow and Stiles is bored.

Stiles worries about college and his schedule and grades and where he’s going to live next year because his best friend might move in with his girlfriend, except that her shotgun-crazy dad probably won’t let that happen. He thinks about his best friend and how nauseatingly and thrillingly happy he is with Allison, about his dad and if he’s eating himself toward a heart attack, and if Mrs. McCall is keeping up her end of the deal to watch his dad in exchange for Stiles keeping Scott out of trouble. Well, most trouble. He goes on about the fact that he’s not getting laid as much as he did last year, but that might have something to do with him working more and going out less, even though he still gets drunk more than he probably should but what the hell, it’s fun, and if you can’t do this in college in the middle of New York, where can you. He throws his hands up and gestures to the space around him, as though he can take in and embrace the entire city with just his arms.

Derek squeezes his mug so hard when Stiles talks about hooking up with other people that it cracks down the side. Stiles cuts himself off, suddenly focusing on Derek. It’s such a strange feeling when he does this, when he just stops and all of his attention lands in one place, on Derek. In moments like these, Derek settles even as his body tenses and readies itself for Stiles’ touch, a touch that never comes, of course. He resents all the trappings of civilization around them both, because they won’t let him pull Stiles down to the raw ground and show him how Derek is his, if only he would have him.

Derek’s never been great with words. “Don’t be a caveman while I’m gone, babe,” Laura told him while she packed her bag before the car picked her up for the airport. “If I come home and find you’ve gone feral, there will be some serious ass-kicking.”

“Dude,” Stiles says. “Derek?”

Derek blinks away.

“Where’d you go?” For once, Stiles’ voice is still. Derek risks a glance at him and finds his face quiet and drawn, older, as though he too knows what it’s like to flee elsewhere without ever moving. In that instant Derek catches a glimpse of the man Stiles will be and fears he’s never going to be able to walk away from him.

He shoves his chair back with a loud scrape and leaves without answering.

+++

He goes back the following night and as an apology lets Stiles put extra whipped cream on his hot chocolate without complaint. Stiles shoots pointed looks at him the entire time he drinks it. When Stiles comes over – unnecessarily – to take the empty mug from him, Derek’s hand reaches out and grabs Stiles’ wrist, wrapping around it in a loose hold.

He wants to lick the shocked expression from his face. He forces himself to let go just as quickly as he’d claimed him.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, low.

Stiles makes an annoyed sound. “You think?”

Derek doesn’t know whether he’s talking about touching him or walking out without a word last night, but it doesn’t really matter either way. Stiles isn’t giving an inch, and in a world where Derek’s always supposed to be in charge and have the answers and know what’s going on, it’s one more blow Stiles lands on his heart.

“You were going to leave,” Derek tells him.

“Damn right I was. Am. This is me walking away from you, tonight.” He stalks back behind the counter and ignores Derek, muttering things Derek only catches pieces of that don’t make sense, about assholes and stupid Italian loafers and V-necked t-shirts.

When Derek finally gets up to leave, Stiles waits until he gets to the door and then calls out, “I’m not on tomorrow night.”

This isn’t news to Derek; he snuck into the back room and looked at the schedules hanging on the wall weeks ago. “I know,” he admits to Stiles, and Stiles’ mouth relaxes.

“Okay.”

+++

Stiles says he doesn’t have a clue what he’s going to do with his life, doesn’t have a plan yet, and he grins.

+++

On Wednesday morning, Derek thinks he catches sight of Isaac walking away from the coffee shop carrying a disposable cup branded with the Cups logo on the side.

+++

As the semester slips inexorably forward, sometimes Stiles flicks these little glances at him, and Derek wonders if he, too, can sense this weird, crazy rush that keeps drawing Derek back to him, but then he comes to himself and figures that Stiles is just wondering why he keeps creeping around. At this point, it’s got to be obvious that Derek only shows up in the evenings when he’s there. Stiles doesn’t have much of a filter, and if he wanted something, Derek’s pretty sure it would pop out of his mouth as soon as he figured it out.

Still, though. Even if Stiles doesn’t say what Derek really wants to hear and has no right to even think about laying claim to, the way Stiles talks makes things easier for him. He doesn’t always understand what Stiles is saying – he thinks Stiles doesn’t either or wouldn’t if he slowed down long enough to think about it – but Derek lets his words trip over him and settle into the rhythm of his pulse.

Most days he doesn’t delude himself into thinking that Stiles is talking for him, telling him these things because he wants Derek to know, but Derek sometimes lets himself imagine, just for a few minutes, that it matters just a bit to Stiles, too, and that the red blush that creeps up his cheeks is for Derek.

+++

Occasionally in February and even more into March, he finds Cups napkins tossed into the garbage in his apartment and at the office.

He snarls under his breath at Isaac, who smiles at him like a cherub, and regrets letting him do his internship this semester at Hale & Hale.

+++

Isaac’s at Hunter. Derek went to Baruch. To this day, he has no idea how he even got in. It probably has something to do with how Laura wrote his personal statement. Back then, he’d hated her for even making him get his GED. He’d hated a lot of things at that point. But after a while, it got hard to hate someone who whapped him upside the head before he even knew he needed it. When he’d asked her how she knew, not specifying what, exactly, she just smiled a small and sad sideways smile and tapped her nose the same way their mom used to.

Laura’d gone uptown to Columbia. But then, she’d actually finished high school and that must have helped.

He shouldn’t be in charge at Hale & Hale, not even with all the help he has from his team of managers. A twenty-five-year-old with a bachelor’s and a few years of experience he’d gained on the job running a fifteen-million-dollar company. He wonders if someone saw this coming a long time ago. If that’s why the trust exists. There’s no one left alive who might know, except maybe Rebecca as part of her family lore about how they got mixed up with the Hales, but he thinks that someone in his family must have figured that there was always a possibility, always the chance that one day there might not be a great and sprawling clan of Hales to run the firm.

+++

The end of March is gloomy. Winter’s mostly gone but spring hasn’t arrived yet. In less than a month, the cherry trees will be blooming all over, creating pink-carpeted streets in scattered neighborhoods. Right now, though, the city holds its breath and waits.

It’s been a few days since Derek made it in during Stiles’ evening shift. He saw him two days ago in the morning, just a quick grin from Stiles and the accidental brush of his hand against Derek’s as he pressed the tumbler back into his grasp. Before that, the start of the prior week, Derek had been away with Isaac for two days, and then Stiles had been covering for one of the other baristas, so he hadn’t been there when Derek stopped in.

It’s almost closing time. “Yo, Stiles,” Andy calls out. “Derek’s here.” To Derek he says, “He’s in the back room putting some stuff away. You’d better wait to order. He gets sorta twitchy if we make you your drink.”

The corner of Derek’s mouth edges up. He can’t really help it, and he rolls his eyes at himself just as Stiles pops his head around the corner of the doorway to the back and sees him do it. He looks flustered and grabs at the doorframe to stop himself from faceplanting into the counter, and Derek wants to tell him that he wasn’t rolling his eyes at him, but there’s no good way to do that without sounding like a total douche.

“Lies,” Stiles exclaims, “vicious lies! Derek, if you want to trust this chump to make your cocoa, that’s all on you.”

“You’re an idiot,” he tells Stiles. What, does he come here for the quality of the hot chocolate? The guy’s got to have a clue by now. Surely.

“Offensive!” He flips Derek off and grabs a mug for him. “Where’s the love tonight?”

This time, Derek’s rolling his eyes at him. Stiles flushes and looks away for just a second before looking back at Derek. He follows Derek over to the table they usually take. Derek thinks of it as their table. He scowls at anyone sitting in it when he wants to sit there until they sheepishly gather their things and go, but most nights it’s empty since it’s the closest one to the edge of the coffee bar.

“I didn’t take my break yet. I was waiting,” Stiles tells him when he asks. Derek raises his eyebrow at this – it’s ten minutes before closing – but he’s the one benefitting here so he doesn’t ask what Stiles was waiting for. Stiles draws spirals on the tabletop with his bony fingers while he talks about Scott’s plans for the summer. Lydia’s planning on staying in Boston, which means that Allison is thinking about going to dorm with her in BU’s summer housing, which means that Scott’s freaking out and Christ, he’s not the only one. How has Derek not thought about summer vacation? Stiles is in college, and college kids tend to do things like go home for three months in the summer or take internships in places like Washington and L.A.

“Uh, are you having an asthma attack or something? You’re breathing hard. Only, Scott has asthma and he doesn’t sound like that.”

Stiles’ hand is solid on Derek’s forearm. Derek stares at it.

“That’s not a good idea,” Derek says with all the finality he can put into his voice, which is a lot according to Isaac.

“What?”

“You. Going.”

Stiles’ mouth is hanging open. He squints at Derek, so Derek tries to clarify. “To Boston. Leaving the city. For the summer.”

“Do you think you could put that in a complete sentence?” Stiles looks at him sideways. His tongue peeks out and wets his lips.

“How about this? You’re an ass.” Stiles snorts and doesn’t deny it, and Derek says, “You should stay here this summer.” His stomach threatens to stage a minor revolt at the thought that Stiles might ask just why Derek wants him to stay.

Of course he does because he can’t just let anything go. He absent-mindedly taps his fingers on the table while he waits for Derek’s answer.

Derek shrugs as though his pulse isn’t beating so hard that it’s about ready to explode out of his veins. “New York has a lot of good summer opportunities. You aren’t going to find something better in another city.” Stiles is still watching him, like he’s waiting for more, and somehow Derek finds himself trying to give it to him. “You’ve already interviewed for two internships here. And you could pick up more hours here at the shop, earn more money, enjoy the city a little.”

Stiles exhales noisily. He looks impressed. “I think that’s the most I’ve ever heard you say in one go.”

Derek asks him if he’s always been this prone to exaggeration. “Believe it or not, I’m downright chatty these days,” he says.

Stiles starts laughing. “Who even says that? ‘Downright chatty?’ What the hell? But if that’s true, I pity the person who had to socialize you.”

The edge of Derek’s mouth turns up unexpectedly. “She would have agreed with you.”

“Yeah.” Stiles sounds unfocused. His eyes are directed at Derek’s mouth, but it seems like he’s not really seeing him. Then, suddenly decisive, he looks at Derek a little sideways, the way he does sometimes, bright and teasing and brash. “So if I stay here and explore the city this summer, are you going to do some of that with me? Seeing as it’s your idea and all.”

A chair scrapes the floor nearby when someone gets up to leave. Andy drops a spoon on the counter with a clank. The bell above the door tinkles when someone else walks in. Derek leans forward, and Stiles’ gaze falters. “I mean, I know you’re super busy and shit, but. If you had time.” His foot swings under the table and makes it shiver. “No big deal or anything. Just sayin’.”

There’s a burn twisting up Derek’s sternum, something hot and vital. He curls his fingers into his thighs and opens his mouth to say, “Yes, anytime, whenever you want,” and probably a whole lot of other crap that he really shouldn’t say to Stiles because he doesn’t know what else to do with this enormous, intense want that’s been building inside him.

But a hand lands on his shoulder and digs in, and Derek jerks. The words fall back inside him without ever making it out. Stiles looks disappointed and then he exclaims, “Shit.”

“Exactly,” Erica tells him. “Am I paying you to sit around? Go help Andy close up. God.”

“Knock it off,” Derek growls at her. “And don’t touch me like that. You know better than to do that.”

She flips her hair at him and takes Stiles’ hastily vacated chair. “You didn’t even hear me coming. That’s so sad.”

“Don’t push it, kid.” She’s not much older than Stiles; the shop actually belongs to Rebecca’s family. Erica’s been managing it for them ever since they picked her up. Derek watches Stiles wipe down the machines. He’s biting his lip, worrying at it.

She follows his eyes. “He’s cute. There’s something about him.” She tilts her head, considering. “He’s got a spark to him.”

Derek crosses his arms over his chest. It’ll wrinkle the wool of his suit but he doesn’t care. It needs to go to the cleaners anyway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Erica’s laugh is loud. “Puh-lease. Like you’re fooling me.”

He snarls wordlessly at her, and she shoves her chair back quickly before slowing the motion down and smoothing it out as she rises. She smirks. “Go get him, tiger.”

Derek stares at her until she walks away, and then he sits as the shop closes down around him. Rain falls glinting and cold on the sidewalk through the streetlamps. Stiles watches him out of the corner of his eye while he cleans and turns things off. Erica helps.

He leaves before they finish. If he doesn’t, he might offer to walk Stiles back to his apartment, and then, rain or no rain, he’d either push him back against the side of the building so he can drop to his knees in front of him or he’d end up stalking outside the building all night. He’d sit on the fire escape and dangle his legs over the edge while Stiles slept inside.

Somehow neither of these options seems like a good one at the moment. There’s always another choice, however unpalatable. Peter taught him that.

Stiles waves at him and then shoves his hands in his pockets when he gets up.

++++

The topic doesn’t come back up in the next two weeks but Stiles doesn’t say anything more about going to Boston for the summer.

The trees start budding in April.

+++

When Derek walks into Cups and finds Stiles trying to shove his way out of a headlock that some guy’s got him in, Derek starts forward, fury rising in his chest that tries to release itself in a howl of protest. He’s almost reached them before the rest of the scene filters into his brain through the heaviness of his senses, and he stops short two feet shy of them.

Stiles is laughing, “Lemme go, Scott, Erica’s going to kill me if I break another dish,” as he squirms under Scott’s arm.

Derek looks at Scott’s hands on Stiles’ body and wants to rip them off, even if this is the best friend he’s heard so much about, best friends since meeting at age four on the playground. He thinks that maybe, if he had the right to touch Stiles at all, even the easy way Scott does, which isn’t the way Derek wants to touch him anyway, then maybe he wouldn’t see red at the sight of another person’s skin against Stiles’.

At night, he lies in his bed and thinks of the way it would feel to have even the smallest patch of Stiles’ bare skin pressed against his own. Maybe the sharpness of Stiles’ hip jutting into the muscle of Derek’s thigh, maybe just the tip of his finger tracing the line of Derek’s clavicle.

Rarely, when he’s feeling really indulgent with himself, he imagines the taste of Stiles’ mouth on his mouth, the slight chapping of Stiles’ lips, the moist warmth of his breath licking Derek’s face. The things he’d do if he ever did get Stiles pinned up against the cool brick of a nameless building in the dark.

Scott rubs the top of Stiles’ head and pushes him away gently. Stiles’ arms wheel wide as he loses his balance. Derek feels like he’s right there with him, freewheeling as Stiles pushes his way through Derek’s nights and days, cutting across his path and leaving Derek clutching unsteadily for balance. Derek’s arm shoots forward and he rights Stiles even as Scott reaches out for him, too.

“Such a nerd,” Scott says. Derek looks at his floppy hair and soft brown eyes, pictures himself in his mind’s eye, all hard edges and dark frowns, and exhales.

“Hey, Derek, so this is Scott,” Stiles tells him, rubbing the back of his head. “He’s kind of a schmuck, but he’s my schmuck, so I’m stuck with him.”

Scott’s grin is crooked. “If this is the love I get, I’m going back to Allison’s to wait for her to get home.” His expression goes a bit slack before he suddenly focuses on Derek. “So, this is Derek, huh.” He flashes an expression like code at Stiles. “Derek,” he says again. There’s a strange emphasis when he says Derek’s name.

“Yeah,” Stiles says quickly. “He’s, like, a customer. Frequent, you know, customer.”

Something deep stabs into Derek’s gut; he bites down against it. He feels like he must be bleeding, a long gash ripped across whatever soft parts he has. Aside from that burning pain, his senses close down against Stiles’ rejection. The smells of the coffee shop weaken, the clank of metal spoons against ceramic mugs and the steady whir of the machines waiting for use fade. The edge of the counter under Derek’s hands grows chilly. Only Stiles does not dim, even as he becomes distant.

More than four months of Derek coming to him, and he’s Derek, the customer? It’s not like he thinks Stiles should have said, “This is Derek, the man I desperately want to bone and also I might be halfway in love with.” Derek’s not totally nuts. He recognizes that just because that’s how he feels – scratch that, he’s been gone on Stiles since the night Stiles handed him his first cup of cocoa and Derek felt a weight flip over under the cage of his ribs – but just because he feels that way doesn’t mean Stiles does, too. But Stiles talks to him, tells him things. He’d thought – wrongly, obviously – that Stiles was trying to ask him out two weeks ago, even if it was just to hang “like bros,” as Stiles would say. That was supposed to count, make him more than just some random customer who happens to stop in way too much to be anything other than some sort of creeper.

God, he feels like a fool. Ten times a fool, and for that he wants to hate Stiles, but can’t.

“I’ll have a coffee. Black. Please,” Derek says finally. He stares up at the chalkboard menu above Stiles’ head. The words are a smear to his eyes.

“Wait, wha—”

Derek doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s frowning. He knows the way Stiles talks, the way expressions flit across his face. He knows the berry-bright way he smells when he’s happy, the sourdough of his stress. He knows the way his breath hitches when a new thought hits his mind and he sidetracks himself, and the tap-dance of his heartbeat.

“No caramel.”

Stiles’ surprise is bitter-scented. “Derek,” he says, an odd note in his voice. It’s not quite a question and far from an answer, and Derek would rather wait for the possibility of him for the rest of his life, forever and until the moon fails to rise in the night sky, before he would want to hear Stiles tell him that he means nothing to him, to go away and leave him alone.

The stink of his own fear is a miasma surrounding him. He snarls helplessly against it and stumbles back as Stiles’ bitter surprise flares again, he knows, at seeing Derek move so gracelessly. “I have to go,” he grits out.

There’s a mug of coffee still in Stiles’ hand. As the door shuts behind him with a tinkle of the bell, Derek hears Scott say, “Dude, what crawled up his ass and died.”

+++

Laura would never let him apologize. Maybe this is why he sucks at it now and makes Isaac want to claw his eyeballs out most of the time.

“Derek, apologize to your sisters,” his mom would tell him, exasperation clear in her voice. “No fair, Mom, I didn’t do anything to Natalie or Laura! It was Amalie and Mikey!” he’d whine back. “Don’t blame your cousins,” she’d say from the kitchen downstairs. Teddy pulled at the leg of his jeans and asked what Auntie Talia was saying. He always hated it when everyone else could hear conversations he couldn’t, even if he was still too little to really understand most of what was said anyway. Derek scooped Teddy up and scowled at the girls across the room. He mumbled something that could have been interpreted, loosely, as an apology. Magnanimously, Laura said, “I forgive you,” and Derek put Teddy on the ground and lunged at her legs to take her down.

After everything happened, when Derek tried to apologize, Laura would hit the backside of his head and tell him not to be more of an idiot than he could help. “It wasn’t your fault. Get that out of your head. There’s nothing to apologize for. You were a stupid kid thinking with his dick like every other teenage boy I’ve ever met, and she was a bitch who was going to get what she wanted one way or the other. Do you think I didn’t know you were sneaking around with her?” She wrapped herself around him on her bed. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” she repeated. “Foolish little cub.”

+++

The full moon is two nights after that horrible moment with Stiles in the shop. There’s no way Derek’s going to be able to get through it in the city, so he grabs a car, shoves Isaac into it because there’s also no way he’s going to get through it without pack, his own pack, and Isaac’s all he’s got, and heads north to the upstate woods. He presses down on the gas of his rented Honda and brutally squashes thoughts of Laura’s Camaro.

“Seriously,” Isaac complains. “Two days without your morning cup of coffee and you turn into an animal. What the fuck.”

Derek glares at him and strips with hurried efficiency as soon as he parks the car. It’s just getting dark around 7:30. He lets the moon pull the change over him, even though he hasn’t needed its help since he hit adolescence. The familiarity of its constant tug, strongest as it rises full in the cold sky, eases the pain of the transition.

“Whoa,” says Isaac when Derek doesn’t stop at his beta form as usual. Derek welcomes the fur spreading across his body, runs his tongue over his elongated teeth, and sinks down on all fours. The ground is rich as the spring thaw brings it back to life. He throws his head back and howls; in the next instant Isaac shudders with the shift and cries out to the moon with his alpha. He probably doesn’t know what he’s howling for, but Derek does, and he doesn’t need Isaac to understand, just to join.

In this form, he doesn’t have to think. The rough forest beneath his paws distracts him from the ache of Stiles that he carries with him.

He lets his tongue hang out, and he runs. He has to loop back to Isaac over the course of the night since the alpha form is stronger and faster than any beta could ever be, but the woods are large enough to hold them, and he runs until Isaac is flagging and can go no longer. Then he curls around him while the boy sleeps amid the brown leaves of last fall.

+++

A week or two ago, Stiles had asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Then he’d laughed, as though catching himself. In that instant, he looked every bit as young as his nineteen years made him. “That’s a stupid question. You must already have it all figured out. You’re always in a suit when I see you. Like someone successful.”

Derek shrugged. “I do okay.”

Across the table, Stiles looked curious. “What do you do? The last time I asked, you pretty much grunted at me and mumbled something about working in an office.” He leaned back and stretched his arms over his head. Derek wished it were summer so that Stiles wouldn’t be wearing about ten layers. Maybe then he’d be able to see the pale underside of his arm and the interplay of lithe muscle into his shoulder joint. But this worked too, because Stiles’ shirt edged up and there was a flash of skin and a line of hair leading into his pants. The button on his jeans got in the way then. Derek would nose there. The thought of being able to simply rest his head on Stiles’ lap, his face buried in the heady scents there, forced him to curl his fingers into his thigh under the table to distract himself. The thought of being able to do that, of Stiles giving him that right, was nearly painful.

“It’s my family’s office. It’s a consulting business.”

Stiles pulled his shirt down. Derek exhaled.

“Cool. So you guys own it? Are you a start-up?”

It took Derek a minute to answer. “No,” he said. “The firm’s been around a while. But I’m the only one left of my family. The company’s held in trust so I don’t actually own it. I’m the sole beneficiary of the trust, though, so it’s mostly like I do.” He had a meeting the following month with the lawyers his family had used for years to add Isaac as a beneficiary. The fiduciaries had consented.

Stiles looked a little sad. “That’s why you work so hard. You’re always here so late.” He didn't leave Derek any time to respond before saying, in a hesitant tone unlike him, “My mom died when I was a kid.” He met Derek’s eyes and that was all he said about that.

He idly played with Derek’s cup on the table. “Did you always plan to go into the family business? Did you play consultant when you were a kid?” He snorted, presumably at some image in his head. “Little Derek in a suit. Like, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do with your life?”

There were grooves on the table, dents and pockmarks from years of use. “When I was little? Never really thought about it. After –” Derek felt his lip curl, and he started over – “Later, it didn’t matter. I just grew into the business.”

Stiles sighed and rested his chin in his hand. “Must have been nice. To know. Not to have to angst over it.”

“Yeah,” Derek agreed slowly. Yeah, he guessed, except for the part where it wasn’t because he never had the chance to flail around and figure it out at his own pace – he jumped right into playing at being an adult and trying not to fuck this up like he’d fucked everything else up.

“I’ll start at Columbia in the fall,” Laura had said. “You get your GED. New York’s big, we’ll be safe enough. We’ll have to ask the Meyerson pack to shelter us. Grams was close to their alpha. I think her name is Rebecca.” She lifted her chin, barely eighteen and alpha for a week. Derek nuzzled her shoulder from behind because he didn't know what else to do.

“An alliance?”

Laura snorted. Her shoulders jerked. “Babe, there’s two of us now. We’ll be lucky if they agree to continue the arrangement Uncle Peter had with them and share the territory with us. Hales and Meyersons have been sharing limited space for generations, but each pack carried its weight. Till now.”

It’s not like they could be pack with the Meyersons. Not with Laura an alpha. “We need their protection.” A pack of two, barely a pack at all with no strength for the alpha to draw on, couldn't always be on the alert, and they had a consulting firm they had to learn how to run. “I’ll be damned if I let Hale & Hale go,” Laura said. Her eyes flashed red. “It’s all we have left, and I won’t let that be taken from us, too. Besides, if Uncle Peter ever wakes up, he’ll be able to help us. He loves Hale & Hale.”

They were halfway across the country, stopped for the night at a rundown motel a hundred miles west of Lincoln. The Camaro was parked outside the door. It was pretty much empty. Inside, they shared one bag between them. Everything else had burned.

Laura’s hair still smelled like smoke and charred flesh. Derek could tell by the way she wrinkled her nose that his did, too.

Derek doesn’t think the smell will ever really go away.

“We have to make a plan,” she'd said, and turned out the light.

+++

Stiles sighed and rested his chin in his hand. His eyes were bright. “Must have been nice. To just know. Not to have to angst over it.”

“I guess,” Derek agreed slowly.

“I don’t have a clue. Don’t even have a plan. So I’m double-majoring in Chem and Linguistics.” He laughed. “I guess I should be more worried about this. Cuz I talk about it all the time – that’s pretty much what you’re obligated to do in college, be all existential and thoughtful, but really? Allison’s changed her major three times. The only one of us who knows anything is Scott. He’s always wanted to be a vet.”

“It’s not really nice,” said Derek suddenly. He hadn’t planned to. Just – it was easy to say things to Stiles, as much as it could be easy to say these things ever. “We had to take over the business. There wasn’t really a choice.”

“Why?”

Derek looked out the window. The sidewalk was crowded. This seemed obvious. “Because there was no one else left to do it.”

“I thought you said it was a trust. Why couldn’t the trust run it?”

Derek was already shaking his head as the words left Stiles’ mouth. “The family’s always handled the firm.”

“So? You don’t have to keep doing it that way. Not if it’s not how you want to spend your life.” Stiles looked at his phone and exclaimed, “Crap. I’m supposed to be working. Stop getting me in trouble. See you tomorrow?”

+++

He didn’t say, “Because it’s my fault that there’s no one else left to do it,” or “It’s the last piece of my family I've got left.”

He thought it, though.

+++

After spending the full moon running around the woods upstate with Isaac and avoiding Stiles, he shows up late by a few days to Rebecca’s to pay her the monthly tribute fee. Erica gives him hell for not being there for the moon and for not coming by Cups. “Seriously,” she says, “you’re half my business with the way you’ve been coming round. We’ll go under and it’ll be all your fault.” She glares at him. “Besides, Stiles smells unhappy. Because of you. So his friends have been coming around every night, and he knows he can only have them in there once a week because he can’t concentrate with them there, but he smells sad and looks sad and is sad, so I let them come anyway.”

Derek’s gut twists in on itself. Why Stiles should be upset when he’s the one who rejected Derek – not even. It’s not like they had anything to reject, apparently. It was all just a fool’s wishes and dreams.

“Shut up,” he tells Erica shortly.

She scoffs at him. “Or what. You’re walking around smelling just as bad as Stiles does. Men are so stupid, honestly.”

“How about ‘shut up or I’ll break your arm’?”

“Well, that’s one way to lead your pack,” Rebecca says tartly as she comes in. Her spine is straight. She nails Derek with her eyes. “Not one I’d recommend, but maybe Talia raised you differently.”

The alpha in Derek wants to roar a challenge; the rest of him wants to let her grip the back of his neck and shake him like a young one. She radiates calm and authority, the same way his mother did. “No, ma’am. She didn’t. She didn’t raise me to be an alpha at all.”

Rebecca harrumphs. “You’re here now, so you’d best learn how to treat pack right.”

Startled, Derek says, “Erica’s not my pack.” Erica wrinkles her nose at the same time and says, “I’m not his pack.”

+++

Because when it comes down to it, Derek’s a stalker. He knows which mornings he can get coffee at Cups and which mornings Stiles is working and he should stay away. “I’m not stalking her,” Mikey had told him once about his not-yet, never-to-be girlfriend. “I’m honing my tracking skills.”

“Really?” Isaac says when Derek comes home in a foul mood for the fifth night in a row. He’s earlier than usual now that he’s not stopping at Cups for an hour. “You know what? If you won’t go, I’m going.” He slams the door on his way out.

It’s been almost two weeks since he’s seen Stiles, smelled his berry-bright scent, and Derek’s kind of going nuts. It feels like a piece of him has been carved out, not in that horrible, smoke-ridden way of his family but like his heart has been torn from him, still fresh and beating. The wolf in him whimpers as he lies alone in his bed at night. He licks his hand, his fingers, and fists his cock. Swiping his thumb over the head, he imagines that it’s Stiles’ tongue on his flesh. He comes on his own stomach with a cry, something that sounds a lot like Stiles’ name.

In the end, he can’t stay away. He gets off the train at night and walks to the center of the block that Cups is located on. There he stops and pulls out his phone, pretending to play a game or read a text or something, not that the passersby are paying attention. He loiters there listening to Stiles taking orders and making lattes for people. Something that’s been pulled tight in the weeks since he’s seen Stiles eases the slightest bit at hearing his voice. He doesn’t seem to be laughing as often as usual, but he’s probably just stressed about finals coming up soon.

+++

Derek goes back and does it again. He keeps inching closer to the actual storefront of Cups because from out here, through the brick, it’s hard to pick Stiles’ scent out. There are so many competing smells. His body prickles with longing whenever he catches a heady note of it as the door opens and shuts.

On the third night of this, Isaac crosses the street and walks up to him. “Really?” he says. “This is what you’re going with?”

Derek doesn’t bother replying.

Isaac heads over to the door of Cups. “Dude,” he says over his shoulder. “Someone’s gonna call the cops on you if you keep this up.” He opens the door and calls out, “Stiles, what’s up, yo?” and Derek shakes his head into his hand.

He’s going to kill him. Isaac's worse than his sister. Derek had figured Isaac was dropping by the shop – he wasn’t exactly subtle about the cups thrown in the trash – but he’s talking to Stiles. Being friends with him. Derek’s innards clench a little thinking about what Isaac might have told him.

“Why are you such a sadface tonight?” he hears Isaac ask Stiles.

Stiles sputters and tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “School sucks. I hate group work! My group is awful. We met last night and one of them was going to redo the slides and upload the new version in Dropbox, and I checked a few hours ago and nothing. Nothing!”

Someone else snorts. Derek’s pretty sure it’s Scott. He’s been in there the past few nights. “You don’t hate your group. You’re just missing—”

“Scott!” A girl cuts him off and hits him lightly on the arm or shoulder, from the sound of it. “Let Stiles pine in peace, okay?”

“Oh my god, shut up. I’m not pining.” Derek can hear him making Isaac a frappuccino. The ice rattles in the blender.

She laughs, a light sound. “He’ll be back. He’s probably just busy.”

“Thanks for that brilliant insight,” Stiles says sarcastically. “I feel so much better now.”

“Stiles,” Scott snaps. He sounds like a wounded teddy bear. “Don’t be mean to Allison. She’s just trying to help.”

Stiles mutters an apology. He’s swiping his cleaning cloth over the counters in some sort of circular motion. It doesn’t sound like he’s paying much attention to what he’s doing. “It’s just, like, months since I saw him. And he’s so –”

“Ripped?” Allison suggests.

“Exactly! His arms. His ass. The way it looks in jeans.” Stiles moans around his words. Allison pats him on the arm and Isaac coughs around a mouthful of his coffee. “He’s fucking gorgeous. And when he smiles. And he’s even nice, sometimes.” The sound of Stiles hitting his head on the counter is clear.

“Sweetie,” Allison begins, and Stiles says, “I know, I know, I’m so gone on this guy and he probably barely even knows I exist. I’m just the weird kid who works in a coffee shop. I just – I want to do things to him. To that body.”

“Uh,” says Isaac. “You need a break. Why don’t you take your break and sit with us? I’m not going home yet – my roommate’s all fucked up these days.”

Stiles sighs. “Not yet. It’s too early,” and Derek finally snaps and slams his fist into the solid brick of the building next to him. Bones crack with a satisfying snick. He ignores the exclamations of the lady walking past him and doesn’t stick around to hear any more of this conversation. He can’t. He can’t stand here and listen to Stiles talk about some other guy he’s crazy about like it doesn’t matter to him, like he’s just leaning against some building that doesn’t contain too, too many pieces of his heart.

He shoves his broken hand in his pocket and lets the bones fuse back together with sharp flicks of pain. Hunching his shoulders over into his leather jacket, he swallows and heads off into the dusky city. Cars honk around him with their typical, uncaring rush.

For a second, he’d let himself hope. Something so fierce and vibrant leapt up inside him that it felt like being set on fire from the inside out, not easy, not comfortable, but nothing like the deep red flames of Kate’s hands parting his legs, licking up the sides of his house. He’d thought – he’d thought that Stiles could be talking about him, missing him because he hasn’t come around, that maybe he was the one that could make Stiles moan like that, like Derek would spend day and night straining with his hands and mouth and entire body to hear again. If only Stiles would let him. If only Stiles wanted him.

Because it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t. It feels like months since he saw Stiles, but he knows it’s only been three weeks. He’s counted every day. And whoever that faceless guy is who Stiles is into, he smiles and is nice to Stiles, and Derek sure as hell hasn’t done that, hasn’t been nice to him. He goes in and grunts his order and glares at Stiles when he comes to talk to him and loses his words around him, because with Stiles he doesn’t have to be anything other than his silent, bound self.

And that’s it, isn’t it. He didn’t even try with Stiles. He couldn’t just open his mouth and tell him, didn’t ask him to do something crappy and uninspired with him like dinner and a movie, didn’t let Stiles mock his idea with, “Wow, way to try. I’m totally holding out for ‘let’s go skating in Central Park and see some pretentious play in a twenty-person theater in the Village.’”

Derek didn’t push himself to be better, to make Stiles want him back even half as much as he wants Stiles, and he should have. With a snarl, he lets his claws cut into his fisted hands as his anger at himself flares and he fights to stay calm. The city turns ash-grey as night falls and he paces her side streets.

Stiles was talking about that other guy’s ass, the things he wants to do to his body. Derek would give him his. If that’s all he could get from Stiles, he’d do it and he’d force himself to be happy with it. He’d try, and he knows he’d fail because he’ll never be content with just that from Stiles. Stiles is heedless and fearless and he knows what it’s like to lose someone and yet he’s so full of life despite that. He chooses to be. And he infects Derek and makes him want to be a little more vibrant, too.

When he gets home, finally, he shifts all the way and curls up in the middle of the bed. He takes up most of the space.

+++

There’s this old saying among werewolves that goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Uncle Peter said scornfully. “That’s a human thing.”

Laura frowned. “We’re human.”

“Yes,” Uncle Peter said, drawing the word out. “And that’s why the saying is common among us, too.”

A few years later, Derek fell for Kate and look how that turned out. He doesn’t for a second think Stiles is a Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Derek hasn’t made a fool out of himself nonetheless.

+++

Isaac finds him still tucked up around himself in his alpha form in the morning. There was a time, in the beginning, when he wouldn’t have dared walk into Derek’s bedroom. Things between them back then probably would have been a lot easier if Derek hadn’t snarled him into quivering submission after slamming him down onto the pavement, pretty much behaving too much like Isaac’s dad and making him leery of Derek for the next year. There are a lot of things Derek doesn’t think back on proudly. This is one, although at the time Isaac was Peter’s pack and Derek needed to take him down to get to Peter.

Isaac didn’t put up much of a fight.

“Why the hell did he do that?” Derek said later.

“He was creepy,” Isaac said consideringly.

Derek made an annoyed sound. “That’s my uncle you’re talking about.”

Isaac looked at him. “Okay? He was a creepy fucker?”

Derek cuffed him on the back of his head, and Isaac hid his smile as he bumped his shoulder into Derek’s.

Now he looks at Derek and says, “I can’t even,” and leaves. He comes back a half hour later with a steaming paper cup that says “Cups” on the side.

Derek shifts back to his human form with a groan. Isaac’s a traitor for going in there and making friends with Stiles and his friends. It’s a nick against Derek’s skin. He knows that Isaac wouldn’t have chosen him to be his alpha, but sneaking around like this behind Derek’s back?

“Don’t,” Isaac says. He looks uncomfortable. “I had to see what was going on with you. You’re – we’re pack.” He rubs the back of his neck and holds out the coffee. Derek grudgingly takes it.

“Stiles traded shift with Jane this morning. He made it. Well, he doesn’t know he made it for you. You should have seen the look he gave me when I asked for black with the caramel sitting on the shelf.”

Derek takes a sip and closes his eyes against the image of Stiles in the morning, tired and full of groggy smiles and messy hair.

“You’d better go back there soon, you know. He might forget you and one day when you get your head out of your ass, you’ll walk in and see him making someone else coffee just the way that guy likes it. See him flirt with someone else, sit down on his break at some other table with some other guy.” Isaac looks sad, and then it passes.

Derek thinks that’s what’s already happened, only it’s not because Stiles has forgotten him but because they never had anything outside Derek’s head to begin with. He doesn’t say anything, though. He remembers how Isaac had sounded when he talked to Stiles’ friends, Scott’s warm brown eyes and the pretty laugh of Scott’s girlfriend.

He says haltingly, “I don’t – I don’t get things right,” and Isaac laughs quietly.

“I know that, you fuck-wolf.”

+++

The thing is that three and a half weeks ago, the night before Stiles had told Scott that he was just some other customer, there was this – moment – that Derek pretty much thinks about all the time now. He hadn’t meant for it to happen. It just did.

The shop was mostly empty by the time he got there, late because work had shat in his face that afternoon and he’d stayed to clean it up. Stiles was alone. “Andy begged off early. I told Erica I could handle it.” He scrunched his face up. “There was a rush around eight, but it’s quiet now. So I can’t take, like, an official break, but it’s cool if you hang around a few. Scott’s staying at Allison’s tonight because she was gone all weekend, off with her parents somewhere visiting her crazy aunt. She’s in jail for life or something for murdering a family. My dad worked the case. They go to see her once in a while, and Scott was so boring all weekend, whining about how much he missed Allison.”

Stiles ducked his head under the counter to grab a container. His voice was muffled by his shirt as the loose material fell into his face. “They’ve been dating since high school. You’d think they’d be over it by now. Even her parents are, and you should have seen them when Scott first started dating her. Her mom had this thing where every time he’d come over, they’d make him stay for dinner and they’d both stare at him like they expected him to start choking or something. Ugh, I’m out of the Ethiopian blend. I just need to grab some from the back.”

As he spoke, he was already pushing through the door that said “Employees Only,” even though he was still talking. So Derek followed. Erica wouldn’t care, and Derek would – Derek would probably follow Stiles anywhere he’d let him, really.

Stiles was pouring coffee beans into the bin he was holding. “It freaked Scott out because the whole dining room would be decked out in these little purple flowers, like a florist’s place, only they weren’t in arrangements or anything. They were just everywhere. Her mom has weird decorating taste. And then one day, at a lacrosse game, he had an asthma attack because, okay, that’s what Scott does, and her dad was like so happy. And then he was suddenly fine with Scott. I mean, as much as any dad probably is with the guy who’s—whoa!”

He turned suddenly and ran smack into Derek’s chest. His hands flew up, a few stray beans bouncing off the floor with a clacking sound. With one hand Derek grabbed the container from him to save the rest; the other slammed into the wall behind Stiles to stop him from falling into the shelving.

Stiles’ hands were flat on Derek’s shirt, the same way they’d been a few months ago so briefly, but this time they were in the back room and they were alone. Stiles’ lips were parted in surprise, curved and inviting. His fingertips pressed in so slightly against Derek’s front that Derek pushed into them just to feel them more. Stiles’ breath, warm and coffee-tinted, brushed over his face, and he was leaning closer, his eyes impossibly wide and golden, and there was this second where their lips weren’t touching but could be. They could be, and Stiles swallowed and his eyelids slipped halfway closed but Derek kept his eyes full open because he didn’t want to miss a second of this, of that delicate blush suffusing Stiles’ face and how good he looked like that, pinned back by Derek’s arm and bracing himself against him.

Stiles inhaled sharply and his fingers curled into Derek’s chest. One of them thumbed past his nipple and a shudder ran down his spine. There was the barest touch of Stiles’ bottom lip against Derek’s, and the bell above the main door tinkled crisply. The rest of the world zoomed back into focus around them.

Stiles’ eyes flew open and he jumped. “Shit,” he said, and he cleared his throat and ran his hands through his hair and generally looked incredibly, deliciously flustered. “I gotta – that.” He jerked his hands in the direction of the front, and Derek looked away so he could make himself step back and let him go.

Derek took a few minutes in the back before he went out front. He slumped against the wall to steady himself, and tried not to hope too much.

When he left, he couldn’t read the look Stiles threw at him, but he didn’t think it was a bad one.

+++

Until the next night when Scott said, “So this is Derek,” like it meant something, and Stiles nearly tripped over himself in his haste to say, “He’s a customer. Frequent, you know, customer.”

And that, well, there was really only one way to take that. Message received, loud and clear.

+++

“You’re not an idiot.” Erica examines her nails. “Well, not only an idiot. You’re an ass, too.”

Next to her, his solid frame taking up the chair, Boyd hums under his breath. “No, I think he’s just an idiot.”

It’s Thursday night and Cups is full of people. Stiles isn’t on tonight, which is the only reason Derek’s here. Erica with her red lips and red nails and short leather skirts never seems like she quite fits here. Boyd, on the other hand, is all stoic silence, and he blends right into the urban nouveau-bohemian vibe Cups has going.

Derek growls low but deep in his throat and lets his eyes flash red at both of them. They edge back in their chairs but otherwise don’t budge. “Don’t push it.” He stares up at the ceiling as though it’s going to give him answers. He thinks that maybe he can’t do this anymore. He needs to get over this thing, over Stiles. He’s going to start acting normal again. He’ll even come into the shop every morning, not just those Stiles isn’t working, to get his coffee, the way it was before. He’ll say hi to Stiles and Stiles will say hi back, and Stiles will see that Derek’s not going to make him uncomfortable, and eventually it’ll be okay.

Next week, he’ll start that next week.

“I don’t know why I’m even sitting here with you,” he tells them.

Boyd’s gaze is direct. “Because when it comes down to it, you’re just another stray like us. Alpha or not.”

Derek figures it’s a good thing he left Beacon Hills when he did. He’d buried Laura in a ring of wolfsbane so that she could run fast and free in the woods for as long as eternity lasted, and he and Isaac had dug a grave for Peter far from the wolfsbane growing in the large Hale family plot at the cemetery and just as far, too, from Laura’s grave. Better for him to stay still and human under the ground than to roam forever in that black, misshapen form that he twisted into as alpha.

“I’m going back to New York,” he’d told Isaac. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to come with me, but the offer’s there. I have a company to run and promises to keep.” He didn’t say, “And if I stay here, I’ll go crazy, too.” He imagined a future where, out of desperation and the unquenchable need for pack, he would try to force one into being.

“We have a plan,” Laura had said fiercely into his hair as they curled together on her bed in their apartment. “We have Hale & Hale, and I’m stuck with you, babe. We’ll be okay.” She turned to glare at him. “Or we will be if you stop apologizing. Seriously, it’s fricking annoying. Get over yourself. There’s nothing to forgive. That bitch killed our pack, not you.”

These days, Derek still has Hale & Hale, the last piece of his family left, and he has Isaac. Who disappears on Saturday night, which just happens to be the night of the full moon. They’re already late for Rebecca’s pseudo-pack meet and greet. She insists they come and hand her the payment for their unequal alliance in person. Derek suspects it’s more just an excuse to make sure he and Isaac spend at least some time around other wolves. “Everyone needs a little socialization now and then,” she'd told him, her gaze stern. She’s right about that: Isaac shouldn’t be out on his own tonight. His control is good, but the full moon could still make it a little shaky. It hasn’t in months. That doesn’t mean it can’t be tricky, especially for bitten wolves.

His phone goes to voicemail and he doesn’t answer his texts. After half an hour, Derek’s getting worried.

He paces in their apartment. He wants to howl for him – his beta will answer the call – but howling is strongly frowned on in the middle of the city and there’s no real danger here, even here on the outskirts of Meyerson territory. Rebecca’s people run a clean show and tolerate no nonsense. The city’s just too crowded for anything else. So it’s probably Isaac being a stupid teenager, forgetting the day or losing track of time, or maybe stuck on a train between stations somewhere, or maybe – maybe being really, really dumb and sitting in a certain coffee shop because it’s Stiles’ night to work and he knows that Derek will come looking for him.

Derek’s going to kill him.

He stalks into the coffee shop ten minutes later. He could smell Isaac’s trail half a block away with the sharpness that the moon brings.

Isaac’s sitting at a large round table with Stiles, Scott, and a girl who Derek assumes to be Allison. She smells like Scott, and like something else that he can’t quite place. Isaac’s twitching nervously.

“I’m going to kill you,” Derek tells him flatly. “Get up.”

“Whoa,” Stiles exclaims. He jumps to his feet; Derek can hear his heart jackrabbiting. “First of all, whoa, and second, what the hell, Derek? Do you even know Isaac?”

Derek hears Allison whisper to Scott, “That’s Derek? Nice,” as he turns to face Stiles and says, “Stiles. Stay out of this.”

Scott snorts. “Oh, wrong thing to say, dude.”

Stiles sputters. “Stay out of this? You just waltz into my coffee shop after a month away and start ordering my friend around, and you can’t even stop and say hello? Fucking rude. He’s not going anywhere with you.”

His eyes are full of angry sparks and his breath is uneven with outrage, and god, Derek wants to kiss him. He wants to worry a claiming mark onto his neck and lean into him and steal the scent of his body for Derek’s own so that in the moonlight everyone will know that Derek is his.

“Stiles,” he snaps. “One, this is a public coffee shop. Two, he’s making us late for a meeting that we can’t miss which happens to include the boss of this coffee shop so I seriously doubt she’s going to care that I showed up to drag him out. Three, he’s my roommate so yes, I do know him, and right now I wish I didn’t. And four –” He breaks off and sighs, exasperated and tired and heartsick. This is not how he wanted this meeting to go.

“Four, hi. Hello, Stiles.”

Stiles’ eyes are wide. He whirls on Isaac. “You know him? You live with him?” Stiles’ scent is turning sour, and Derek hates it. “What, did you talk about me? About all that stuff I told you and how ridiculous I am? Did you tell him what I said and then laugh? God, I’m so stupid. Stupid.” He hunches his shoulders defensively and stares at the floor. Allison looks like she wants to reach out for him, and Scott’s face is scrunched up with anger.

“Oh my god, no,” Isaac bursts out just as Derek steps forward to do – he doesn’t even know – and says, “Stiles.” Derek hears the pleading in his own voice but Stiles won’t look at him, and it makes Derek want to howl with misery.

“Isaac’s a moron. He came here tonight because he knew I’d have to come looking for him. He’s been trying to get me to — because you—”

“I what,” Stiles hisses. “What did I do?”

Derek swallows and tries to force the words out. He can’t, not with Stiles’ friends there, ready to jump between them.

Isaac whimpers once, quietly, and cuts himself off.

Stiles is staring at Derek now, looking raw and gutted. “Don’t you know how much I – you know what. No. I am not having this conversation here.”

For a heart-stopping moment, Derek thinks that’s it, Stiles wants nothing more to do with him, is going to say he doesn’t want him, is going to tell him to stay away from him. Instead Stiles turns and glares at his friends.

“Stay here. We’re going in the back room and do not follow me and if Andy needs help at the counter, you take care of it.” They nod their heads quickly. “And you,” he says, pointing at Isaac, “you are in a world of trouble. There will be words. I can’t believe you.”

Isaac’s eyes are soft and sad in his face. “I had to! He kept coming home smelling like – coffee,” he says, catching himself at the last second on the edge of Derek’s glare. “I had to make sure he wasn’t doing anything stupid. And then he was so miserable because he thought his mate didn’t want him, and—”

“Argh!” Stiles exclaims. “I can’t even figure out what you’re talking about, and I don’t care right now. Words, later.” At the same time Derek is startled into saying, “Mate? The hell, Isaac?”

“Can we just go in the back for a second?” Stiles says. He fists his hands into the bottom of his shirt.

Derek shoots a look at Isaac. “Don’t listen.”

The back room smells like coffee and sweetness and wood, and away from the scents of other people, Stiles. “I don’t understand,” Stiles says.

Derek starts to reach out to touch him and makes himself drop his hand. “You—” He takes a deep breath, wishing he could just show him. “You didn't want me.”

“Where the fuck did you get that idea? What did I ever do to make you think that?”

“You told Scott I was just a customer. You told him I was nothing.”

“Of course I did!” Stiles throws his hands up. “I didn’t know if you even liked me, and he was going to blurt it all out in front of you because Scott’s really stupid sometimes and it would have been awful, so I was trying to tell him to shut up!”

“I—” Derek begins.

Stiles keeps talking, his words fast and furious and full of so much hurt that Derek wants to curl up over the fact that he, somehow, seems to have done this. “And then you just disappeared. You just stopped coming without a word. And you know what? I waited for you,” he says, his voice cracking a little. “I didn’t take my breaks because I thought if I just waited long enough you’d come in, just before closing. But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t—” Derek says, and “Just shut up,” Stiles tells him. His tongue darts out over his lips.

“Derek,” he says as he steps forward into Derek’s space, and this time when Derek reaches out for him, he doesn’t make himself stop. Stiles’ skin is hot against his hand, and he strains forward as Derek backs him into the wall and pushes him up on it. Stiles’ lips part against his.

“Oh my god, yes, Derek, please,” he gasps into his mouth. His hands slide up Derek’s back under his shirt, a brand on his flesh, and if Derek could hear him say his name like that even once a day for as long as he can have him, he would face a hundred agonies, if only to give Stiles what he wants.

It almost hurts to drag his mouth away impossible moments later. Stiles’ lips are swollen and bruised. Somewhere hanging heavy in the sky beyond the tall city buildings, the moon is calling. He and Isaac still need to go. He rests his forehead against Stiles’.

Stiles exhales a shaky breath and opens his mouth, and Derek lays a finger on his lips. The seconds hang suspended between them.

When Derek comes out of the back, Isaac’s face is pale but his eyes are brown and he’s perfectly human. “Let’s go,” Derek tells him, not pausing in his steps because if he does he won’t be able to leave.

“Wait,” Scott calls out. “Where’s Stiles? Is he even alive? Jesus, what did you do with him?”

Derek ignores him, but he has to look back when Stiles calls from the doorway to the back room, “It’s good, Scott,” a tiny smile playing around his mouth. Derek tears his eyes away and heads outside, Isaac in tow.

+++

The next morning, Derek drags himself out of bed even though he’s exhausted after the moon and it’s Sunday on top of that, because he knows Stiles is working and he doesn’t want the shift to pass without showing up. Stiles has two more finals this week, so he won’t be free later to do anything, Derek knows. It’s amazing what you can find out simply by lurking around the outside of a coffee shop for a few hours every night like a loser with nothing better to do. “Yeah, or like a chickenshit,” Isaac tells him.

He doesn’t know what to say to Stiles, but he thinks he’s supposed to be asking him out on a date. He looks up the new releases on his phone because that’s what’s normal, right? Dinner and a movie. He hasn’t exactly done this much. He’s had his share of mostly anonymous hookups over the years, a spectacular crash and burn with a guy named Jeremy that Laura had pushed him into, and when he was fourteen he and Lisa Jenkins had held hands and swayed together at their 8th grade semi-formal.

Stiles grins nervously at him when he orders his coffee. He says, “So, there’s an Indonesian food fest on 3rd next weekend – wanna go?” and Derek exhales and says, “Okay. We could finally get you to Pommes Frites for the best fries in the city when you finish your finals on Thursday. If you want.”

+++

They go, and it’s not all that different from hanging out in the shop together, only now Derek is free to touch Stiles.

Stiles touches him right back.

+++

The week after finals are over, the weather goes from warm to verging on hot. It begins to feel like summer, with its sultry nights. Stiles laughs and wraps himself around Derek's back when he groans at the length of the line. “I don’t even understand,” Derek tells him. “Why are we doing this again?”

“Because I’m irresistible,” Stiles says and flicks Derek’s ear with his tongue. Around them the night is warm. It’s just getting dark. They’re in line for the Shake Shack, and it’s currently wrapping around the section of the park that’s got the rickety little chairs and tables and reaching over by the subway stairs before curving back toward the center of the park.

“All this for a burger?”

“Reputed to be an excellent burger! Anyway, that’s not the point. You’ve never done this. Me neither. And I am not leaving this city and telling my kids twenty years from now that I lived in the city for four whole years and never went to the Shake Shack! Last summer I went home. This summer is for knocking all sorts of things off my list.”

Derek tries to hide his flinch, unsuccessfully he thinks from the way Stiles tenses for just a second before deliberately relaxing against him. Derek hasn’t let himself think about things like kids and cubs. There had been a time, though, when the careless assumptions of his naivety would have been different. The idea of Stiles having kids someday – it startles a noise out of him.

“Cramp in my foot,” Derek says after a beat. The fact that Stiles doesn’t push the issue, whatever he may think it is, tells Derek that it’s because Stiles doesn’t think it’s important. When Stiles wants to know something, he’s relentless.

He does, in fact, have a list of all the summer activities he’s planning on doing. It’s in his phone. “I warned you,” he reminds Derek. So Derek sighs and angles his head so that Stiles can kiss the edge of his jaw, and stays in line.

+++

The first time they end up back at Derek’s apartment, he makes sure Isaac’s out. He suspects he’s with Erica and Boyd, but Isaac also likes to just wander the streets aimlessly, poking around into places and laughing at people. Stiles, as Derek expected, walks around the apartment and examines things. They don’t have many photos up but the few there are Stiles stares at. He picks up a few things, somehow able to distinguish between the random objects that hang out just to make the place look like it’s inhabited by two halfway normal guys and the things that actually mean something.

He runs his fingers lightly over Laura’s seashells that still line the living room windowsill. It’s surprisingly okay. Derek didn’t let Isaac touch them for a good six months when he moved in. But then, he’d rearranged the whole place and moved all his stuff into Laura’s bedroom and made Isaac take his old one, rather than let someone else into her space.

He goes into the bedroom to change. He’s standing next to the bed shrugging out of his button down and is in his dress pants, belt, and wifebeater when he hears Stiles suck in his breath, sharp. Derek glances over his shoulder at him leaning against the doorway.

“You have got to be the stupidest human being I have ever met,” Stiles tells him. “How did you – how could you think I didn’t want you? In what world is that even possible. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror, ever? Didn’t you see the way I stared at you? Constantly?” Stiles’ eyes track down his body and back up, lingering on his chest and the dark hair peeking over the top of his undershirt.

Derek hears him swallow loudly. He says, “Everyone does that,” and Stiles makes a face and huffs a laugh.

“Wow. Way to be an arrogant dick.”

Derek frowns a little and looks away. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just – ” And he’s going to say something like, “It doesn’t mean anything, they just want what they think they see,” but the eager look in Stiles’ eyes, the wet sheen on his parted mouth, the way Stiles’ is drawing closer to him – they stop him.

When Stiles gets close enough, he bites his bottom lip and reaches for Derek’s belt buckle. It drops to the floor with a clank that’s loud in the stillness of the bedroom. Derek reads the intent in Stiles’ eyes right before he pushes Derek’s shoulders backwards. Derek resists for just a second, because he has to, before allowing Stiles to bear him down to the bed behind his knees and straddle his thighs.

Above him, Stiles’ eyes are bright with expectation.

+++

After that, he does catch, from time to time, the way Stiles watches him. It’s not secret anymore, but open and covetous.

Derek likes pushing Stiles into the cool cement and brick of buildings they pass in the late hours as they walk back toward their apartments. He likes eating the soft, needy sounds from Stiles’ mouth. When Stiles does it to him for the first time, shoving him tight against the side of a gated storefront, Derek can’t help the surprised whimper he makes.

In the half-light of Derek’s room, Stiles says, “No, slow down. Let me see you take them off.” He props himself up on his elbow in the middle of Derek’s bed. His breathing is slow and heavy, his eyelids at half-mast, as he watches Derek bare himself to him.

+++

Stiles turns out to be unabashed about the silliest things, and yet blushes like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar over others.

He drags Derek into Whole Foods at Columbus Circle one breezy Sunday in early June and buys snacks to take into the park for an impromptu picnic. Derek’s never liked Central Park much. There’s nothing natural about it, the carefully tended trees, the squirrels that have no fear of humans even if they do freeze and run when he growls under his breath at them. Laura used to laugh her ass off when they fucked with the squirrels. With Stiles lying on the grass next to him, their arms pillowing their heads as Stiles persuades Derek to tell him the shapes of the clouds slowly drifting by, he has to admit to himself that maybe it’s not horrible.

On their meandering way out, Stiles sees a hot dog cart and insists they stop. Stiles munches his happily, slathered in ketchup and mustard, then says suddenly, “I know there are things you don’t talk about. Don’t tell me.”

Derek looks at him so quickly he practically hears his neck snap. The hot dog in his hand feels leaden. He doesn’t want it in his stomach, curdled.

Stiles shrugs. “That’s okay. Just, don’t think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t,” Derek says. The opposite, in fact. Stiles is too smart.

Stiles’ mouth flips up into a smile. “It doesn’t matter to – summer. Summer is awesome and I am going to enjoy every second of it.”

Derek’s heart pulls tight, but Stiles is grinning at him, cramming the last of his disgusting hotdog into his mouth messily. Then he’s running ahead, veering off the park’s path and scrambling over a granite boulder to a green patch of lawn, and Derek doesn’t know what else to do except tackle him to the ground the way he would his pack, but more carefully, and Stiles whoops with laughter and wraps his arm around the back of Derek’s neck and pulls him down on top of him.

If summer is what Stiles wants, all he wants from Derek, then Derek will try to give him the best one he’s ever had.

+++

Sometimes when Derek’s out and about, he sees the living statues. There are white-painted Greek sculptures, blue fairies, tuxedoed Charlie Chaplins, indeterminate gold mannequins, more Statues of Liberty than even this city should have to handle, silver Victorian gentlefolk. If he has cash on him, he always drops some in their hats. They whir to life and offer him roses or blown kisses when he does.

He doesn’t do it because he thinks they’re doing some great job or because he particularly admires them. He does it because they’re strangers and he’s a stranger to them, and yet when they stir to life and meet his eyes, there’s a connection. They unfreeze from their stillness just long enough to bend down to him and offer the flower, and then their bodies quiet again while they wait for him to accept it. The precision of their movements, their control, it compels him to them. In that moment, when they reach toward him, he sees them; they see him, and together they are held, suspended. For a few minutes, he can fall a little in love with them, quietly and anonymously, until they release him and turn to the next stranger.

The paint on their bodies is a mask. They’re safe.

Stiles is anything but a stranger. He refuses to be – he doesn’t know the meaning of distance, and he makes it all look easy. Somehow he talks Derek into doing a dozen things he’s never done, even though he’s lived in the city for nine years at this point, all of his adult life. Shake Shack and Central Park were just the beginning.

This is how it goes, this summer that Derek can’t help but think is something misplaced, something out of time, something that surely must belong to another Derek Hale. Maybe one whose parents are still back in the grand house in the Preserve, one who didn’t somehow fall into being in charge of Hale & Hale because his uncle’s got it all under control, one who didn’t slice Uncle Peter’s throat for killing his sister. Not him. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to fall.

May passes and June and July, and it doesn’t. He cranes his neck back, seeking out the moon, and wishes that this summer could last forever.

One sticky late Saturday, he loses Stiles for an hour in the stacks of his favorite used bookstore. Stiles wanders out later, his eyes bright and his words flying fast as he tells Derek about the fantastic creatures in the book he’d found. “It’s almost like books are better than Google, sometimes. Holy crap, it was like – the last time I went to Professor Coughlin’s office hours, he actually looked something up in a phone book.”

Derek looks at him. Stiles looks back, obviously expecting some sort of reaction. “You know, a phone book. Like a paper book. It was so weird.”

Derek shakes his head. His mom had a phone book. She kept it in a drawer in the kitchen next to the cordless.

They end up back at Stiles’ that evening. Derek doesn’t spend the night. He usually doesn’t. It’s not like they live that far apart, and Derek stays the night at his place even less frequently than Stiles does at Derek’s.

Stiles’ room smells like stale sweat and spunk and something sharp and addictive, a lot like Stiles himself. The random roommate he’s been assigned for the summer while Scott’s in Boston is hardly ever around. There are only faint traces of someone else in the room. Derek presses Stiles into his narrow dorm-style bed. Beneath him, Stiles spreads his legs. Derek slides in between them; his cock is hard inside his pants. He unzips Stiles’ jeans and pushes them down just enough to pull his dick free. It curves up against his belly with a heady scent that makes Derek’s mouth water. He learns the crease where Stiles’ thigh meets his groin, the salty thickness of his dick in his mouth, the softness of his balls, the embarrassed flush that suffuses his body when Derek flips him over and spreads his cheeks and licks and tongues and tastes everything until he mewls his pleasure into the sheets and Derek can barely trap his animal growls safe in his throat. He has to close his eyes so that they can’t bleed red when Stiles might look back and see them.

+++

This is not to say that they never spend the entire night together.

Derek doesn’t like sleeping with the air conditioning on. He prefers to be able to smell all the night scents, even if it does mean going to bed in the heat. He learns, though, after the first time Stiles stays, that that’s really not going to work with him around. Stiles likes his space when he sleeps. He’s all for cozying it up so that he can get laid – “Subtlety’s my strong point,” Stiles tells Derek with a nod – or after they’re through, but when he settles into sleep, he edges away. Derek on the other hand tends to roll into the middle of the bed like an octopus.

The first time this happens, Stiles actually shoves him off the bed. “Ugh, hot,” he grumbles and falls back asleep. "Whatever, grumpypants,” he says the next morning when confronted with this. “It’s your fault for being an inferno. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

Stiles is kind of an asshole. “I have a condition,” Derek tells him with his straightest face, and Stiles stares at him, all tangled up in his sheet, making a ‘what the fuck’ face.

+++

Stiles looks at the coffee table, all gouged up and broken on the corner. “What the hell happened to this thing? It looks like you took a knife to it. Or, you know, kept a mountain lion as a pet for a while and this was his scratching post.”

Derek coughs to cover a laugh, thinking of Isaac’s difficult adjustment to the city. “Hand-me-down. Never got around to replacing it.”

+++

Isaac says to him, “You could just tell him about us. You know you’re going to have to tell him if you keep up this thing with him. He’s too smart. He’ll notice you always disappear at the same time every month. He’ll see that you’re stronger than you should be or you’ll get cut and heal too fast. Or he’ll just plain figure out that you’re hiding something, and what do you think he’s going to do then?”

Derek crosses his arms over his chest and slouches back in the couch, and doesn’t say, “I know.” But he does. He already knows this, and he tells himself that it doesn’t matter. This isn’t going to last long enough to matter. Stiles has been clear about what he expects from Derek, what he wants – this summer fling with a guy whose body he can’t seem to get enough of, insatiable – and Derek will indulge him. Because doing so means he gets something, too, and he knows it can’t last. It’ll never be what he wants it to be, so he’ll take what he can have and deal with whatever he has to when it comes.

A few evenings ago when everyone got done with work and internships for the day, they all ended up at Cups. “As if I don’t already spend enough time here,” Stiles scoffed. Erica tilted her head. “Are you saying you don’t like being in my coffee shop?” and Stiles shook his head vigorously.

“You are such a girl,” Isaac told Stiles witheringly.

Stiles moaned and buried his head in his arms on the table. “I am such a girl,” he agreed, his words muffled.

Erica set down Isaac’s frappuccino with excessive force. “Please,” she said. “Don’t make me brain you with my stiletto. You only wish you could be this awesome.”

Stiles looked up, nodding. “I really do.”

She smiled slowly at him. “Now tell me all the reasons you suck.”

“Because,” Stiles exclaimed, “I don’t know if we’ve been—” He waved his hands around to explain, and Boyd said, “Dating?”

“Yeah, whatever, dating for two months or seven, and Derek won’t tell me.”

“Rude,” Isaac said to Derek, and Erica agreed. “I really don’t know why you like him.”

Stiles snapped his head up. “Hello, have you seen him? Oh my god.”

“Ugh, I’m not going to sit here and listen to this. Again,” Erica groaned just as Isaac eyeballed Derek and said, “Yes, and I don’t really have the urge to jump his bones.”

“Heretics, all of you.”

Derek glared at them and crossed his arms over his chest, and ignored the pensive heaviness in his gut with the ease of long practice.

+++

Derek’s not going to try to hold him. When Stiles decides to go, when real life resumes in the fall – he’ll let him go. He owes him that much at least.

As summer grows later and the days start to shorten imperceptibly, sometimes he turns to say something and will catch Stiles off-guard with a look on his face Derek can’t describe. Stiles will blink, and it’ll disappear as quickly as it came.

Stiles convinces him to take a day off in the middle of the week at the very end of July because he doesn’t have his internship that day. He spends the night before at Derek’s apartment – “I’m buying earplugs,” Isaac says around a mouthful of sushi, as though that would help – and they wake up late, have a breakfast that’s really lunch at a corner diner, and wander uptown. Stiles walks along the edge of a low fountain and hops down at the end, wrinkling his nose. “Dude, I think my Converse are wet.” It’s about 90 degrees with 90% humidity, and they’re both dripping with sweat anyway, so he doesn’t look very concerned. Derek slings an arm around his neck and swipes his tongue up the side. Stiles pushes him off and calls him a whackjob. “That is so gross,” he says.

“That isn’t what you said this morning,” Derek points out.

“This morning I wasn’t covered in sweat.”

“You kind of were,” Derek says mildly. He can’t help but smirk a little.

“Oh shut up,” Stiles tells him. “Hey, look, it’s the Love sculpture.” Without saying anything further, he climbs up into the large red letters. He pokes his head out the other side of the top part of the “E” and orders Derek to take his picture. “We should get one of both of us.” He’s grinning as he clambers into the “O” over him, but he can only get his arms and head in. Derek takes a picture of his ass sticking out the back end.

Stiles is pretty much flailing around awkwardly and Derek’s enjoying it too much to help him down, when he looks over and next to them, which at this point means next to Stiles’ wet sneakers, a man is kneeling down and holding a ring out to his girlfriend. She claps her hands to her face and look like she’s about to start crying.

“Stiles, get out of there,” Derek hisses.

“I’m trying!” he shouts back, and Derek rolls his eyes and grabs his legs and hoists him backwards and down.

“I could have done it,” says Stiles indignantly when he’s on the ground. Derek slaps his hand over his mouth and gestures to the couple next to them. He feels Stiles’ lips form an “O” beneath his hand. Cautiously, Derek removes it.

“Aww,” Stiles says. There’s a small crowd forming, taking pictures of the kissing couple. Derek and Stiles stay there for another few minutes, and that look is back, the one that Derek doesn’t understand. It’s almost like Stiles is waiting for something from him. Stiles’ hand, strong and hot and slippery with the day’s humidity, slips into his.

+++

Stiles spends the night again. They both shower off the day’s gunk. “Fucking dog days of summer,” Stiles mutters, and Derek chokes back a laugh. It shouldn’t be funny, but his family used to make dog jokes at their own expense all the time, and when Stiles says that, he thinks of Cora complaining bitterly as she climbed out of the lake by their house and shook herself off.

It’s as dark as the night ever gets here when Derek says, lying in bed next to Stiles, “No, my first real relationship wasn’t great.” He clears his throat. “Not real, it wasn’t real. She used me to get at my family.”

Underneath the sheets, Stiles’ foot nudges his lightly. Derek’s grateful for the contact of his skin. Even with the air on, Stiles won’t let him wrap himself around him the way he wants to right now. Maybe he will in the winter when it’s not so hot, if in the winter they –

“Isn’t it against the rules to talk about exes?” Derek asks.

“Probably,” says Stiles, uncaring. He rolls over, faceplanting into his pillow, and it muffles anything he says after. It sounds something like “Fuck the rules. What are they to us?” but that can’t be it. Wishful thinking is a dangerous habit to get into.

Derek’s almost all the way asleep when he feels long fingers wrap around his wrist and hold on.

+++

Isaac looks like he’s going to cry when Derek sits him down for the whole “mates” talk. “This is really embarrassing,” Derek mutters.

“There’s no such thing?” Isaac echoes his earlier words plaintively. “Why?”

Derek looks at him flatly. “I don’t know? Why don’t you go ask the moon goddess.”

“The moon god – oh shut up.” Isaac throws one of the couch pillows at Derek’s face. “How did you expect me to know these things? If you don’t tell me. It wasn’t exactly like Peter went around doing anything other than being creepy and attacking people.”

He doesn’t say, “And I’ve been stuck with you for the last few years,” but he might as well have. It’s the truth. Derek can practically see Laura arching her brows at him. “Wow,” she’d say, “it’s almost like he’s been raised by wolves. Why is that, Derek?”

Because he’d had this conversation with her, years ago. “I wish there were,” she’d said. “It’d be so much easier if we had mates.”

Derek frowned at her, never having given the matter much attention.

“No, think about it, babe.”

If he’d had a mate, or at least known that they existed, maybe Kate never would have happened. Maybe she’d have smelled wrong or there’d have been no magic bond or whatever it would be that would show you that this person was your mate, and since he’d have known she wasn’t his mate, he’d have never let her close enough to murder his family.

“Oh my god, no, that’s not what I meant.” Laura had been watching his face. “Kate was a psycho and there’s nothing to forgive. I didn’t mean her. I meant – if you fell in love and knew that that person was it for you, forever, and you were it for him. Even if you were a werewolf and he wasn’t.”

This is the kind of thing they’d never had to think about, growing up, surrounded by family and pack as they were. They were taught to be careful and to hide themselves in plain sight, but they were never taught fear and loneliness because there was always a place to go home to.

When he and Isaac first got to New York, Derek had taken him to the Meyerson pack and introduced him to Rebecca. Once back in Derek’s apartment, he’d told Isaac that if he wanted to be part of that pack, he’d find a way to make it happen. “They’re big and established, and you’d be safe and they could teach you things you need to know.”

Isaac had tugged on one of his curls. “I’ll think about it.”

Now, he says, “I wish you and Stiles were mates.” Derek questions him silently. “Because,” Isaac continues, “then he’d be stuck with you and your scowly face. And you could just tell him about us. You know you’re going to have to tell him, Derek, if you keep up this thing with him. What do you think he’s going to do when he finds out anyway? When you didn’t tell him?”

Derek crosses his arms over his chest and slouches back in the couch. He doesn’t admit that he’s already thought all of this, and more. “Where is this coming from?”

Isaac looks sheepish. “I might have been talking to Erica and Boyd,” he mumbles.

“Isaac.” Derek says his name low in his throat, warning. “They may be your friends, but they’re not pack.”

Isaac rolls his eyes. “It’s not like you’re the chatty type. I have to find out stuff somewhere. Anyway,” he says, somewhat sullenly, “they could be.”

“No,” Derek snaps back. “They don’t deserve to get tangled up with me. Just – no. I can’t.”

“Won’t, is more like. It’s not like you could fuck them up any more than you’ve done to me. Get over yourself.” He grabs his phone and wallet and slams the door on his way out.

Derek stays smushed into his couch until he gets up to let Stiles in a few hours later.

“Whoa, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Derek says grumpily.

“Uh-huh.” Stiles rolls his neck, somehow managing to make the cracking sound skeptical. “You want to stay in and watch something?”

An hour into the movie, with Stiles’ feet tucked under his thigh, Derek still doesn’t have a clue what they’re watching – something about space invaders and fast ships and explosions – because 1) Isaac’s right, but that doesn’t mean Derek’s not right, too, and 2) Stiles won’t stop staring at him as he crunches on his Cheetos and doesn’t watch the movie either, as though it’s going to make him talk, and 3) Isaac’s right, god damn it.

“Isaac’s a little shit who talks too much,” Derek says abruptly.

“Duh,” replies Stiles, “but sometimes people say things not because they think they’re true but because they think you need to hear them,” and they watch the rest of the movie and make out on the couch “just so Isaac can find us and have to go bleach his eyeballs when he comes home.”

+++

Stiles brings curry puffs to his office at lunchtime on a Tuesday. They’re Derek’s favorite. It’s the last week of July, and school’s going to start in three and a half weeks. “I was just in the neighborhood,” Stiles says with a shrug. “Had to run some errands on my lunch.”

He hangs around for a few minutes. A couple of times he opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something, but when he does actually speak, Derek has the distinct feeling he doesn’t say what he was going to.

“Nice place,” Stiles says.

“You can shut the door,” Derek tells him as he gets up from his desk. “What’s going on?”

“What makes you think something is going on? Maybe I came for the grand tour. Maybe I need some consulting done.”

“Uh-huh.” But Derek shows him around anyway. Stiles grins at the employees in their cubicles and peers out Derek’s window and stands for a long time in front of the row of Hale portraits hanging on the wall in the library. These days it’s used as a conference room but Derek and Laura, and Peter before them, didn’t want to get rid of the books that line the walls.

+++

On Thursday, Stile shows up again in the middle of the day. Derek’s assistant calls him, and he frowns, wondering what’s wrong, and says to have Melinda send him up.

“So,” Stiles finally says, perching himself on the edge of Derek’s desk. “My dad surprised me with plane tickets. For the beginning of August, to go home.”

Beneath his desk, Derek flexes a pencil between his fingers. It’s going to snap with any more pressure; it’s going to happen, and he’s got to cover the noise. “How long will you be home?”

“Two weeks.”

Derek tries to smile, even though he’s not very good at it and Stiles will see right through him. It’s the thought that counts, right? Because if Stiles is gone for two weeks, he’ll be back just before school starts.

“End of summer sucks,” Stiles says with feeling. “I want it to last forever. I mean, I’m psyched to go home and see my dad, but once classes start back up things’ll be different. It’ll be all back to work. And stuff. Hey.” He reaches over and smacks the back of Derek’s head. The side, really, since it’s an awkward angle.

“Dude, whatever you’re thinking about? It can’t be that bad. You know, you could – it’s only for two weeks.” He stops and smiles strangely. “The thing is – whydonchacome?” The words are all rushed together, and Derek recoils from the idea, a horrible, visceral reaction. Because Stiles is from the Sacramento area, too close to Beacon Hills for any kind of comfort at all, and he hasn’t been back anywhere near since Peter killed Laura there.

Derek doesn’t get any words out – he swallows around them, thick in his throat – before Stiles is saying, “Yeah, no, terrible idea, I don’t know why I said it, wasn’t thinking, sorry, God. Just forget I said anything.” He looks at his phone. “Shit, my lunch is over. I gotta get back to my internship.”

He leaves in a rush, muttering, “Late, so late, stupid.” A piece of paper from Derek’s desk falls to the floor in his wake.

+++

The city is loud, and it drowns out a lot of things that Derek would rather not think about. But sometimes he misses the stillness of the forest, the way noises there don’t echo but are absorbed by the moist earth and the trees standing sentinel.

Stiles traces the spiral of the triskelion on Derek’s back. “You don’t really like what you do,” Stiles says.

Derek shrugs, as much as anyone can shrug while lying naked on his stomach in a soft bed. He’d cleaned them up with a washcloth and tossed it somewhere on the floor.

“I know you don’t. Why do you keep doing it? And I know, you’re going to say something about it being your family’s company and I get that, I do, because my dad keeps this fucking ugly acrylic green chair that’s got a spring that pokes you in the ass if you try to even sit in it, just because my mom loved it. I’m going to be eighty and that thing’s going to be sitting in my living room. Just – you don’t have to spend the rest of your life doing something you don’t want to.”

He must feel Derek’s body tensing because he shuts up and trails his fingers over the planes of Derek’s back. After a long time, Derek says, “One of the trustees has offered to run it for me. Give me a portion of the profits that aren’t mandated to go back into the trust, keep the rest as her fee.”

Stiles perks up next to him. “Yeah?”

“She’d do a good job. Rebecca’s – family – has a lot of experience.”

“So why don’t you?” In the darkness, Stiles’ eyes seem to shine a tawny gold.

Derek doesn’t let himself look away. “I don’t know what else I’d do.”

“Whatever you want,” Stiles says, like it’s obvious.

It isn’t, though, and in this moment, Derek feels every one of those six years separating him and Stiles. But no, Stiles at any age would be bolder than Derek in this. He would push himself past his fears, because Stiles isn’t stupid. He’s just as afraid as anyone else is and maybe more so, because he’s known loss in his life too; he knows that dreaming and imagining – they don’t make things real just because you want them so badly to be – but the difference is that he shoves himself through it.

Derek turns his head to the other side and wonders, not for the first time, what the hell Stiles is doing in his life. “It’s not that easy, Stiles.”

“It could be,” he whispers. He doesn’t leave. It’s August 1st.

+++

On August 1st, Stiles tells him that he can do anything he wants to do. He says, “I’d help you make it happen,” and then he immediately flinches back from Derek’s skin. He laughs a dark, scrawny laugh. “Fuck.” His voice has gone so quiet that if it weren’t for Derek’s hearing, he might not catch his words. Stiles rubs his hand over his eyes. “My mouth, sorry. That was too much.”

Derek turns his head away. They’re both looking in opposite directions. If this is how Stiles is trying to make sure that he doesn’t inadvertently promise Derek more than he can give, Derek will let him. Stiles is an ass but he’s not cruel, not like that.

It takes him a few minutes – he lets his fangs drop low and cut his lip to steady himself against the pain throbbing under his ribs – but eventually Derek tells Stiles that it’s fine. “But doing what you’re talking about, letting all this go, it’s not that easy.”

“It could be,” he whispers. He doesn’t leave, and Derek doesn’t ask him to.

+++

Summer’s ending. Stiles says, “Where do you and Isaac disappear to every month?”

After a beat, “Camping,” Isaac tells him, taking the lie from Derek.

Stiles looks at Derek, and he looks like he’s going to ask if he can come camping too with them, but then his face tightens and he doesn’t. He mutters something about having classes soon. Derek gets up and goes into the kitchen.

+++

Derek reads on the couch while Stiles kicks Isaac’s ass on the X-box. He’d come back from the kitchen an hour ago with soda and snacks, Cheetos for Stiles, more as an excuse for fleeing there in the first place than actual hunger. When Stiles wins and throws his arms up in victory, Isaac tackles him sideways.

“Jesus, you’re strong,” Stiles says as he hauls himself up. He leans next to Derek’s leg where it dangles off the side. He narrows his eyes. “Wait a second. How do you camp without gear? You don’t have any,” Stiles points out.

“Derek has a storage unit,” Isaac counters.

Stiles’ expression could raise sarcasm to an artform. “You go camping in the winter?” and Isaac scoffs. “I wish. We go to these meetings with one of the trustees of Derek’s company. And her entire family. It’s important to keep the connection up.” He sounds like he’s parroting his last words, sing-songy.

“It is important, Isaac,” Derek says. He crosses his arms over his chest, uncomfortable with this entire conversation but not sure how to derail Stiles and whatever’s going through his head. Stiles looks at him, considering.

“Okay, but if that’s true, why take Isaac? He doesn’t work for you.”

“He’s family now. He has to learn the family trade.” Isaac’s flush is pleased.

“So, what, you’re like some kind of dynasty? How? Your family is —” Stiles cuts himself off abruptly, as though just realizing what he was about to say. The skepticism is wiped off his face, replaced by something else.

“Nice one,” says Isaac. He watches Derek and Derek watches him right back, but his hand reaches out and wraps itself around the back of Stiles’ neck, the way he would to any member of his pack. Stiles stills at the unfamiliar touch but quickly relaxes back into the strength of Derek’s hand. Isaac drops his eyes.

Derek would’ve thought that once he actually had Stiles – had tasted and touched and wrapped himself up in him – he would've thought that whatever this ache for Stiles is that he carries around with him, it would have weakened. After all, things that you want really badly, once you finally get them? They’re never quite as good as you thought they would be.

So he has no idea why that isn’t happening here. But Stiles will go and do or say something like this, be an utter asshole with his words even while he’s pulling away from Derek as summer draws to an end, just as he’d planned all along, and that ache of want will throb deep inside Derek. Stiles is unapologetic and pushy; he refuses to back off anything, and Derek would probably do anything, move heaven and earth and rip his own body apart doing so, if only to make Stiles happy.

“You’re such a little shit,” he says to Stiles.

Stiles laughs. Derek feels the vibration under his palm.

“I know.” There’s a pause. “You look like ass,” Stiles tells him. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” At the look Stiles gives him, Derek amends. “Just haven’t been sleeping great, that’s all.” He’s been waking up, pushing down worry, staring at the ceiling above him.

“I don’t have to stay tonight, then.” Stiles watches him, waiting for a response, Derek guesses. It’s not as though Derek’s going to make him stay if he doesn’t want to.

“Sure,” he says, as though it doesn’t really matter to him.

Behind Stiles, Isaac rolls his eyes and says, “I can’t. I’m going out.” The door is loud behind him. The only other sound in the apartment is the repetitive music of the game’s menu playing on the TV screen.

On the floor below Derek, Stiles fidgets. “Knock it off,” Derek tells him.

“Why don’t you turn the A/C up?” Stiles replies. His smile is small and suggestive. Derek exhales. Stiles gets up and walks down the hallway, stripping clothes and dropping them to the floor one at a time as he goes. Derek follows when he hears Stiles squeeze lube into his hand and start fisting his dick into hardness. The mental image of Stiles’ skin bearing down on Derek’s sheets, right where he’ll leave the scent of him for Derek to smell for days, yanks Derek off his butt. His shirt joins Stiles’ on the hallway floor.

In his room, he leans against his dresser, naked, and shakes his head at Stiles when he stretches out and tells him to get his ass over there. Derek strokes himself and watches Stiles spread his legs farther apart. They fall open. He is shamelessly exposed to Derek, and Derek’s body yearns to take him, to claim him for his own, to drive into him until Stiles cries out sharply, until it’s too much and he spills himself onto the grey sheets and Derek collapses over his back, shielding him from – everything, himself included.

Stiles would hate that, not the fucking – he’d love it; they’ve done it many times and never enough – but the rest of it, the claiming, the protection Derek wants to give him. And Derek doesn’t trust himself enough to be able to sink into Stiles’ body and hold back the rest right now.

“I want to see you,” he says, his voice low, almost a growl. “Roll over and rub yourself off on my bed. Let me watch.”

“Holy god, that’s—” Stiles’ entire body blushes red. “I don’t think I—”

“You can,” Derek tells him. He doesn’t blink away from him. “You can,” he repeats. “I’ll be right here.”

Stiles whimpers, and he rolls over. His ass is perfect. Derek’s second favorite mole tempts him closer, but he digs his blunt fingers into the wood of his dresser and forces himself to stay there. Stiles’ movements are halting at first, before they pick up speed. Derek almost forgets to touch himself; nothing matters outside the confines of his bed, beyond the way Stiles loses his inhibitions and writhes against the sheets. He throws his hands high above his head as though seeking purchase, something to ground him, and when they find nothing, they fist into each other, a desperate grip. “Derek,” he moans. His eyes are closed, his head turned sideways against the sheets. His mouth is open.

His face is almost bewildered. “Derek,” he says again, pleading, and Derek responds because he can’t do anything else, has no desire to. “Right here,” he chokes out. His cock is leaking on his hand. He slides his thumb over the tip and shudders. He doesn’t know if three minutes or three hours have passed by. Sweat sheens Stiles’ back, his lower lip catches on the cotton beneath him, and the entire room smells of messy, nasty things that steal away his sense of anything other than Stiles and this greedy, clutching need for him.

The sound of Stiles’ breath is harsh. His body’s movements as it ruts against the sheets lose their sinuous grace and turn frantic, and it’s enough or never enough, and it threatens to push Derek over the edge. He stumbles onto the bed and kneels behind Stiles, pushing apart his legs and his ass cheeks, and he’s coming hot onto his hole, down the crack of ass. He groans as he watches it slip down Stiles’ balls and drip onto his bed, and Stiles jerks abruptly. He eats a mouthful of sheet, biting down as he spills himself loudly.

Derek doesn’t give him time to catch his breath before he’s on him, manhandling his legs and ass high into the air so that he can lick him clean, every bit of him. Stiles sighs and lets him. His body is easy and pliable in Derek’s hands.

Finally, he twists and reaches down to grab Derek’s hair and pull him up. Cupping Derek’s face, he kisses him, long and lazy. When he breaks it off with a gasp, he grins. “You’ve got jizz on your face.” He flops back down, arms spread wide. Derek lets himself have this, for a few minutes – he lays down with him, against him. Stiles’ body is hot; it feels like pack, like something more that he’s never experienced before.

He knows he has to get up, pull away before Stiles gets antsy from too much cuddling so that Stiles doesn’t catch on to how hard it is to do, so that he doesn’t go running before the end of summer. Derek wants at least to have that much. He listens to Stiles’ heartbeat, wanting nothing more than to be able to stay like this while the moon rises and crosses the sky before falling low and out of sight. When Stiles’ heart slows back to its normal pace, he rolls over and stretches and says, “I’m going to shower.”

Stiles lies there and looks at him for a long minute. His eyes are dark before they drift to the side. “Yeah, all right. Go on.”

A few minutes later, Stiles knocks on the bathroom door perfunctorily and pops his head in. “I’m headed out. See you later.”

“You don’t want to at least stay to clean up?” Derek asks around the shower curtain.

“Nah, I’m good. Do it at home.”

+++

Scott and Allison get back from Boston on a Thursday night. Stiles texts him that he’s going to answer the call of the bro-code and hang with them. He works until close on Friday but tells Derek to meet him then.

Derek shows up at Cups just before close. Isaac’s already there, lounging around with Scott and Allison, who he’s been skyping all summer. Erica and Boyd are at another table, bent over his ipad and talking end of month figures for the shop to take back to the Meyersons. Stiles calls out a greeting and asks him to lock the door behind the last two people heading out of the shop.

After Stiles finishes cleaning up, he joins Derek at Scott’s table. His knee knocks against Derek’s underneath it. It’s a small, round thing that hides nothing. Scott watches Stiles with him. He’s vaguely friendly but he hasn’t spent much time with Derek since he and Stiles got their act together, and Derek doesn’t know him that well. To be fair, if he were Scott, he’s not sure he’d like himself very much at all after he was such a dipshit about Stiles back in the spring.

Stiles is laughing and tossing Swedish Fish at Scott and Isaac, and Derek isn’t paying much attention to them. Erica and Boyd’s quiet murmuring washes over him in the background; Scott is choking on a candy that he actually managed to catch; Isaac’s scent is calm and easy as he chats with Allison. Stiles’ heartbeat is a steady, soothing rhythm, and he looks and smells happy. Derek tries to memorize the scents and sounds of these moments for later. Stiles leans over and presses a careless kiss to Derek’s temple. Summer’s not over yet.

It had been a hot, sticky night a little later in the year but still much like this one when Laura told him that she was going back to Beacon Hills. “Not to stay, squirrel-breath,” she’d said to the protesting look on his face. “I just – I have this feeling. Like there’s something going on there that I have to check out. I’ll be a few weeks at most.”

“You can’t,” he’d said, automatically. She’d leveled a look at him. He didn't know how to say what he was thinking, not even thinking. More of a feeling, a shaky, pulsing feeling. They hadn’t been away from each other for more than two nights since the fire. Her going back there – going back there at all – it wasn’t part of the plan. So he said instead, “What about the company?”

“You’ll be in charge of Hale & Hale while I’m gone.” He still doesn’t know what she saw on his face, but her eyes flared red and she said, “Babe, we made a plan so that we could get through what we needed to do. But you can’t live your entire life by a plan that was made by two scared kids. That place runs like clockwork. We need it way more than it needs us. And people shouldn’t be like that, shouldn’t run like clockwork. Things come up and plans have to be able to change. You’ll be okay while I’m gone.”

Her face was so much like their mother’s in that moment that he said, “I know that,” sharply.

“Don’t be a brat,” she said, and tackled him into the wall the way she would when they were cubs.

Stiles’ hand knocks him out of his thoughts. Scott’s started throwing the Swedish Fish back at him, and Stiles is trying, pretty unsuccessfully, to catch them. “Hey, did you hear that, Derek?” he asks, and this is when it all starts to slow down, like a movie in slow-motion. “Scott and Allison are going home too! My dad is such a sneak. He must have planned this with their parents.”

“Yeah?” Derek says.

Scott nods. “It was our idea but we didn’t know they were actually doing to do it. Stiles hasn’t been back to Beacon Hills since last summer. His dad came out here last Christmas, so he didn’t go home.”

The words roll slowly, like heavy stones gathering speed. Derek feels helpless to get out of their way. His entire body goes taut, on alert.

Isaac stills. The sudden tenseness of his beta radiates through Derek like a magnifying echo of his own wariness. Across the room, Boyd and Erica look up and freeze in place. “Beacon Hills?” Isaac repeats. The words seem to reverberate in the room, drawn out and exaggerated. It’s like there ought to be ominous theme music rolling in the background.

“I thought you lived in Sacramento,” Derek says slowly.

Stiles looks puzzled and no wonder, because Derek’s guarded and he feels like he’s swimming blindly, thickly, toward something he doesn’t want to get anywhere near, only there’s no way out. The hairs on the back of his neck are raised. They are all, him and Isaac, Erica and Boyd, hinged to their animal senses, operating on a feedback loop starting with Derek and tightening among themselves. They wait.

“Yeah, not too far away,” Stiles says. “That’s the nearest big city. Beacon Hills isn’t very big. I can’t believe it’s been a year since I was home. My dad wanted to come out here again, but he’s the sheriff and it’s hard for him to get away.”

Derek remembers Stiles telling him that his dad was a sheriff, but he thought he’d meant a deputy somewhere, not the sheriff of Beacon Hills. He stares at the table blindly. He remembers the old sheriff and his deputies arriving at his house as it burned. Was Stiles’ dad there? Someone had knelt down on the dry leaves with him outside and placed a warm hand on his shoulder.

Isaac is watching him, barely breathing. Derek meets his eyes. Scott says, “Mr. Argent has already emailed me to invite me for dinner the day after we get there,” and Stiles snorts.

“Yeah, no offense Allison, but your dad is scary as hell. Scott showed me that collection of weapons in the basement – whoa.”

And it’s not even like slow motion. It’s like being shot in the chest over and over, and feeling his body jerk back helplessly under the force of the bullets and being utterly out of control of his flailing arms and legs and his heart as it bleeds out. He has no breath. That’s what this feels like, only his body doesn’t really move, not yet – he simply stares at Isaac, frozen, and Isaac stares back and Derek blinks and his eyes burn red and he growls so low and quiet that the humans don’t even hear it over their excited chatter. But Isaac does, and then suddenly time unfreezes and everything tumbles all over everything else and happens at once.

Isaac growls, and it is not quiet but loud and angry in response to Derek’s distress and to the memories that still make Isaac himself spend silent days in front of the X-box, and Stiles, Scott, and Allison do hear that, because they shut up and look around nervously.

“What was—” Stiles begins, just as Isaac’s eyes flash yellow and he snarls again, and Boyd and Erica leap to their feet and they’re growling too, now standing behind Derek, low in their throats and continuous. Derek manages to take his eyes off Allison long enough to glance at Stiles, who’s pressed back in his chair with a look on his face that Derek can’t even begin to know what to do with. Scott scuttles up out of his chair and drags Allison away until their backs hit the wall behind them. It takes Stiles an extra few seconds, a lag of time that seems forever, before he goes scrambling too. Derek takes a deep breath and tilts his head and lets the red bleed back into his eyes so that he can bring the three others under control. “Isaac,” he rumbles, deep. “Shut up. And you two. Stop it.”

They do, instantly. There’s this hanging moment of dead silence in the shop before Stiles begins to sputter and Scott crouches with his mouth open and arm gripped around Allison. Allison just stares.

Isaac says, faintly, “We’re from Beacon Hills, too,” and Derek stares at Allison and says, “Argent. You’re an Argent.” He laughs, short and harsh. “Who sent you? Gerard? Kate?”

“Um,” Allison says. “My dad let me come to school out here? Chris? Kate’s my aunt. She’s, uh, like not around. She burned—”

“Oh my god,” says Stiles, and Derek sees something like knowledge pass over his face. He grips Scott’s arm and repeats, “Oh my god. The Hale house. Derek Hale,” and Allison covers her mouth with her free hand. “And everyone in it,” she says faintly. Her eyes are wet. Stiles looks sick, as though he’s holding back his gag reflex.

Scott has his fingers laced so tightly with Allison’s hand that his knuckles are white. “What are you?” His heart rate is fast and uneven.

Erica leans forward, plants her hands on the table, and smiles at him with her fangs bared. “Erica,” Derek growls. She glares at him but subsides. “Werewolves?” Stiles breathes out, incredulously, just as Isaac tells Scott, all of them. “We’re not going to hurt you.” He smells sad.

The three of them are huddled against the wall, seeking its protection, as though that would suffice if they needed it, and Derek’s heart has had claws, his own, dragged across it. Stiles is watching him apprehensively. He never wanted this. Derek never wanted to see a look like that cross his face, not aimed at him, not aimed at anyone. But he has to ask, to make sure of the answer that he thinks he knows. The memory of those first months on the run from Kate and her hunters hasn’t faded enough not to.

Derek looks directly at Stiles. His face is splotchy white and red; his moles stand out in relief. “Did you know?”

“What?” Stiles says.

“Her family.” He jerks his head toward Allison. “They hunt us down. Murder us. Did. You. Know? Were you part of this?”

“Jesus, no. Of course not!” Indignation crowds away some of Stiles’ wariness. “Oh my god, do you think I, what, lured you into this? That this was all some sort of set up? What is wrong with you! Oh my god,” he exclaims again. “Look at her – Allison doesn’t even know.”

“Stiles,” Scott says under his breath, his voice holding a worried edge.

Stiles whirls on him. “No, Scott, no. I want an explanation.” He points an angry, trembling finger at Derek, nowhere near enough to hit him in the chest. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Well, that didn’t go as smoothly as it could have’ or ‘Yeah, sorry for not telling you my roommate and I turn into hairy monsters once a month,’ or even, ‘Guess what, Stiles? You’re dating a werewolf.’”

“We’re not monsters,” Derek says evenly, and he looks away.

Stiles is tipping backwards on his feet now, nearly falling over in his agitation. “I know that! Gimme a break here. You can’t just drop that sort of thing on a guy and not expect him to say something dumb. I can’t believe we grew up in the same town. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out. I can’t believe you’re a werewolf, holy god. They’re a thing. I mean, you’re a thing. I—”

Derek shakes his head. “Can you just – go? Leave?”

Stiles’ breath stutters. “Derek,” he says.

“I can’t,” Derek tells him. The confusion in Stiles’ voice. “Just go. Take them with you.”

Scott’s holding Allison’s hand and backing away cautiously. “C’mon, Stiles. Give them some space.” Stiles is still reaching out to Derek as though he wants to touch him, and Derek grits out, “Please.”

Stiles leaves, finally, trailing after Scott and Allison. Derek stares down at the table. Behind him, Isaac, Erica, and Boyd watch the three of them walk away.

+++

Erica fumbles around for her phone. Somewhere on the floor beside them all, it’s chirping. The morning light filters through the living room window.

“Ugh,” Isaac complains. They’re all in a tangle on the living room floor with every couch cushion and pillow in Derek and Isaac’s apartment around or under them. Boyd and Erica had followed them home after Stiles left the shop. Boyd had shrugged and said, “Guess this is what happens when you pick up strays.” He’d smiled, small but there.

Isaac stretches. “We haven’t even brushed our teeth yet. Who the hell is texting now? Make them stop.”

Erica shoves him in the shoulder. “It’s after 10 already. Crap.” Her scent curdles. “Stiles called in for the entire day. Tomorrow, too.”

And he’ll be getting on a plane bound for California the following day. Derek doesn’t move.

“Gimme that.” Isaac grabs for her phone. “Why is he talking to you and not Derek?”

“He kind of has to,” she points out. “So the bright side here is that he hasn’t quit yet.”

Derek presses his face into his pillow. If he buries his own face, maybe he won’t have to think about Stiles’, and the wounded, skittish expression on it. “It was too much. I couldn’t think.”

Isaac snorts but his hand is gentle on Derek’s head. “Yeah, we’re all familiar with how you just react. Thought you were better about that, though.” He mumbles the last part. “I hate to say it, but I told you so.”

“No,” Boyd says. “You really don’t hate saying that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Derek isn’t really paying much attention to them. He wonders what Stiles is doing right now, how long he stared at the phone in his hand before he texted Erica. The thought of Stiles sitting in his apartment right now, pissed off and disappointed and scared, makes his ribs pierce his soft innards. He breathes in the faint scent of Stiles on his pillow.

+++

Isaac fills Boyd and Erica in on the mess that went down in Beacon Hills, light on the Kate Argent bit because only Laura, and Kate, ever knew that full story. Derek gets up and showers because he stinks like a hot city night and surprise and fear and sharp, unpleasant things.

“No wonder you’re so fucked up,” Boyd says finally. “Both of you.”

Derek glances over at him from where he’s sitting apart from them, but doesn’t respond. Stiles is going to go back to Beacon Hills and get his head filled with all the whispering words of the Argents. He’ll start by googling werewolves – he’s probably doing it right now. He’ll read everything he can find, and he won’t know how to sort myth from reality because so often there is no line between them. When he starts seeing the same general information repeated, he’ll remember that he has an actual person to talk to about this, people who know. He’ll call Allison, and they’ll call her parents. They’ll say, “Stay away from him. He and his kind are dangerous. It’s unnatural for a human to be with one of them,” and they’ll tell Stiles to come over the day after he gets home so they can share with him the sorts of things he needs to know. The things they deem necessary. And Stiles will feel strange about this at first, that first time he talks to the Argents about Derek, about this man whose body has been his for a short, glorious summer, whose heart he holds without even knowing it. But that’ll be at first.

When Stiles comes back, because he’ll have to, he’ll pass Derek in the street one day and be startled. Because he isn’t cruel, even if he is an ass, he’ll half-smile in recognition before he looks away awkwardly. There will be a hitch in his step, but he’ll keep walking, his hands shoved into his pockets. It will be fall: the sun will shine in a cloudless blue sky so bright Derek’s eyes will sting, and small city leaves of yellow and oak-red will drift by.

+++

It’s for the best.

+++

Half an hour past midnight the day after Stiles finds out, Derek gets a text. It says, “Kate Argent, she was the one you told me about. Your first.”

Derek should have known he’d piece it together. He can’t get a read on the text, if there’s curiosity there or sympathy or something else. Of all the things Stiles could have focused on, this isn’t what Derek would have expected. It’s not a question about werewolves or an issue with the lies and all the things he didn’t tell him.

“So you’re going to answer him,” Isaac says.

Derek glances at him. “No.”

Isaac stares at him, and then says, “You – I just – I’m going to go drown myself in the toilet. Anyone else coming?”

Erica perks up. “We could take him down. The three of us. See, the thing is,” she says, her voice going mellow and conversational, “I’m not going through this again with you. I don’t care if you are an alpha. No way am I going to sit here and let you bury your head in your ass while you push Stiles away. We gave you a day to wallow. Now do something about it, Derek.”

“Really?” Derek raises his eyebrow at the three of them. “I’m supposed to march over to his apartment and say, ‘Stiles, that didn’t go as smoothly as it could have.’ Or maybe, ‘Yeah, I should have told you my roommate and I get a little hairy once a month.’ Or even, ‘Guess what? You’re dating a werewolf.’ Is that it?”

“Yes!” they all shout.

“You need to get out of here,” he tells them. “One of you is bad enough. Three of you—” Derek scowls.

“That’s wanton abuse of alpha power,” Isaac complains.

“No,” Derek says, raising his eyebrows. “This is.” His eyes flash red and he growls, “Go away.”

They glare at him and slink out. “You should feel terrible about this!” Erica shouts on her way through the door.

“I do,” Derek replies. He doesn’t bother speaking louder. They’ll hear him. “Crocodile tears are streaming down my face right now.”

+++

Once they’re finally gone, he picks up his phone. “Yes,” he writes, slowly. He feels exposed. Then, “We should talk.”

Stiles doesn’t answer. Derek stays up until 3:30 before finally falling asleep with the phone next to him.

+++

A week ago, Derek had lightly pushed Stiles off so he could grab a washcloth to clean them with. Stiles lay sprawled while Derek wiped him down. Derek swatted his ass. “Lazy,” he’d told him.

The ceiling fan murmured above them. Derek said, pretty much out of the blue, “I can’t just disappear from the office.” His words were rushed.

Stiles hummed. The sheet was caught around his ankle. The rest of him was bare.

“Two weeks is a long time,” Derek added after getting no response from Stiles. This time Stiles nodded sleepily.

“I know,” he said haltingly, trying to pick his words carefully, “that it’s almost over and—”

“What?” Stiles said sharply. His head snapped up and he stared at Derek in the dark. His face was cast in shadow.

“Summer,” Derek tried to explain. “You’ll be gone and then you’ll be in school almost as soon as you get back.”

Stiles put his head back down on the pillow. He was silent a while. “Oh. Yeah, it sucks. Look, Derek, I get it. I told you to forget that I even mentioned you coming with me. It was a stupid idea. It still is. Leave it alone, god.” The fact that he didn’t push this, didn’t force the issue like everything else – it worried at Derek with a gnawing sensation deep in his gut.

Derek didn’t say anything else. Later, much later in the night, Stiles said quietly, breathing into Derek’s flesh in the dark as Derek ached beneath him, “Just don’t go feral on me while I’m gone.”

The flight leaves late tonight or early tomorrow morning, however you look at it. It’s an overnight, landing in the small hours of the west coast. Derek drags himself up and walks over to Stiles’ apartment. The night is sticky. Security waves him up without calling Stiles. They’ve seen him enough. He knocks on the door; Stiles opens it, stares at him hard for a few heart-pounding seconds, then turns around and walks back to his room. He leaves the door open.

Stiles is packing. His suitcase is open on his bed, half-full. Derek has this whole conversation planned, as much as he can. He’s going to say, “Can I answer some questions for you?” and Stiles will launch into a hundred things he wants to know and Derek will be able to explain about 25% of them, and in the end Derek’ll offer him a ride to the airport and Stiles might even say okay.

But Stiles has a way of fucking up Derek’s plans. Derek says, “I was born into a pack of werewolves. We were like any other family. Just some of us were werewolves too.” He says, “We’ve always been around, for as long as anyone can remember.” He says, “We’re not monsters, but we can be dangerous.”

Stiles keeps packing. He’s not looking at Derek, which, bad sign, but at least it means he’s not scared of him and doesn’t feel like he has to watch Derek’s every move to make sure he’s not going to maul him or something. The silence, though: there is nothing good about Stiles’ silence. It’s unnatural, the way a forest stills just before something really bad happens.

He folds a shirt very deliberately. He then unfolds it and refolds it, exactly the same way as before. “You know what I don’t get?” he says finally. “See, I could deal with you being a werewolf. I don’t know what it means entirely, but you’re still you, right? I could deal with the fact that werewolves exist and that apparently I was dating one.” His voice is rising, getting louder. “Even the fact that you’re some sort of leader of wolves or something – the alpha. You have no idea how many jokes I have about that. And we’re not even going to talk about what an utter fuck up you seem to be about the whole thing, but Allison’s dad says that you were never supposed to be an alpha in the first place.”

Stiles has given up on folding now and is rooting through his closet, tossing sneakers over his shoulders emphatically. “Scott and Allison, they’re still trying to wrap their heads around the whole werewolf thing, but I could have gotten past that. Your eyes turn colors and you have fangs, so what. Your dick’s still normal, so what do I care.” He spits the words out.

“I could have even understood that you might not want to tell me because I might think it was weird. Because werewolves keep their existence a secret to stay safe. Because your kind is hunted down like animals. Because your entire family was murdered simply for being werewolves. I could have dealt with all that.” He slams down a boot and stands up, and for the first time looks directly at Derek. His eyes are blown with anger, bright and snapping, and a sheen of furious sweat glints against his hairline despite the air conditioning.

“But you know what I don’t know how to deal with? What I don’t understand?” He steps forward and clenches his fists at his side. “I don’t get—” He stops and takes a breath, and Derek’s belly twists in on itself, leaving too many empty spaces behind and a horrible, breath-stealing sensation. Stiles’ chest rises and falls too rapidly, and he says, “I don’t know what to do with you not telling me because you thought I was going to ditch you at the end of summer. That’s what it was, right? That, what, summer was going to end and school was going to start and I was going to say ‘see ya, bitch?’ That you decided for me when this ended.” He swallows. “Jesus, Derek.”

Like a string has been cut, he slumps down on his bed. “All I wanted was for you to give me something that said it actually mattered, just maybe, even though you kept pulling away. I thought it was because of whatever secret it was you were carrying around and not telling me, or maybe even because I was demanding, saying things I shouldn’t have said, too soon, too much.”

Something is cracking in Derek, something he didn’t even know he still had to crack. Inside, he’s bleeding faster than he can heal, faster than anyone could, even an alpha. Slowly, heavily, he sits down on the bed next to Stiles. He’s careful not to touch him. He doesn’t know what to do with this, this entirely unexpected reaction that has nothing to do with him being a werewolf, nothing to do with the way he got his entire family killed, nothing to do with what he is. This is human and could happen to anyone and Stiles is pissed, and Derek has no words for this.

Stiles says, “All I wanted was that. And what do I get? This.” He straightens and picks up one of his shirts, and smoothes out a wrinkle with his hand. “So now it’s my turn to ask you to go. Just leave.”

+++

The night after Stiles flies away, the full moon comes. Earlier than usual, he and Isaac trudge through the evening’s slick heat to Rebecca’s, and once there, he approaches her, gives her second the check, and says, “I have a request to make.”

She looks at him, interested. She crosses her arms. “Oh?”

“Give me permission to take Erica and Boyd with us tonight. Isaac and I are going to the woods north of the city.”

Rebecca’s elegant grey eyebrow shoots up. At his side, just behind him, he feels Isaac startle.

“Do you want to spend the moon with this alpha?” she asks Erica and Boyd. Derek turns to look at them.

Erica doesn’t say anything, just bites her lip down against a smile. Boyd answers, quiet and sure, “Yes,” and Rebecca says, “Then I release them into your care, for this moon.”

As soon as the Meyerson door closes behind them, Isaac whoops, and Derek thinks that he might have got this one right.

+++

After the moon, after running with his packmate and whatever Erica and Boyd are, Derek realizes something. The thing is – the thing is that maybe Stiles isn’t the only one who’s upset. Derek’s willing to accept that most of this is his fault, because that’s the way his life goes, but he’s beginning to suspect that Stiles might have had something to do with this, too.

What was he supposed to think when Stiles made it clear to him and everyone else they spoke to that he was after Derek’s body? And the way he didn’t seem to care about things, the way he said they didn’t matter because this was summer – what was Derek supposed to do with that?

But most of all – “You could do so much more,” Stiles had said once. Derek had believed he was talking about his job at Hale & Hale, and he’d thought Stiles didn’t get it, didn’t get how huge that company really was, how much he’d given it and taken from it. He’d been annoyed at the time, actually, and Stiles had known it. “That’s right,” Stiles had said, “get mad. Fight for it. You want something? Then don’t just sit back and take what life gives you. I’m going to fight for more, for better things, for what I want.”

“I don’t know what that is.” Derek sat up on the bed, swinging his legs over the edge. The moon was waxing.

Stiles sat up too and wrapped himself around Derek’s back, the same way he had a few months ago as they stood in line for burgers at the Shake Shack. “I think you do,” he said quietly. The words cut across Derek’s shoulders.

Some years before this exchange in the dark with Stiles, in the very same bedroom, Derek had had his last real conversation with Laura. As she packed for that last trip back to Beacon Hills, Derek had sat in her bedroom and watched her. She threw in all sorts of clothes, just in case, and ordered him not to become a caveman while she was gone. “I just have a feeling,” she’d said. “There’s something going on back there and I’m alpha, I have to check it out. If I come home and find you’ve gone feral, there will be some serious asskicking.”

When the call came saying that the car had arrived to take her to the airport, she kissed his forehead and said, “It’s okay, babe. I forgive you,” and with a final pat to his cheek, she’d gone.

When he’d buried her, he’d howled to the dark sky and told her body, “I thought you said there was nothing to forgive,” even though he’d always known better. Her words had been a macabre relief to him. For years, he’s pulled them out when things have been particularly grim.

He’d carried them with him, for years, until one day Stiles said to him carelessly, as if it were obvious, “Sometimes people say things not because they think they’re true but because they think you need to hear them.”

The night after the full moon, two days after Stiles gets on the plane heading west, Derek lies in bed and turns Stiles’ weeks-old words over in his head, and thinks he’s an idiot. Not a foolish boy who betrayed his family to their death, but just your plain old run of the mill moron.

He climbs out of bed, boots up his laptop, and buys a plane ticket.

+++

When he gets out of his rental car in front of Stiles’ dad’s house, he remembers this place. He hasn’t gone to his own burnt shell of a home yet. The porch step creaks under his foot, just the way his parents’ had.

The sheriff opens the door when he rings the bell. He swings open the screen door and regards him for a long minute. “Derek Hale,” he says. “Huh. You came. ” He rubs the back of his neck the same way Stiles does.

Derek stares at him cautiously. “You know who I am. Did Stiles – what did he tell you?”

Stiles’ dad sighs. “I know my kid. He said less than I’d like, more than he thinks. And I had a very interesting conversation with Chris Argent.” He steps back and says, “Well, you might as well come in.”

“You’re inviting me in?”

The sheriff appears to know about him, both him being a werewolf and his relationship with his son, and he’s letting him come into his house. He narrows his eyes. “Unless you’ve travelled all this way and have nothing to say to Stiles?”

“No, sir,” Derek says reflexively.

“Good.” Stiles’ dad turns his head and yells upstairs, “Stiles, you have someone here to see you.”

A few long seconds tick by in uncomfortable silence. Uncomfortable for Derek, at least. The sheriff looks faintly amused. Just as Derek hears footsteps head toward the stairs, Stiles’ dad leans in and says, “If you ever hurt my son, you can forget about New York City. You’ll find that the entire world won’t be big enough to hide in. We clear?”

Derek stands straight. “Yes, sir.”

Stiles’ dad jerks his chin toward the stairs. “Go on, then.”

Before Derek can think of anything to say, Stiles is skidding down the stairs and wheeling to a halt halfway down. “Derek?” His mouth is an "O" of shock.

Derek stares up at him. He’s torn in a hundred directions. He wants to bury his face in Stiles’ skin, his neck. He wants to kiss the surprise off his face. He wants to scent him and mark him and touch him, and be nowhere near him, too, because of the sudden rush of anger that suffuses Derek’s entire body at seeing him

Next to him, Stiles’ dad shakes his head and says, “Yup. Boys, take it upstairs.”

Stiles gives his dad the stinkeye but turns and climbs back up the stairs, looking over his shoulder every other step as though checking that Derek’s really there. He looks tired. There are bags under his eyes. Derek lets the door swing shut with a noise behind him once he’s in Stiles’ bedroom and he leans back against it.

There’s a heavy pause between them. It’s almost like Stiles is going to wait for Derek to say whatever he came to say, but he can’t contain himself long enough to actually let that happen because he’s stepping forward into Derek’s space, poking him in the chest, and saying, “You don’t ever get to do that to me again.”

His face goes hard. “I mean it, I’ll be gone so fast all you’re going to see is the tumbleweed I leave behind. Tumbleweed, you hear me? You don’t get to throw me out of your life. You don’t get to doubt me. You can yell at me or stare at a wall for three days while I play X-box in the next room or work it out of your system with really hot, sweaty sex – I vote for option three – but you do not get to kick me out and expect me to come back when you call.”

Derek doesn’t bother pointing out that the last time he saw Stiles, it was Stiles who kicked him out. Or that he’s the one who got on a plane and flew across the entire country to come after him.

“Oh, please,” Stiles says anyway. “You so were the one to dump me on my ass. And then your sad little heart howled out emo haiku to me for the last four days.”

“You heard all this.”

Stiles scoffs. “Because I am awesome.” His voice turns serious again. “Listen to me, you turd. You may be a werewolf, but you’re my werewolf. I don’t care what you are, except that you’re mine.” It’s the same firm, unquestioning way he said Scott was a schmuck but his schmuck and so he was stuck with him, and something fierce settles in the base of Derek’s spine.

“Then stop pretending,” Derek says, practically growling, “that I’m not.”

Stiles’ expression is startled, and Derek shakes his head at him. “You know exactly what I mean.” He knows his tone is harsh. Stiles shoves his hands in his pockets and stands unnaturally still.

Derek looks away. “I need to go to my family’s house.” Dread curls in his stomach, at going there, at having to leave Stiles now, but this is something he has to do. He swallows.

“You haven’t been there yet?” Stiles’ voice sounds a little uneven.

“No,” he says simply. Something reverberates between them, inexorable and expansive. Derek swallows. “Don’t you dare think,” he says, low, his hand on the doorknob, “that I won’t come back.”

+++

The ruins of his family’s house sit in the middle of the Preserve. There’s a faint but fresh familiar scent there that he picks up as he gets out. He grabs his bag out of the back of the car and walks up his old steps and into the house. The door is half-open already.

His phone buzzes. The text says, “I’m a horrible, horrible person, and you know that. So I might have already snuck to your old house and crept around.”

“It’s fine,” Derek texts back.

“I don’t know what that means,” Stiles replies.

Derek looks askance at Stiles’ text. “It means it’s fine,” he texts. The floor is dirty, scattered with old dried leaves and other wind-blown detritus. There are still kitchen chairs in the corner around the small round table his mother used for the younger kids. In the living room, most of the roof still exists and the couch is flat against the wall, the way it was when Derek left it the last time. He rummages around in his bag and pulls out a sheet he’s brought from New York and spreads it haphazardly over the couch.

+++

The next morning, he hears a car pull up. He steps onto his front porch and sees a blue jeep and Stiles climbing out of it, all limbs. He leans back against the car, and looks at the house and looks at Derek standing there.

The sun slants lines of uncertainty across his body. “So,” he calls out from across the grown-in clearing that used to be Derek’s lawn. “I know you said you’d come back, but I kind of couldn’t wait? I thought it might be my turn anyway?”

Derek swallows, and then he exhales. He feels the sun warm on his face. “You are,” he says to Stiles as he jumps off the porch and walks slowly over to him, “so goddamn pushy and annoying. My sister would have liked you,” Derek tells him, and a smile starts to spread wide over Stiles entire body. His face is somehow incandescent in the late morning sunlight.

Derek makes an aborted move toward reaching out to him, impossible not to when Stiles is right there looking at him like that, like Derek has made him happy. Stiles frowns at him, opens his arms up, and says, “Not everything has to be so hard,” and Derek folds into him, grateful. Stiles’ arms wrap tight around him, and pressed against him like this Derek can feel the fine tremors running through his body. Derek nuzzles his face into the join of his neck and breathes slowly into his skin until some of the tension in Stiles dissipates. It’s just so Stiles that Derek tugs one of Stiles’ arms away and runs his fingers over the back of his hand. He’s all brash, false confidence, enough to fool anyone not looking closely, while shaking inside and refusing to back down in spite of it.

Derek presses Stiles back against the Jeep but is careful not to crowd him too much, not wanting to force Stiles to be closer than he’s comfortable with. Stiles rolls his eyes and pulls his entire body closer, so they’re flush against each other. He rubs his face against Derek’s cheek and reaches up, smoothing his thumb over an eyebrow, and then kisses him until they’re both panting and have to break off for air.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want,” Derek says, and Stiles shakes his head.

“I can’t imagine not wanting to touch you,” he tells Derek. He slides his hands under the back of Derek’s shirt. His breath is slow, keeping time with the tracing of his fingers over Derek’s skin. Derek closes his eyes against the side of Stiles’ face.

“You could tell me about Laura,” Stiles offers.

“Yeah,” says Derek, stepping reluctantly away. “Come on.”

Stiles looks at the house. “Is that even safe?”

Derek glances back at him over his shoulder. “Has that ever stopped you?” and Stiles scrambles up after him. It should be darker inside than it is. The heavy summer sunlight slants in through all sorts of impossible cracks.

“What?” Stiles says. “Are you actually staying here? You can stay at my house. My dad’ll make you take the guestroom but you can sneak in my bedroom and just keep an ear out for him. He’s not around lots anyway.” He waggles his eyebrows at Derek. It’s really not sexy but it doesn’t matter. Derek wants him anyway.

He pushes Stiles down onto the couch and kneels between his legs, spreading them wide. Stiles’ eyes are bright; he reaches down and cards his fingers through Derek’s hair and lets him slide his hands up his thighs and pull his dick out of his pants, mostly soft, and take him in his mouth just the way Derek knows Stiles loves the most. Stiles’ hitching breath and the soft, wet slide of Derek’s lips, the loud swallow of his throat, a choked-off whine – they sound shocking in the stillness of the house, and Stiles gasps, “Don’t want to come yet.” Derek eases up and holds Stiles in his mouth, loving the hot weight of him, the way he’s tender and fragile and trusting in Derek’s mouth.

He listens to Stiles’ heartbeat even out as he comes back from the brink and can tell the exact second when Stiles opens his eyes and looks down at Derek’s head bent over him as he cradles his cock in his mouth. Stiles’ entire body stutters, and he says desperately, “C’mere, c’mere, oh my god, c’mere,” and he’s tugging Derek up his body and stealing the breath from him with frantic lips and hands. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and Derek loves every bend of his body as he yanks his pants off, and every second of time passing as Stiles pushes him onto his back on the sheet, shoves one of his legs over the back of the couch and the other up into his chest.

“Derek.” His name is a broken moan. “Can’t wait, fuck, sorry, need to be inside you so bad,” and whatever he’s saying doesn’t even matter anymore because there’s lube and pre-come dripping from his dick where it’s pressing against Derek’s hole, sliding and not nearly enough, and Derek grabs his hips and pulls him inexorably into his body. He grunts and bears down against the burn, and Stiles stares down at him, stunned. And then they’re both moving, straining against each other, and in one impossibly bright moment, Derek thinks of the words of the old binding ceremony that his family practiced for generations, “for he will be flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, and I will write his name upon my heart with my rib and bear it in me until the earth consume me and the moon release me.”

Stiles falls slack upon his body. Sometime later he mumbles into Derek’s chest, “You got on a plane,” and Derek knows that’s not all he’s really saying, and he says back, “Yeah,” and it’s enough.

+++

He sits for a long time by the patch of purple flowers where he buried Laura, ignoring the way the wolfsbane tries to choke him, and pictures her younger than he is now, laughing under a summer moon. He throws back his head and howls for her, and afterward lets Stiles take him out for burgers and curly fries at the best diner in town – they both agree. It was Laura’s favorite too, and he orders an overly sweet strawberry milkshake for her and shares it with Stiles.

+++

He sees Chris Argent at the gas station, and they stare at each other over their cars and then get in and drive away in opposite directions.

+++

“Oh my god,” Stiles says, flapping his hands at him on his front porch as he prepares to drag Derek in for dinner. “My dad would’ve already shot you if he’d really wanted to.” There’s a pause. “And anyway, if he did, you’d heal.”

“That doesn’t make it any more fun for me,” Derek points out.

“Whatever.”

All told, it’s not terrible, but he’s also pretty happy to get back on that plane for New York, even if Stiles will still be in Beacon Hills for another five days. Stiles blows him a kiss, half-mocking, half-serious, from his house as Derek pulls away to catch his plane.

+++

Isaac, Erica, and Boyd meet him at La Guardia to pick him up. Boyd grabs his bag and Isaac nudges him with his shoulder. Derek grips the back of his neck, grounding his beta, until Erica wiggles in between them and silently demands the same treatment.

Derek raises his eyebrow but lets his hand rest on her nape, hot and solid. “You too,” she tells Boyd. He shrugs but there’s a little smile on his face when Derek hauls him in. “Did you ever think you’d go back?” he asks.

“No,” Derek tells him honestly. “I didn’t. I guess plans have a way of changing.”

Isaac grins at him, wide. “So does that mean we can keep Erica and Boyd? If you’re changing your plans and all?”

Derek cuffs the side of his head and Isaac ducks, laughing.

+++

He’s lying in Stiles’ narrow bed. Next to him, Stiles is twirling a red leaf in his hand. A cool, crisp autumn sun filters through the window. It paints Stiles’ body golden around Derek’s fingers where he’s pushed up Stiles’ shirt and rested a hand on his belly.

“When you were a kid,” Stiles asks, “what did you want to be when you grew up?”

“The usual. You know, an astronaut. Firefighter. Detective.” The corner of Derek’s mouth lifts. “There was this one week where Laura convinced me I wanted to be a hairdresser.”

Stiles snorts. “You’re such a dork,” he says fondly. He gets up and pulls Derek off the bed. “C’mon. It’s the perfect day for the first cup of cocoa of the season and I know just where to get one,” and Derek rolls his eyes at him and lets him tug him out the door to the coffee shop.

Notes:

I'm on tumblr. Woe.