Stiles sat on the dock at the lake. She tried smoothing some more sunblock on her ridiculously white skin, but she knew that there was no way she was getting out of the burn that was going to torture her as soon as she settled in for the night.
"Stiles, come swimming with us!" Lydia called from the lake.
Stiles rolled her eyes before diving into the lake after her girlfriends. There was no way that just last year that Lydia freakin' Martin would have been friends. True, she was Stiles's first crush, but if Allison hadn't moved to their little town they would have never been friends. And friends is what they were, because Stiles realized that while the girl was completely gorgeous and smart and witty, there was no Naked.
Naked, as Scott defined it, was that feeling that you got when you were around someone and just had to strip their clothing off and lick them until they were moaning your name. Which was a lot more likely to happen now that Scott was a werewolf and all.
Which was another reason that Stiles was hanging out with Lydia and Allison without her best friend anywhere near her. Scott had gone and gotten himself bit so that he turned into a werewolf whenever he freaked out or if he was turned on or if there was a full moon. Stupid puppy had no sense of control whatsoever. Which is why, when Stiles had come over to try and help him pick out some clothing for a date with Allison, he had were'd out when Stiles had maybe said two or three too many words about something that she couldn't even remember anymore. And then his mom walked in.
"Scott!" she said, her eyes wide, "You're a werewolf!" Except she hadn't said werewolf. She'd said 'Shungmanitou,' or something like that. Scott's mom sometimes said weird words, and it had taken Stiles forever to figure out that it was 'cause they were some sort of Native American or something.
"Mom, I was going to tell you…"
"You have no control," she observed with some disappointment. "You're going to stay with your cousins for the summer."
"Mo-om," Scott had said, "How is that going to teach me control?"
"Goddammit boy, look in the mirror, you're a freakin' Indian. We don't call wolves our 'brothers' and 'friends' just because we're made by Inyan together. You're going to go and you're going to learn control, and when the elders decide that you're ready you can come back. I'm not going to let you hurt your friends just because you can't control yourself."
Scott's mom was kind of scary when she made her mind up like that, so Scott knew that he couldn't argue with her. This was why Stiles was spending the summer sans her best friend, who still texted her occasionally and Allison constantly.
It would have been so easy to hate Allison, for taking Stiles's best friend away from her, but the girl was so open about being best friends with Stiles despite her unfortunate diarrhea of the mouth and differently proportioned attention span problem. She accepted Stiles as quickly as she accepted Lydia, and made it easy for Stiles and Lydia to accept each other.
"I thought that Attention Deficit Disorder was just kids who didn't pay attention," Lydia confessed to her while they were treading water in the lake.
Stiles kept her attention on Lydia, trying not to think about the last time she was treading water in the school pool. "No, I can pay attention to things. Sometimes I pay attention to many things at the same time, and when I only pay attention to one thing it's like the rest of the world goes away."
Lydia frowned. "You can pay attention to a lot of things at once?"
Stiles stilled her brain for a moment so she could stay on topic, "While we're swimming, there's three squirrels playing tag on the far side of the bank, two deer in that clearing over there, your car's left tire is slightly sunken into the mud, Allison has had two flies land on her head, a fish just swam past my feet, and Derek Hale is being a creeper again behind my Jeep."
Lydia gasped when Derek stepped out from behind Stiles's Jeep, glaring at her. Stiles shrugged and flipped him off, turning her attention back to the girls that she had planned to spend the afternoon with.
"You should probably go talk to him," Allison nudged her.
Lydia giggled. "Stiles has an older man after her."
Stiles glared at both of them. They knew she was gay, and that she was sixteen and he was twenty-four, and that Derek and she practically hissed at each other any time they within a two foot proximity of each other. All of these things were not conducive for a relationship between the two of them. Even if he was Calvin Klein model gorgeous.
Stiles dragged herself up the dock to where Derek was standing. She wasn't self-conscious in her bathing suit, she told herself, as she crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Derek. It wasn't like she had anything worth hiding, anyway.
"What?" she snapped.
Derek was quiet, and he just sort of stared at her.
"You're like a freakin' stalker, Derek," Stiles said. "Pervin' on underage girls."
Derek rolled his eyes. "I can promise you, I'm not perving," Derek said. He had such a light voice for being so physically… there.
Stiles glared at him a little bit more.
"I need you to look something up for me."
"What else is new?" Stiles asked, opening her Jeep up to grab a pair of shorts to slide on over her bathing suit. She turned around to see Derek looking at her ass, and she hoped to God her heart didn't skip a beat when he looked up into her eyes, his eyes slightly bluer than normal. Stupid hazel eyes, always changing color and keeping her guessing instead of staying the same color like a normal person's. It was probably a sign of his mental instability.
Derek rolled his eyes a bit. "I need you to find out who owned my house before my family lived there."
"Derek, God, that's so easy. You could do it yourself…"
"Nope, it was part of a police investigation. Those records have been sealed."
"You just use me for my connections," Stiles grumbled.
"What else would I use you for?" Derek asked her, and they stared at each other for a moment before they looked away, blushing.
Stiles walked back to the dock. "Derek wants me to come with him!" she yelled across the lake.
"We know," Lydia laughed back at her.
Stiles flipped her off before making her way back to her Jeep and Derek. "Did you run here?" she asked him.
Derek grinned at her, shrugging. She knew he had heard Lydia's smart ass remark, but they were both ignoring it. Like they ignored a lot of things.
They drove over to Derek's house, which is where they hung out mostly since the last time Stiles's dad caught them in her room. He was understandably upset, as boys weren't allowed in her room (with Scott being the exception, because it wasn't like Scott was actually a boy), and Derek's little age gap with Stiles.
Stiles didn't mind Derek's house so much. He had been working on it in his spare time (and she often wondered where he got the money to fix the house up: it wasn't like she had found a bank account with his name on it or he had some huge inheritance from his parents) and most of the ground floor at least had dry wall up. Stiles had even fixed some of his furniture, when he had taken the rest of the pack out to run around and do werewolfy things and she had nothing else to do.
She noticed that he at least had roofing tarp up on the back end of the house now, which was good because the summer rains had made his house smell even stranger than it did what with all those stinky werewolf/wet dog/hormonal teenage boys odor that always permeated the premises. Stiles didn't say anything as she opened her laptop and made her network find Internet connection on her cell phone.
Stiles looked through the public library's records for about thirty minutes, typing in passwords that Danny had given her over the past few months when whatever Derek wanted her to look up had been password protected. She sorted through land deeds, building permits, and tax records, not even noticing when Derek somehow produced her nightly dose of Adderall with a large glass of water next to her, which she took without looking up or even acknowledging that he had been taking care of her. He found a fan which took some of the musty smell away and stirred up the too warm summer air, and just kind of puttered around her while she worked for him on her computer.
"Your house was built on the site of another burned out house, owned by a Javier Nunez, a twenty-four year old prospector in the nineteenth century," Stiles said, sipping on the water that Derek had left her. "He was married to a sixteen year old Isabella Gonzalez y Nunez, who died during childbirth shortly before the fire. Later, this land was owned by a twenty-four year old Hector Smith, who was married to… a sixteen year old Jane Bryant. She died from pneumonia, and he burnt the house down, killing himself and three other people, which was apparently deemed as a murder/suicide. Then your parents bought this apparently very cursed property for a not so amazingly low price and built a house large enough to house your entire family, until it burned down." Stiles looked up to see a very quiet Derek staring at her across the room.
"Huh," Derek said. He was always so eloquent in his observations.
Stiles looked up to finally notice that the sun had sent and the moon was rising. She had to go work at her summer job at the local diner in the morning, so she started packing things up. "I hope this means that I've answered all your questions, 'cause I got to go home," she said.
"Yeah? You gotta be somewhere?" Derek asked her.
"Yeah, it's called bed. Some of us are productive members of society and have to get sleep before going to work in the morning. It's not like they pay Sherriffs enough money that dad's gonna send me to college and then finance everything else involved with that when I'm done with school. Plus, I'm gonna need a new transmission on my Jeep, and I have to buy a dress for prom and throw in with everyone else for the limo. And I've got Senior dues and Yearbook fees…" Stiles knew she was rambling, but Derek never seemed to mind and he just leaned back against the window sill and listened to the rhythm of her voice. It was weird, whenever they were alone there was much less snarling and sarcasm recently. Stiles ignored that.
"Do you want me to ride with you home? You shouldn't be out alone," Derek said.
This made Stiles pause. Was Derek showing concern for her safety? What was that about? He had never done that before, if the constantly being thrown (sometimes physically) into danger history between them was anything to be referred to. "I can drive the fifteen minutes from my house from yours with relative safety precautions taken and not run into harm," Stiles informed him.
Derek nodded. "Call me when you get home."
Stiles looked at him strangely, but she nodded her head. "Okay," she said. "I'm going to go," she gestured to the door.
Derek nodded, and Stiles took that as her cue to leave. She walked out the door and then locked the Jeep as soon as she was inside. She had just bragged that she would be safe, so now she was paranoid that she hadn't knocked on wood. It wasn't like there wasn't a lot of wood in Derek's house to knock on, or that Derek's head wasn't made out of wood, although possibly his stomach was made out of chocolate. Bumpy, lickable chocolate. And where the hell had that thought come from? What was wrong with her? She was gay, dammit, gay! She had lusted after Lydia for years, hadn't she? She had an entire external hard drive filled with pictures of Victoria's Secret models, for crissakes. She got off on the thought of Anne Hathaway on a semi-regular basis. That made her gay, not the type to think about Derek's lickable chocolate abs.
Stiles talked with her dad for a few minutes before he went back to work to finish up some paperwork. She ran up to her room and flopped on her bed, pulling out her phone to call Derek.
"'Lo," Derek said.
"I'm home. In one piece. You happy?"
"It's normal for a man to worry about the safety of a girl driving alone at night, Stiles," Derek said.
"Yeah, whatever. You've never cared before, so I shouldn't consider it weird that you care now. Although I do. What's that about, Derek?"
Derek growled.
"Whatever again. I'm gonna go to bed now, away from your weirdness," Stiles said, and then she pressed the End button on her phone and threw it down on the bed. She dragged herself up and took a quick shower, getting the stink of the lake off of herself, and then pulled on a tank top and flannel pants before going back into her room. She didn't trust Derek enough to not be there after she had hung up on him, and she was relieved and not disappointed when he wasn't in her room when she crawled under the covers. Really. She was.
It wasn't until work the next morning that Stiles decided that she didn't really care about Derek's weirdness. She wrote it off to something he had said earlier that summer, about her being pack and he considered her his responsibility more than he should sometimes. Whatever that meant. Maybe he looked at her like an annoying little sister or something. Which would explain all the growling. All of her friends were only children, so it wasn't like she had a lot of sibling relationships to compare hers and Derek's to, so it was entirely probable that Derek saw her as a younger sister. Wasn't it?
In any case, there were eggs to serve and bacon to take back as not crispy enough, orange juice glasses to refill and coffee pots to replace. Stiles was actually pretty good at her job, something that surprised her because she always saw herself as doing something different like working in a music store or a book store or a library, but all those jobs weren't even hiring when Stiles went around applying at whatever random places took her fancy that were already held by overeducated people in a limited job market. It didn't matter: the tips were great even though the pay was quite possibly illegal, her boss didn't care when she disappeared for half an hour to go stare at the back alley behind the store for no apparent reason, and the work was mind numbing enough that she could basically tell what people were going to order on the limited menu before they opened their mouths. It was good, in the way that things like going to the bathroom or going to English or gym or getting picked on at school was good in its predictability. These were the things that made up Stiles's life.
Stiles smelled like grease and coffee grinds by the time her shift was done. Her arm had gotten a little burnt from having grease spilled across her wrist on a slight collision with the cook after rushing into the kitchen during the morning hour rush. She kept trying to suck on it, because the ice had just made it feel like complete shit. She was concentrating on the burn so hard she hadn't seen Derek being a lurking lurker who lurks all up against her driver's side door.
"What happened?" Derek asked, looking concerned.
"Jesus fuck shit, Derek," Stiles said, being startled as she pulled off her greasy apron that had been hanging over her jeans and tee-shirt. "Get a job. Go do something else other than taking every opportunity to encourage pants shitting amongst the easily startled."
Derek gave her a look that was incredibly hard to interpret, but Stiles was used to those looks so it was easy to ignore. What wasn't ignorable (was that a word) was the way that Derek grabbed her wrist, stared at the burn on it for a total of two seconds before he pulled it up to his mouth and just fucking licked it, like that was socially acceptable and something that people actually did in public. And what startled Stiles more than the licking was the fact that she was not jerking her wrist away, and instead stared in fascination as Derek's tongue just caressed her wrist over and over again, soothing the burn in a way that her mouth hadn't.
Derek was licking her wrist and her burn and her spit. "I slobbered all over that already," Stiles said weakly.
Derek smirked at her before he let go.
"What are you doing here?" Stiles asked, and for once she was tired of being confrontational. "Don't you have a pack to train or something?"
Derek shrugged. "I guess. It's just, Scott's not here, so I wanted someone who was a little more… adult than they are to hang out with. And you're not working, so let's go do something."
"Like what?" Stiles asked, wishing that he had come around when she didn't smell like a greasy diner. And why should she care about that? "And I'm the same age as your pack, aren't I? Can't you bite someone older?"
"They never adapt as well," Derek shrugged. "Teenagers are most likely to survive the bite."
Stiles nodded her head as if this were the most logical statement in the world. "Fine. Let me go home and get this stink off me, and then we'll… whatever. Hang out."
Derek climbed into her Jeep, and Stiles sighed. Because logic had obviously flown out the window at this point.
She only glanced over at Derek once during the drive home, and then chanted Anne Hathaway's name in her mind like a mantra for the rest of the drive. She was gay, after all.
So, I've got some pretty desperate writer's block at the moment. I don't know if this is going anywhere, and I don't know if I even like this, (I'm not going to reread it before putting it out there or anything, so this is completely not edited or anything and sorry about the typos or inconsistencies) so don't get too upset if this just ends here. I'll try to update it but I'm trying even more not to push myself, and I thought writing another fandom would help me out. We'll see how it goes.