Derek hears the male voice first. Faint and tinny, as if from a speaker. He feels his eyes narrow and instinctively tilts his head to listen: the voice is young, judging by timbre and mention of skipping lacrosse practice; single heartbeat, so it's one person on a phone. No scent of gunpowder, no subtle sound of handcuffs, so not a cop. The footsteps are even, carefully placed. An attempt at stealth?
He hears a faint pop, the snick of a twig, and leaves sliding on mud. A young woman's voice curses in a startled hiss, and the first thing he sees when he clears a knot of briars is a spray of golden-brown hair, a flash of white throat, and honey colored eyes in a pale face. The rest of the scene registers: teenaged girl on her knees in an awkward back-bend, her throat exposed.
"What are you doing here? This is private property," he demands, because despite what his instincts are telling him, this is not a misplaced submissive gesture.
"Yeah, Scotty, I, uh, have to call you back. But you tell Mrs. Soomekh I've still got the T-drop, if you see her," the girl says, and Derek sees the blue glow at her ear. Bluetooth headset?
"Why," Derek says again, "are you here?"
"Inhaler. Me and Scott - Scotty and I were in the preserve last night, just fucking around, stupid stuff, but we dropped his inhaler," the girl says in a rush. Her heart rate is fast, erratic, but he suspects she's just startled and a little afraid. She levers herself to her feet, strangely slow, and Derek has to fight himself not to let his gaze drop to her hips. As it is, he can't miss it when she crams a small scrap of red into the back pocket of fitted jeans.
Derek digs in his jacket pockets. The girl's eyes follow his motions, and he can't help noticing that her pupils dilate, irises contracting. Could be fear, could be arousal, and he really needs it to be neither. So he says, "What were you two doing to the trees? You took a chunk out of some bark back where I found this."
He holds up the inhaler for her to see, then tosses it to her underhand.
She catches it easily, but her heart has begun to pound, and blood rushes to her face. "Please," she says, and even though her voice is normal, her pulse is wrong for humiliation and right for a lie, "don't tell the sheriff, but alcohol may have been a factor. So I really don't know what we were thinking."
It's an excellent lie. If he couldn't hear her heart and the very faint notes of strain to her tone, he'd believe her.
"Why the sheriff?"
She rolls her eyes. "He's my dad."
"Whatever," he says, and turns away. He doesn't expect to see her again.
Naturally, he does. Again, and again, and again. Most of the time, her hair is smooth, straight, but clearly unattended - brushed once or twice, and then pushed behind her ears, or knotted into a bun, or swept off her face in a messy ponytail. She uses slightly tangy fruit-based perfumes, but the natural scent of her skin is something warm, perhaps closer to vanilla or heated sugar.
Once, he presses her against her bedroom door, using his arms to block her in and the weight of his stare to pin her.
She raises a small can of something that smells like ten thousand kinds of pepper and at least twelve kinds of angry acidic chemicals, and says, very calmly, "This is DefTech OC mach four. Its Scoville Heat Unit is something like twenty five thousand, and it sticks like a bitch. You keep standing there like a dick to try and scare the sheriff's daughter in her bedroom, and I'll ruin your week."
He never attempts physical intimidation again. Not even when she threatens to leave him for dead in the middle of the road. He begs her, instead, and though his pride hates every moment of it, the thought of begging Stiles Stilinski for anything does uncomfortable things to him when he's alone. He's never been particularly submissive, but he could be, if that's what it takes to -
No. He stops indulging those thoughts, because they bring back blonde curls and make him sick to his stomach. He distracts himself by winding a tourniquet around his arm. Stiles picks up the bone saw and stares at him, and her honeyed eyes look sick.
He lets her rope him into some kind of half-naked show for a high school friend (and then, when he leaves the room to grab one of the Sheriff's shirts, she triumphantly shrieks, "You were perving on my cousin! The Sheriff's nephew! I know about that thing with you and Jackson and Lydia's mom's pool! You owe me!"). He could refuse, could try and maintain his dignity, but she wouldn't be pointedly suggesting he strip simply for her own amusement. She's ruthless, quite possibly on a scale with sociopathy, but that means that she thinks him being shirtless is going to get them what they want.
He feels both gratified and betrayed when he notices the way her eyes linger, the faint briny-sweet smell of her arousal.
After, once he has her in the car, he leans in close - close enough to smell the warm, sugary skin scent underneath the creamsicle bodywash - and murmurs into her ear: "I could smell exactly how much you enjoyed that. Never again."
After Peter's death, his confrontations with Stiles actually start to thaw, become less confrontations and more meet-ups. She doesn't seem happy with him, but she also clearly lacks Scott's antipathy. He almost asks her about it, but it's not a conversation he can have on the phone, and when he's with her in person, the way her hair catches on make-up sticky lips or the subtle warm sugar scent of her distracts him. He has a hard enough time staying on track with research into the kanima and whatever the hell is going on with her red-headed crush.
Bitten by Peter, but unchanged and evidently hallucinating? He doesn't like it.
"Seriously," Stiles says one afternoon. She'd moved her laptop to a piece of plastic on the floor and now sits in front of it, perfectly comfortable on her knees in an awkward-looking stretch, "I'm going to save her from this, and then I am going to bury my face between those creamy, perfect thighs of hers."
Growing up in a house with fellow teenagers and two married couples not only meant an early sex education but also learning to turn his visual imagination the hell off. He's never been so grateful for learning how not to think.
"And if I'm lucky, it'll be a good day for her, you know, a forty percent evil day, and she won't crush my trachea with those wonderful thighs I mentioned."
"Make sure she's not the kanima, first," he grunts, and tries not to think about how much he hates the thought of Stiles sleeping with someone else.
Stiles laughs. "I can think of worse situations to be paralyzed in."
