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It is September 27th.
It is September 27th and the fall term began on August 19th.
Do you know what that means?
It means that Stiles has been sitting in the same seat every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for over five weeks now.
So why did he walk into Theory of Personality at 8:56 a.m. only to find some bastard in his seat? One of the best unspoken rules of college is that where you sit on the first day is your assigned seat for the rest of the semester unless you’re late to class, then you sit wherever’s closest to the door you came in.
But it’s a whole four minutes before class starts and judging by the way this guy has his shit spread out on the table, using a highlighter on his textbook with one hand and a pen on his notebook with the other in an amazing show of dexterity, he’s been here for a while. So what reason could he possibly have for suddenly switching seats a month into instruction?! There’s a whole row of empty seats on his left, why did he have to choose Stiles’ exact seat?
And yeah, maybe Stiles is overreacting to this, but as a child his psychiatrist may have mentioned once or twice that he might be on the spectrum because ADHD has a high rate of comorbidity with things like autism and dyslexia and Stiles can be... odd at times. He was never officially diagnosed because his mother was afraid of the stigma, but he once had a panic attack from the texture of his socks and that doesn’t sound very not-autismy.
But most people who don’t have autism get pissed when you sit in their seats because there’s a whole slew of college etiquette rules that everyone’s expected to follow or else you’ll be labelled a dick and no one in your lab group will respond to your messages in the group chat.
There are three major rules about seats though:
- Don’t steal seats
- Don’t sit directly next to someone if there’s an open seat somewhere else
- Don’t put your bag in the seat next to you
Stiles figures if this guy can go around breaking the rules, then so can he.
“Howdy!” Stiles exclaims loudly, dropping gracelessly into the seat next to the thief with a loud bang that causes him to flinch and jerk his writing utensils across both pages.
The guy glares at him from behind his thick, burgundy glasses frames, and holy fuckballs that’s a gorgeous set of lookers, a hypnotising mixture of laurel green and steel blue that pops next to the deep red rims. Actually, his whole face is gorgeous from his sexy black eyebrows to his deliciously sharp jawline. If someone pointed at this man and said “that’s Clark Kent”, Stiles would have no choice but to believe them.
“Hi,” he glares in a clipped tone before going back to what he was doing.
“Whatcha doing there?” Stiles leans over to peak but slowly recoils back to where he was as the guy gives him murder eyes.
“Studying.”
“Looks like you’re just transcribing the book.”
“Because I am.”
“Oo! Are you a kinesthetic learner? That’s-“
“Stiles, sweetheart,” the professor calls from the front of the room in her sweeter than honey voice. The woman is honestly a blessing to society and too kind for her own good. Stiles feels bad that he can never remember her name. It starts with an A. “Would you like to kick off today’s lesson by reading your answer to the discussion question I posted online? I thought it was very interesting.”
••••
“Hot guy. Green eyes. Black hair. Cute glasses. Kind of a dick,” Stiles spouts off without preamble, entering the library study room that Scott has rented out for all of his friends to study in together. Even though they’re all in different programs, they always study together because the quickest way to fall into a pit of depression is to hole yourself up alone in your dorm with nothing but your books and the undercurrent of dread that just being in college causes. Human interaction is good and necessary no matter how much of a waste of time it seems like in comparison to your coursework.
“Max Chamberlain or Derek Hale,” Lydia responds naturally without looking up from her book. Somewhere between obsessing from afar over the color of her hair in third grade and sleeping on her couch for three weeks to stave off midterm depression last year, he’d learned that if he spouted off random attributes about a stranger, Lydia could usually name them. He actually found this out because he was trying to complain about a crush he had on his Gen Chem lab partner without telling Lydia her name, and to his complete mortification she guessed it after only five minutes of pathetic, wine-driven burbling.
Malia, the aforementioned lab partner turned awkward hookup turned Lydia’s freaking girlfriend, perks up at the second name. “Oh yeah. It’s probably Derek. He’s my cousin.”
“Of course he is,” Stiles sighs, sinking into the chair beside Scott, shortly before slamming his face down on the table once so hard that his vision goes splotchy. Kira, Scott’s girlfriend, jumps clear into the air from where her nose had been damn near pressed against her MacBook’s screen. “I made an ass of myself in front of him so it’s not like it matters anyway.”
“Aw, what did you do? Propose to him?” Lydia taunts even though she said she’d totally forgiven him for basically stalking her in grade school. She’s just mean to him because everyone else in the room besides him is either eating her out or too nice to be rude to even playfully.
“Hardy har. No. I said howdy then proceeded to annoy him the entire class period.”
“If it makes you feel better-” Malia starts, and nothing she says ever makes anyone feel better, “-you annoy everyone. Also Derek has the fuse of a toddler in need of a nap.”
“Wow, that makes me feel way worse. Thanks, Malia.”
“Shut up, boner. You know what I meant.”
“Boner. Nice one, Malia. Wanna call me a butthead to really drive home the fact that you’re a fucking fourth grader? I’m crisising right now!”
Lydia and Malia share a look before rolling their eyes in scary synchronisation and going back to their work.
“Scott?” Stiles tries desperately even though he knows Scott won’t be able to help him. Scott’s never pined for more than a week before getting with the person he was interested in. He’s also never pined over someone who treats him like a wad of gum they stepped in. All in all, he has no experience with soul crushing rejection, and he’s probably gonna say something stupid and unhelpful like:
“Just try asking him out.”
“And get my face punched in?! He’s probably not even gay, but even if he was–“
“He is,” Malia interrupts with a simper.
“–he’s not interested in me,” Stiles finishes, angrily locked in a staring contest with Malia who couldn’t look more amused.
“He usually goes for the twinky types.”
Now wait just a goddamn minute—
“I’m so not a twink!”
“You kind of are,” Kira smiles apologetically.
“Oh my god, I hate all of you.”
••••
“How about these?”
Stiles takes one look at the bouquet of fake flowers and bangs his head against the shelf next to him. He’s hoping that will convey his exact feelings to Lydia about the flowers, but apparently giving himself a minor concussion isn’t good enough for her.
“Stiles! This is serious!”
“I already said they’re fine!”
“No, you said the last ones were fine. These are different.”
Stiles takes the flowers flipping them around at all angles. “How are these not the same flowers?”
“The last ones had black stems, and these have green stems,” Lydia replies tersely, snatching the flowers out of his hand and smacking him in the shoulder with them.
Stiles groans loudly, falling into the floor despite Lydia’s embarrassed pleading that he not do this in the middle of Michael’s. But she brought this upon herself by forcing him to go decoration shopping instead of picking someone who gives a fuck about stem colors. They’ve been standing in the same spot for ten minutes while Lydia shoves flowers in his face and asks for his opinion so that she can completely disregard everything he says, ultimately choosing what she knew she wanted the entire time.
“You are twenty-one!” Lydia whisper-yells, trying to balance her purse on her shoulder while also scraping him off the floor. “This isn’t cute! Get the fuck up or so help me god!”
Stiles stares at her petulantly because yes, he’s twenty-one, but he’s twenty-one with no dignity and nothing to lose by making an ass of himself in a craft store.
“I’ll–“ Lydia cuts herself off with a frustrated huff. “I’ll let you wear that ridiculous fucking costume to my birthday party.”
“Tempting, but I feel like you can do better than that.”
“And...” It looks like Lydia’s about to cry from the physical pain of her next words, turning her head to the side and clenching her eyes shut just to get the words out. “...I’ll let you borrow my vintage copy of Gone With The Wind.”
“Borrow as in I can leave your apartment with it?” Stiles asks skeptically, rolling his eyes when Lydia starts frantically listing all the reasons why that book will never leave the safety of her home. Sure, it’s a $5,000 collectors item, but Stiles is a geek okay. He understands the importance of handling rare items with care and reverence. Also, if he fucked it up he could never afford to replace it so that’s just more incentive to be careful with it.
He blows a raspberry in her face, signalling two thumbs down.
“Hey, isn’t that Derek?”
Stiles scrambles off the floor, trying to tug his shirt straight while looking around in all directions for the latest subject of his cruelly obsessive personality. All he sees though is a tiny old lady at the other end of the aisle meanmugging the fuck out of him. How can something so little and frail hold that much contempt? It almost completely distracts him from the fact that Derek and his adorable little glasses are nowhere to be seen.
“You’re so pathetic,” Lydia snickers, pulling all the black stemmed roses out of the display.
“I fucking hate you.”
••••
Derek is in his seat again on Wednesday, clearly not perturbed enough by Stiles’ freakish antics to go back to wherever he was sitting before. This is a good thing, Stiles tries to convince himself, despite feeling an intense agitation like a bunch of ants are crawling around his ribcage. His urge to bodily remove Derek from the chair is only tempered by the fact that the other guy looks like he could and would mop the floor with Stiles’ face if Stiles laid so much as a pinky on him.
After standing in the doorway for way longer than he should have, Stiles decides to act like a well functioning, nonviolent human being and just sit beside him again. Maybe he didn’t get a big enough dose of Stiles the first time.
“Heya, Derek!” Stiles shouts when he’s right behind him, taking at least a little sadistic pleasure in watching the guy drop the book he was reading, the pages fluttering closed on the desk next to the now useless bookmark.
“Are you fucking–“ Derek takes a deep breath, counting long enough on the exhale for Stiles to get situated in the seat next to him.
“Whatcha reading?” Stiles asks just to be a dick, fluttering his eyelashes as innocently as possible. He’s been told before that his eyes ‘make him look sweeter than he really is’. His Aunt Claire tried to get everyone to call him Bambi, but thankfully ‘Stiles’ was the nickname that stuck.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Is that the name of the book, or are you actually asking me why I’m talking to you?”
“Oh my god,” the guy mutters under his breath, before turning to Stiles completely, and wow he has actual pecs. Stiles has to physically shake his head to snap out of his whore moment, suddenly remembering that he’s a real person and Derek is saying something.
“What was that?”
“How much is she paying you?”
What? “Who?”
Derek stands up to dig his wallet out of the pocket of his nicely fitted jeans. “I’ll double it for you to fuck off.”
And, wow, that was fucking rude. It makes Stiles feel a lot less shitty about replying, “A hundred.”
The dude doesn’t even react to that, pulling two hundreds out of his wallet and flinging them at Stiles, which— who in the fuck just has two hundred dollars to give away like that? Stiles is lucky if he has fifty dollars left over to eat after he pays the bills and picks up the refills of his ADHD meds. He definitely doesn’t feel bad about taking Derek’s money now.
Stiles grabs the money off the table and happily scoots into an open seat a couple rows back.
••••
Stiles is a bit of an overthinker. He can lie in bed for hours just thinking about an awkward pause in a conversation three days previous where he could have said something hilarious and relevant, but he didn’t. He once came up with a fifty two point list on why he will never eat yogurt that begins and ends with the fact that it screams when you eat it.
So it’s a bit of a surprise that he didn’t think about the possibility of being confronted by the person who was supposedly paying him to annoy Derek. It’s even more of a surprise that she’s smiling at him proudly instead of verbally assaulting him for stealing from her brother. Derek has to be her brother. They’ve got the same impeccable bone structure and beautiful black hair. Even though her eyes are brown where his are that crazy hazel blue, they somehow look familiar enough that Stiles feels a small bit of errant attraction to her.
Also, nobody but a sibling takes this much pleasure in the bamboozling of someone they love. Pretty much all of Stiles’ friends are single children so he doesn’t have that much practical experience with sibling rivalry, but he has heard Malia taunting her younger sister over the phone for not being able to best her high school track and field records— which, track and field. Hot. He totally smashed that.
Once....
Kind of...
It counts.
“Normally, I wouldn’t condone this kind of behavior, but I’m just so impressed that I can’t even be mad at you.” And, wow. Her voice is even smoother than her perfectly shaped lips, which are spread in a wide, red grin. She could totally be a radio personality on some easy listening station.
Despite her extremely charming aura, Stiles is still freaked out by the fact that this woman was not only able but willing to track him down on their huge ass campus, so he does what he learned to do very early in life and very calmly states, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Honestly, you could have probably gotten away with two hundred,” the woman continues in a conspiring tone as if he had just confessed to the crime.
“Not that I’m confessing to doing anything, but would you really pay someone two hundred dollars just to annoy your brother?” Honestly, are these people just made of money?
“No, but I might pay someone two hundred dollars to get back at him for being a complete asshole to you, you darling little thing. Look at those eyes,” she coos, pinching his cheek adoringly.
Stiles bristles at the contact, and it takes everything in him not to wig out over it. He does not like being touched without warning by people he’s not intimately associated with, and he especially doesn’t like people touching his face. The only reason he doesn’t snap at this chick is because she’s offering to pay him the equivalent of two full shifts at the crappy Best Buy he works at so he’s willing to suck it up.
The only thing worse than being touched on the face is having to deal with at least thirty old people a day who insist their phone is broken when they’ve actually just changed a minor setting. Camille comes in once a week for help changing the face of her Apple Watch to the newest picture of her grandchildren. It’s cute, but also infuriating because Stiles can’t afford one and he actually knows how to use it.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it’s a deal,” Stiles smiles, backing up under the pretence of making room between them for a handshake.
••••
“What are you doing?”
“Me?” Stiles asks, tilting his head guilelessly and batting his eyelashes a couple times for added effect.
Derek just stares at him, furry eyebrows raised expectantly.
“I’m just spending some bro time with my new bud.”
“I thought I paid you to fuck off.”
“Well, I was persuaded to fuck on again, so I’m just gonna keep standing slightly to the left of you until you make me a better offer.”
“How about I don’t break your legs, and we call it even?” he replies in what Stiles hopes is hyperbolic sarcasm. Too bad Stiles is being paid not to give a fuck about his own general well-being.
“What? Are you going to threaten to tear out my throat next?” Stiles asks with a smirk, leaning against the table Derek’s sat at. He must really not give a fuck about his health if he’s going to try flirting with Derek. But he’s being paid to be as annoying as possible, and there’s nothing more annoying than someone trying to hit on you when you’re not interested.
“With my teeth.”
“Ooh, I might be developing a cannibalism kink from this conversation.”
“Stiles,” Derek growls threateningly, and it goes straight to Stiles’ dick.
“I’m more scared of your sister than I am of you, big guy.”
“I could pick you up and throw you.”
“I’d take you manhandling me over your sister descending upon my body any day.”
“If you don’t get out of my face, I’ll descend upon your body— wait-“ Derek tries to backtrack, but it’s too late.
Stiles leans as far into Derek’s personal space as he thinks he can get away with, lips spread into a Cheshire grin. “No takebacksies.” He jumps back a foot, flailing, when Derek stands abruptly, totally shattering his smooth guy facade. Look, he’s not actually interested in having his face rearranged.
It’s Derek’s turn to smirk at him then as he swipes his books off the table before striding out of the library.
And, W O W, Stiles does not have proper fear responses. The thought of Derek drop kicking him shouldn’t register in his brain as ‘7/10: kinda hot’.
••••
Stiles dials back the flirting, but for the next month he does his very best to annoy Derek to tears. It never happens, but there is a bit of hair pulling, unfortunately not of the sexual variety.
“Stiles, can I say something? Like as a friend.”
Stiles turns to Scott on the couch as he’s buckling the shoes to his Halloween costume. “Yeah, dude. Go for it.”
“I saw your underwear when you bent over a couple minutes ago, and it made me feel uncomfy.”
“They’re called panties, Scott. And unfortunately, this costume doesn’t come in men’s sizes so country boys make do. You’re gonna see a little cheek tonight. You’ll live.”
Scott sighs in exhaustion, which Stiles is choosing to interpret as resignation. Stiles is a twenty-one-year-old grown man. If he wants to dress up like Little Red Riding Slut for an adult party with his adult friends, then he will. Besides, these high heels make his legs look fucking awesome.
••••
“Oh my god, I forgot I said you could wear that,” Lydia says in lieu of a greeting as Stiles and Scott enter the door of the sorority house. There’s a top 40 song blaring out of the open doors and windows, which are covered in fake webbing and huge, fuzzy spider decorations.
“I look good right, Scott?” Stiles turns to Scott only to find his friend has abandoned him, probably to look for Kira. “His opinion never mattered anyway,” Stiles says to Lydia, who snorts and hooks her arm around his.
“Let’s get drinks. Malia’s in the kitchen.”
••••
What Lydia should’ve said was, “Malia’s in the kitchen WITH FUCKING DEREK. Stiles has never in his life wanted an invisibility cloak more than when Derek turns around (in a wolf costume of fucking course) and his beautiful eyes practically fall out of his head and roll across the floor.
Suddenly, Stiles’ corset feels claustrophobic and the open air on his cupcakes is impossible to ignore.
“Are you supposed to be little red riding hood?” Malia asks, shattering through Stiles’ mortification with her stank tone. He thanks every deity for the distraction, taking the opportunity to look away from the shellshocked look on Derek’s face to the unimpressed look on Malia’s.
“What gave it away? Was it the red riding hood?” he replies sarcastically, gripping the bottom of his skirt to give his hands something to do since he left the basket at home.
“You know,” a smooth voice cuts in, its owner slinking around Stiles in something tight and leather. “The fairytale says you’re supposed to eat him with your teeth, not your eyes, Der-bear.”
“Fuck off, Laura.”
Laura turns to Stiles, giving him a proper view of her immaculate Black Widow costume, red lips stretched into a menacing grin. “I’ll pay you two hundred to dance with him.” And, well, it’s not like Stiles doesn’t want to dance with Derek, so, like every other time Laura has paid him, Stiles throws his self preservation out the window, and grabs Derek’s arm, squealing like a fourteen year old in his mind when Derek actually lets Stiles drag him out into the living room where an obscene amount of petting and grinding is being done. You know what they say. When in Rome...
Stiles lets loose the way he always does when he dances, arms flying whichever way they wanna go as he throws his body around in several directions. Meanwhile, Derek just stands there with a glowing blush that deepens as Stiles grabs his fake wolf paws and forces him to do some bastardisation of the twist.
“You don’t dance?” Stiles yells over the music.
“This is dancing?” Derek shouts back.
“You got something better, big guy? Come on. Let’s see those moves.”
Stiles is dead, he decides. He’s dead or dreaming or hallucinating because the next thing he knows, Derek has spun him around and is rubbing his crotch against the back of Stiles’ fluffy skirt in time with the music, and Stiles just has to take a moment to curse the damn skirt because it’s stopping him from properly feeling if Derek’s as hard as he is. He feels chill bumps break out across his skin as his dick fills out his panties just from the idea that Derek could be hard. It’s like he’s taken back in time to when he was a hypersexual teenager with a hair trigger reaction to anything even remotely sexual.
Stiles is so caught up trying not to float away that he doesn’t even notice Derek’s hands have left their safe place on his hips until he feels a ghost-like touch skimming up his bare thighs under the skirt. His body tries to startle away from the touch reflexively but he only ends up with his back flat against Derek’s warm chest.
His fingertips skirt around the obvious bulge, travelling higher to rest on his hips again but under the skirt this time.
“You’re evil.”
“No, this is evil,” Derek rumbles lowly in his ear, grabbing Stiles’ dick and tugging it once roughly before dropping it. Derek’s hand splays wide across his pelvis as they dance after that, teasing but not touching.
It feels like years later when Derek finally nudges him forward with his hips, hands vacating his skirt to rest on his shoulders and guide him out of the crowded room.
“I wonder how much Laura’s gonna pay me for this.”
“Fuck off.”