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Turning eighteen was supposed to be awesome.
Turning eighteen was going to mean, like, buying cigarettes and porn, right? Nevermind that Stiles had never smoked a day in his life, and no one had bought porn since the internet became a thing. Still, it was the principle of it. Of Being eighteen. An adult—legally. In the eyes of his great nation, Stiles would be completely and totally responsible for himself.
(Well, unless he got himself, like, maimed or something, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, in which case his dad’s insurance would be responsible for him. But Stiles isn’t in tenth grade anymore, so the likelihood of that happening is, like, way low. So, yeah.)
Eighteen.
Stiles had had plans for turning eighteen since the day he turned fourteen. They had been nebulous things back then—vague ideas of “I’m going to get so drunk,” when he was still acting like he totally loved the way beer tasted and “I’m going to be a man,” before he realized that fighting monsters would become his day job and age him even harder than his mom’s death.
Sometime around his sixteenth birthday, eighteen had become a deadline for losing his virginity. No-fuckin’-way was Stiles Stilinski going to be an eighteen-year-old virgin.
(“You know what happens to eighteen-year-old virgins, Scott? They become forty-year-old virgins! I swear to God, dude, I am not becoming Steve Carell!”)
The problem with being sixteen and perpetually horny, for Stiles at least, was that he was also in love. Love and sex, back then, existed on separate planes. So, like, yeah. Lydia had—she was—okay, everyone with eyes knows it’s impossible to not lust after Lydia Martin.
But Stiles wasn’t that guy, okay? He loved Lydia. He fantasized more about holding her purse while she shopped than anything else. His love between eight in the morning and eleven-thirty at night had been pure. He felt guilty jerking off while thinking about Lydia, okay, and he refused to be held accountable for anything that happened in his dreams.
So, he’d been stuck between a rock and a hard place of sorts: wanting to lose his virginity ASAP but only wanting to sleep with the girl who was least likely to notice him in a town full of perfectly nice other, non-Lydia Martin girls.
And in walked Derek.
Let’s be clear here: Derek Hale was a piece of shit.
(Derek Hale is still sometimes a piece of shit in a lot of ways, but—you know what? Just hold that thought for a sec. We’ll get there.)
You know how some people just bug you? They’re like fuckin’ splinters because they push under your skin and you can’t pull them out so you just keep picking and scraping at them, and other people try to talk to you about, like, relevant shit, right? But all you can focus on is the fucking splinter in your finger and how fuckin’ annoying and unwelcome it is because goddammit it’s a splinter!
Derek Hale was the splinter. Stiles’s splinter. This is a metaphor.
And the more Stiles picked at Derek, the deeper he fuckin’ went.
Scott once sat down at the lunch table and said, “Stiles, I need your help,” and at the same time Stiles said, without any sort of Derek-prompt necessary, “How big of an asshole was Derek being last night? What a prick, right?”
Yeah. Yeah.
But the good thing about Derek being Stiles’s splinter?
Stiles never felt guilty jerking off thinking about his thighs.
(Because have you seen how Derek Hale fits in his jeans? Stiles has several proposed laws drafted and ready to be sent to his state representatives on the detriments of allowing Derek Hale to wear Levi’s.)
Stuff with Derek didn’t stay tense and awful and unwelcome for long, though. Because, you know, underneath the manpain and the scowling and the, yeah, violent tendencies that dictated Derek’s life the first two months Stiles really knew him, Derek was kind of awesome.
He liked to roll his eyes with his whole head, for one thing, and, yeah, he was pretty, but he had a tendency to be a little shit pretty regularly. And, well, if Stiles has ever had a type other than “hot and sarcastic,” he’s never known it.
Plus, sometimes Derek would do these things— be a little shit, you know? And it’d be hilarious, but only to Stiles. Like the two of them alone were sitting in on this great joke, so they’d laugh to themselves or maybe share a smirk and move along, but these moments? They felt like something.
And at some point, Stiles kind of figured, “Hey, maybe I’m his splinter, too?” There wasn’t really a way to confirm this theory, so he sorta sat on it for a while, brought himself off to the idea that Derek was—maybe—bringing himself off to thoughts of Stiles. It was, like, the Circle of Spank Bank for a solid four months there. Chaffing abounded.
Two weeks ago, Isaac had shown up at school, clapped Scott on the back, and given Stiles a long once-over.
“Okay, creepy much?” Stiles had demanded, squirming under the scrutiny.
In his airily douchey manner, Isaac had said, “I don’t see the appeal.”
“Hey!” Stiles had gone in for the defense before—“Wait. Hold on. Rewind that shit for a second. Are you saying that someone does see the appeal? As in, someone you know? We know? I know?”
And Isaac had smiled, just smiled.
Which, like, fucking ace, right? The only common denominator Stiles could see between himself and Isaac was Derek (and Scott, but—no. Not since a weird month and a half in seventh grade after Stiles got hard while wrestling with Scott, anyway, when he’d been at an age where a well-shaped LEGO could set him off).
(Also Boyd, but Boyd didn’t fuckin’ like Stiles. Had never fuckin’ liked Stiles. Would, likely, never fuckin’ like Stiles.)
It felt like a green light. Possibly a yield to oncoming traffic sign. But Stiles was an optimist, so he saw this as the green light to his sexual fantasies becoming reality. And it was awesome.
There were things to consider, though, before Stiles could make his move on his splinter-turned-(ughhowdidthishappen)-crush Derek Hale.
Things like the fact that his dad was an elected law enforcement official, and Stiles, the sheriff's kid, was seventeen.
For a week and a half longer.
Ten days, then the Circle of Spank Bank would evolve into the Circle of Mutual Orgasms. In this, Stiles was confident.
Arrogant even.
He wrote a song. It went: I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex with Derek Hale.
He sang it a lot. He gave it a drum beat. It was catchy as hell.
Scott got it stuck in his head once and it was just a bad situation for everyone involved (namely: Allison, Stiles, and—oh, God—Harris).
Three days ago, Stiles was supposed to arrive on Derek Hale’s doorstep and announce that he was an adult and thus legally sex-able. He saw no flaw in this plan; he expected to be devirginized in all of the best ways. He had plans for the spiral staircase in that apartment, okay. Detailed plans.
But, six days ago, Stiles’s father had derailed all of Stiles’s trains of thoughts on the subject (and there were a lot of these, okay).
He sat Stiles down and said, “Stiles, you’ll be eighteen in three days.”
And Stiles had said, “I know,” with all the excitement and joy capable of a seventeen year old on the cusp of manhood.
And his dad had said, “It’s time for you to start taking on some responsibility, I think.”
And Stiles had said, “Is this about me forgetting trash day again? Because I’m still, like, super sorry about that.”
And his dad had shook his head and said. “I’m talking about money, Stiles. Car insurance? Cell phone bills? Now that you’re eighteen, I think it’s time that these things became your responsibility.”
Stiles gave him a blank look; turning eighteen was supposed to be awesome. Getting a job did not sound awesome.
“That being said, I took the liberty of looking around town, and, through a few of my connections, I managed to get you a job.”
Really, in retrospect, the McDonald’s visor on the table should have sent up, like, a dozen red flags as soon as Stiles walked in. But Stiles, in a cloud of I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex with Derek Hale, had completely missed it.
So, this is how Stiles started working at McDonald’s five days ago. Working so much, in fact, that his new job effectively shut down his quest to get his VCard swiped.
Leaving him, Stiles Stilinski, a fuckin’ eighteen-year-old virgin after all.
Goddammit.
*
So. Working.
Stiles’s boss’s name is Alfie, and he’s kind of a dick, but he likes Stiles ok and thinks they’re going to be BFFs because Alfie had a thirty-minute conversation with the sheriff of Beacon Hills a week ago. And Stiles is his son. The sheriff’s. Not Alfie. Alfie’s kind of a dick.
Stiles is beginning to think his dad is kind of a dick, too, which would make sense since Stiles himself is kind of a dick.
Hereditary dickishness.
This is the sort of thing he thinks about as he’s running his hand under cold water because the french fry fryer has burned the fuck out of his hand for the third time today.
The one good thing about working at McDonald’s is that none of his freakishly in-shape friends ever, ever, ever come this way. If they want some good ole fashion artery clogging, they go to the Arby’s on the other side of town where the curly fries are. Or Taco Bell. Or In-N-Out if they have a burger craving so powerful and so specific they’re willing to drive four hours to satisfy it.
(Lydia.)
Greenberg comes by every once in a while, but he never recognizes Stiles under the visor. The fact that Greenberg doesn’t notice him would be really, really upsetting in any other scenario.
That is the sort of thing that Stiles thinks about as he’s driving home from his fourth day of training, blasting the Pussy Cat Dolls and trying not to think about how “Tainted Love” makes him think about Derek.
His work schedule is hell, by the way. After school, from four to nine, every week day. Then full days on the weekends. His dad promised these to Alfie, apparently, and when Stiles first found this out and had tried to worm his way out—
(“But school, Dad! My grades?”
“If you could manage straight As when your life was on the line, son, I think you can handle a little part time work.”)
— Yeah. Yeah.
He’s trying to formulate some counterargument to that as he makes his way upstairs and into his room. His tacky uniform is too baggy, and the part of him that is grossly proud and protective of his sense of style demands that he strip ASAP and wash the grease out from under his fingernails and put his world back on its axis. With plaid.
Allison is in his room, though, because of course she is.
“Oh my God,” she says, looking at his uniform.
“Oh my God,” Stiles says, looking at her looking at his uniform.
“Oh my God.”
“Oh my God.”
This goes on for a minute or so before Stiles has the sense to try and cover himself and hisses, “Allison what are you doing here?”
She looks a little ashamed for a second, but the dark, delighted grin on her face kills the effect. “I wanted to talk to you about Scott,” – oh, duh— “but this is better. When did you get a job?”
“My dad got it for me,” Stiles answers stiffly. “I don’t really want to talk about it, actually. What about Scott?”
“Couldn’t he have found someplace… else?”
For the life of him, Stiles can’t explain the need to defend his employer. It just kind of happens. “Hey! For your information, McDonald’s employs over half a million people worldwide—and that’s not even counting their franchises! And I don’t exactly see you with a job—”
“Does Scott know?”
Stiles shifts his weight awkwardly and rips off his visor. “No,” he says stubbornly. “Are you going to tell him?”
“Does Derek know? Oh, please tell me you’ve told Derek.”
“Have I mentioned that I don’t want to talk about this?”
“His face, oh my God. I bet it would be priceless. Can I be there when you tell him?”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Stiles snaps, his ears burning. “I need to take a shower, and you,” he points an accusatory finger at her, “you need to go. And not tell anybody about this.”
Not waiting for her answer, he starts shimmying out of his polo, twisting a little bit in its overwhelming mass. Allison gets to her feet, but she lingers to watch him, an obnoxious little smirk on her lips as she makes her way—slowly—towards the door.
Stiles has his belt halfway off and is dancing out of his pants when she speaks again:
“Can I get a Filet-O-Fish with that shake?”
She takes off down the hallway with a laugh before he can round on her.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up!” Stiles hollers as he scrambles into the empty upstairs hallway, stumbling in his half-off pants. “And Filet-O-Go Fuck Yourself while you’re at it!”
He can hear Allison laughing her way through the front door.
Dammit, he really likes her. When did that happen?
*
Lydia visits him at work two days later.
“So it’s true,” she says, clearly more to herself than to him.
“Is nothing in this town sacred?” Stiles asks her.
“I thought Allison was joking. I had hoped she was joking.”
“I hate my friends.”
“Companies that put their employees in visors should be shut down.”
“Can I even call you my friend? Lydia, are we friends?”
“And, really, beige and black? It might actually be better if they made you wear head-to-toe yellow.”
“I don’t think we’re friends.”
“Between this and your Jeep, I honestly don’t know what to do with you, Stiles.”
“I really wanted us to be friends, but I understand the long history of sexual tension between us is just too much to bury.”
“How are you going to convince anybody to go to prom with you this spring?”
“No, really, it’s for the best, Lydia. Friendships are hard things, I know. It’s me, not you. I hope you can understand, someday.”
“I mean, I certainly wouldn’t go with you.”
“How are you still ignoring me? I think you’re giving me a complex.”
“Actually…”
“Don’t mind me; I’ll just be over here, tending to my neutering wounds.”
“I like to be bold, though, and you definitely couldn’t do fuchsia, and I was really wanting to do fuchsia this year to spite Becca Parsons for saying red heads can’t wear warm colors.”
“Get it? Because you’re soldering my balls off here, Lydia.”
“You could do red, though. You might actually look palatable in red. We could do red, and Becca Parsons could shove it.”
“I wear red a lot, and you’ve never told me I look palatable in it before.”
Lydia makes a hmm sound, her hand cocked at a bossy, judgey angle near her chin, then says, “It’s a date. I’ll figure everything out. Just take off the visor and try not to get horribly disfigured falling into the fryer.”
“What exactly is Becca Parsons shoving and where?”
Lydia tosses her bangs back and leaves without another word.
It takes Stiles twenty minutes to realize he’s going to be Lydia Martin’s date to senior prom.
Alfie makes creepy eyebrows at him in the office when Stiles clocks out later that night and says, “Gonna tap that? Get all up in that ass?”
Stiles vomits a little in his mouth.
*
After that, he spills the beans about his new, glamorous job to Scott and Isaac and Boyd at lunch the next day, figuring it’s best to rip that BAND-AID off. Besides, being ashamed of it is dumb, and it could only make him more ashamed of it. Owning it like a boss would just make him seem confident, and confidence is sexy as fuck. Right?
It goes alright, and everybody seems quietly amused but not obnoxiously mocking.
Then Boyd asks him if he has to wear a visor, and Isaac kind of loses it.
Again: Stiles hates his friends. Are they even his friends? If they aren't, he totally doesn't want them to be.
Later, at work, he takes his break in the corner booth along the wall of windows at the front of the store, attempting to put a dent in his homework and humming I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex, I’m going to have sex with Derek Hale, and Scott slides across from him.
Scott bobs his head along and says, “Have you actually done that yet?”
“No,” Stiles says testily. “When I’m not in school-hell, I’m in work-hell, and when I’m not in work-hell, my dad is getting super clingy about me going off to college and stuff, so we’re doing father-son things.”
“… Oh, that’s…” Scott is visibly torn between being supportive of family time and being supportive of Stiles’s plan to get laid.
“Yeah,” Stiles sighs, cutting him some slack. “It is.”
“So, you haven’t told Derek about the new job either?”
Stiles levels Scott with a hard look. “Did you miss the part about havingliterally zero time to myself?”
Scott shrugs; his eyes are on the menu plastered above the cashiers’ counter.
“Besides,” Stiles sighs, his cheeks puffing out as the air passes through him, “I’m sure he and Isaac and Boyd are laughing over it as we speak.”
“It’s less the job,” Scott says, his eyes still on the menu. “I don’t think anybody cares that you’re working here. It’s just the idea of you wearing avisor.”
There’s a beat where they both look at Stiles’s visor where it’s laying on the table top.
“It’s so dumb,” Stiles groans after a few seconds of silence as he slumps against the vinyl of the booth. “I hate it. Lydia’s right, companies that make their employees wear these should be shut down.”
“Don’t they have, like, normal hats?”
“They look just as dorky when I can’t wear them backwards.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“So, are you guys still selling the McRib?”
“Oh my God.”
*
The thing is, Stiles wasn’t exaggerating when he said that he had no time to himself these days. He works constantly—to the point that he thinks he might actually be able to make a case about labor laws if he can sell the idea of school-as-labor—and when he’s not working or at school, his dad is weirdly present.
Like, all the time.
All the time.
And while he might be getting worked to the bone and growing more and more anxious because he hasn’t heard back about any scholarships yet (even though he just submitted his information for scholarship season two weeks ago), Stiles knows what suspicious-as-fuck smells like, and his dad reeks these days.
He just can’t figure out why his dad is being so clingy.
He doesn’t buy the you’re-leaving-for-college thing for a freaking second, okay? And, while he loves his dad, they have shared and enjoyed all the benefits of a pretty hands-off single father household for five years. The fact that Stiles’s eighteenth birthday came with more parental supervision is really, really, really starting to get to him.
The puzzle gets solved on a Friday night when Stiles gets let out of his shift because Maisie wanted an extra shift for Christmas cash. It’s his first Friday night to himself since he started working three weeks earlier. He celebrates for a solid fifteen minutes in the bathroom, with “Cowboy Casanova”playing through the speaker overhead.
Which, funnily enough, kind of made him miss Jackson.
Anyway, he’s getting home as his dad is humming under his breath and gathering his things to get ready for his first night shift in weeks. It’s like the clouds have opened up and a choir of angels has started to singYou’re going to have sex, you’re going to have sex, you’re going to have sex with Derek Hale. It’s awesome.
“Heading out?” Stiles asks, hanging his visor on the rack near the door. His dad stops in his tracks, narrowing his eyes.
“You’re supposed to be working,” he says, the music gone from his breath and his entire demeanor shifting into something stiff and distant. “Why aren’t you at work, Stiles?”
Stiles shrugs, going for nonchalant even as he’s trying to catch tells from his father; the man’s like Fort Knox with this shit, but it’s good practice to try. “Maisie wanted an extra shift for Christmas cash, so I get my tonight off.”
“Maisie Roberts?” his dad asks.
“The one and only,” Stiles practically sings. Because life is great and he is so going to seduce Derek Hale tonight. “Night shift tonight?”
His dad purses his lips and nods stiffly. “I can try and get out of it— Do some father-son stuff tonight? Maybe watch the game?”
“Dad, it’s Friday night. There is no game.”
The look crossing his dad’s face is one Stiles has never, ever seen before. He looks a little like a caged animal.
“Besides, I was thinking I would hang out with Scott tonight—”
“Oh, come on, Stiles.”
And—what? “What?” Stiles asks, going for innocence. His dad’s expression is stormy.
That’s when it occurs to Stiles.
Earlier, when he first got home, it hadn’t been a chorus of angels singing the sex-with-Derek-Hale song. It had been his father.
This occurs to him with sudden clarity, and he can feel his eyes go comically wide.
“Motherfu—”
*
The conversation they have after that is possibly the most bizarre and awkward sex conversation a father and son have ever had the misery of sharing.
“You,” Stiles starts angrily when he can finally make words happen. “You were trying to cockblock—”
“You wrote a song, Stiles. Who writes a song about this sort of thing?”
“This wasn’t about cell phone bills at all! You put me in a visor to keep me from getting deflowered. You gave me a chastity visor.”
“You and I both know how word gets around in this town. Marcia was singing it over the dispatch all day yesterday.”
“Because no one would want to have sex with me in that thing.”
“She thought it was an indie song she heard on the radio and that the lyrics were I’m obsessed with a hay bale.”
“You are a terrible person, oh my God.”
“And while I completely trust that you are extremely well-educated on the possible risks of having sex—”
“Oh my God.”
“I am your father, and it is my right to be concerned about these things.”
“Oh my God?”
“Things like your heart and your body.”
“Oh my God.”
“And making sure that you’re not just throwing yourself around.”
“Throwing myself around, oh my God.”
“Would you stop with the ‘oh my Gods,’ Stiles? I’m being serious.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. There is literally nothing else to be said. I have no words for how painful this conversation is for me right now, Dad.”
“And while I respect that you are eighteen, and you have a right to choose what you’d like to do with your body and who you’d like to… do those things with—”
“I feel like I should have gained that right after the Harpies, actually.”
His dad pauses mid-sentence and stares Stiles down. “The Harpies,” he repeats, clearly remembering that nightmare in vivid detail.
“Yes, the Harpies. The ones I helped to vanquish?” Stiles pushes like he’s going to jog some sudden memory out of an amnesiac if he speaks slowly and emphatically enough. “After that mess, I feel ready to tackle the grand and terrifying task of putting on a condom.”
“Oh my God,” his dad says.
“RIGHT?”
*
Through all the trials and tribulations of having his first job, Stiles hadn’t once stopped to question the thing that set all of this off. Isaac saying “I don’t see the appeal,” five weeks ago had been, back then, solidevidence that Derek wanted a piece of Stilinski pie. The card had read Go straight to bed, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, be prepared to check your virginity at the door, and that had been that. No questions asked.
Now, standing on Derek’s doorstep, Stiles can’t help but feel like—maybe—he had just heard what he’d wanted to hear. He’s spent the better part of a year, now, falling into some strange, indescribable Derek Hale crush, and he’d just wanted.
He feels kind of dumb, now, so he turns to walk away from Derek’s door. Maybe he’ll go to Scott’s place, ask him to clarify once and for all the sort of shit werewolf smelling powers can say about a person since that shit gives Stiles all sorts of panic when he lets himself think too long and hard about it.
But before he can get off the freaking door mat, the door is opening and, oh God, there’s Derek Hale. Six feet of what are you doing here surprise and his stupid leather jacket in hand like he was ready to go out.
“Oh,” Stiles says.
“Oh,” Derek says.
Then silence.
“Well,” Stiles shoots for cool and collected and misses by a gazillion miles. “This has been fun and all, but I’m just gonna—yeah.”
He says, as he stands still, totally not moving, like, at all.
“Do you want to come in?” Derek asks.
“Oh, uh. If you’re going out—”
“I’m not going out,” Derek says quickly. Both of their eyes go, then, to Derek’s jacket, and Derek leans back into the apartment to toss it aside. Then he pulls the door back and looks at Stiles, which is about as much of an invitation as Stiles could want.
“I mean, don’t change your plans for me,” Stiles says even as he walks right on in, brushing past Derek in a way that makes him feel wired from head to toe.
“No plans to change, really,” Derek tells him with a shrug, closing the door quietly.
They stand there for a while, Stiles hovering a few feet away from the bar by the kitchen, and Derek a couple steps removed from the doorway. Silence stretches between them until Stiles literally can’t take the way Derek’s not looking at him anymore.
“So, like, okay,” he starts, putting his hands in front of him, holding them out in a follow along, please gesture. “You know how some people are like splinters?”
“No,” Derek answers.
“No, like, not actual splinters, but like, they’re really obnoxious and you can’t pay attention to anything but how much you want to pick at them?”
“Until your body pushes it all the way out because it’s rejected the splinter the whole time?” Derek asks, looking wary all of the sudden.
“Exactly! No—wait—what? No. That—no. Like, yes, but no. Like, if your body could… tolerate splinters. Like, accept them instead of rejecting them. That kind of thing. Like… until you grew to like the splinter a little bit.”
Derek looks horribly lost; his mouth is open a little bit like he’s trying to come up with all of the reasons why what Stiles is trying to say makes no sense.
“Okay, wait,” he says, sighing. “I’m doing this all wrong. I turned eighteen like almost a month ago, right? And I was telling Scott for ever that I didn’t want to be Steve Carell, but then my dad goes and gets me this job, and all of the sudden I’m Steve Carell after all. And I don’t want to be Steve Carell, you know? And Isaac said this thing that made me think, like, maybe you’d want to help me, but then my dad put me in a chastity visor, and that literally took up all my time, so I’ve been working at this stupid job for three freakin’ weeks and all I’ve gotten from it is a stupid uniform.
“Oh, and a prom date. Because, get this, right? Lydia Martin wants to go to prom with me, and I’m pretty positive I’m not going to survive that after three freakin’ years of supernatural bullshit, Lydia’s going to kill me overthe color red she wants to wear or something.
“And I just—that—I freaking hate that, and I hate that I’ve spent the past three weeks working when all I wanted to do was give you permission to un-velcro that stupid fucking visor and do away with these terrible metaphors.”
Derek blinks at him, slowly.
“You got absolutely none of that,” Stiles guesses.
“Something about Steve Carell and prom?” Derek tries, sounding overwhelmed.
Stiles deflates, then, sagging against the barstool behind him. The silence takes over again.
Derek breaks it this time by saying, “You’re working at McDonald’s?”
Stiles laughs mirthlessly and rubs a hand over his face like he can wipe his embarrassment away. “Isaac and Boyd tell you that?”
“No,” Derek says, shaking his head. “Your hands.”
Stiles looks up, his eyebrows high on his forehead, then looks down at his hands, which are covered in small red blisters from a few incidents he’s had with popping oil from the fryers. “Oh,” he says.
“I used to get those, sometimes,” Derek tells him. “Mine healed quickly, though.”
Stiles snorts. “Right. Freaky werewolf crap—wait.”
Derek smirks back at him when Stiles narrows his eyes suspiciously.
“Are you telling me,” Stiles says slowly, “that you worked at McDonald’s?You?”
“It was my first job.”
“Your first job,” Stiles repeats carefully, feeling the words in his mouth.
“In New York.”
“City?”
Derek nods and shrugs at the same time. “Work was work, and living in the city costs a lot. Laura covered most of it, but I wanted to help.”
“By working at McDonald’s.”
Derek gives him a Look. “Yes, by working at McDonald’s.”
“I’m sorry!” Stiles cries, throwing his hands out defensively. “I always just thought, you’d do something—I dunno—cooler. Like bartending or something.”
“At eighteen?”
“I don’t know!” Stiles insists. “Honestly, I never thought that much about it!”
Derek snorts and tucks his hands into his pockets, folding his shoulders in a little and looking much smaller than Stiles remembers him ever being.
“I didn’t mind it,” Derek confesses. “I didn’t like cleaning the bathrooms, though.”
Stiles is on his feet again quickly, ready to share his own grievances with near-violent enthusiasm.
“The other day I sliced my finger open in the kitchen, and I couldn’t tell if I got any blood on the burger I was wrapping or if that was just ketchup.”
“Yeah, that happens.”
“And my boss is a creepy dick.”
“I think that’s a prerequisite for being a fast food manager, actually.”
“And the assholes we get in there sometimes. Don’t fucking start with them. It’s like do you realize we are a fast food place? This isn’t fuckingBurger King. You can’t have it your way.”
Derek just nods along, looking like he’s remembering. Jesus.
“And my fingers.” Stiles can’t stop himself; the dam’s broken, and all the complaints he has pent up in his body are just going to sweep the world away. “They hurt all the time. They’re never going to stop being blistered ever, are they?”
“Probably not,” Derek purses his lips. “I smelled like french fries for three months after I quit.”
Then he smiles, just a little bit, in this gesture of awkward comfort from across the several feet of distance they’ve put between themselves.
And that—that’s it. Stiles is done, capital D O N E. What is he supposed to do in the face of this side of Derek, who smiles (however small) at Stiles and shares stories about his past like Stiles is allowed to know about them? He doesn’t want to laugh about it or ignore it or shove thefeelings he gets from it into some dark corner anymore. He wants to—he wants to—
“I really want you to kiss me right now,” he admits weakly.
“Oh thank God,” Derek breathes, and then—just like that—he’s on Stiles.
They’re not kissing, exactly, but Derek’s got an arm hooked around Stiles’s lower back, pulling Stiles in close, and his other hand is angling Stiles’s face down (because being eighteen comes with a growth spurt, so maybe it is awesome after all).
“Oh my God,” Stiles gets out, his voice wobbling a bit and his heart in his throat.
“I’ve been hearing that stupid song for weeks,” Derek hisses.
“It is not stupid,” Stiles says, but his words and argument get lost almost instantly in Derek’s mouth.
And, wow, Stiles should have quit his job twenty days ago because the fact that he hasn’t been kissing Derek all the time since he turned eighteen should be considered a crime in at least forty-nine states. (Texas does shit weirdly okay, you never fucking know with them.) Derek has really soft, nice lips, and he keeps grazing Stiles’s lower lip with histeeth and, oh, Christ.
Stiles threads his fingers through Derek’s hair, blindsided a bit by howsoft it is—blindsided a bit by how soft Derek is. His hand on Stiles’s face is soft; his lips are soft; his hair is soft. For a guy who spends a lot of time looking hard, he’s awful comfy to make out with.
Because that’s what this is. Making out.
Aggressively, actually, since Derek has managed to back Stiles up into the bar that separates the kitchen from the living area of the loft, and he’s getting his hands under Stiles’s thighs and hiking him up enough that Stiles has to stand on his freaking toes and open his legs a little for Derek to wedge his knee right on in.
There’s a lot of noises between them; it’s equally awkward and sexy. Stiles gets the idea that that’s a pretty good summary of what sex is, and he’s totally on board with testing that theory ASAP. Derek’s hands are on Stiles’s hips, and they’re moving together, rolling a little, as Derek’s hands slide up underneath Stiles’s shirt. His thumbs make little circles on the skin over Stiles hip bones, while Stiles sucks on Derek’s tongue.
“This is a really great way to get this show over and done with fast,” Stiles tells him when Derek’s lips start to trail away to the hook of Stiles’s jaw. “Just so you know.”
“We have all night,” Derek says, his voice low and rough and oh, okay.
“All night,” Stiles repeats, dazed.
Derek hums agreement into Stiles’s neck, and the vibrations of it go all the way to Stiles’s toes. He laughs, breathlessly, and tightens his arms around Derek’s neck.
“Cool,” he says. “I actually know this really great place where we can get breakfast. I mean, we kind of have to be there by 10:30, but—”
Derek kisses the laughter right out of him.