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Stiles could feel his lip curl as he plucked at the sweater vest lying on the bed. It was striped with bands of charcoal against a lighter grey, and he could tell before he ever put it on that it was going to itch like crazy. "Really?"
Derek shrugged without looking away from the mirror. "Lydia picked it out."
"Of course she did," Stiles muttered, because if there was anything that Lydia liked more than ruling over all she surveyed with an iron fist, it was making sure that all she surveyed was tastefully outfitted courtesy of Neiman Marcus. "I'm going to look like a hipster. An itchy, itchy hipster."
In the mirror, Stiles could see Derek raise an eyebrow with what seemed like an unwarranted level of implied sarcasm about Stiles' usual wardrobe.
"Don't even," Stiles said, tugging the sweater vest on over his head. Ugh. Between this and his glasses and the slacks (slacks!) Lydia had insisted he wear, he was going to look like Greenberg's nerdier cousin. "Not when you're all..." He flapped a hand at Derek.
"What?"
Derek had spent the last five minutes carefully combing a pin-sharp side part into his hair, and the pair of glasses Lydia had given him were a close match to Stiles' own. He was wearing a crisply starched shirt and a neatly knotted tie, and it should have looked incongruous, weird, too much like Derek Hale the Regional Accounts Manager, because for Christ's sake he was wearing loafers.
(It didn't. Stiles sort of wanted to push him up against the wall and blow him. There was no accounting for kinks, he thought sagely to himself.)
"You know," Stiles said with all the eloquence which four years at Stanford had bestowed upon him, "all thing."
"Thanks for that in-depth clarification," Derek said, "that helps."
"They're going to make me in, like, 0.5 seconds," Stiles pointed out. "You, sure, I could buy you as a Eurotrash hedge fund manager who's looking for a tony boarding school to dump his kid in—"
Derek folded his arms. "Eurotrash?"
"Oh please," Stiles said, "In those loafers? I'm just surprised Lydia didn't tell you your undercover name was Jean-Paul."
Derek's brow furrowed. "I would never be a Jean-Paul."
"—but me?" Stiles said. "I still get carded regularly. That little old lady in Starbucks the other week, remember her? She pinched my cheek and told me I was such a nice boy. Who's going to buy that I'm old enough to adopt, let alone have a kid old enough to be going to boarding school?"
The aggravated sigh that Derek let out was a little undercut by the way he crossed the room and pressed a gentle kiss to Stiles' cheek. "So we just imply that you're my trophy husband. They'll never call us on it, it'd be too rude."
Stiles squinted at him. "The people running the boarding school for werewolves that we have every reason to believe is in fact a front for the non-fun kind of magical shenanigans, those kind of people are going to be too polite to question our hastily concocted cover story?"
"You know, I don't remember you kicking up a fuss the time we pretended to be FBI agents," Derek said, "and that was a felony."
"That was different," Stiles muttered, blowing out a breath that surprised him with how shaky it was.
"Why?" Derek asked, and then blinked. "Because we weren't together then?"
Most of the time, the whole concept of parsing human emotion seemed foreign to Derek, but then sometimes—usually when it was most inconvenient to Stiles, but admittedly also with the occasional upside of first kisses and blowjobs—he was like a savant with this shit.
"I don't know! Maybe?" Stiles said, uncomfortably aware that he was this close to whining. "Just—"
Derek's eyebrows did something complicated. "You're worried about the fact that we're going to be pretending to be fictional people who're in a fictional relationship together, when we're in an actual relationship together, aren't you?"
"Sure," Stiles said, dropping his head onto Derek's shoulder, "when you say it like that it sounds nuts."
Derek hummed softly and wrapped his arms around Stiles. It was good, and for a moment Stiles could admit to himself that it had been a long week at work and he was tired; that he'd been looking forward to two whole days of lying around the house with Derek and doing nothing more energetic than napping and engaging in some moderately limber frottage. It had taken him and Derek years to get their act together. The last thing Stiles wanted was to spend time with strangers watching the two of them together and thinking the wrong thing all over again.
Then Derek said, in a pissy voice, "This sweater is really itchy."
"I know, right?" Stiles said.
(What with one thing (them making out before they left) and another (Stiles having to unleash the magical equivalent of a Molotov cocktail as he and Derek high-tailed it out of the fake school), Lydia never was able to return any of their outfits to Neiman Marcus.
She was unimpressed. )