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“One Uber for a sad puppy in a sad, sad puddle of rain?”
Liam flicks his head up at the rumble of Theo’s voice over the pattering rain and glowers as best he can through the tendrils of drenched hair plastered to his forehead. He’s shivering and soaked to the bone to the point that not even his naturally oven-heated temperature, courtesy of his werewolf powers, can compete with the absolute cloud of gray cold surrounding him. He’s freezing, he’s exhausted, and he’s been wandering along the side of the road for G-d knows how long.
“Where the fuck is the Uber?” Liam demands. He glances around. Sure enough, Theo has come alone, in nothing but his hoodie and sopping wet Converse and not a truck or a jangle of car keys to be found. He’s equally as sodden as his boyfriend.
“I didn’t actually call an Uber.” Theo rolls his eyes. “Dropped my phone somewhere back there trying to run after you. Kinda inconvenient, you know, deciding to make a dramatic exit from the diner in the middle of a rainstorm when it’s almost impossible to sniff you out. You sure do know how to keep a guy on his toes.”
Liam crosses his arms over his chest. He swears it’s for emphasis and not because his skin is going blue and could use a little stimulation.
“I did not make a dramatic exit,” he argues. “I made a completely reasonable exit while it was still light out and there is no way I could have predicted the rainstorm.”
Theo heaves his shoulders in a sigh. It’s obvious he has a thousand and one counterarguments just waiting to spring from his tongue, but he wisely bites them off. Instead, he decides to point out, “You made your ‘reasonable exit’ while I was in the bathroom so I couldn’t have known you had decided to disappear until five minutes later. Thanks for the headstart, by the way.”
“Just—whatever.” Liam shuts his eyes and blows out a breath through his nose. “I know I should still be angry with you but I’m just tired and neither of us have a car or a phone and I just…I wanna go home.”
Something shifts immediately in the air between them. Blinking through the steady stream of summer rain, Theo shuffles closer and grabs Liam’s elbow through the soggy material of his denim jacket. “That can be arranged.”
Liam laughs humorlessly. “How?”
“Well, for starters…” Theo reaches for the back pocket of his jeans and produces a collapsible umbrella with a flourish. It bursts open, sending a spray of droplets arching toward Liam’s face, who scrunches up his nose and flinches back to avoid impact. When he opens his eyes again, the downpour of rain has ceased, because he’s now standing under the shade of Theo’s spring green umbrella while the chimera stares back at him expectantly through the beads of moisture crowding his eyebrows and sliding down the slope of his nose.
Objectively, Liam knows he still ought to be upset with his boyfriend. Objectively, he also knows that Theo can be an asshole and a pretty asshole at the same time.
“Why the fuck didn’t you use the umbrella coming after me?” says Liam.
“Excuse me for being a little more preoccupied with the possibility that you hated me. Possibly forever,” Theo retorts.
“I don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, well, your ‘perfectly reasonable exit’ in the middle of our date kinda contradicts that idea.”
“I don’t hate you, Theo,” Liam repeats, more urgently this time. “Yeah, I think you’re a dick for suggesting that we break up just because I’m going to college. I think you’re an utter asshole for talking over me and not letting me have a g-ddamn choice in the matter. But I don’t hate you. I could—I could never hate you.”
“Because you’re too good? Because it’s just not in your blood?” Theo has his gaze fixed on the ground as he scuffs the toe of his drenched sneaker against the edge of the puddled pothole in the pavement.
“Because there’s nothing about you to hate,” Liam sighs, resigned to the fact that his genius of a boyfriend is an absolute dolt at all things unrelated to crime, science, or other people’s business.
Theo lets out a choked laugh. “Highly doubtful. My time underground would kinda undermine your whole argument.”
“When are you going to put that argument to rest?” Liam says softly. He follows the instincts of his beating heart and reaches forward to grab Theo’s hand and squeeze it once, twice, restoring circulation to the freezing skin there. “The fact that you ran after me because I was upset…if I think hard about it, it kind of balances out all the previous assholery.”
“Yeah, but I was the one that made you upset in the first place.”
“Because you weren’t listening to me.”
“I just want the best for you.”
“And that’s exactly why you prove, time and again, that there’s nothing to hate about you. I could hear it in your voice, could smell it in your chemosignals over lunch,” says Liam. “You were killing yourself even just suggesting that we break up. But in some twisted, misguided sense, you believed you were after my own welfare.”
“I don’t want you to feel obligated to stay with me when you discover there are bigger and better things waiting for you out there,” Theo confesses in a whisper.
“‘When’?” Liam quotes him. “Since when did chimeras acquire the power to tell the future, huh?”
Theo mutters, “Shut up.”
“Nope. Theo, look at me.”
At the gentle prodding of Liam’s fingers underneath Theo’s chin, the chimera finally lifts his gaze to meet the beta’s, his irises already full and brimming.
“There’s nothing bigger and better out there for me,” Liam says, matching the softness of Theo’s earlier tone. “What could possibly be bigger and better than the guy who saved me from a supernatural genocide and decided to stay in this godforsaken place for me? Who decided to turn his life around because he wanted me to believe in him? And who also, by the way, happens to be my anchor?”
“I—” But the protest dies as quickly as it arose on Theo’s tongue. He bites down on his bottom lip and meets the blaze of Liam’s steady gaze with newfound awe.
“Also,” Liam adds lightly, “I’m chronically attracted to violent idiots with reformed psychopathic tendencies. So.” He shrugs. “Guess you’ll be stuck with me for a lifetime and then some.”
Theo swallows. “I s’pose I am attracted to reckless dumbasses who need constant rescuing,” he concedes.
Liam beams. “See? Now you’re getting it.”
“I’m an idiot.”
Liam’s grin widens. “Yeah. See my previous comment re: violent psychopathic idiots.”
“You done now?”
“Depends. You think you can manage to direct us home? I kinda got lost and have no idea which part of Beacon Hills we’re in.”
“Neither do I. I was kind of more preoccupied with chasing down the love of my life.”
At that, Liam socks him squarely in the arm.
Theo scowls, but there’s no denying the light that dances now in both their eyes. “Well, who’s the violent psychopathic idiot now?”