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Theo swipes the apple out of Liam’s hand before he can actually bite it, and puts it back in the basket that he’s got slung over his elbow; when Liam makes a scalded protest and goes to snatch it back, Theo deliberately wraps Liam’s ankle up with one of his own, and trips him into a nearby advertising shelf. Liam flails, making a stupid noise and just barely managing to avoid the collision with—several boxes of gaudily-colored children’s breakfast cereals? The cardboard boxes are plastered with grinning cartoon dragons, anyway, and it at least buys Theo a few seconds to get a few steps ahead of him in the meantime.
Liam jogs to catch up with him once he’s recovered, grousing, “Dick move,” as he comes up along Theo’s side.
“Leave my fruit alone, then,” Theo absently retorts—tagliatelle; why is tagliatelle always impossible to find in the store, does everyone in this town have a weirdly specific addiction?—and doesn’t realize that he’s given Liam the perfect opening until Liam smarms, “But I thought you liked it when I don’t leave your fruit alone,” and waggles his eyebrows ridiculously when Theo twists mechanically around to stare at him.
Down the aisle, Mrs. Anesko pauses in reaching for a jar of peanut butter, her eyebrows reaching her hairline.
Liam’s cheeks immediately flare. “Sorry, Mrs. Anesko!” he squeaks, and scuttles away around the corner of the next aisle before she can reply, thereby missing the amused grin that follows him. Theo just sighs and gives a her friendly—if pained—acknowledging smile, and sedately trails after Liam, ducking low between two shelves to snag the second-to-last box of tagliatelle that he’d finally spotted as he goes.
Liam’s huddled behind a tower of stacked black beans halfway down the next aisle, hiding. He peeks out when Theo passes him, and then—when he sees that the aisle behind Theo remains empty—reattaches himself to Theo’s side, near tripping Theo with his proximity. His cheeks are still stained a light pink, and if Theo doesn’t find a way to distract himself, he’s going to reach over and personally free Liam’s bitten bottom lip from between his teeth with his thumb. He focuses on pulling up his remaining grocery list on his phone instead.
Liam takes advantage of his distraction to start rooting through the basket at his hip, making exclamatory hmmms and judgmental huhs depending on what he finds, and whether he approves of it. He ends up yanking Theo off-balance when Theo fails to notice and tries to keep walking, Theo making a dumb noise and Liam yelping as the two of them then engage in a wild scramble right after to keep the basket from falling or any of the groceries inside from making a break for it. They manage, barely, and Theo glares and smacks Liam’s hands pointedly away from the basket edge, Liam yanking his fingers to his chest and holding them cradled there as he peers up at Theo with injured, soulful eyes.
Theo just gives him a dry look right back.
Liam drops the act. “This date is boring,” he complains, dogging Theo’s heels as Theo starts walking again.
Having tuned him out, it takes a moment for Liam’s complaint to register. “This isn’t a date,” he counters.
Liam frowns at him.
Theo rolls his eyes and turns back to the displays of oatmeal in front of him, briefly considering branching out and trying a different brand, before giving up and grabbing the one he always gets. “I told you I was going to the store.”
Liam stops in the middle of the aisle, still frowning. “Then why did you invite me?”
“I didn’t,” Theo reminds him, snagging a block of cheese from a stack of its fellows, and starting to make his way towards the registers. “I specifically said, ‘do not come with me,’ and you said, ‘don’t tell me what to do,’ and followed me here.”
Liam makes a face, apparently considering this, and then—follows him.
He also follows Theo back to his apartment, but that’s to be expected, given he’d left his car there. Theo half expects him to split off and wander home, just like he’d wandered over in the first place, but instead Liam trails him up to his apartment, and starts putting groceries away without being asked. Theo mentally shrugs and snags the ingredients he needs for the dinner he’d been planning on making before Liam can put them away, mentally adjusting the recipe up another serving.
He’s in the middle of caramelizing onions when there’s a knock on the front door, and by the time he’s leaned back to see through the archway out of the kitchen and into the rest of his apartment’s first floor, the lock is disengaging. Corey pokes his head through, followed a second later by Mason, hovering just above him.
“Hey,” Corey greets. “We heard you were cooking.”
Theo turns to glare at Liam.
“What!” Liam squawks. “You are!”
Corey grins and pads through the doorway, offering, “We can chop things, we’re pro choppers,” as Mason follows on his heels, a large wooden bowl full of slightly sad-looking salad supplies in his arms, which he and Corey had clearly scrounged from Corey’s fridge. Theo spots several shriveled carrots, a head of lettuce just starting to droop at the edges; a half-empty box of cherry tomatoes and a wrinkled cucumber, among other random vegetables. He sighs, grabbing another onion from the bowl on the counter, and tells them, “Cutting boards and knives are in the—“ only for both of them and Liam to chorus, “We know!”
They set up a little assembly line, Liam peeling and Corey chopping and Mason arranging things in the bowl, as the only one of three with any aesthetic sense. Corey and Liam get into a heated squabble over the optimal carrot-slices-for-salad thinness at one point, and Theo eventually bodily separates them when he can’t take it anymore, planting a put-out Liam in front of the onions to despondently stir them every minute or so, while Mason and Corey rebalance their respective duties, Mason taking over peeling as well.
“Yo!” someone calls, as Theo is wrapping chicken breast in herbs and oil and parchment paper to roast in the oven that he actually, physically has to relocate Liam from in front of, before he can open it. Stiles comes loping into the kitchen as Liam is dramatically crying, “But my onions!” as Theo shoulders him out of the way, so Theo has to look up at him from his half-bent over position, glass dish of wrapped chicken breasts in his hands.
“Don’t tell me,” he says dryly. “You heard I was cooking.”
Stiles scowls. “Oh, so you don’t want these melt-in-your-mouth scallops from that fishwife in Redding that Derek has to make a special trip to see?” he shoots back tartly, circling the aforementioned scallops temptingly through the air, and then miming taking them back as Theo helplessly follows them with his eyes.
Luckily, Derek comes up behind Stiles the next second, and removes them from his hands. “You still keeping the lemons and garlic in the same place?” he asks Theo, as Stiles squawks and ineffectually tries to steal them back.
“Sure does,” Liam answers instead, waving his oil-stained spatula around; he bumps into Theo in his enthusiasm, nearly knocking him into the open oven, so Theo gives up on dignity and control over his own kitchen and life and finally shoves the chicken breasts into the oven, closing it and yelling at Corey, “Hey, put a timer on your phone for twenty-five minutes.”
The chicken breasts are just over halfway done when Theo hears his front door roll open again, and Lydia swans into his apartment, still looking radiant and radiantly put together even though Theo’s pretty sure she’d spent the day with her mom on one of their impeccable couches, having a mother-daughter date with some sweats and bad television. She’s still wearing the sweats, though they might as well be designer jeans, and she presents Theo with a wrapped appetizer tray full of beautifully arranged, layered slices of tomato and mozzarella, each slice perfectly drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Theo’s, “Thank you,” isn’t even begrudging; he has to resist the urge to peel back a corner and stuff a bunch of it into his mouth like an animal.
Stiles has no such reservations. “Stars in my sky!” he crows, catching Lydia up and spinning her around before noticing the tray Theo’s now holding, and making a dive for it; Theo yanks it protectively away.
He’s about to invoke Derek when Stiles is distracted by Lydia’s mom flowing in on her daughter’s heels, holding another perfectly executed tray of caprese salad in her hands. “Mother of the stars in my sky!” Stiles greets her, darting in for a quick kiss on the cheek, but Natalie Martin wasn’t born yesterday; she lifts the tray up above both hers and Stiles’ heads, transferring it to Derek when he immediately reaches over to snag it, Stiles protesting voraciously all the while.
“Okay, some of you are going to have to get out of my kitchen,” Theo declares loudly after, because he literally cannot turn without elbowing someone on all sides of him, and the tagliatelle he has cooking on the stove is about to boil itself right over. He says it primarily to Liam and Mason and Corey, who had perched themselves on the counter like a peanut-gallery receiving line now that they’d finished the salad, picking individual carrot slices and halved cherry tomatoes out of the bowl they’d prepared and popping them in their mouths as they kick their heels against the cabinets and occasionally comment on Theo’s boiling skills or Derek’s garlic mincing approach or Stiles tripping over his own feet and nearly taking the skillet of caramelized onions with him.
“Uh, we were here first,” Liam points out, lifting a leg so that Derek can get into the drawer that his right thigh had previously been blocking.
“Uh, we’re going to need more tables and placemats and other civilized human eating instruments,” Stiles counters, poking him in the forehead. “You and the brain trust should go get that folding table and extra chairs from that empty apartment Derek has been using for storage.”
Liam just blinks innocently back at him. “But we’re not human,” he says, and then yelps and ducks laughingly away when Stiles scowls and swipes at him.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he says to Mason and Corey afterwards, and they disappear to, presumably, go actually find the table and chairs and other ‘civilized human eating instruments’ that Stiles had mentioned. Theo just shakes his head, and takes advantage of the freed-up space to rescue his pot of pasta before it can send boiling water fountaining all over his counters; he’d known he shouldn’t have let Liam fill it unsupervised.
“Room for two more?” he hears, as he’s finishing dumping the pasta into the colander he’d set in the sink. A hand comes down just at the place where his neck meets his shoulder, and he glances up, surprised, right into Scott’s grin.
Scott squeezes his hand, and does Theo the favor of ignoring his resultant shiver, Theo’s eyes briefly falling shut.
“We brought dessert,” Scott tells him, gesturing with his chin towards Malia, who’s holding three stacked pastry boxes in her arms, her chin resting on the top. She raises her eyebrows when she catches his attention, and they manage to have an entire conversation with their eyebrows about where she should set them down. The boxes wind up safely on the counter, and Theo turns back his pasta, his neck and shoulder still prickling with warmth.
The Sheriff, Parrish, Argent, Melissa, and Liam’s dad all arrive almost at the same time, leading to something of a traffic jam at Theo’s front door as they all try to politely gesture the others through first. Finally Melissa rolls her eyes and stomps through first, thrusting the bottles of wine in her hands at Theo when he comes to investigate the commotion, and telling him seriously, “I will pay you actual money to open one of those and bring me back a glass,” and so Theo smirks lightly and goes to dig out his corkscrew, accepting the bottles that David offers as well as he goes.
The Sheriff and Parrish trail him into the kitchen, and start up a search for a bread knife for the absolutely massive loaves that they’d brought. Theo directs them to the right spot, and then to a massive bowl to put the sliced bread in, and then to a stack of cloth napkins to wrap the fresh-baked loaves in to keep them warm. “Emmalee’s?” he asks, when he catches a whiff; he can smell the rosemary. The Sheriff grins and sneaks him a hunk of a piece, he and Parrish stuffing the rest of it in their mouths before Parrish hefts the bread bowl and wanders out towards Theo’s dining room table with it. There’s a clamor of noise out in the rest of the apartment: Liam, Mason, and Corey returning with the extra tables and chairs and other items they’d been sent to find, and setting up a racket as they get stuck at the closed door due to their lack of hands. Scott leads the set-up, standing in the middle of Theo’s apartment directing pack members and furniture this way and that, so Theo leaves it in his capable hands and starts plating things into serving dishes instead, and then begins handing them off to whoever happens to wander through the kitchen when they’re ready, until finally all the food and wine and appetizers and plates are all set out, and everyone makes their ways over to the pushed-together, not-at-all-the-same-size-or-height tables to sit down, and start eating.
Theo sits down next to Liam, then frowns and nudges him with an elbow to ask, “Hey, didn’t someone text your—“
He’s interrupted by his front door rolling open, and Jenna Geyer flying through, apologizing, “Sorry, sorry! I always forget about the construction on Palmera,” to the room at large. A chorus of welcomes goes up, and Theo immediately stands—beating Liam and David to it—so that he can take the bowl that she’s holding, and gesture her into his seat. “No, it’s—“ she tries to protest, but Liam is already dragging Theo’s armchair—the last remaining possible seat in the place—over to add another place for Theo to take instead, and she lets it go and grins, softly.
“I tried what you suggested,” she tells Theo, as he peers down into the bowl that she’d brought, a perfect match for the bowl that Theo had created, and left in the middle of the table; already half-empty as the vultures surrounding it had dug in. “I’m not quite sure it’s up to the same level as yours, but—“
“I’m sure it is,” Theo answers, and proves his point by peeling back the plastic wrap covering it, and using it to refill the other bowl; Liam immediately reaches forward and uses the serving spoons inside to mix up the contents, shooting his mother a sly grin.
Jenna smiles at him, and then at Theo, and briefly cups Theo’s cheek before sliding into the chair he’d vacated for her. Theo hovers uncertainly for a moment, debating whether to take Jenna’s empty bowl into the kitchen, but then Liam settles it: he reaches up and drags Theo down into the armchair on his other side.
They eat.
And linger, afterwards, everyone spreading out throughout his apartment afterwards, chairs dragged this way and that as people drift in and out of ever-shifting clumps. An low, steady hum of conversation fills the space, broken at frequent intervals by sudden spurts of laughter or louder exclamations, and Theo ends up ducking into the kitchen, at one point, and hovering over the sink as he clears serving dishes and slots things into the dishwasher, his shifted ears still tuned to the rhythm of it. Liam wanders in to join him after a few minutes, and comes up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him at the sink, his arm very warm.
Theo keeps his eyes on his working hands, his cheeks heating some under the fond smile that he can feel Liam giving him, even if he can’t see it, until Liam finally laughs.
“You should just go do it,” he says, and Theo mutely shakes his head. “Theo,” Liam chastises easily, bumping him with his shoulder. “Just go do it.”
Theo squeezes his eyes shut, turning his forehead against the meat of Liam’s arm, and hiding it there. Liam hums and turns his face against the top of Theo’s head, pressing his mouth to the very edge of Theo’s temple and bringing up a hand to cup the back of Theo’s skull, and hold it.
Theo goes, and does it.
He heads up the winding spiral staircase to his apartment’s loft, and comes back down on four legs. Derek is passing by the bottom of the staircase as he does; he notices Theo and reaches out a hand to stroke down Theo’s back, giving him a quick scratch behind the ears before he gets out of range. Theo noses up into it, and then keeps padding through the apartment once Derek’s continued on his way to rejoin Natalie Martin and Parrish and Argent and Scott all talking about something.
Mason and Corey spot him almost immediately, and start yelling and gesturing until he changes direction, and goes to join him. They slide to the floor—they’d been perched in chairs or on the arms of couches—and scrub roughly at his sides and back as he struggles to keep his feet as he’s rocked, knocking into one and then the other as they continue their conversation, unbroken, with Melissa and the Sheriff across from them. Melissa laughs and reaches out a hand and Theo steps into it, Mason and Corey giving voice to their disappointment behind him—Mason tugging lightly at his tail—but Theo just closes his eyes, tipping his head back for the long, firm strokes Melissa is smoothing back between his ears and down his neck, and then pressing sideways into it when the Sheriff reaches out to scratch at one of his flanks.
His eyes open as someone passes nearby, his nose twitching. Stiles had somehow discovered a last, uneaten scallop and dropped it on a plate that he’s carrying over to his seat by Scott and Lydia’s mom, and Theo eyes it as it makes its way by. Melissa apparently notices: she leans down over him and whispers, “Do it,” conspiratorially, so Theo lets his tongue loll out in a lupine grin and then slinks his way over behind Stiles, twisting around and darting up at the last moment to snap the scallop off of his plate and then take off with his prize.
Stiles yells, scandalized, and gives chase.
They do two circuits of the apartment before Theo eels his way onto the couch where Scott and Natalie are sitting, Scott yelping in surprise and then laughing as he gets a lapful of big black wolf. Stiles skids to an unsteady stop, nearly crashing into them anyway, and sits poking and tugging at Theo—who pointedly licks his chops at him, victorious—until Scott pushes him, grinning, away.
Theo stays there for the next little while, eyes drifting shut and breath leaving him in a gusty, easy rush as Scott cards his fingers through the fur on Theo’s sides and back, and Natalie strokes absently at his flanks. Parrish takes a moment to give him several good scratches when he gets up for more wine—asking Natalie if she wants another glass, too, and bringing one back when she says she does—until finally Scott gently shakes him, apologizing, “Hey, I’ve got to get up,” when Theo blinks owlishly up at him.
Theo yawns, and slides down off his lap.
Lydia wraps an arm around his back and scratches at his chest when he sits down next to her knees, and leans heavily against her legs. Malia lets him curve his big body around her back and lay his head over one of her thighs as she sits on the ground playing some game she and Mason and Corey had made up involving silverware and napkins stolen from the table, Stiles and Derek eventually coming over to join them, and sitting warm and solid next to Theo as well.
But finally it starts to get late, and Theo shakes himself and goes to stand, preparing to head back upstairs to go shift back, and come back downstairs and start cleaning up. But Melissa must spot him, and somehow divine what he’d been intending, because she calls, “Oh, no. Don’t you dare,” while pointing at him, and then shoos him away from the stairs and marshals the rest of the pack, directing Malia and Corey to clear away plates while Derek and Lydia gather up wine glasses and bottles, Scott and Liam eventually being conscripted to go return the tables and extra chairs to wherever Liam and company had originally found them. Theo sits on his haunches and watches, bemused, and then twists around to look over his shoulder when someone calls his name.
Jenna smiles at him, and gestures him over to the couch where she and David had returned after taking their own dishes to the kitchen. Theo hesitates just a second, and then goes to join them.
He spends the next fifteen minutes or so with his head in her lap, and his haunches in David’s, as he listens to the pack joke and shove and work around each other, slotting things into the dishwasher and hand-washing the larger items that won’t fit, and—Theo hearing the shir, shir of a rag going—wiping them dry to finish airing out atop Theo’s counters. By the time they finish he’s half asleep, and Jenna has to gently shake him awake so that she and David can stand, and prepare to leave.
Theo hovers around as everyone grabs coats, shoes; the random bags and other daily detritus that they’d brought with them. Whenever anyone passes close enough they reach for him, tugging lightly on his ears or scratching at his head, or—in some cases—squatting down to scrub at his sides as they grin at him, and say, “Thanks,” before stepping through his front door, and leaving.
Jenna and David are the last ones out. “Liam, you staying here?” Jenna calls, and Liam gives her a thumbs-up from where he’d sprawled himself out, eyes closed, in the middle of the living room floor. She snorts and shakes her head lightly, then cups her hand under Theo’s chin and gives him a last scratch. “See you later, Theo,” she murmurs, and laughs softly when he noses at her wrist. David gives him one last, firm scratch, and then they both step through the door, and slide it shut behind them.
Theo gives a jaw-cracking yawn, and then twists to go pad his way over to Liam.
“Oof,” Liam complains, when Theo drops down half on top of him, curling up reflexively around him like a pill bug, before more deliberately shifting around to throw a leg over Theo’s haunches, and bury his face in Theo’s ruff. He sighs out gustily, ruffling the fur on Theo’s neck and causing him to shiver, and scoots his way even closer, until Theo is feeling his ribs expand heavily against his own.
“Congrats on pulling it off at the end there,” Liam mumbles, nonsensically, adding, “Good date,” when Theo pulls his head up to stare quizzically down at him.
Theo blinks, and then looks around at the rest of the apartment. Melissa had made sure the pack had put it back together exactly as it had been before they’d all descended on it, but their scents still linger; the scent of the pack, and warm, good food, all layered over top of each other and sinking in to Theo’s floors, his walls. Theo breathes it all in helplessly, lungs expanding as much as he can get them to, and then he lets it all out, and twists so that he can curve his muzzle around the top of Liam’s head and keep it there as he relaxes down.
Good date, he agrees, and lets his own eyes slip closed.