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The jeep is quiet. It was the first thing you noticed when you climbed into the passenger seat, legs shaking, knees wobbling—shoving Stiles’s hands away when he tried to help you. Now, you’re gripping the faded upholstery as the blood slowly drains from your knuckles. It’s a funny thing to notice, silence, but it’s hard not to when the quiet is so heavy you can feel it weighing down your chest, pushing the anger and hurt from your lungs to the pit of your stomach.
Stiles is wearing the blue sweatshirt you love so much. The one that’s gone through the wash so many times you can rub your cheek against it and feel like you’re curled up in bed under cottony sheets, safe and warm. He knows that. You hate that he knows that.
Stiles’s lithe fingers wrap around the steering wheel, despite the jeep being safely parked against the curb of some random road halfway between your house and his. He squeezes the wheel until the veins in his wrist bulge and his knuckles turn white. “I’m not sorry,” he says in a low voice, like he can feel the silence too, like he’s scared of snapping the cord holding a hundred-ton weight over your heads.
The weight falls, and a wet, choked-off gasp is ripped from your raw throat. It hurts, from all the crying while he was gone, from the look on his face when he came back. “I fucking hate you,” you whisper. Your voice is raspy, barely there between your shallow exhales. After he locked you in that godforsaken closet, you'd screamed at him through the door, spewing every hateful, awful thing you could think of, until there was nothing left. Every part of you still aches—knuckles bruised from trying to beat the door down, fingernails bloodied from biting them down to the quick. You'd torn yourself apart while you sat against the wall, alone in the dark, waiting for him to come back. If he came back.
“No you don’t,” Stiles says, but he winces anyway.
You shake your head violently and clench your jaw to stifle the angry sobs budding in your chest. You’re done with the crying; you'd already cried all night waiting for him to come back alive. “You had no right.” Your voice quivers, thick with mucus, and it fractures right through the marrow, “You had no fucking right to leave me there like that.”
Stiles tugs his hand through his hair. It’s already a mess, sticking up in random tufts from previous passes. Under normal circumstances, you’d try to fix it and then immediately get distracted by the softness and his soft content whines—but nothing feels normal now. You’ve never felt this frantic, this desperate, this much. It’s too much. You want to shed your skin and set something on fire—maybe yourself, at least until the ringing in your ears stops.
He licks his lips, swollen from ripping them apart with his teeth, and stares out the window, “I did it to keep you alive.”
Your voice cracks when you try to scream again, “It wasn’t your choice to make!”
His teeth grind together for a moment. He won’t look at you. Maybe he can’t. “I would do it again,” he finally says in a quiet voice, like a confession, like he’s seeking atonement from god—or, more importantly, from you. Neither of you speak, the sound of your shallow breathing fills the jeep until his arm surges forward. You flinch when he slams his hand against the steering wheel; the horn is shrill and almost as loud as the tension left in its wake. “God, don’t you get it?” The muscles in his neck strain with the clench of his jaw, “None of it matters if you’re gone. I don’t give a fuck about stopping the villain of the month, or saving the entire goddamn town again, or keeping the world from imploding if you’re not in it, so don’t fucking yell at me.”
You shake your head again because everything else feels like it’s shaking too, partly from the fury burning brightly in your eyes, but mostly because you love this stupid, arrogant boy so much it hurts. “I had to sit there, alone, and—and just hope that you came back—that you’d all come back. Ally died, Stiles. Boyd, Erica, Aidan—they’re all dead. It’s just a matter of time before someone else—before it happens again.” Your voice hitches, and you can't breathe, “You’re not allowed to do that to me, okay? You’re not allowed to—to fucking—to leave me behind like that. I can’t do it again—I can’t fucking—”
Even though he’s angry too, Stiles takes your hand and taps his heartbeat onto the inside of your wrist with his forefinger until your chest rises and falls in an even rhythm. Stiles looks down at your hands, layered on top of each other and trembling, before he speaks again. His voice is strained, his face stricken, “I can’t lose you.”
You stare at him, cheeks red and splotchy, mascara flaking underneath your eyes. Wrecked. And then you realize that he’s crying. His rounded eyes are wet and glossy, his chin trembles, and then that’s it. You can’t fight it anymore. You hiccup in-between your sobs and wipe your snot off on your sleeve, “And I can’t lose you.”
The car is silent again, and you can feel your heartbeat in your ears. “Don’t leave me again,” you whisper.
The words linger in the air, and Stiles cups your cheek, thumbs the tears and smeared makeup off of the apple of your cheeks—he's especially gentle with the fragile skin just under your eyes. He pulls you as close as he can manage with the gearshift in the way, moving your hair off of your forehead and pressing a tender kiss to each of your temples. He trails his lips to your cheeks, to the tip of your nose, one cheek and then the other. His final destination is your lips. His tongue darts out, briefly tasting the salt of your tears, and then he kisses you. Three chaste brushes of his lips before he settles in for a real one, a reassurance that you’re both here. Breathing. Alive. The fact that he doesn’t respond to your demand isn’t lost on either of you.
“I love you,” he breathes against your lips. It’s not an answer, but it’s enough for tonight.
You sigh into his mouth and hold onto his wrist, fingers resting against his pulse, “I know.”