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Stiles takes the small flight of steps outside his apartment block in a single leap and doesn’t even try to smooth away the smug grin he’s throwing his crotchety old neighbor who has to scuttle out of his way. It’s payback for the last time she tried to trip him down those very same steps with her cane.
She purses her lips around a butterscotch candy and her beady eyes narrow in that manner that says she’s well on her way to concocting a plan to hamstring the spring in his step — literally — but it doesn’t matter. He has the Stilinski Family Specialty Chicken marinating in the fridge and there isn’t a damn thing she can do to ruin it.
He’d gotten everything ready the night before, the aroma of spices a seductive punch to the face that morning when he’d slung the butter back in the fridge before tearing out the door, toast in hand. He almost drools all over his shirt when he looks down to fumble his keys from his pocket.
She’s still watching him through the glass door when he hops into the elevator and turns to jab the button for his floor, so he waves with a provocative wiggle of his fingers and starts to hum the Jaws theme even though he knows she can’t hear him. Well, maybe she can. Last week, he’d complained to his best bro, Scott, over the phone about the reek of the fishmongers down the street and had come home the next day to their floor stinking to high heaven. She’d watched him with glittering eyes through a crack in her door as he’d passed, much in the way the elevator doors are now sliding closed on her.
When he reaches his floor, The Shrew is forgotten, and he skips down the hall to the merry tune of his jangling keys, bursting into his apartment with Honey, I’m home! ready on his tongue. But the darkness inside is being sliced in two by a beam of light that has nothing to do with his open apartment door.
The yowl of a strangled cat bursts free from where his planned words get mangled at the base of his throat and he stumbles forward, crashing to his knees and swinging the fridge door open the rest of the way.
Nothing inside it registers apart from the glass bowl holding his chicken and he lunges for it, praying that maybe, just maybe, the door only popped open in the last hour or the rest of his groceries sacrificed themselves to keep it cold or—
But no. His chicken has zero chill.
In any other situation, he’d be cackling at his own joke, laughing until he cries, but right now he’s ready for the tears to come for an entirely different reason.
It’s The Shrew, it has to be!
He doesn't know how long he sits there, cradling the bowl as he bathes in the light of his misery, but eventually there’s a creak from behind as his still-open apartment door gets pushed open wider.
“Are you okay?”
He cuts off mid-moan and would wheel about to see the poor soul who’s decided to subject themselves to his despair, but he doesn't have to. He knows that voice. He hears it every morning when it's owner stomps past his door snarling into his phone. He hears it through the walls every Saturday when the guy’s sisters join him for lunch. He may have also overheard it during a one night stand a couple of weeks ago, rumbling deep beneath the delighted screams of a lucky lady-friend - which fueled his jerkoff fantasies for days (the rumbling, not the screaming).
The voice belongs to his neighbor Derek Hale in 6C, the gorgeous heartthrob of the entire building. (Even The Shrew flutters her eyelashes at him.)
“I'm fine,” he chokes out, not daring to turn round because he's pretty sure 6C has never noticed him before and he doesn't need the first time to be when he's practically sobbing over the breasts of a chicken.
It also doesn’t help that there may have been another time he heard that voice: in a dream a few nights ago. But this really isn’t a situation in which he’d like to remember it.
It had started with him standing outside the guy’s apartment with the door opening to reveal him in nothing but a particularly form-hugging pair of boxer briefs with sleep mussed hair and squinting eyes. Stiles had purred something ridiculous, something like Howdy, studmuffin and reached out to drag a solitary finger down abs that were more like the ridges of a chocolate bar - and, really, he had to have been dreaming because no one looked like that!
In the reality-bending way of dreams, it had leaped from the apartment doorway to Stiles’ own room where he was lowered onto his mattress, and for some reason Derek was frowning like he was in physical pain, grumbling into his ear about fucking tease and deserve a medal. He could remember writhing against him, choking out moans when nothing was even happening, but the dream faded to black with the click of a door closing—
“Have you been drinking again?”
—and he'd woken at noon the next day with the resolution crusted in his— wait, what?
“What?” he asks, finally whipping round to face him.
‘Again’? What.
“So you don't remember,” 6C sighs, leaning a shoulder against the door frame. A bag of groceries dangles from one hand and he reaches up with the other to stroke his beard that’s more than the stubble it had been the last time Stiles saw him. The soft scritch of it shivers through the air, hurling him into a daze.
No, Stiles doesn’t remember. But judging by the evil smirk tugging up one corner of 6C’s probably-illegal mouth, he's about to find out.
Stiles feels the drag of his eyes over his kneeling position on the floor like the barely-there caress of calloused fingertips down his spine, watches as they slide over his lukewarm fridge and the bowl in his hands.
“How about I tell you over dinner? Studmuffin.”
As Stiles’ eyes widen to saucers of horror, 6C’s smirk of evil intensifies and he would be lying if he said it wasn't doing things to regions best left unnoticed.
Derek glides from the doorway and is striding down the hall outside before Stiles can even fathom an answer.
When he manages to rise to his feet and peek out into the hallway two minutes later, the door to 6C has been left ajar.