Chapter Text
Stiles wasn’t above begging.
”Please, Lyds?” he whined, walking backward and narrowly avoiding bumping into tables and people carrying their lunch trays.
She didn’t even bat an eyelash. ”No.”
”But—”
”No,” she repeated and flicked her hair over her shoulder.
”Lydia, light of my life, you’re my only hope,” Stiles begged. ”I’ll buy you something nice.”
Lydia snorted, amused. ”With what money?”
Stiles paused to blink a couple of times. ”With the money from the essays I write for desperate people in need?” he ventured and waved his hand in a dismissing move. ”Or I’ll just use my dad’s credit card. Anyway. So you’ll help me?”
Lydia shook her head and let out a long-suffering sigh. ”Uh. I guess I have to. If only just to shut you up.”
Stiles bumped air with his fist and hissed, ”Yass!” ignoring the looks he got from the students around him.
”I’m not going to kiss you,” she said with narrowed eyes.
”You don’t have to! Scout’s honor,” Stiles said solemnly with his hand over his heart. ”I wouldn’t kiss you if you were the last girl on earth.” He paused to reconsider, and, ”That came out wrong.”
Lydia huffed and walked away, her heels clicking sharply on the floor. Stiles stared after her for a moment, then shook himself like a dog after rain. He had one class left before he could leave and head out to do some shopping.
Okay, so.
Problem was, Stiles was in love.
Correction: being in love wasn’t the problem. After all, he’d been in love with Lydia for over a decade and had both waxed poetic about her looks and intellect as well as composed an elaborate ten-year plan to woo her. Of course, that particular plan had hit rock bottom when her true love kiss had saved Jackson from turning permanently into a homicidal lizard man. Oh, and because Stiles had realized he also liked dicks. Specifically, a dick.
So. Love wasn’t the problem.
It was the person said dick was attached to.
Stiles wasn’t sure when it had happened, but somewhere in between Derek threatening to rip his throat out with his teeth and almost drowning in the pool together, Stiles had fallen for him. Hard. Not in the moony, fluffy way Scott was about Allison, or even the odd love/hate thing Jackson and Lydia had going, but in a full-body, gut-wrenching, I-can’t-breathe kinda way.
It was completely different from what he had ever felt for Lydia. She’d been the goddess of his dreams, something to admire from afar — like, from across three rows in class — but it had been pure and innocent. And, unfortunately, nothing about Derek was pure and innocent: the guy had had the misfortune of losing his innocence at a relatively early age, and it showed.
Intellectually, Stiles knew he had no chance with Derek. Stiles might be a hyperactive spaz with massive concentration issues and a tendency to run his mouth without his brain making it in time to interfere, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. Derek was older than him, had a body like a Greek god, and he was most likely straight. And even if he wasn’t, why would he look at someone like Stiles?
However, Stiles was also stubborn as hell and didn’t let things like realism or common sense hinder his advances. So he tried anyway.
And God, he tried! He had tried flirting with Derek and throwing pick-up lines and innuendos around to the point of Erica kicking him out of the loft. He had even left the best of his gay porn bookmarks up and running on his laptop when Derek had last stopped by on some research business for the pack. That had been… interesting. Derek’s face had gone through some weird emotions too fast for Stiles to track, and he’d left in a hurry, leaving Stiles to wonder if Derek could smell his boner from across the room and through layers of clothes.
Probably. Damn werewolf senses.
So. Because subtle or not-so-subtle flirting didn’t work, Stiles had to try something else. He had no masculine wiles to use to his advantage, so he had to be sneaky. Stiles could do sneaky — he was awesome at sneaky — which meant that since Derek was a guy and a wolf and guys and wolves were always hungry, Stiles would woo his heart (and dick) with food. And not just any kind of food, but with aphrodisiac food.
What could go wrong?
After he’d decided to do this, Stiles had started compiling a list of known aphrodisiacs. It wasn’t unreasonably long but it had stuff in it he was going to have some serious trouble getting his hands on, like champagne, caviar, and red wine.
Fortunately, there was stuff he could start with, for example, oysters. According to the mighty internet, they were the number one aphrodisiac out there, and if Stiles was going to do this thing, that’s what he was going to start with. Go big or go home, right?
So he went to the store, bought a bargain package of oysters, picked up Lydia on his way home, and set to work.
It took him bribery and a good deal of groveling to get Lydia help him out even after her hesitant yes. Stiles didn’t mind groveling: no matter what they were at this point — Friends? Slightly less violent enemies? — Lydia was the only person Stiles could trust with this. Apart from Scott, he didn’t really have friends, and Scott wasn’t exactly someone he could gush about Derek’s hotter-than-porn biceps. Lydia, at least, could understand. Maybe.
Besides, if someone knew how to eat oysters, it was Lydia. Stiles was sure of it.
Except that she was allergic to shellfish, which she didn’t see necessary to mention until Stiles practically shoved the oysters in her face.
”Look, you don’t have to touch them,” Stiles said. ”Just… tell me how they’re eaten, okay? I’m sure you know how!”
Lydia cocked her head and gave Stiles a speculative look. ”Tell me, why am I doing this again?”
”Uh… because I asked nicely?” Stiles offered and, seeing Lydia’s flat look, he continued. ”And because I’m paying you.”
Lydia raised a well-manicured brow. ”The things I do for a new lipstick,” she deadpanned and sat at the table. ”So… you need to check if they’re good. Ditch the ones that are open because they’re dead. Then wash them, open them, and, well, eat them.”
”Like, raw?”
She rolled her eyes. ”Yes, Stiles. Raw. You eat oysters raw. You can eat them with a squirt of lemon, with red wine vinegar and shallots, a drop of tabasco, or just slurp them plain from the shell.”
Stiles stared at the small pile of oysters in the sink, then shrugged and got to work. He could feel Lydia’s stare burning in the nape of his neck, but he ignored it. It took some effort to open one, and when he finally had the opened oyster in his hand — with the muscle cut like Lydia had instructed — he stared at it like it was about to jump him and attach itself on his face like some pygmy alien facehugger.
”Uh, so, did you know that raw mollusks, and especially oysters, are rich in rare amino acids that can trigger increased levels of sex hormones? That’s probably why Casanova always had 50 oysters as breakfast,” he said, still staring at the oyster.
”Fascinating,” Lydia said. ”What are you waiting for? Chop chop.”
Stiles swallowed, braced himself, and slurped the oyster into his mouth.
It was slimy, salty, and tasted slightly of old socks and seawater.
”This is disgusting,” he managed around the thing in his mouth, turned around and spat it into the trash, narrowly avoiding puking. ”I can’t believe I almost ate that.”
”Wasn’t eating kind of the point?” Lydia asked.
”Maybe? I mean, I guess I have to know how they taste like if I’m going to feed them to—” he barely caught himself in time, blushed, and finished with a lame, ”others.”
He wasn’t even sure why he didn’t just say it — it wasn’t like Lydia didn’t know Stiles was ridiculously in lust with Derek.
Like she knew what he was thinking about, Lydia leveled him a flat look. ”Stiles, you’re an idiot.”
He made a face. ”Not helping!”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. ”If we’re done here…” she said, raising her brow and collecting her bag to leave. By the door, she stopped, whirled around with her locks flaring in that perfect way they always did, and said, ”For the record, I still think you should just tell him.”
”Yeah, yeah,” Stiles muttered as he started cleaning up.
He dumped the remaining oysters into the trash and took them out to get rid of the smell. He couldn’t get the taste and feeling of the oyster from his mouth even though he tried washing his teeth at least six times and used half of his dad’s mouthwash.
It. Wasn’t. Helping.
He ordered Chinese for dinner and grumbled something under his breath when Dad raised a brow and asked what was the occasion. He couldn’t tell him because then Dad would ask about the oysters, and— no. Stiles might be okay-ish with telling his dad he wasn’t exactly straight, but he wasn’t sure his dad would be so thrilled with learning that Stiles was gay for a former murder suspect. If nothing else, Dad would call it a Stockholm Syndrome and book Stiles an appointment with a therapist. Which might not be a bad thing because any therapist would have a field day with him, but perhaps this wasn’t the time.
So Stiles stuffed his mouth full of fried rice and eggrolls and shrugged. Good thing that his dad was so fond of Chinese that he didn’t test his luck with further interrogation.
Sadly, the Epically Failed Oyster Experiment was a bullet right into Stiles’s great seduction plan. If he couldn’t even eat them himself, how the hell was he supposed to smoothly seduce Derek with them?
He was brooding his way through a pack meeting, hardly paying any attention to what they were talking about and daydreaming about licking Derek’s abs instead. Pack dynamics blah blah, Deaton wanting to give them a lecture (shocker) blah blah, opening diplomatic negotiations with an old ally of the Hale pack blah blah.
He closed his eyes and was on his way to undress Derek in his mind when something dropped on his lap, rudely interrupting him. He flailed and almost dropped the bright red… fruit?
”The hell?” he asked, confused.
”That’s a pomegranate,” Lydia said smartly. ”It’s quite tasty.”
Stiles eyeballed the fruit, picked it up, and raised to eye-level. ”To be or not to be,” he intoned, earning a chorus of huffs, groans, and snorts.
”Idiot,” Lydia huffed and took the pomegranate from Stiles. ”You eat the seeds. Stiles, get me a spoon. Jackson, open this up,” she commanded, handing him the fruit.
Jackson rolled his eyes but obediently snapped his claws out and deftly cut the thing into four parts. The whole pack leaned in as Lydia put the chunks on Derek’s coffee table, presenting them with the gleaming crimson seeds. Stiles thought they were quite pretty. Without saying a word, Lydia spooned the seeds out and divided them to each pack member to taste. Cora poked the seeds on her hand with suspicion, while Erica, Boyd, and Isaac merely shrugged and chomped their portions down. Scott and Allison snuggled together in the corner of the couch and fed each other the seeds, sharing kisses in between nibbles.
Stiles sniffed his seeds and ate one. It was crunchy and surprisingly tart, but not bad. ”Huh,” he said and ate a few more.
”They’re tasty, right?” Lydia asked around with a raised brow. She seemed smug when the pack’s reactions were mostly positive. Then she cocked her head and asked, sweetly, ”How about you, Derek? What do you think?”
Stiles narrowed his eyes at Lydia’s sweet tone. She was never sweet unless she had something in her mind.
Derek shrugged. ”They’re nice. I like the flavor.”
”Good to hear,” Lydia said brightly. ”We should add pomegranate to the pack’s snack menu. It improves mood, increases memory, and reduces stress hormones. It also has lots of antioxidants, and it can help us girls strengthen our bones and muscles.”
Erica and Allison grinned at each other.
”What about us guys? Does it have any special effects in us?” Scott asked eagerly.
”Well, for example, it increases facial hair,” Lydia said. ”Oh, and apparently it increases the testosterone levels and acts as a powerful aphrodisiac. Especially pomegranate juice is supposed to be potent— kind of like nature’s own Viagra.”
The pack stared at her for a moment, then Scott, Boyd, and Jackson lunged for the remaining seeds as the girls shared smug smiles. Stiles gaped at them for a moment until Lydia caught his eye and winked.
”More pomegranate, Derek?” Erica leered and glanced at Stiles who snapped his mouth shut and tried to sink in between the couch pillows.
”I have no need for viagra seeds,” Derek said calmly. ”I’m an alpha.”
”Really?” Lydia asked.
Derek crossed his arms, cocked his head, and smirked.
Lydia let out a hum, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and fed Jackson the last pomegranate seeds.