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Peter would love to say he gets less tongue-tied around Stiles. And mostly he does.
But if anyone can make Peter stumble over his words, it’s his mate. Who's always equal parts perplexed and amused by the wolf’s inarticulate fits.
“Wait—then what am I supposed to say?” Stiles demands, frowning. Peter hands him a crisp poplin button-up, yet another dress shirt to add to the pile of them already in his arms. The human makes a face but obediently disappears into the changing room, pulling the curtain behind him. “I mean, at some point, your family’s probably going to ask how we met, right?”
Peter hums noncommittally as he hangs the shirts Stiles has already tried—none of them nearly flattering enough on his lean figure—onto a nearby rack.
His pack is nosy by nature, and they’re going to be particularly so about anyone Peter brings home. Especially given that he so rarely bothers. He’s been putting this first meeting off for quite a while, in part to buy extra time to soothe Stiles’s worries that the Hale pack won’t like him—ridiculous, given that they’ll either instantly love him or instantly fall from Peter’s good graces—and in part because he’s already dreading the probing questions and meddling.
But the impending wedding of his second cousin is too perfect an opportunity to miss: the excitement of the ceremony and reception will be a good distraction for everyone involved. And if he’s both lucky and shrewd, perhaps he can keep Stiles and his relatives from getting chummy in ways that don’t directly benefit him. It's bad enough that he and Laura get along so well.
“Say we met at a cafe,” Peter decides. “It’s not a lie.”
“No, of course not. It’s just ‘bending the truth to suit you,’” Stiles mutters from the other side of the curtain, sounding amused. “C’mon, dude, you don’t think it’s a little bit funny? It’s a good anecdote!”
“Yes, dear. But that’s because you weren’t the one briefly giving off what I’ve been informed were ‘serial killer vibes.’”
“Is it a werewolf thing that you can never let people know you made one tiny mistake, or is it just a you thing? Actually, you know what, never mind. I’ll find out soon enough.” There’s a dissatisfied grunt and then a rustling sound. “God, do I really have to wear a suit for this? They’re just…stuffy modern straightjackets. And they’re so fucking boring. How do you always look so good in them?”
“It’s one of my many gifts. And as I’ve told you, those flannels you have the gall to call ‘clothing’ don’t show you to your advantage.”
“Depends on your definition of ‘advantage.’ Although, I guess I kind of like the way this one…” He makes a considering hum and then trails off. He’s quiet for long enough that Peter starts to grow suspicious.
“Let me see it before you strip.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Stiles agrees, but there’s a brief beat of hesitation. “Don’t freak out, though.”
“Why would I—?”
Stiles pushes the curtain aside, stepping out into the fitting room, and Peter loses track of the rest of his sentence.
His mate is wearing one of the plain white shirts Peter picked out for him to try, but he’s paired it with a waistcoat Peter most certainly did not pick out. It’s a deep burgundy, almost a perfect match for the color of his favorite flannel, with a subtle brocade pattern that turns almost iridescent when it catches the light. It fits snugly around his trim waist, the silky shirt sleeves accentuating his long arms. And the sleek cut of his black suit pants strike a perfect balance between pleasing to look at and pleasing to envision stripping off.
By the time Peter comes back to himself from a brief but pleasurable journey envisioning what’s under the cut of those pants, Stiles is already in defensive babbling mode.
“—I mean, I know you said the waistcoat usually matches the suit, but I dunno, I figured it might be okay to pair them together like this, and I kind of liked the pattern because it’s not super boring, and I know you have serious thoughts about so-called ‘garish’ stuff, but this one doesn’t seem too loud, or at least not over the top?” He pauses, fidgeting, as he waits for a response that doesn’t immediately come. “I know this wedding’s fanciness levels are top-tier or whatever, but would it be like, offensive to show up in this?”
Peter’s still struggling back from his visions of stripping Stiles down right here on the tile floor of the fitting room, but he at last manages to string together a few words: “We’ll just have to lower our standards.”
Stiles’s hesitant smile drops off his face. “Oh.” He toys with the edges of the waistcoat as Peter replays his own words in horror. “Is it that bad?”
Peter clears his throat, pausing to let his brain catch up, but Stiles seems to take this as an answer.
“Okay. Well, I’ll just go get the one that matches the suit, if that’s—”
“No, no,” Peter blurts, taking him by the shoulders to stop him talking. “Sweetheart, that’s not what—I meant to say—”
Realization dawns on Stiles’s face. “Is this one of your little…you know. ‘Mindless moments?’”
“I told you to stop calling them that,” Peter replies with a scowl.
Stiles nods, studying him. “So…you don’t actually hate it?”
“Not at all. What I meant to say is that this look is setting the bar. We’ll have to lower our standards for other suits going forward.”
“Really?” Stiles’s eyes are narrowed, his expression still a little dubious.
“Sweetheart, you look lovely. If you don’t think we’re buying that waistcoat to match, then you don’t have eyes.” Peter runs his hands up and down Stiles’s arms in reassurance. “You know how I get sometimes,” he offers, with some begrudgement.
“Sure,” Stiles says with a hum. Seeming more satisfied with this answer now, he lets Peter tug the side of the waistcoat down to check its length and fit against the waistline of his pants. “When you’re being mean to me because you think I’m hot.”
“I’m not being mean, I just—”
“Lose your mind a little bit?”
“It’s only ever around you,” Peter grumbles, and he grabs his mate by the hips to turn him around. The waistcoat fits just as perfectly in back as in front, though it might need to be taken in a fraction of an inch. Peter drags his eyes up and down to take in the view.
“Blaming the victim here, but okay. It’s my fault you get tongue-tied around me,” Stiles returns cheekily, turning back around when he grows tired of Peter’s manhandling.
“I wouldn’t word it that way.”
“You know I think it’s cute,” Stiles tells him, his tone losing its cheek in favor of outright fondness.
Peter slowly takes Stiles’s hand in both of his, staring at him with an expression so grave it makes his mate go still in surprise. “You must never describe me using that word in front of my family.”
Stiles sputters out an incredulous laugh. Though Peter was half-serious, he spends a moment adoring the sound of it and proud to have drawn it out.
“Let’s keep this between us, alright?” Peter asks at last. “I don’t need to give my sister any more ammunition against me than she already has.”
“You make it sound like the two of you are actively feuding or something,” Stiles says, drawing away to begin gathering the pile of unwanted shirts.
“We’ve always butted heads.”
“Hm. Sounds like you and literally everyone else in the world.”
“Not everyone sees how charming I am.”
“You can be charming?” Stiles asks, feigning surprise. He throws the shirts haphazardly over the rest of their discard pile on the rack. Somewhere, the fitting room attendant Peter chased away is probably cringing.
“When I want to be.” Once his mate returns, Peter reels him in for a kiss. “Let’s just…keep the details of our first meeting between the two of us, alright?”
Stiles sighs, but the sound brims with amusement. “Fine. She won’t hear a word from me.”
“Good,” Peter agrees, and then herds him back into the fitting room and steps in after him.
“Wai—what are you doing?” Stiles demands when Peter’s hands slide down to the buttons of his suit pants.
“Helping you get undressed,” Peter replies slyly, “so you can change back.”
Stiles helplessly gropes around to pull the curtain shut.
⬩
In the six months since they’ve been dating—or more accurately in the six months since the two halves of Peter’s soul snapped together, leaving him disastrously besotted and far more sentimental than he used to be—Stiles has made a great effort to learn everything he can about werewolves.
The aftermath of the Big Bad Reveal, as Stiles has taken to calling it, brought many more perplexed questions than Peter first expected. Peter's been a werewolf his entire life, after all, and while he thought he did an excellent job of clarifying things after the first unveiling of his powers, there are plenty of subtler qualities to being a werewolf that he didn't immediately think to explain.
Did the transformation hurt, Stiles wanted to know, and could Peter control it? What were the limits of his hearing? And of greatest importance, how much could he bench press (and would he maybe be willing to bench press Stiles to demonstrate for science)?
Most fascinating to Stiles was the concept of scent-marking, particularly as something essential to Peter’s comfort. The human still doesn’t really get it, but he’s been worried from the start that he might not naturally make himself available for scenting as much as Peter’s used to. He’s gone to great lengths to ensure they touch often, even to the point of plastering himself against Peter at odd moments, often to the werewolf’s surprise.
“Are you gonna check me in for my flight, too?” Stiles demands, setting his chin on Peter’s shoulder when the werewolf pulls up their travel itinerary at his desk.
That evening, Stiles leans into Peter and pats his cheek after listening to complaints, not for the first time, that weddings are just messy mergers with amateur management. “I’ll remember you said that when it’s our turn to get married,” Stiles informs him sagely, and Peter splutters incoherently for a full minute in his attempt to take it back.
“I know you already organized your carry-on,” Stiles says later, flinging his legs over Peter’s as they eat takeout on the couch, “but I stuck a bag of M&Ms in the outer pocket in case they skimp on peanuts.” With that, he sags into Peter’s side while they watch TV, clinging so he can rest his head near Peter’s neck.
When Peter steps into the bathroom while Stiles is brushing his teeth before bed, the human catches him at the waist and pulls him close. “Dude, tell me your cousins’ names again?” he demands, bending over to spit into the sink. “Full disclosure, I’m going to mix them up anyway, but at least you’ll know I’m trying.”
By the time Stiles starts rubbing circles onto Peter’s back during the last once-over of tomorrow’s checklist, Peter’s growing curious.
“What are you doing?” he demands. His mate doesn’t even pause in the face of his scrutiny.
“None of your goddamn business,” Stiles says cheerfully. (He also looks up at Peter through his lashes, which he must know is immensely distracting.)
At last, when they climb into bed, Stiles shuffles close and flings a hand over Peter’s chest, melting into his side at once. It’s not wholly different from his usual behavior, but as the latest addition to a very tactile day, it still raises a flag. A green one, but a flag all the same.
Peter catches Stiles’s hand as it trails up and down his side. “What are you up to, sweetheart?”
Even with the pointed tone, Stiles just hums and relaxes into him. “Just making sure you have the right smells. Scenting, or whatever.”
“For what? You’ll be with me for the whole trip.”
“Yeah, I know. But you remember that one time the cops booted your car by mistake? And we had to take the bus to go sort it out, and you complained about the smell the whole time. And for days afterward, it was all ‘too many people, too many scents’ and all that.” He pulls his head up to look at Peter. “When we’re on the plane, it’s gonna be the same way, right? Too many different scents. So I’m trying to…I dunno, layer up the scent-marking so it’s not so bad for you. Do you think it’s working?”
Peter lets out a breath, finding himself incapable of thinking of a single way to express his sudden depth of feeling. Every cognizant thought seems to have abandoned him, except for the fact that he loves this human who deigns to consider his comfort, who stares at him with such affection in his eyes.
After a few seconds in which no words come—a shortcoming he’s unfortunately had to grow used to—he gives up trying. Instead, he slips a hand around Stiles’s neck and pulls his mate down into a kiss.
What if the honeymoon period never ends? he thinks, caught somewhere between love and desperation. What if it’s always this way?
⬩
Blinded as he is by his mate’s attractiveness and loving attentions, Peter sometimes forgets that Stiles is also a little shit.
“Dear,” he growls, squeezing Stiles’s arm in warning. “I thought we weren’t going to—”
“Wait, wait,” Derek manages, still sniggering into his fist. Laura and Cora are no better off, having abandoned their cake to cackle without distraction. “He had you pinned against the wall?”
They’re in the thick of the wedding reception, half the guests drunk on wolfsbane-laced wine and the other half high on endorphins on the dance floor. A few stringy rugrats somehow related to Peter—first cousins once removed, he thinks—are running through the tables around them.
Somehow, Stiles slipped away to mingle with Peter’s nieces and nephew on his own, making himself comfortable at their table. By the time Peter found him (and managed to stop staring at his mate’s lips and the cake frosting eventually licked from them), it was too late to keep the story from unfolding.
He’s never going to hear the end of this.
“I didn’t pin you—”
“Well, pinned against the window, yeah,” Stiles replies, absently patting Peter’s hand like he doesn’t know the werewolf is trying to censor this little anecdote. “I was trying to decide if I needed to run back into the cafe to call for help, or if he was a crazy stalker but mostly harmless.”
“Oh. My god,” Laura is saying slowly, a maniacal grin curled onto her lips. Cora is wheezing, doubled over on her chair. “I can't believe you never told me this. He really threatened to eat you?”
“For a second, I was worried he was going to wear my skin,” Stiles tells them with relish, and Derek throws his head back to howl with laughter. Cora is almost on the floor.
Peter scowls at the lot of them.
(Once, a client hired him to deal with the fallout after an employee sent the company’s classified data to a competitor. Short of a miraculous undo button, he told his client, the next best thing would be terminating the employee in question as punishment. Standard practice. Good advice.
As always, Peter’s hard-won experience does him no good when it comes to Stiles: he unfortunately can’t fire his mate from the position, and he doesn’t even have the good sense to want to.)
Laura is still the most composed of them all, but only just. When she manages to catch her breath, she says, “Of all the wolves on the planet to get a fairy tale romance, it’s hilarious that Peter is the one who ended up speechless.” She turns, pinning him with a smirk that she quite possibly learned from him. “It serves you right, you know,” she adds.
And alright, Peter might have used his silver tongue to her detriment when they were both younger, laying occasional blame at her feet (and the feet of her siblings) for odd squabbles and spats and the rare instance of minor property damage. But he doesn’t feel that warrants his current treatment.
“I may have briefly been at a loss for words. But it wasn’t as bad as all that,” Peter scoffs, aiming a glare at Stiles. His mate meets it with a grin. “And I do like to think I’ve made up for it.”
Stiles softens at that. “Well, yeah. I guess so.”
“Irrelevant,” Laura says, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “You can never let him live it down. Promise you won’t.”
Derek nods seriously. “Peter deserves nice things. But he also deserves to be taken down a peg. Ideally, at least once a day. It’s good for his ego.”
Cora pats Stiles on the arm. “Glad to have you in the family,” she tells him, still cackling.
When his great-aunt comes round to say hello, Peter takes the opportunity to escape with Stiles during a lull in the conversation. He has the sinking feeling the story is more likely to be dragged out for repeat performances as long as his nieces and nephew have eyes on Stiles.
Searching for somewhere a little more private, he drags his mate out of the reception hall and into the cool night air outside. There’s a small patio in which a dozen or so people sit or dance under string lights, and a cement path leading through a garden to a small gazebo further off. Both of these options are pretty exposed, so Peter pulls his mate behind the cover of a neat topiary to one side of the lawn.
When Peter shoves him toward the trimmed leaves, Stiles is already fighting back a grin.
“What happened to not saying anything?” Peter demands, raising an eyebrow.
“Uhhh, drank too much?” Stiles tries.
“Pull the other one. You can’t even stomach the wolfsbane.”
“Yeah, and if you’d told me up front I wasn’t even getting free booze out of tonight, I might have thought twice about coming,” Stiles jokes, and then his smile turns sheepish. “Anyway, we agreed I wouldn’t say anything to Talia. But…I dunno, those guys seemed fun. And I've always liked Laura.”
“‘Those guys’ are her children. And they’ll certainly tell my sister by the end of the night.”
“Yeah, well.” Stiles shifts from foot to foot, wincing. He clears his throat. “She also seemed…pretty cool? Tiny bit. Sorry.”
“My sister. Seemed—” Peter sighs, just barely stopping himself before he can run a hand through his hair, which is already messy enough from when Stiles yanked him into one of the bathrooms to stick his tongue down his throat earlier. “I didn’t ask if she ‘seemed cool—’”
“And look, I’m gonna admit this to you in strictest confidence, she’s also a little scary. I figured, hey, it might earn me some brownie points if she hears a story about us that gives her a chance to laugh at you. Besides, is it so terrible that you can’t control yourself around your mate sometimes? It’s cu—” He does, at least, swallow back the dreaded C word. “It’s very sexy of you,” he amends.
Peter shakes his head at Stiles’s smirk. (Unfortunately, he’s incapable of being irritated with his boy for more than about four and a half consecutive minutes. He should know. He’s tried and he’s timed it. Even now, he can already feel the exasperation starting to wane.)
And sure, he can’t exactly fire Stiles. Nor does he want to. But…
“What’s terrible,” Peter says, stepping a little closer, “is that I have a mate who went back on his word.”
Stiles scoffs, but he allows Peter to slip his hands around his waist and pull their bodies flush against each other. “Oh my god. Please can you be more hypocritical, mister ‘my clients eat out of the palm of my hand, no matter what bananas bullshit I say to them?’”
Ignoring this, Peter nuzzles the sensitive skin behind Stiles’s ear with his nose. “Maybe you’ll get what’s coming to you.”
He gets a pleased shiver from Stiles, and then presses soft kisses into his jaw and down his neck. He begins to nip at the skin there, worrying it between his teeth. When Stiles clutches at him, dragging him nearer, Peter steps Stiles’s legs to bring their hips flush.
The moment he does, Stiles’s scent goes rich in the way Peter so adores, deepening with arousal and pleasure.
“Ah…fuck,” Stiles manages, and one of his hands goes yet again to the back of Peter’s head, fingers twisting into his hair. Peter has the passing thought that he’ll have to find a mirror to fix it before they return to the party, and then Stiles grinds against him and Peter can think of nothing else.
Stiles’s breaths have gone shallow. If he pulls his head back, Peter’s pretty sure he’ll catch Stiles biting his lip to muffle the sounds threatening to escape him. He adores this side of Stiles, how pliant he becomes when Peter gets his hands on him, but he won’t get what he wants unless he drags things out a little more.
He laps gently at the skin he’s been abusing, listening for the catch in Stiles’s breath, and then sweeps a hand down his mate’s front to cup him through his pants. This teases out another moan, and the sound of the next (and loudest by far) sends a shot of heat straight into Peter’s groin.
“Hey, keep it in your pants over there!” someone shouts from the veranda—probably his second cousin Charlotte, who seems perpetually opposed to the concept of joy—and Stiles startles in his arms.
“What the hell?” he hisses, flustered. He tries to pull away to peek around the edge of the topiary, but when Peter won’t let him out of his arms—or more accurately, when he catches Peter’s smug expression—he punches him in the shoulder. “You did that on purpose.”
“It’s not my fault you still have a poor concept of how well shifters can hear,” Peter informs him, keeping his voice low and drawling.
They aren’t in any serious danger of being overheard, though, or at least not by anyone who matters. As far as Peter can tell, most everyone under the veranda is distracted and chattering, except of course for that prude Charlotte and a pair of his distant cousins, both of them preteens and horny and probably hoping to catch an earful.
Peter smiles, enjoying Stiles’s suspicious glower as he skims his eyes up and down the gorgeous suit his mate ended up with. “And as you said, I simply can’t control myself around you, remember? Is it really my fault that I want to rip your new expensive suit off and get my hands on your—”
Stiles slaps a hand over Peter’s mouth, eyes wide. “Shhh!” he says, incredulous. “This is not how I wanna do the whole ‘meet the family’ thing. What if someone hears?”
Peter kisses Stiles’s palm and then pulls his hand away. “All’s fair in love and war,” he counters, raising a brow. “And I love you, Stiles, but you’re on the verge of starting the latter.”
Stiles snorts, but he stops leaning away from Peter’s grasp and settles into his arms instead. “Fine. Fair enough. Look, I will never stop telling you that it is really cu—I mean, sexy when you get tongue-tied. So don’t ask that of me, and you can stop making that face. But…I swear I’ll stop telling your family about it.” He chews his bottom lip for a moment, debating something, and then adds, “And also, if you do find us somewhere more private—seriously, like zero chance werewolf ears can overhear at all—I’d be interested in you maybe showing me what you can do with your tongue?”
From somewhere in the distance, Peter thinks he hears someone shouting that there are kids around, but he thinks he can be forgiven for not quite parsing it. His brain has mostly short-circuited. His claws have come out.
When he comes back to himself, Stiles is poking a finger into his cheek. Peter pulls his head back, indignant.
“You back with me, dude?” Stiles asks, his grin impossibly smug. He clearly knows what he’s done: Peter’s always been one to dish out dirty talk, but he virtually melts the instant his mate even hints at the same.
“How did this happen to me?” Peter wonders piteously. He stares into Stiles’s amber eyes, which he finds so stunning in the glow from the fairy lights that it’s cosmically unfair. “You’re the only one who makes me this way.”
“I think it’s just that karma gave you everything you deserve,” Stiles tells him, his smile softening. “And I do mean everything.”