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Allison’s on the phone to her father, arranging for the transport of their previously unidentified hunter friend, and Scott’s paying for the bar stools they broke, so Stiles is the one who goes looking for Dara, after. Anyway, no one else had been there to see the way Dara’s hands had been clenched into fists, the way her mouth had been pressed thin and taut, how pale she’d gotten. When he slips out the club’s side door, he nearly stumbles over her abandoned heels, and thinking of her outside, barefoot on the damp ground, makes his stomach clench and his chest ache.
He’s got it really bad for Dara Hale, he knows this, okay? And he knows she’s never going to look at him twice any more than Lydia will. He’s accepted that. Mostly. Mostly he’s accepted that. It doesn’t change the way he feels about her: like he wishes he could take her pain away. Like he wishes he could protect her, which is stupid, because she’s got an inch of height and twenty-five pounds of sheer muscle on him, not to mention the supernatural strength and speed and healing.
He finds her not too far off from the club, in an alleyway. She’s on the ground, back against the brick wall, one knee up, the other leg stretched out in front of her, bottom of her dress pulled high against her bent thigh. She’s still wearing the fishnets and her head’s tipped back, eyes closed. She has to know someone’s there—maybe it’s obvious it’s him, by his scent or his heartbeat or however it is she can always tell who’s at the door—but she doesn’t turn to look, or even open her eyes.
“Brought your shoes,” he offers dumbly, holding them pointlessly out in front of him. “In case you wanted them, or whatever.”
“Just put them down somewhere,” Dara replies after a few beats, and she sounds exhausted.
He sets the shoes down. He should probably leave. Instead, he hesitates.
Dara notices. Of course she notices.
“What do you want, Stiles?” she says, voice breaking. She finally opens her eyes, and they’re bright and wet, eyelashes spiky with tears. Her face looks haunted.
She’s been crying.
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He shoves his hands in his pockets and shrugs, uncomfortable. Because he can’t just go, not with Dara like this.
She huffs out something sharp and bitter and almost a laugh, and says, “Whatever, stay if you want, I don’t care,” before pulling both her knees in close, heedless of the fall of her skirt, and tipping her head back against the brick.
He’s not one to refuse an invitation, even one like that, so he takes a few shuffling steps toward her, awkward. He’s never seen her express an emotion beyond irritation or anger, much less seen her cry.
“What can I do?” he asks finally, hands fisted, helpless, at his sides. “Tell me what I can do.”
She gives a sharp, violent shake of her head, but she won’t look at him again, and he falls to his knees. From his new position, he can see her bare toes are curled under, and he stares at them, feeling like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be. Dara Hale—alpha bitch, who throws around her size, her bulk, as easy as breathing—is trying to make herself small.
“Hey,” he whispers, “hey, Dara, don’t—”
She snarls, rearing up suddenly at his words, and he loses his balance in surprise, has to put his hands down to keep himself from falling into her. She flinches back again, hisses, her back audibly hitting the brick, and he looks down at where his hands have fallen. The hem of her skirt is covering them to the second knuckle. The crosshatch of her fishnets presses into his palms.
His whole body spasms. Like the time that Lydia, high on muscle relaxers, nearly face-planted into his lap, except worse, so much worse, because Dara’s conscious, she’s aware, and she isn’t pushing him off. She doesn’t even look like she wants to.
Dara’s nostils flare; she can smell him. She must. And, he realizes dimly, he can smell her.
“Stiles,” she says, low, eyes locked with his.
Her feet shift on the asphalt, parting her knees further. Her chest is rising and falling under the top of her dress, and he wants—he wants things he’s afraid to want, even as, heart in his throat, eyes still locked with Dara’s and chest too tight to take a breath, he slides his hands cautiously forward. Under.
He’s expecting . . . he doesn’t know what. Something violent, in reaction. But she just tips her head back again, and lets her thighs fall open further. Letting him close. Letting him in.
The noise he makes as her skirt slips up far enough that he can tell she isn’t wearing anything but the fishnets underneath doesn’t even sound human, and the broken moan Dara lets out in response makes him want to cry it hurts so good. Her hips shift forward and her hand comes up to the back of his head but he’s already dropping down without the urging, he can’t help it, the way the fishnet threads bite into the red flush of her hot, swollen flesh, it’s—it’s mesmerizing. He brushes the tips of his fingers over the mesh and heat and she whines, breaks into a whimper and pulls him in closer.
And shit, he’s not prepared for this, hasn’t watched enough porn for this (can you ever watch enough porn for this?), but he’s nowhere crazy enough to say no. He’s actually shaking—nerves, astonishment, a little shock—but he lowers himself between her parted thighs, crammed between her bent knees, and puts his mouth on her.
The scent this close makes him dizzy—musky, thick. He wants to roll in it, and he wonders distantly if this is what being a wolf is like. He licks the fishnet wet, flattens his whole tongue over it and drags, sucks the sweat from the threads and worms his tongue in underneath. It pulls the netting even tighter against her, she arches into his mouth with a quiet cry, and god, he needs—he needs to get something inside her, his tongue, his fingers, anything, fuck. She’s pushing up into him like she wants it too, the damp fibers beginning to rub his mouth raw, and as his fingers dig into her thighs—Dara’s thighs—there’s a snick sound, movement by his cheek.
His eyes fly open in time to see a claw retreat, already dissolving back into a human finger. He looks up to see Dara staring down at him, eyes burning red. Keeping his eyes on hers, he fumbles his fingers into the space she’s made, hooks them tight, and jerks. The fishnet rips open. And with a groan, he finally sinks into her, nose pushing against what he’s hoping is her clit, tongue licking deeper inside her where it’s hotter and slicker. His eyelids flutter.
“Stiles,” she whispers once, sounding strung out and desperate, and he knows his name will never ever sound that fucking good again; he’s going to come just from this, from licking out alpha-fucking-werewolf Dara Hale—from the taste of her tart on his tongue and her little hitched breaths and the pressure of the pavement on his dick through his jeans.
It’s a small mercy Dara is too distracted to notice how pathetically close he is. She’s grinding against his face, lifting and twisting her hips as he tries his best to stay with her. His tongue is sloppy, he can tell, already getting the feel of this enough to know how much better he could be at it with some practice. But he also already knows how much he fucking loves it, and when he takes a chance, tightens his fingers on her thighs again and sucks, he groans aloud at the way her body tenses, long and tight under his hands, and then just breaks, shuddering, shaking.
Afterward, she falls back against the wall, eyes closed and body lax, and where he goes wrong is, it makes him brave. His hands are still on her thighs; all the blood in his body is pooled at his groin, brain offline. And so it doesn’t occur to him, fascinated, not to slide his thumb past the wet swollen folds framed by broken fishnet and inside.
That’s when the world restarts—Dara jerks, pulls back and up so fast he has to scramble not to fall on his face, and by the time he’s caught himself, she’s already on her feet. He levers himself to his knees, and looks up at her, dazed. Wipes his mouth.
For a moment, she just stares at him, then she snatches up her shoes in one hand and suddenly she’s gone, leaving him stunned and breathless on the pavement, dick thick and heavy and aching.
*
The reason Stiles remembers Dara from before she and Laura left Beacon Hills is, okay, first, the fire; he remembers his dad on the phone late at night, talking quietly about the flames, so much smoke—those poor girls. But he also remembers her because even back then, Dara Hale was hot.
Stiles was ten, had barely discovered what his dick was even for, and his regular babysitter had a crush on the captain of the field hockey team, so for awhile there he’d spent a lot of time sitting on the bleachers during their practices after school, and . . . Dara. In a little skirt, black hair loose and whipping across her face. Always serious and focused on the bench, but her broad smile whenever a ball she hit slammed into the net was blinding. For a few months Dara had even surpassed Lydia in his pre-teen affections. But then he’d switched babysitters, and that had been it, really.
Dara’s even hotter now, and not just because of all the leather. It’s not the whole tragic-past thing, either, because Stiles has never been especially into that. Maybe it’s that Dara’s older, more . . . womanly; maybe it’s that he’s older. Or maybe it’s that he knows her, now, at least a little. That he’s seen her hurt, and seen her—well, not happy, exactly, but something like content. He knows a lot more about this Dara than he knew about that other one. And she’s stubborn and hot-headed and rough, but also—careful, when it counts. Fiercely loyal. Determined.
Still, he has fond memories of that field hockey skirt. Which he hadn’t revisited for years, until the night he followed Dara back to her apartment to grab the hoodie he’d left (maybe on purpose) the last time they were all there. Dara was using a towel to clean the leftover blood from her injured arm; he’d grabbed the hoodie from the back of the couch where he’d left it, then started poking around her bookshelves.
On one of them was a photograph he’d never seen before—one of exactly two he’s seen at her place ever. Dara, in her field hockey uniform, stood between two adults; her parents, he assumed. The woman had her arm around Dara’s waist. The man had his hand on Dara’s shoulder. Dara looked embarrassed but pleased. And her legs were just as description defying as he’d remembered.
Next to it was a second photo, obviously taken at arm’s length by one of its subjects. In it were two girls—young women. One was Dara, familiar black hair, curiously clear green-gray eyes, narrow jaw and razor-sharp cheekbones. The other one was less severe in every detail: hair dark brown rather than black, eyes a rich hazel. The resemblance between them was clear but the other woman’s face was softer: rounded cheeks, more warmth in her skin and her smile. Laura. She looked like a place you could curl up and be safe for a while. Where Dara looked like she’d steal your milk money, Laura looked like she’d bake you cookies.
“You sister was beautiful,” Stiles said absently, glancing back over his shoulder, and Dara’s jaw clenched.
“I know.”
*
A few weeks back they’d started tracking what they eventually learned was a nocnitsa. Deaton was the one that first raised the proverbial red flag, after seeing some strange cases of fatigue in his patients, then Scott’s mom had made an offhand comment about a patient of hers with symptoms that sounded suspiciously similar.
They hadn’t been taking it as seriously as they otherwise might have, because it’s not like people were dying. They figured out pretty early on what the nocnitsa was, and also what it did: drained energy, mostly. As long as it didn’t drain too much, it didn’t seem worth making a big deal out of. But then a clubber who showed up at the hospital suffering from “exhaustion” almost died.
Which is why, earlier that night, instead of partaking in their usual Friday night activities, they went out to look for the nocnitsa.
From what the bestiary said, the things are at their strongest after dark, and prefer younger prey; every case they’d identified as nocnitsa-related so far was someone under twenty-five, and most of the ER patients they knew about had been out drinking the night they came in. Beacon Hills has a few bars, mostly the seedier kind, at the outskirts of town. But the "club district” (the two square blocks that house Jungle, a few broken down warehouse spaces that hold the occasional rave, and an upscale club or two) is the best bet.
They draft Lydia to the cause and split up into three pairs consisting of one werewolf and human each. Isaac and Lydia are checking the swankier spots, because Lydia’s the only one of them who can afford to get in their front doors. Scott and Allison have the warehouses; there’s a not-very-underground costume party there that night that means Allison can wear her knives in plain sight. Which leaves Stiles and Dara with Jungle.
(“You’ve got friends there, right, Stiles?” Lydia had mentioned, eyes big and unconvincingly innocent. Scott—the traitor—had laughed.)
So Stiles dresses himself according to Lydia’s instructions—“the point is to blend in, Stiles, not make everyone feel sorry for you”—and parks the Jeep a few blocks away. Dara emerges from the shadows just as he’s approaching the building.
“Holy—” he squeaks, which is officially in response to her scaring the daylights out of him for the seventy millionth time, but also, unofficially, for her outfit. She’s wearing what he’s heard Lydia call fuck-me pumps (a term he’s never really understood until now) in black, black fishnets, and an actual dress—something knit and deep red that clings to every muscle and curve. Her hair is long and loose and inky black around her shoulders.
When he finally manages to make it to her face, she looks uncomfortable, and he feels a faint pang of guilt at objectifying her. Dara has never seemed at ease with the way she looks. It’s like her body was a weapon, but not one she ever wanted to learn how to aim. She seems angry about it every time she uses it, which is why Stiles has stopped telling her she’s pretty. Or, okay, it’s not like he used to compliment her eyes or anything (except that one time, but he’s pretty sure he was concussed at the time, so he thinks he should get a pass. Dara’s never mentioned it, anyway). But he’s stopped making jokes about how hot she is. Because she goes cold, shuts down, every time.
“You’re, like, a girl,” he tells her instead, and predictably, she scowls, which is better. Normal.
“Come on,” she says shortly, “let’s get this over with.”
“You mean let’s go kick some nocnitsa ass,” he corrects cheerfully, nearly tripping over his own feet to catch up with her.
Just not immediately, because he’s only human, okay? And he’s never seen her from behind in anything but jeans. Not that he’s complaining about her jeans.
“But seriously,” he says as he pulls up even with her, breathing a little fast, “you own something other than combat boots?”
“I’ve been to clubs before,” she snaps without looking at him.
“In New York?” he asks, and then holds his hands up when she whirls to glare. “Police background check! You were a murder suspect.”
“Your dad just leaves those lying around the house?”
“Pretty much,” he says, then makes a face. “Well, less, these days.”
Dara looks like she might say something—something like I’m sorry—but then seems to think better of it. He appreciates the sentiment better that she doesn’t put it into words, anyway.
Once they’re inside, Dara heads straight for the bar, and it’s impressive, the way the crowd pretty much parts for her. He wonders if it"s the alpha thing, or the six-foot tall and made of muscle thing. Maybe the outfit? Because her legs, seriously.
Dara signals the bartender, orders something he can’t hear, then scans the room.
“We could dance,” Stiles suggests, just in case Dara’s undergone some sort of personality transplant in the last few minutes. She hasn’t.
“You are going to sit here and drink the coke I just ordered you. I am going to look for the nocnitsa.”
“What’s the point of me being here if I have to sit at the bar?”
“Because if we left you at home, you’d do something stupid,” she says bluntly.
Which is so not even true. Not the “do something stupid” bit, that part’s probably not wrong. He’s here because he’s back-up.
“And I have Scott on speed dial, in case something goes wrong.”
He knows his strengths.
“I have Scott on speed dial,” Dara points out.
“Yeah, but he answers when I call,” Stiles shoots back, and immediately after feels like maybe that was too far, because there’s resignation and hurt in Dara’s eyes when she scowls this time.
“Give me your wallet,” she says.
“What? Why?” he asks, even as he hands it over.
She opens it up, pulls out a few bills, and puts them on the bar before handing it back.
“Just stay put,” she says, handing him the coke the bartender’s just put down behind her.
He huffs in protest but does what she says, biting down sulkily on his straw.
They spend the next hour looking for the nocnitsa—or Dara spends the next hour looking for the nocnitsa, and he spends it tracking her movements from the bar in between sizing up everyone who comes up for signs of nocnitsa-ness, while nursing his coke. He idly wonders if he could get away with telling this story as “Dara bought me a drink” without Scott hearing the technical lie.
But the nocnitsa isn’t what they find.
Dara’s back at the bar, grabbing a water and looking flushed and sweaty and cranky (a good look for her, like pretty much everything else). Stiles is pointing out a few candidates on the dance floor while she nods, actually taking him seriously, much to his surprise, when her hand clamps down on his arm, hard enough that he knows it’s going to bruise.
“What the hell?” he asks, startled and kind of irritated—how’s he supposed to explain that to his dad, lacrosse again?—but then she’s shifted her body in front of his, obscuring his view.
“Nate?” he thinks he hears her whisper.
Stiles bounces up out of his seat and goes on his toes, and when he manages to catch a look over her shoulder, there’s a guy standing there that looks a lot like Nate Argent, just a few years younger, maybe, and Jesus, that’s enough to send shivers down Stiles’ spine, and the guy didn’t kill his entire family, so. Painful manhandling forgiven.
“You must be Dara Hale,” the guys says, slow smile spreading like a stain across his face. He’s giving her a slow look up and down, dirty enough that Stiles feels uncomfortable just standing behind her. “Nate told me all about you.”
Dara’s silent, but she’s—is she shaking?
Stiles moves far enough over that he catches the guy’s attention.
“Hey, buddy, you related to the Argents?” he opens, trying for pleasant. He’s usually the good cop to Dara’s bad anyway.
“Who’s the jailbait, Dara?” the guy asks, ignoring Stiles’ question completely. So rude. And kind of insulting, with the jailbait thing, to both of them.
“I’m a friend of Allison Argent’s,” Stiles answers, trying to inject just a bit more threat into the tone. “You know Allison?”
Finally, the guy’s gaze shifts off Dara and onto him, sizing him up a little more thoroughly, like maybe he missed something the first time. “Sure, Allison. Chris’ kid.”
“Very good!” Stiles praises, maybe more sarcastically than is totally wise in this situation, since if this guy is an Argent, safe money’s on him having a few concealed weapons and lacking the sanity to not use them in a crowded space.
Stiles has an alpha werewolf, but Dara’s still silence isn’t exactly filling him with confidence. She should be able to take this guy no problem, but she still looks like she’s seeing a ghost.
“Chris know you’re in town?” Stiles asks. “Allison didn’t say they were expecting anybody.”
“Allison tell you everything?”
The guy’s hand is sliding toward his waistband; Stiles is already hitting send on a one-handed text to Scott behind his back. He’s pretty sure he just typed a string of random characters, but Scott’ll get it. He’ll come.
“She tells me enough,” Stiles says meaningfully, and the guy says, fingers resting now on something dark and solid jutting out the top of his jeans, “Well then.”
“Why are you here,” Dara says flatly, finally speaking.
“The guy shrugs. “In Beacon Hills? I’m tracking something.”
“The nocnitsa?” Stiles asks, and Dara says, “We’ve got it. You can go.”
“But Beacon Hills is such a nice little town,” the guy says, fingers starting to curve around the edge of what Stiles is pretty sure, now, is a gun. “Thought I’d stay awhile, see if Cousin Chris had any wildlife problems he needed any help with.”
Dara growls, sharp and aggressive, the guy pulls his gun, and Stiles drops to make himself as small a target as possible as Dara lunges. The shot the guy gets off misses, but the sharp crack of the bullet leaving the barrel draws enough attention that there are a few screams, even as the guy throws a punch at Dara and she, by the look of it, knees him viciously in the groin before delivering a hard uppercut to his jaw. The people around them are starting to panic, the realization that something’s going down spreading through the room. At least no one’s getting paralyzed, this time. Dara has the unidentified Argent by the throat, lifted onto his toes, and thank God Stiles can see, past them, Scott pushing through the crowd.
The guy grins at Dara, blood on his teeth. “Nate said you had a good grip.”
Dara recoils. She recoils. Stiles has never seen her do that before. She drops him like she’s been burned, but it’s okay, because Scott’s there to grab him when he stumbles back, laughing, and force him to his knees in the swiftly emptying space.
The music shuts off just as Allison steps up; the DJ ran, so there"s no one in the booth to cue up the next song. The sudden silence is eerie.
“Hi, Alex,” Allison greets him, hands resting on the hilts of her own weapons, the knives strapped at her belt, as she looks down at him, held in place by Scott’s sharp-clawed grip on his shoulders. “You really should have called first.”
In all the drama, it takes a few minutes for Stiles to even realize Dara’s gone.
*
Forty-eight hours after he picks himself up off the ground outside Jungle and drives himself home alone, Stiles decides fuck it and just goes to Dara’s apartment.
She opens the door even though she knows it’s him, which he wants to take as a good sign. Except that, when she does, she’s looking at the space above his shoulder, not his face.
“So, Friday,” he says, because all the conversation openings he practiced seem stupid now.
She grimaces, like maybe she’d expected him to just pretend it didn’t happen. She’s still looking at the hallway instead of at him.
Stiffly, she says, “Did you want me to apologize?”
“You could,” he says. He just wants her to look at him, mostly. “That’s the kind of thing that, you know, people do. When they abandon their sexual partners on the ground in dark alleyways.”
She frowns, and her eyes finally focus on his. “We aren’t sexual partners.”
“We could be, if you—wanted. Sometimes.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, feeling suddenly even more uncomfortable. “I wasn’t too terrible, was I?”
“What?” Like that was the last thing she would have thought he’d ask.
“If I was, I can get better,” he can’t help saying. Trying. “I haven’t really had any practice.”
She looks even more stunned at that. Like somehow she didn"t know. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out, eyes wide. “I shouldn’t have—let you do that.”
Let him. Jesus.
“Maybe not,” he concedes, even if he wouldn’t trade it, no matter what happened after. “But you did. And then you—” His voice fucking wavers with all the hurt he was trying not to feel. “—you just left me there. How could you—” And then he realizes he’s crying, as if his voice cracking wasn’t bad enough. He wipes violently at the tears that have managed to spill over onto his cheeks. Shit. “This is humiliating. I’m just gonna—”
But Dara grabs his bicep before he can finish turning; she squeezes it once before releasing it. “Stiles,” she says. She looks miserable, but determined. “Come in. We’ll talk.”
He follows her inside, and when she pauses by the kitchen table, he sits. She stays standing.
“So,” she says uncomfortably, “what did you want to talk about?”
He almost laughs. “Take your pick! What happened in Jungle. What happened outside Jungle.”
“Look, Stiles, what do you want from me?” she asks—steadily, not desperately. Just asking the question.
“I don’t know,” he says, but he does, it’s just too embarrassing to say. He wants to kiss her. He didn’t even get to kiss her.
“This can’t happen,” she says, voice muted, like she’s trying to be kind, and it gets his back up. He doesn’t want kind. He wants her.
And maybe just wanting her was okay, when he was sure he had no chance, but now that she’s let him in this far, now that he’s touched her (more than touched her), it’s burning under his skin. He’s mad, and he’s also scared, but more than both of those things he wants, desperately. He’s not an idiot, he knows it’s probably dumb, with the things he knows she’s been through, the things he knows she’s done, but he still wants her. And if there’s any way he can have her . . .
“Why did it happen?” he asks, instead of saying any of that. “Why did you let me—”
She closes her eyes briefly, like it hurts to have them open. Like it hurts to look at him. “I don’t know.”
“It was something about the fight?” he pushes, carefully.
Her mouth tightens.
“I just . . .” He rubs a hand through his hair, frustrated. He knows she’s getting close to the point where she’s going to shut him out again, and it’s going to hurt so much worse, this time. “Why me? Why not . . . somebody else?” Anybody else.
He never claimed to have great self-esteem, okay? He knows what his strengths are, and none of them should have led to Dara Hale letting him go down on her in an alley.
She looks like she’s in pain—actual, physical pain—but she says, “You’re safe.”
“I’m . . . safe?” he repeats dumbly. Bitterness washes over him. Safe.
“You’re not a threat,” she clarifies, and maybe it shouldn’t, but it stings. He knows he’s human. He knows, even for a human, that he’s not exactly a physical threat. He’s not Chris Argent, or Allison. But it hurts anyway.
Then again—“If I’m so safe,” he says, eyes narrowing, “why did you run? If I’m so harmless.”
She sets her jaw. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“That you can’t hurt me,” she says. But it sounds like a lie, and the look on her face says she hears it too.
Slowly, he stands up. “Are you sure?”
It’s not like he wants Dara to think he’d hurt her. But it must mean something, if she thinks he could. He must mean something, right? To her.
“Stop asking so many questions,” she seethes, and he’s standing up, drawn toward her, hands held in front of him, open. Not a threat. Not a threat, except how apparently, somehow, he is.
She stands her ground—of course she does—and he’s close enough now that he could touch her. He doesn’t.
He licks his lips, leaves them parted. Says, a little breathless, not quite selling it as the joke it should be: “Why?”
He’s about to back off. He is. Or she’ll pull back and he won’t try to stop her (as if he could). But then her gaze drops to his mouth. And all he has time to do is take a deep breath before they’re kissing, Dara’s mouth closing over his, hot and hard like she’s trying to swallow him down, and maybe it’s not an answer, but it’s close enough.
“Okay, yeah,” he says breathily as she moves to his jaw, stretching his neck back to bare his throat.
She’s backed him against the windows, wrists pinned, and it’s better like this, than it was the other night: better with her in her gray wifebeater and the terrible-fitting men’s jeans that bunch at her boots. Better with her pushing at him, her whole body pressed insistently against his. He goes along with enthusiasm, managing to get a leg wedged in between her thighs, feeling himself thickening up against her hip.
He flexes his hands against hers, and she loosens her grip, doesn’t stop him from skimming his fingers up the smooth skin of her bare arms, somehow vulnerable without the leather jacket no matter how thick they are with muscle. He moves one hand to the back of her neck, hears the high sound she makes in her throat. Starts to thread his fingers into her hair as she steers them away from the windows, but pulls back immediately when she tenses up.
“Sorry, shit, sorry,” he mutters, pressing the words against her temple, her cheek. Don’t stop, please, don’t stop.
“Forget it,” she says as she moves back up to his mouth, then nips his bottom lip, and he’s sure there’s a story there, even more now than when she first stiffened. He wants to know, but not now—not when he’s here, Dara under his hands and pulling him down onto her bed, not because she’s traumatized and needs something and he’s there, but because it’s him, specifically, something about him, that she needs.
It’s not like he’s never kissed anyone before, but he’s definitely never kissed anyone he wanted as much as he does Dara, and he’s nearly giddy with it, happy and eager and shivery. When she rakes blunt human nails down his back, forcibly rolls them until he"s under her, he can’t help teasing. “Wildcat,” he says, near to bursting with affection.
She grunts into his mouth. “Wild, huh? You want to tame me?”
“What?” There"s something a little off in her voice, and he pulls away slightly to look at her face. He furrows his brow at her, bewildered. “Why?”
And she buries her face in his neck and laughs. It’s a sound he’s never heard before, from her. It makes him itch to be closer.
“I think you’re supposed to want to,” she says after a moment, mouthing now at the skin behind his ear. Her tongue slides quick up the crease, then along the underside of the lobe.
“Fuck that,” he mutters, shivering, and she laughs again, light and quick. She kisses his throat once, twice, and then she’s pulling back to look at him with a worryingly serious expression. He wants to rub the crease from her forehead.
“You have to tell me,” she says, fingers paused at the button of his jeans, “if I do anything you don’t want.”
He jokes, throat dry: “Don’t you think it’s a little unfair, extracting promises from a guy at a time like this?”
“Stiles.” The humor is totally gone from her eyes. Her thumb is rubbing slow circles over the metal. “Swear it.”
“Okay. Okay! I will, I swear. But I can’t really imagine you doing something I holy f—”
“You what?” she asks archly, hand fitted hot and sure around Little Stiles.
His own hand is fisted, too, but it’s stuffed into his mouth to keep him from making any embarrassing noises. He waves the other one—carry on—and he gets to see her smile before he can’t look anymore, because the sight of Dara Hale tugging on his dick is almost enough to make him come before he even gets to appreciate how it feels. And it feels amazing.
“So this is the first time someone’s touched you like this, Stiles?” she asks conversationally, hand smooth and sure, and he groans.
“Oh my God, you asshole,” he says.
“Is it?” She’s smiling.
“You know it is,” he says, and is—rewarded?—by the soft press of her mouth on the inner stretch of his thigh, a slow lave of her tongue.
His jeans and boxers are both bunched a few inches above his knees, and it means he can’t move his legs much, can’t spread them, can’t use them to urge her closer.
“I shouldn’t be glad,” she murmurs against his skin, “but I am.”
“You’re trying to kill me,” he accuses, and she smiles again. His breath catches as she slides her thumb down the inside of that same thigh until his jeans halt her progress.
“Off?” she queries.
“Off, yes, use your claws, I don’t care,” he says frantically, but she just takes her hand off of him—why? Oh—and pulls them off.
Then Dara is kneeling between his spread legs, a hand on each knee. She waits until he’s looking at her face—there’s a lot he wants to take in about this, okay?—then slowly pushes his knees back toward him.
“Like this, okay?” she says. “Hold them if you need to.” And he puts his hands where hers had been automatically, even if he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on.
He can feel her breath on the base of his dick, and then—lower. His legs almost slip out of his grip as she presses her tongue to the tender, sensitive skin just below his balls. This is . . . That’s . . . She slides her tongue around the curve of one ball, then the other, making him arch like a bow, and then she moves down.
The first sure touch of her tongue there still shocks him, somehow. His mind goes momentarily white; then it’s racing again, because holy shit, he’s seen porn, but he never figured—it was always between guys, and also he always kind of thought the reality would be a little gross and he doesn’t even remember how well he actually showered. But Dara doesn’t seem to care, licking flat across, then spiraling in until she’s nudging him open with the warm, wet tip of her unexpectedly agile tongue before starting the whole process all over again. Her thumb is rubbing back and forth just under his balls and he grips onto his legs harder—which just opens him up for her more.
It’s a stomach-churning sort of pleasure, one that rides the edge of nausea and rapture; he’s sweating, and he’s pretty sure his legs are shaking, and it’s incredible.
“Holy fuck, Dara,” he gasps out, kind of shocky, and she hums into his skin as she licks further inside him.
She puts one hand firm on his stomach to hold him in pace when he starts to rock into the pressure, needing . . . needing more, and then, as the prickling heat in his gut begins to expand and spread through him, she slides her other hand up and closes it around the shaft, pulling up, pulling everything taut, and he’s done, he is totally done, shooting and shaking and losing his grip on his legs as he comes so hard he might actually black out for a second.
He’s staring slack-jawed at the ceiling, ears still ringing, when Dara crawls back up and settles in next to him, full length of her body pressed against his side.
“Good?” she asks, hint of hesitation unfamiliar in her voice, and he nods, emphatically, trying to put all of the words of veneration he can’t string together just now into the movement.
She smiles. “I’m glad,” she breathes hot into his ear, “I owed you one,” and his eyes roll all the way back in his head.
When he gets himself together enough to turn his head to look at her, she’s laying on her side, watching him, head propped up on one hand. She’s still fully dressed. His shirt is still on.
“How long,” she asks, mouth curled at one side, “until you can get it up again?”
And he says, “Uh, ten minutes? Maybe? Less if you take your clothes off?”
“If you wanted me naked, Stiles, you should have just asked,” she almost purrs, and he butts her in the shoulder with his head in response, because that so would not have worked.
Also, he may have overestimated how long his refractory period is, because he can already feel something happening down there. And by the time Dana’s pulled off her shirt and unfastened her jeans, he’s feeling like he could maybe go again. Either way, he wants to be the one taking the rest of that off, no matter how much he’s sure he’s about to embarrass himself, struggling with her bra.
“Dara, let me—” he says as he surges up, stripping off his own shirt then reaching around her body to grab the hand she’s twisted back to unfasten the clasp.
She lets him, even though it takes him a few tries to get it—longer than it should have, because while he’s struggling she tips his chin up with one hand and kisses him, careful but firm, and he gets lost in it for a minute, in the heat of her tongue, in the brush of her nose on his cheek. He doesn"t even care where her mouth has been. Especially when the clasp finally releases—he doesn’t even know what he did—and then she’s naked from the waist up, bare breasts soft and, shit, lush, against his chest. Her back is smooth and her body feels deceptively small like this, his arms wrapped around her as she continues to kiss him, her hands framing his face.
She shifts until her thighs are on either side of his, and the position sends him reeling.
“You’re going to ride me, right?” he says, breathless. “Please tell me you’re going to ride me.”
She pulls back, brow furrowed. “You don’t want, your first time—”
“God no,” he says, “I’ll just mess it up. I can—later. I mean, if you want, after this . . .”
“Stiles,” she says, her lips against his. “Take off my pants.”
And it’s not a no, at least. He can work with that.
He fumbles open the button on her jeans, feels dizzy as he pulls down the zipper. Her underwear is black, cotton, simple. It’s possible he moans a little.
“Jesus, Stilinski,” Dara says, sounding amused but also, maybe, kind of fond.
She ends up taking her pants the rest of the way off herself, as he shifts further onto the bed, and when she’s done he tugs her up by the hips and lays back until she’s straddling his chest. Almost close enough to taste.
He urges her up further and presses his nose into the fabric, inhaling deep. She smells the same way she did the other night, just less sharp through the cotton of her underwear. She shudders over him.
“Quit wasting time,” she mutters, and obediently he slips a thumb underneath the fabric’s edge, finds where she’s, God, so wet. For him.
You’re beautiful, he thinks, and bites his tongue. He smooths his hands up her hips instead, peels her underwear down as he presses a kiss low on her stomach.
She groans as she settles back over him, underwear discarded, and says, “Your fingers, use—” and it only takes a little fumbling to find where he can push two fingers inside, slow and easy. He stares up at her, mouth slack, as she shifts, fucking herself on them; she meets his eyes, and hers are dilated, intense, the kind of intense he’s only used to from her in a fight.
“Stiles,” she breathes out, and his stomach clenches, his dick aches. But he doesn’t want to move, just wants to keep curling his fingers and letting her rock into him, keep drawing out the sounds she’s making.
Then she’s shifting back and bending down to kiss him, fiercely, so fiercely it takes him by surprise, leaving him flailing slightly before he can settle his hands on her thighs. The kiss is deep, and wet, and he’s pretty sure he’s been ruined for all other women.
“Going to fuck you now, okay?” she asks, and he says, “Completely okay,” and just barely catches her smile as she drops her head to position herself over him, taking him in hand and making him buck up involuntarily.
“Condom?” he asks, hoarse, as she sets the head against the heat and wetness between her legs.
“Got the pill,” she says, lines them up just right, and sinks down.
It’s like every nerve ending he has is in his dick.
“Yes, fuck,” she groans with satisfaction as she bottoms out, and Jesus Christ, he has never seen anything hotter than this in his entire life: the way her thighs flex as she starts to move, the slight shift of her breasts as she lifts and falls, the flush on her usually pale cheeks. Her hair loose around her shoulders. It makes him light-headed: seeing her, feeling her working up and down his dick. His fingers find her hips—not holding her, not guiding her, just feeling her as she moves above him, feeling the muscles contract—and she lets him.
He stares at her helplessly; he wants to touch more, his hands itch with it, but he doesn’t want to push, he doesn’t want to do anything wrong. He’s still having trouble believing this is even happening.
“Hey,” Dara says, her hips stilling. “Still want to be doing this?”
Her hair swings forward she shifts to get a better look at his face; he hopes it’s not as slack-jawed as he suspects it probably is.
“There is literally nothing in the entire universe I would rather be doing, are you kidding?”
“Okay,” she says slowly, like she doesn’t quite understand. Like maybe she doesn’t trust him. Her lips press together.
“I just don’t know what I’m doing,” he blurts out, face burning. Because he’d rather lose every bit of dignity he’s ever had than have her look at him like that. Especially with him inside her.
“I mean, it sounds like you’re enjoying it,” he goes on, “but I want to make sure, and I don’t know what I’m doing with my hands or where I’m allowed to touch or how I’m—ngh.”
She’s taken his hand and pressed it to her breast. The wrist position’s a little awkward, but he’s not about to complain.
“Touch me however you want,” she tells him. “You aren’t going to hurt me.”
He looks up into her eyes, remembering with a suddenly hollow stomach her words from earlier. “Because I can’t?” he asks.
Her face is serious when she looks back. “Because I know you won’t,” she says.