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“The hell is that?” Peter asks in disgust, leaning away from the bloated gray fish oozing on their doorstep.
Here in the rosy dawn light, it looks less appetizing than it did when Stiles first snagged it from the water ten minutes ago. Its natural coloring, with dark flecks scattered across its long body, make it look sort of pitted.
Stiles’s face is caught between a scowl and a smirk. “It’s a wolf eel.”
He’s still dripping wet, fresh from his morning swim. Behind him, the ocean waves roar in the distance, the surf wild and rough and carrying the briny scent of salt his wolf nose loves so much.
“Get it?” he presses.
Peter, still looking a little bleary-eyed, starts to shut the door in his face. Stiles gets his foot over the threshold just in time.
“Aw, c’mon! Wolf eel for my favorite wolf. That’s a good one, you have to admit.” Without giving an inch in the battle for the door, Stiles bends down to haul the fish up. “Anyway, this bad boy is gonna be so awesome for dinner later. I’m thinking grilled, but I’m open to suggestions.”
Peter’s staring at it with revulsion, still blocking the door from opening despite Stiles’s insistent pushes. (And okay, the eel does kinda have a face only a mother could love.)
“You know, some werewolves give each other normal gifts. Like fresh deer. Or a nice, fat rabbit. Edible things.” Peter steps back, causing Stiles to stumble forward and into the house.
Stiles scowls, slamming the door shut behind him. He follows Peter into the kitchen. “Well, you’re not worth killing a deer for.”
“I love you too, darling.”
Stiles flails his arms in exasperation. “You know what I mean!”
Peter glares, probably because Stiles is splattering seawater across the tile floor, both from his bare limbs and from the fish he’s still holding.
“Yes, so you’ve said,” he replies, feigning a whine to add, “‘It’s the eyes,’ wasn’t it?”
“They’re literally Bambi eyes, Peter. I can’t do it.”
Peter rolls his eyes and disappears down the hall, leaving Stiles alone in the kitchen with the wolf eel. Stiles frowns down at its toothy grin.
“And you know what?” Stiles adds, “I’m not apologizing for being unable to resist the natural defenses of some cute woodland anim—”
There’s a coffee mug on the counter. Stiles peers down into it. Empty. Which means Peter’s been up for a bit. Which, on a Saturday morning, means…
Stiles spins around. “Are you going to the beach?” he shouts, far louder than he needs to in his excitement. “Today? Right now?”
There’s a low grunt from somewhere in the vicinity of their bedroom, and the rustle of cloth. “Looks like good surf.”
“Yes!” Stiles says, pumping his fist in the air. (Unfortunately, it’s the one holding the wolf eel, which means a few more drops of fish-water splatters onto the floor. Peter can complain about the smell later.) “It really, really is, I promise.”
“God, you’re like a giant puppy,” Peter mutters from their room.
“Dude, I’m more wolf than you are.” Stiles snags a few paper towels and wraps the eel in it.
Somehow, even though Peter can bring down a deer in seconds and has definitely snapped at least a few human necks in his day, gutting and cleaning fish offends his delicate sensibilities. So of course, Stiles will do that part later, while his boyfriend is in the kitchen.
A snort. “And yet, you can’t even bring down a brush rabbit.”
“Won’t bring down a rabbit,” Stiles corrects, opening the fridge. The bottom shelf has been, somewhat begrudgingly, allocated to “ocean things.” He shoves the eel inside and slams the door shut. “I’m a swimmer, not a sprinter. Besides, you’re one to talk; you can’t even catch a surfperch with your teeth. A surfperch. Are you serious?”
“I’ve never seen the appeal of fishing,” Peter says, his voice taking on the note of amusement that it usually does when he knows he’s stirring the pot. “Why are you trying to eat something that lives, eats, and drinks in its own shit?”
“Oh my god, Peter, it’s the ocean! You swim in it all the time.”
“Notice I’m not lining up to drink the seawater,” Peter replies.
He emerges in a black wetsuit, raking fingers through sleep-mussed hair. And Stiles could finish their well-trod argument, but he instead springs up and heads to the door, ready to get back into the water. It takes Peter a minute to find his pack, and by then, Stiles is vibrating in place with his boyfriend’s surfboard in hand.
“I’m sorry, were you in a hurry?” Peter teases, and Stiles is sure he’s going slow on purpose.
“Come on.”
“It’s not like we don’t do this all the time, minnow.”
“Not all the time! And I know, just—” Stiles opens the door, exasperated.
Peter holds a hand out for his board as he passes, shaking his head fondly. “Alright, alright,” he laughs. “Let’s go.”
⬩
Their cabin is relatively secluded within the trees, but from its windows you can see rocky ground sloping toward the ocean below. A small footpath leads down to the water, three switchbacks winding over moss and stone to reach the sand. It’s a small beach, the view overgrown with trees on one side and obscured by rocky cliffs on the other.
It’s faster to the water on four legs, so Stiles transforms into a wolf halfway down the trail, already excited to swim again and even more excited to do it with Peter.
Back when Peter first showed up here on the coast, it seemed to take him a while to find his stride. He was running from something or perhaps looking for it, Stiles understood, this lone wolf that sometimes ambled through Stiles’s tiny corner of the world.
It’s the seclusion that appealed to Peter, the idea of making a territory his own without a pack. Fortunately, he was pretty unsuccessful at that last bit. Though he proclaimed to find Stiles “distinctly un-wolflike,” he practically refused to leave him alone whenever he was around.
(“You ever think how un-wolflike you are to me?” Stiles remembers asking. “You don’t even like to get your fur wet.”
“I was raised on land, where we’re taught good manners,” Peter replied, amused. “And you’re a seawolf, through and through.”)
He’s always seemed a little bemused by how keen Stiles is on the sea. In those early days of their relationship, he was often grumbling but dutiful in the face of Stiles’s frequent beach trips, packing a book and beach towel and watching Stiles’s fur get matted with saltwater from afar. Back then, he called Stiles his “semi-aquatic boyfriend” on his rare phone calls home, always smirking when Stiles flipped him off.
Stiles remembers wondering when Peter would leave. Expecting it and dreading it.
Land wolves usually need sprawling territories, wanting the security of large forests flush with game. But seawolves need far less. Stiles grew up here on the coast, paddling out into the waves with his mother, cracking open barnacles with his tough back molars, hauling in the occasional sea lion when he could. The ocean is his territory. Stiles exists within a tiny stretch of woodland, rock, and sand, because it also comprises every part of the sea he can reach by paddling.
Eventually, though, Peter picked up an old surfboard from somewhere in town.
“It’s just an old hobby,” he told Stiles once, as if he isn’t as graceful on the waves as he is loping through the woods, translating quick and predatory strides into dextrous turns and cutbacks. He’s swift as a shark when he carves through the surf, and slick as a…well, as a wolf eel.
But prettier, obviously, Stiles thinks, watching Peter wax his board as he trots through the shallows.
His eyes drift down the long line of Peter’s back as he leans in, making neat, careful lines across the surface. When he feels Stiles’s eyes upon him, he looks up and smirks, tossing the wax aside.
“Shall we?” he asks.
Peter strides out into the waves, Stiles lunging forward right on his heels until the water gets so high he has to swim. When Peter gets onto the board, Stiles paddles beside him into the surf.
“Your tail is wagging, you lunatic,” Peter says affectionately, bringing his board out to the deepest swells. “Tell me if you get tired.”
Peter doesn’t yet understand that Stiles could never get tired of this. Not physically, because he’s spent years swimming in the surf from morning to night, and not otherwise, because now Peter’s in the water beside him.
Plus, Stiles doesn’t think he’s wrong about the water today. The surf looks good. He’s not great at surfing, but he thinks he’s grown an eye for what Peter wants out of his waves: a glassy-smooth surface in the shallows, but a nice bit of foam as the water crests, with deeper swells breaking further off.
Peter hops up onto his board, catching Stiles off-guard; he ducks under the swell of the first wave.
The next time, Stiles hangs a little closer to shore to watch. Peter carves a path through the water that looks almost like magic to Stiles’s eyes, gliding without effort, like he’s bending the waves to his will.
After a brief pause, he catches two more waves back to back, jetting through them faster this time. Stiles still struggles to tell what makes Peter decide to jump in, what qualities of the crest or trough set the good waves apart from the rest. He quickly gives up trying. Instead, he swims after Peter as the board cuts through the waves ahead of him.
Then, the waves must slow, or else Peter must judge them inferior, because he sits on the board for a few minutes as Stiles paddles back to shore to nose at the washed-up kelp further off.
There’s actually much more sitting involved in surfing than Stiles anticipated when Peter first started out. Before surfing became a thing for them, Stiles thought it was all constant motion, cutting from one wave into the next until you wanted to stop. But he should have known it’s not that easy: the ocean’s far from constant.
Peter catches a few more waves after that, occasionally sitting idle between them. Stiles often swims back toward him while he waits, watching the waves rock him up and down.
Eventually, he climbs up onto the board and shakes out his fur. Peter recoils at first, but he’s less annoyed than he would be if he weren’t already covered in seawater himself.
“Want to try today?” he asks, pulling seaweed out of the fur on Stiles’s side.
Stiles cocks his head in thought and then shifts back to a human. Though the water’s cold against his bare human skin, he straddles the board facing Peter. “What, and have my ass handed to me again?” he laughs. “No, thank you.”
He can’t explain why the ocean feels like a second skin to him when he’s a wolf, like warm arms pulling him into an embrace, and yet his human legs feel so clumsy on the board. Peter seems to be the opposite, using the board as a shield between himself and the sea.
“You were…better. Last time,” Peter tries.
Stiles snorts. Peter’s being charitable, which he never is unless he wants something. “You mean when I wiped out the first time, or when I ended up with sand in places where I had to find it later?”
Peter smirks, running a hand down Stiles thighs and pulling the underside of his knees, like he’s trying to tug him closer.
It’s not that he likes watching Stiles make a fool of himself in the water—though there’s definitely a bit of that in there, given how often Stiles pokes fun at Peter for his less-than-seaworthy ways. But he probably also likes being the one to teach Stiles something new. Especially because he often has a chance to get his hands on Stiles because of it.
“You were very handsome doing it,” Peter offers instead, with a grin that says he knows the line isn’t going to work.
Stiles laughs in earnest this time. “You know what? Alright,” he says, just to see the look of pleased surprise on Peter’s face. “Show me again.”