[Fic] Lovestruck [2/4]
Lovestruck
» Chapter-Specific Rating: R
» Classification(s): Angst
» Chapter-Specific Warnings: Underage Sexual Relations, Dubious Consent
» Summary: Three times Derek was gobsmacked, and one time it just sort of dawned on him.
» Author's Note: Remember, that last chapter was an outtake. This chapter returns to the main 3+1 plotline and contains Kate/Derek of the underage, dubious consent variety, and also mentions of graphic violence. If either of these things disturb you, consider skipping this part.
2.
"You understand, don't you?"
Derek understands.
"We have to do what's best for the pack."
He wants what's best for the pack, too.
"Just... stay there a little longer?"
He'll stay.
"It'll work out."
He doubts it.
"I love you."
"Love you too, Dad," he parrots dutifully.
"We can talk again on the weekend."
"Okay."
Derek waits until he hears the quiet click that signals the alpha has hung up, and gently replaces the receiver in its cradle. He lets his hand fall, bowing his head to stare blindly at the floor. For a moment, the only noise in the darkened motel room is the faint buzz of the stark florescent bulbs.
"Right," he whispers.
Then rips the phone out of the wall with an inchoate roar.
The plastic casing splinters on impact with the opposite wall, swiftly followed by the chair he's sitting on, the cheap motel toaster, the table, and everything on it. The last creates a shuddering hollow boom that finally satisfies, and Derek stops, panting harshly, hands curled into white-knuckled fists.
He wants to run, needs to run; the unthinking rage that led to all of this in the first place is like a fire at his back, a black dog nipping at his heels and he feels half-crazy, surrounded by the smells of a million different strangers.
And that's the point, really. That's why he's here, on the outskirts of this sleepy little suburban town that just happens to lie right in the middle of the neutral zone between the Redwood and Beacon Hills packs. He can't run. He's not even supposed to leave this room. Matthew's parents are demanding full weregild, eye for an eye, son for a son. If they catch him before the pack comes to a formal agreement, they'll kill him outright.
So Derek waits, still and quiet as he can. He hides, like a hare in tall grass, wrapping himself in human scent and human manners, smiling at the woman at the front desk, joking with her husband, making small talk with the man at the convenience store, who worries about the boy who comes in night after night to buy nothing but soda and Hungry Man frozen dinners.
Underneath, the wolf is constantly raging, stronger now as the moon waxes full in the sky above, and it isn't a choice anymore. Derek has toget out.
Slowly, as slowly as he can make himself, he walks across the room, shoving his feet into boots and reaching for his jacket where it hangs on the wall. He wrenches the door open, and twists the hinges so out of joint it refuses to close behind him. He takes several long, deep breaths, and makes it close. It might never open again, but he doesn't care, he doesn't care, not about any of it, and he's going to go feralif he spends one more second-
Deep breaths. The cool, wet scent of autumn fills his head, tainted with human garbage but better than the dense smells of sweat and despair that permeates the grungy room behind him. It's raining, icy needlelike drops that sting as they strike his face, and it's the first bit of luck he's had in days.
His feet move of their own accord, down the steps, into the street and away, body falling into a long easy lope as he works to put as much distance between the motel and himself as possible. As long as he keeps moving, the water will wash away any faint trace he leaves behind, and maybe he'll live to see pack justice passed on his head.
Maybe it will end all the same anyway.
There's a bar, down on a miserable little alley that runs under the highway. It's tiny and rundown and stinks of decades of piss and vomit, but (maybe because of that) he's never smelled another wolf there. Other things, yes; things that itch at his nose, wary-making and confusing, but very definitely not wolves. Not humans. And in the small lonely hours of the night, it's comforting to know a place where the stifling press of humanity that surrounds him during the day isn't all-emcompassing.
It helps that they don't card, either.
It's a Wednesday (maybe Thursday by now) and the bar is dark and all but dead, handfuls of patrons grouped in twos and threes talking quietly amongst themselves as the aging jukebox asks someone to pour some sugar on, love. Derek can feel eyes like the prick of knives as he slinks through the door and up to the dimly-lit bar.
He always gets the same thing: a third of raw whiskey, no ice, sloshing around at the bottom of a smudged glass like liquid regret. He doesn't like it, the taste or the burn, but it'd been the first thing that came to mind when the old man behind the counter had asked, "What'll it be?" He's hoping it makes him seem older, but from the look the man gives him every time he orders, the opposite might be true.
That first sip is always the worst, and the liquor burns all the way down to his empty stomach, hits it like napalm and spreads. Slumped low over the bar, he swallows against a cough and takes another sip, gritting his teeth and cutting a glance back out towards the worn felted pool tables, over the dirty, cracked dance floor.
There's a group in the far corner, two men and a woman sitting at a table together. The light falls so that Derek can only see pieces of them, an arm illuminated here, her waterfall of dark blonde hair there. There's something odd about the way they're sitting, facing each other but not talking, all their attention focused outward on the rest of the dark room. Derek wonders vaguely if they're waiting for someone, and lifts his glass again.
He sits, and drinks, but the restlessness that brought him here won't bleed away. He's tired of waiting, of feeling like the ax over his neck might drop at any moment, and the anticipation mixes with that aimless agitation and simmers just under his skin, resentment, anger, confusion, fear. The wolf says, He challenged. He lost. The wolf says, We were dominant. The wolf says, We were in the right.
Derek remembers the sudden hot gush of a severed artery in his mouth, remembers almost choking on the blood, and the next sip of whiskey is more of a desperate gulp.
"Going at it a little hard, aren't you?" someone asks, voice low and amused.
It's the woman from the corner, hair curling artlessly over her shoulders, eyes half-lidded, mouth crooked into a small smile. Closer, there's something familiar about her face, like he may have seen her around. Maybe she's been in here before.
He'd remember this scent, though. She smells... there's something smooth and warm and ready, coming off of her in waves. Derek can't help but part his lips, inhale so some of that heavy ripeness rolls across his tongue. Inside, the wolf pricks its ears.
She's watching him like she expects an answer, and under her waiting gaze he manages a stumbling, "I don't- know?"
"You don't know," she repeats, eyebrow raised. "Honey, that's just sad."
He scowls and looks away, but she's already falling into his space, sliding onto the stool next to him and leaning companionably against his shoulder. It's hard to breathe around how inviting she smells, and Derek tenses, acutely aware of every point of contact between them.
"Don't look so mad, kid," she husks, rum and cigarette smoke on her breath. "You don't know, that's fine. Maybe I can help with that."
Her name is Kate, and she drinks whiskey like a man twice her height and three times her weight. Normally Derek does as well or better, but he finds himself moving strangely slow and clumsy in comparison to her quick gestures and cutting words.
"My brothers and I, we were meeting some business partners here in town," she says, four or five glasses in. "Nothing but work, work, work, for weeks, Derek. I'm ready for a little fun."
She's running a finger down his arm, lopsided smile gone wide and a little wicked, and he doesn't remember telling her his name but he must have. "Fun?" he asks, slurring the word.
"That's right," she purrs. "Come outside with me?"
Derek's never picked up a woman in a bar before, has never actually kissed one, but he doesn't think this is how it usually goes. Kate pulls him through the door and around the corner, into a damp alley so narrow there's barely enough room for her to drop to her knees. She manages, though.
"God, what-what are you-?"
"Oh, baby," she chuckles, "You look like you could use so much more than a drinking lesson," and palms his dick through his jeans, hard. He groans, hips stuttering forward into her hand as the other slides up his inseam, fingers catching the hem of his shirt and dragging it up, baring the vulnerable stretch of his stomach.
Showing belly is dangerous for wolves, and submissive. Derek holds back an instinctual flinch, has a second to think, No, she's human, before Kate sinks her teeth into the softer flesh just below his navel. She seems to take his high yelp as a compliment.
She opens the button on his pants with her tongue, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. They flutter around her hair uncertainly until she rolls her eyes up to his and twists his fingers in hers, pinning his hands back against the rough brick wall behind him.
It's- sloppy, like this, nothing but her mouth, the white flash of her teeth and the slick, obscenely hot curl of her tongue around the base of him while he's still trapped in his underwear, sliding wet and unbearably slow along the shaft when she's worked him free. And it's good, so good, Derek's head falling back against the wall even as his body pulls tight.
"Kate," he tries, feeling the press of the wolf like fur rubbing all along his insides. "Stop, I'm gonna-"
"I don't mind," she says, before her lips slip over the head of his cock and down, down, down, and after that there is no protest, only low, needy sounds and the occasional gasping "Please."
Derek comes like it's been punched out of him and knows he's shifted when everything goes grey and bright, Kate's face crystal clear as she pulls off him, tugs her fingers free so she can fist a hand in his hair and angle his face up to the moonlight.
"I was wondering when it'd come out to play," she grins, and her voice is throaty and rough from him, and that hits him almost as hard as her words.
She kisses him then, fucks into his stunned-open mouth with her tongue slotted between his fangs, and Derek doesn't know what's happening anymore. It's hard to panic, hard to feel anything at all but the way her body moves against his, the smell of her arousal so strong he can taste it.
"You got a place?" she husks against his lips, nails scratching through the fur where its sprouted along his jaw.
Derek thinks of his motel room, the one no one's supposed to know about, the musty sheets and lumpy mattress that have been his bed for the past three weeks. "It's not much, but-ah," he gasps as she grinds her hips into his.
Kate smiles into his neck, and breaths out, "We can take my car."
Two days later, Derek wakes up to the shrill ringing of the phone where it still lies in pieces on the floor.
"You don't know me," the voice on the other end says, when Derek has gingerly picked up the cracked receiver. "But I'm a friend of your mother's. Pack what you can't leave behind and be waiting in front of the motel in twenty minutes."
"Wait, what?" Derek says, crouched next the bed. His pulse is suddenly beating hard enough to make his voice catch.
"The pack has ruled against you, and you need to get out of there. Twenty minutes. Be waiting."
Derek listens to the click, then the dial tone as Kate stretches into wakefulness beside him.
"I need to go," he tells her, and she sits up, comforter falling away from her bare breasts.
"Where?" she asks, hand coming down to splay lazily over his chest.
"I don't know," he confesses, and she frowns sleepily at him, confusion a little line between her eyebrows.
He reaches for the top of the bedside table, where there's a pen and pad of paper. "If you need to reach me," he starts, and has to stop and swallow. He thinks, for a crazy moment, of asking her to run with him.
But why would she? They barely know each other. Hell, he doesn't even know her last name.
"If you need to reach me," he says again, "someone at this number will know how." He writes it out, rips the sheet off the pad and hands it to her; it's his parents' house, because he doesn't have anything else to give her.
Kate takes the number, turning it in idly her fingers.
"I'm sorry," he says, looking up at her. Her hair is a tangled mess, lips bruised and swollen like overripe fruit. She's beautiful.
"Sorry?" she asks, with a little laugh. She threads her fingers through his hair, tipping his head back so she can lay a brief, dry kiss on his forehead. "For what?" On his lips. "Sweetie, you gave me exactly what I wanted."