Chapter Text
Even long after she’s out from that dark boiler room, where she hadn't know whether to sob from relief at not being dead or choke up everything in her stomach from the sheer stench of the blood, Jennifer finds that she can’t stop her hands from shaking.
Strange, seeing as how they had been so steady before.
Jenny flushes suddenly, clenching the cup in her hand so hard she was surprised it didn’t break. So she had nearly been killed while finishing the last of the grading. And then been rescued by a bloody man that could probably model for GQ if he was so inclined. It’s not like she was suffering some sort of mental breakdown from all of this information, of course not. Oh god.
Breath, Jenny, breath.
Shutting her eyes, she takes a long, shuddery breath and expels it as slowly as her two weeks of yoga classes from three years ago had taught her. Just as she was getting herself under control, a hand snatches the cup from her and she cries out in surprise.
Beside her, the man from the boiler room stares blankly, her cup held limply from his now clean fingers.
Jenny takes in a shuddering breath and repeats what's been explained to her, “Werewolves?”
He just shrugs.
She stares at him for a moment. Then a huff of a laugh breaks through. And another.
And before she knows it she’s giggling like a five year old, hanging on to the polished chair that’s sitting in the kitchen that belongs to a man whose name she doesn’t know just so she doesn’t do something even more stupid than working overtime until four am—like fall off the polished chair that’s sitting in the kitchen that belongs to a man whose name she doesn’t know.
He’s blinking now, slow and oh god he probably thought she was insane. Was she?
Jenny laughs again but cuts herself off, saying through heaving breaths, “I’m sorry…but I just—just—Werewolves.” She runs a hand through her hair. “And here I thought I would have my hands full with teaching Sophomores how to properly annotate text.”
“Oh, don’t worry. You will.”
Her head snaps up and Jenny finds that she’s gaping. “You made a joke!”
The man shifted from foot and foot, juggling the cup as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “No.”
Unable to summon her usual control, Jenny smiles and taunts in a sing-song voice, “Oh, yes you diiiid.” He narrows his eyes at her, but she’s too far gone now, the mix of sleep-deprivation and coffee working wonders on her restraint. “God, here I was thinking you were some Adonis with perfect timing and it turns out—“
She shuts up quickly, reddening like she hadn’t since she was in high school herself. Please, please, let the last five seconds have been a hallucination. Thankfully, or horribly depending on how you look at it, he seems to be equally embarrassed, suddenly turning around to place her cup in the sink.
Jenny stares for few moments more before saying finally, “I never said thanks.”
He looks around slowly, his intense glare almost pinning her to the chair. She takes a deep breath and continues, “So…thanks. For saving my, you know, life.” He nods, but says nothing else.
The complete awkwardness of the moment hits her all of a sudden and she’s laughing again, bursts of alternating terror and embarrassment. “Oh god, I’m sorry, you must think I’m the strangest person you’ve ever met!”
At that, he manages a small twitch in the corner of his lips. “A little.”
“Oh, that’s not very heroic of you, making fun of the poor damsel,” Jenny says jokingly, her smile growing as she slouched further in the polished chair that’s sitting in the kitchen of a man whose name she doesn’t even know.
“Well, I’m not much of a hero, so…” he trails off suggestively, a hint of amusement in that inhuman stare, the skin around his eyes crinkling up.
Jenny looks at him, really looks at him, and wishes she could find the panic and self-preservation to actually be scared of him. As it was she’d hardly protested when he calmly led her out of the dank boiler room, letting her press her face against his chest to sob in relief at not being dead and giving her a trashcan when she’d started to choke up everything in her stomach from the sheer stench of the blood. Sometime in between the two she’d passed out and woken up just as he had been carrying her out of from the car and into his apartment, where he’d promptly given her a cup of coffee, explained the situation, and waited until she’d pushed away the shock enough to start laughing like a maniac.
And see, now that she’s actually looking back at the events in the boiler room, she wishes she would feel a little more useless. Because she had been useless, staring wide-eyed at the monsters before her brain could even catch up.
But Jenny still finds she can’t bring herself to feel useless. What could she have really done? Screamed? Run away and begged someone to save her and risked triggering some sort of predator-chase instinct? Being killed was pretty much all she could have really done in that kind of situation. And because of him, she hadn’t been.
Jenny would have felt more like a damsel in distress if at the exact moment he’d held his bloodied hand out for hers, she hadn’t gotten the feeling that she wasn’t the one being saved here.
Before she realizes it, she’s standing up and holding her hand out to the confused looking werewolf-Adonis before her, her lips moving without her command to say, “My name’s Jennifer. Jennifer Blake. But you can call me Jenny.” She tilts her head to the side and smiles. “Ms. Blake only if you want me to look over and grade your paper on Call of the Wild.”
He stays leaning back on the counter long enough for her to get antsy before abruptly shaking her hand and stating plainly, “Derek Hale.”
Together, their clasped hands feel like a promise.
.
.
.
Of all things, Jenny ends up falling asleep at the kitchen table.
Yawning, she lets her eyes flutter open enough to account for her whereabouts before letting them snap close with a muffled moan. Her hair feels like a rats nest of Oliver Twist-ian proportions and the groove of the wooden table is etched across her cheek. Oh god, her mouth tastes awful. Lifting her head, she groans, clumsily trying to account for all her limbs. The chair beneath her seems less sturdy than the night before and she barely takes two steps before nearly toppling over.
At the last moment a hand catches her, and Jenny goes spinning back into an all too solid and real chest. Eyes clenched shut, she refuses to face her likely rescuer, only moaning softly, “Please tell me you didn’t just save me again from splitting my head open on the floor.”
“I could lie, if you want.” His breath is hot against her neck and Jenny resists the urge to moan for another reason all entirely. It isn’t everyday she wakes up to the sound of a husky male voice, and in fact, it had been far too long since she’d woken up to anything male at all.
In her drowsy state, she relaxes, boneless against him and willing herself to fall back asleep and stay within this dream. For a moment, he freezes, the hard muscles of his chest—oh god he’d finally taken off that blood-stained rag and praise be the shirtless men of this world—tensing up so wonderfully that Jenny couldn’t help from sighing and nuzzling closer to his almost impossible body heat.
Too soon, he steps back, leaving her cold and more wanting than she’s felt in years.
Still a little wobbly, as her knees also appeared to have regressed to her high-school crush days, Jenny staggers from side to side, yawning. “Oh god, what time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
Her eyes snap open. “What?”
The gorgeous man before her—Derek, the actually helpful part of her brain reminds her—blinks and repeats, “Almost eight. Seven-forty, probably.”
“A.M?” Jenny cries back, heart pounding fast enough that it gives her that extra strength to rush to the coffee machine and start chugging down the first cup she sees. Which is, of course, the bitterly cold one she’d discarded from last night. She spits it out in the sink, gagging, just in time to hear his confounded answer.
“That’d probably be it.”
“Oh no, oh no,” she mumbles below her breath, searching around for her purse that she finds thrown haphazardly on the other side of the table, “I’m supposed to teach a class in thirty minutes!”
Derek’s somehow right in front of her again, his eyes narrowed and questioning. “You just got attacked by two werewolves.”
Jenny snaps back, pulling her ratty hair into the closest to a ponytail as she could get it, “And I have a room full of high school students waiting for me to teach them how to properly cite an article!”
Tugging her heels on, she barely avoids toppling over again, but his hands reach out once more to catch her around the waist. Breathing fast, Jenny manages, “Thanks. Again. I just,” she peers up at his strange eyes, pleading, “I just really have to go teach.”
After what seemed like a lifetime of staring at his almost disbelieving green eyes, Jenny almost releases a sigh of relief when he nods, once, understanding her need for normalcy. He lets her go suddenly, announcing to no one in particular, “I’ll drive you.”
“Oh, thank you, but I should probably stop by my house first and grab a change of clothes,” Jenny says quickly, turning to walk towards what she presumes is the living room, “I wouldn’t anyone to get the wrong—“
“Well, hello.”
“Idea,” she finishes dumbly, staring in shock at the strange man at the foot of the stairs. There’s something almost hungry in his gaze, so Jenny can’t help but step back when his taunting lips draw out into a smile. There’s a low rumble behind her and suddenly Derek is in the room beside her.
The man’s eyes flew between her and Derek, his nostrils flaring for some odd reason. It’s a moment or two before he sighs and visibly droops. “So, not that.”
He casts a patronizing stare towards the now too obviously shirtless man beside her and says, “If I had known you were in the habit of letting strange women spend the night in your appartment, I would come over more often, Der-bear.”
Now she’s really not imagining it, Jenny realizes, because Derek is actually growling, the sound low and foreboding and not really managing to have any visible effect on the man before them. For some reason, this makes her nervous and she curls unconsciously closer to Derek’s side, her hand brushing against his.
The strange man shoots Derek a grin and comes forward only to stop before her and bow with a flourish. “It’s lovely to meet the woman that has my dear nephew so enraptured. My name is Peter.” Straightening, he winks. “I look so forward to knowing you better.”
He holds out a hand for her to shake, but before she can even blink Derek’s own shoots out, lightning fast, to grab his uncle’s wrist and twist it until it made an audible crack. She gasps, but only a brief flicker of pain flashes across Peter’s face. “Or not.”
“Derek!” she cries out, more from shock than anything else, because Peter just pulls his hand free and rubs it like it was a particularly bad Indian burn, hissing.
Derek grunts, “He’ll heal.”
All at once, Jenny feels like she’s teaching first grade again. “That doesn’t mean you have free license to abuse anyone you please! Especially your uncle!”
He frowns, and to her surprise, Peter mimics the expression for a few moments, like even he was confused as to what she was talking about. Then he recovers and shoots Derek a taunting glare, “Yea, nephew, respect your elders.”
She’s not finished yet. “And you,” Jenny rounds on Peter, narrowing her eyes and brandishing a finger like it was worth all of the claws he likely had in own hand, “If you keep baiting him like that, I see you less as an elder and more like a first grade bully that should be sent to detention for quiet time!”
Peter’s face twists in repulsion. “You can’t send me to detention!” He turns to Derek, who looks faintly amused now that she’s moved on from him. “She can’t send me to detention!”
“Really?” she retorts, on a roll now, a headache moving in where there had only been bone-deep exhaustion. Jenny realizes that she is absolutely sick and tired of being scared shitless by supernatural creeps and maybe that’s what’s responsible for her next words. “I’ve had an empty detention room so far this year because unlike you, my sixteen year old students know not to test me, and I figure you could benefit from that.” He looks confused, so she clarifies. “Detention. In my classroom. For a week.”
“Hold on, lady,” Peter backtracks, something dangerous glinting in his eyes, “I ain’t one of your loser students and I am not going to be sitting in a classroom when I have more important things to do.”
Clenching her fists, Jenny grits out, “Two weeks.”
“But—“
She points her finger at his face dangerously, like she could and would use it to drill into his skull. “So help me, Mr. Hale, I will make it a month.”
Looking confused and slightly like a dog whose chain has been yanked back, Peter closes his mouth and says nothing else.
Good. Taking a deep breath, Jenny smiles and turns to Derek, who’s standing there with the closest thing to a smile she’s seen on him so far. “So. You said you would drive me?”