bakerstreet | the picture prompt meme.

"What do you want to talk about? I mean, there wasn't anything wrong, was there?" Her own walls start to build back up around her.

"Wrong? What? No, no, there was nothing wrong." It had been perfect and erotic and had moved up to his top thing to think about when he touched himself. Even now, just thinking about it was making his pulse pick up and he wondered if she could hear that. Or if he was starting to smell like she said he did when he got all worked up.

Shifting in his seat, he played with the glass of coke the waitress set in front of him, looking up at her as he did. "There was nothing wrong." His tone was more firm in that, wanting her to believe him.

Erica took a sip of the coke and then set the glass down, "So, you want to know what I think about me? Or about what we did?"

"About... what we did. And, stuff." Oh my god, Stiles. Stop with the stuff. "What do you think about it?" And what does she think about doing it again? But not just that, because no, Stiles is not Jackson.

She shrugged up a shoulder, glancing at him, "I've been trying not to think about it." Which sounded bad.

"Not... not like 'ugh I want to forget it', but because I can't have distractions." Though distractions was a good word for it, but liability was closer to that. She didn't want to have someone worry about her and she didn't want to have to be concerned that her interactions with them would make them a target.

She'd been picked off by Allison once before and that wasn't exactly a shining moment in being true to her pack.

Too late, Erica. He was already worried. Didn't she pick up on that from the instant Derek-hate when he came in? "I don't want to be a distraction." He really hoped she didn't pick up on the blatant lie that was, because he wanted to be a distraction. He wanted to distract her and be distracted by her and figure out all the incredibly distracting things they could do.

Her fingers drummed on the surface of the table, watching him, "But we're having some weird talk about what things mean." She was pretty sure that she never pictured her life having one of these talks. These talks were what girls requested and she never assumed she'd be in that sort of situation.

"Would it be easier if I just ask you what you want?"

What did he want? One word popped into his head and in typical fashion, it tripped out of his mouth before he could pull it back. "More."

Damn. He couldn't leave it like that. "I want... more. Of this." His hands moved between them at the table. "More talking. More you and me." Gee, he was great with the words tonight, wasn't he?

She didn't want to frown, but those reactions were often hard for her to hide. She wasn't used to people caring when she made a face or seemed upset about something.

"Why would you even want that? I'm a werewolf. I bludgeoned you with part of your own car. I'm not even really nice to you unless we're messing around."

Yeah, all of that was true, but...

"But you can be nice to me. The whole messing around part proves it. I want it to be more than that, though. I don't want to just use you or something." Thinking about it had his gaze dropping again, feeling a prick of shame at the way it could be construed as that. "I don't want you to think that's what I'm doing."

Sighing, Erica got up and moved over to his side of the booth.

"Move."

Her knee pressed to his hip as she shoved him as he moved over. Sitting next to him at least she didn't have to watch his face or see the subtle reactions to anything else she said.

"There's an Alpha pack out there and we're not strong enough to even think about protecting each other, let alone other people that we care about. Say this is more. Say we say to hell with Derek and his plans and there's more. That makes you a target. I don't want that."

For all her talk and boasting, Erica knew the risks now. She might not have known them all when she signed on, but in the half a year she'd been a werewolf, she put her eye on survival. That was the important thing.

The sudden rise and shift of her seat to his had him scooting back at the command, his body half turned towards her as she sat beside him.

"Did you think I suddenly forgot about that? I haven't. If anything... happened with us, you think that makes me more of a target than I already am? I'm best friends with the Beta who refuses to join Derek's pack. My dad's the town sheriff who manages to always be right on the cusp of things and I'm terrified he's going to walk headfirst into this crap. This little war's spilled over and away from just the werewolves, Erica. It's beyond being contained, and if maybe in all that chaos and craziness we could find a moment or two to just have a moment, well, what's wrong with that?"

He'd been around the werewolves longer than her. He'd gone up against Peter when he'd been a psychotic homicidal Alpha. There was more than a little irritation that all the wolves he knew seemed to think he was in the way. Or only good as bait. He had pride, thank you.

"Well, gee, since you put it that way, maybe I should keep my distance from you." Erica was joking, but the laundry list of crap that surrounded his life didn't make her feel any better about adding to the pile.

Her hands folded in her lap, trying to just figure this out. "So what we just find moments and they're bad pizza on Fourth street or me coming to get you for some ridiculous pack meeting that you're the go-between for?"

If it was only that easy...

"Or they're you coming over for dinner or we can go for a drive or something that doesn't involve school or werewolves or imminent death." He looked over and watched her hands in her lap, wishing he could just lift his hand and put it over them. His heart was doing a little tap dance in his chest and he mentally told it to shut up.

"Aww, but I do imminent death so well." She didn't want to make jokes, but her stomach was twisting up with nerves and she didn't like that feeling at all. Deflecting was easy.

Of course, anything else she was about to say was interrupted by the pizza arriving, which she really did want to eat.

He bit back what he was going to say when the food arrived, sitting back to let her take what she wanted. Reaching for his coke, he took a sip and stirred his straw in it.

He knew what she was doing, he did it himself, but it didn't make it any easier to know when he wasn't quite sure why she was doing it. Would she rather he just jumped off a cliff? Maybe she regretted ever doing anything in the first place.

Erica wasn't the girl that got noticed. She wasn't the one that had the guy she had a crush on actually notice her and actually want to spend time with her. Maybe she was becoming that girl, but she still didn't quite fit into that space in her life. It was there, waiting for her to take it, but she kept sinking back toward thinking about the library. About the seizure and how she couldn't stop it. How being better, how all the things that Derek promised her didn't come through in the end.

She was going to leave. Maybe Stiles knew that, maybe he didn't, but a part of her had that loyalty to her pack that was now so strong because she had failed them.

So the crisis at hand wasn't whether or not she wanted to actually take something she had wanted for a long time, but it was whether or not she could handle the fact that she was getting it now -- instead of then.

Even as she folded her slice of pizza in half and started to eat it, she still allowed her other hand to slide over and rest to his thigh, because it was one thing she knew she could do.

If they wanted to have a little 'who didn't get noticed by their crush' pity party, they could both wear little princess hats and be the reigning champions. It had taken a long, long time for Stiles to realize that no matter how badly he'd wanted Lydia, that ship was never going to sail. In fact, it had been scuttled and had sunk before he'd even put it in the water. He was just too busy bailing out the water to notice he was already on the bottom of the ocean.

So he'd had to force himself to wake up and move on. And it was then that he'd noticed that he did, in fact, have options. He hadn't know about Erica's crush. She hadn't exactly made it as obvious as his had been, but it had stuck in his mind after he'd found out. It had apparently festered all on its own into something else.

Something that had him reacting to her when she'd teased him at his house and when they'd shared that moment in the shack. Her hand on his thigh had his pulse racing in reaction, but his own hand came down to rest over it, fingers twining through hers. It wasn't some saccharine declaration of love, but it was something, and Stiles wasn't stupid enough to ignore it.

Erica still thought that she'd win.

Either way, she was okay with his hand resting over hers. It wasn't much, it wasn't him saying that he wanted to start dating or anything -- which was that what he was trying to imply? She hadn't exactly been surrounded by females to help translate boy-code for dating. In fact, she didn't have anyone she could talk to about this.

She just had to rely on herself, which wasn't always the best thing. This was the girl that decided to self-medicate and stopped taking her pills.

"I think I need my other hand to eat."

"Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry." He untangled his hand from hers, resting his hand back on his lap in that spot she'd kept warm. What was he trying to imply? Dating? It wasn't out of the realm of possibilities. If Allison and Scott could pull it off, he thought he could make a valiant attempt with Erica. If she allowed it.

That was the rub. Would she? Did she ever think about it? He mused over this as she ate, his other hand still playing with his straw.

For the record, Scott and Allison barely pulled it off and last she checked they weren't exactly in the 'on again' part of things. She ate another slice of pizza and glanced to him with a bite in her mouth. Her hand went to cover over her mouth as she talked with food totally in it.

"Aren't you going to eat?"

That was different. There was parental interference and psychopathic grandparents and a death in the family. This was a completely different situation. He looked up at her question, a small smile appearing.

"I figured you should eat first. You're the one doing all the heavy lifting at the moment and I've seen Scott eat. We can get more if you want."

Swallowing, she glanced over to him, "You're just going to watch me eat? That's a bit weird."

"I'll eat after I know you've had enough." He wasn't the one getting his ass handed to him by Derek. He also wasn't the one washing off dried blood while waiting for her. If she needed to replete her reserves, she was going to get the chance.

Her hand remained over her mouth, waiting until she'd swallowed before she spoke again, "Yeah... that's still a bit odd. Just eat something so I don't feel weird."

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