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“Derbear, my favorite person,” Laura chirps cheerfully over the phone.
Derek's immediately on guard. Laura's only that cheerful when she's plotting to do something evil to him—which is, horrifyingly enough, every other day—or when she needs a favor. Usually, these favors also involve something bad happening to him.
“No,” he says, without even pausing to consider the question. He sets the Wheaties that he'd been holding back on the shelf, grabbing Cocoa Puffs instead—he'll need something good in his life after this conversation. “No, Laura, I'm not doing whatever it is you want me to do.”
“But baby brother,” she says, saccharine sweet. “I'm family.”
“Family doesn't throw each other in the middle of a gay strip club wearing nothing but his boxer shorts as a 'necessary distraction', Laura!”
He maybe says it too loud. A woman with two small children on her heels gives him a filthy look, grabbing their hands and near-dragging them away. He scowls.
“We needed that alcohol, Derek,” Laura says, unconcerned. He can imagine her waving a dismissive hand. “Besides. You were only groped a little bit.”
“It was traumatizing.”
“Please,” she snorts. “I know for a fact that you still meet one of the drag queens for coffee every two weeks.”
He colors. “How did you even--”
“Never mind how I know,” Laura says airily. “The point is, I need this favor, Derek. It's not big. No groping involved, Scout's honor.”
“You were only a girl scout for three days,” Derek mutters, stalking down the aisle with his shopping cart.
“It's not my fault that Scout Leader Marissa couldn't take a little criticism from an eight year old,” Laura replies primly.
“You made the woman cry, Laura.”
“Irrelevant. Derek, you're doing this for me.” her voice brooks no room for argument.
Derek sighs so hard that a nearby store attendant looks at him in concern. “Fine.”
*
All in all, her favor is actually very simple. It's why Derek's suspicious. Nothing with Laura is ever simple.
He's suspicious while he buys a gift basket of foods and bath soaps and teas. He's suspicious while he pays for said ridiculously expensive basket. He's suspicious while he walks the short distance to his apartment, suspicious while he goes up the sleek elevator, and suspicious while he knocks the apartment door next to his.
He hadn't even known that it had been occupied. Maybe it was because his job was involving and he got little sleep (and when he did sleep, it was like a rock). But he hadn't.
He knocks awkwardly, holding the huge basket in both arms, and waits.
It doesn't take long. There's stumbling, unsteady footsteps, then they even out and hurry to the door. A deadbolt slides quickly, a lock clicks, and finally the occupant opens the door.
His hair is sleep rumpled, dark brown and pressed on one side. His drooping eyes are a lighter brown, like whiskey, and he's in nothing but a white undershirt and a pair of Batman boxers, his pink lips in a pout. He's one of the most attractive men that Derek's seen in his life.
God damn it, Laura.
Those eyes blink and widen, and abruptly the man straightens in the doorway, bracing an arm against the side. “Mój Boże jesteś piękny.”
Derek's not as obsessed with languages as Laura—not even close—but he recognizes Polish when he hears it. He also knows that the beginning of that sentence started with 'My god'--and he can guess the rest from the sultry, sleep roughened tone.
The tips of his ears burn. “This is for you, from Laura.” he says it slowly, ignoring the man's commentary. Not mental patient slow—a French friend of Laura's, Erica, had beat that habit out of him—but slow enough in case he was still learning English. "She says it's a welcome to the neighborhood thing."
“Laura?” the man repeats, confused, before recognition dawns. “Oh!”
“Um,” Derek frantically searches for words. When Laura learned a new language, she shouted it, whispered it, repeated it until nearly the entire household knew at least the basics. “Jestem Derek. Her brother.” It's hard to do hand gestures with the basket in his hand. This is so awkward. “I—I'm sorry, I don't speak Polish.”
Apparently, the guy understands enough. “Jestem Stiles,” he replies simply. A strange expression crosses his face—almost impish—and he tilts his head with a bright smile before continuing, “Wejdź, ciacho.”
He walks away with a clear hand gesture--follow. Awkward and significantly more sweaty than he'd been thirty seconds ago, Derek stands there before shrugging the basket higher and following.
Stiles' apartment is messier and smaller than Derek's. There's moving boxes all over the floor, an ugly green couch in the living room—and honestly, how had Derek missed that being dragged up the stairs?--and Stiles is in the section cut out for the kitchen, making space on a small wooden table. Which basically means that's he's shoving a bunch of stuff to the side. For a few, long moments, Derek watches the play of Stiles' muscles as he lifts a box of pots. He looks away.
Obviously, his sister's right. It's been too long. Oblivious to Derek's thoughts, Stiles near-skips over and takes the basket from him.
“Careful,” Derek cautions as he gives it up. “It's like they've packed weights in the bottom.”
Stiles gives him an amused look, his whiskey eyes catching the light, “Poradzę sobie.”
Derek scowls. He just knows that was a smart remark.
Still, Stiles seems to be content to take the basket himself. He sets it onto the table, stepping back to regard it, before he turns to Derek and beams earnestly. “Dziękuję, piękny.”
Derek knows 'thank you', at least. “You're welcome. I'm going to leave, now, if there's anything that you need?”
“Oh, tak zrobię.” And that sultry tone is back.
“Okay.” Derek decides to ignore it. “I'm right next door.”
He stands, awkward for a few more moments, before he turns and leaves. When he glances back one last time, Stiles' eyes are unashamedly glued to his ass.
*
Laura is evil.
“So you met Stiles, huh?” her grin sounds wide and fond. “What'd you think?”
“He's...” Derek lies back in his bed, staring at the gray ceiling, searching for words. Gorgeous, wank fodder, and adorable are all discarded. “...something. I couldn't really understand him though, Laura.”
“Half the time, no one can,” she laughs. “I think you guys would get on great, despite that.”
“You also think that peanut butter is better than nutella.”
“I stand by that,” she says loftily. Then: “So. You gonna tap that?”
“He's my next door neighbor!” Derek yelps. Too loud: the walls are thin. He casts an anxious glance at them before he remembers that Stiles can't understand.
“And?”
“Goodnight Laura.”
“But baby bro, think of that mouth--”
“Goodnight Laura.” he hung up.
...Damn it, now he couldn't stop think ing about that mouth.
*
The second time he bumps into Stiles, the man is muttering furiously under his breath in Polish and balancing three huge paper bags of groceries while attempting to, at the same time, unlock his door while holding his key between pinky and a thumb.
Derek stares at him for a few moments, marveling at the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation, before he clears his throat.
Stiles jerks. One of his bags become a victim of gravity and hit the ground with a sad plop.
The cursing, along with Stiles' sudden blush, becomes more fierce. It's really quite fetching.
Derek takes pity. "Here," he says, stepping forward to kneel and start helping. "I hope there wasn't any eggs in there," he says, even though Stiles can't understand him. He scoops the groceries back in and hauls the bag up easily, still slightly sweaty from his afternoon run.
When he straightens up, Stiles has the door to his apartment open, but he seems to be distracted by something. For the first time, Derek notices the sensation of sweat trickling down his neck. Whiskey colored eyes follow the path almost hungrily, a pink tongue darting out to lick those lips.
"Um," Derek says, shifting uncomfortably.
Stiles' eyes snap back to his, somewhat darker in color than before. "Ugh, dlaczego zawsze to sobie robię?" he sounds irritated, half rough, half whiny, "Moglibyśmy się teraz bzykać! Bzykać! Kurczę, jesteś - po prostu - ugh.""
"You have a really nice mouth," Derek blurts. And promptly panics.
He's Polish, thank god, and he can't have understood that. Could he? His stomach rolls.
But Stiles only opens said mouth, then closes it. He huffs, tilts his head back to glare at the ceiling, and then marches into his apartment. Derek stands in the hallway, at a total loss, before he stomps back out--his flip flops thwacking against his heel with every step--and steps close to Derek to take the bag from him.
His lips, which are pursed, spread into a seemingly reluctant smile. "Dziękuję."
"Proszę bardzo." Derek replies, because he may have--may have--looked up some Polish phrases. Just in case. In the interest of being neighborly, of course.
The smile widens, but Stiles looks strangely wistful as he walks into his apartment, shutting the door behind him with a flip flopped foot.
Totally bewildered, Derek goes into his apartment for a shower. Between Laura and the late night Polish lessons, his head is starting to hurt.
He wonders if there's going to be a restraining order.
*
The third and final time is two weeks later.
Derek's morning starts normally enough.
He stubs his toe on the side table (as always), stumbles to the shower, stripping on the way, and grits his teeth as he waits for the pipes to start spitting out actual hot water. When the chill dies down and his teeth stop chattering, Derek starts to soap up.
Teeth. Deodorant. No shave, because he was feeling lazy and he wasn't planning on being civilized today anyway. Breakfast of yogurt and five slices of turkey bacon with orange juice. (Laura likes to bitch that he's a health freak, but he knows about those power shakes that she thinks she's oh-so-clever about hiding in the back of her fridge.)
By the time Derek's settled into his seat behind his desk, ready for another day of working at home, he's decided that nothing out of the ordinary should be happening.
Of course, that's when there's a knock on his door.
He doesn't recognize it: Laura pounds on the door when she's forgotten her key (otherwise she just barges in) and Erica is stern, tapping three times in quick succession. Boyd taps three times as well, but it's a patient sort of knock. Isaac from 3B is kind of timid about it.
(He has actually started to categorize his friends' knocks. He really, really needs to get out more.)
But this one is frantic, almost impatient. Derek glares, trying to will whoever it is away, before sighing and standing up to get it. It doesn't actually occur to him who it could be until he's staring the man in the face.
He blinks. "Stiles?"
His neighbor seems kind of anxious: his cheeks are flushed, like he's been running outside, his brown hair is messy and his eyes are darting from Derek's face to the ground and back up to his face again.
Derek can't help but drink in the sight of him: he hasn't seen the man since the grocery incident, which kept him up at night. Had he accidentally insulted Stiles? Was there some Polish rule that said you couldn't pick up someone's groceries for them? He'd have asked Laura, but he got the feeling that it would open yet another opportunity for mockery.
When his neighbor doesn't answer, Derek prompts, "Is there something wrong?"
"I speak perfect English."
There is no accent. Like, at all. He sounds perfectly American: and completely guilty from the way that he's trying to bore a hole into the floor.
"What." says Derek.
Stiles seems to twitch all over, his shoulders raising. "I'm from California, but my mom's from Poland, not me, and I took an interest in it and learned and--you were just--there, you know? And you thought I didn't speak English and I remembered how much fun Laura said it was to pick on you--"
Of course it was Laura, it was always Laura--
"Not that she told me to do this! She doesn't even know. But I thought it would be funny if you thought I couldn't understand you. But. You seem sweet." Stiles bites his lip and looks up at Derek with bright, pleading eyes. "And I like you, I think. So. Sorry."
"You thought it would be funny?" Derek can barely think. It's embarrassment clouding his mind, with relief and a general sense of being pissed.
"I'm kind of an asshole," Stiles says apologetically. "My best friend's been telling me for years, but I didn't really get that until just now."
"Yeah," Derek says, and shuts the door in his face.
He fumes for a solid three minutes, pacing, before he heaves a huge sigh and stomps back to the door, opening it again.
Stiles is kneeling on the ground, straightening a blue bow on a ridiculously huge gift basket that is on Derek's stoop. He looks up, his face half hopeful, half miserable.
“Asshole.” Derek grunts.
“I know.” he looks shy, suddenly. “Do you really like my mouth?
Derek sighs, the tips of his ears burning. He really wishes that he hadn't said anything. “Yes.”
The aforementioned mouth curves into a soft smile. “So...there's coffee grounds in this basket. If you, you know, wanna share.”
Derek thinks it over. “No Polish,” he says firmly.
“On my honor.” Stiles promises, beaming. He stands up quickly with the basket in his arms, all long limbs and easy strength. He brushes past Derek, his body warm and quick, and Derek stares after him for a few moments before shutting the door.
He's not sure if he's making the right decision here, but hey: at least he won't have to learn Polish.
(Later, Derek will tell that drag queen, Brittney about this, and she will throw her head back and laugh and laugh.)
(Laura is insufferably smug.)
*