The last thing James "Jay" Hale ever imagined was to begrudgingly return to Beacon Hills, find out his older sister was murdered, and then be forced to go on a wild goose chase after an enigmatic Alpha that seemed to have a particular interest in ru...
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CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Big Blue Eyes and Bared Teeth
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As the ball of warmth lodged right beneath Jay's breastbones continued to burn—deep, where he couldn't manage to rub away the pain even with a rough palm against his chest. Despite his best attempts at tampering it down, Jay found himself hiding—no, not hiding, strategically retreating—in the girl's bathroom, of all places, during final period.
Well, he originally intended to hightail it to the boy's bathroom but it took all of one second in the hallway to hear the unmistakable sound of sobs echoing in his enhanced ears, and he knew from the grumbling alone that it was none other than a certain strawberry blonde wailing away.
Usually, Jay wouldn't even blink at the sounds, choosing to frankly ignore it and go about on his own little spiral of doom. He clearly wasn't equipped to handle himself going through it, much less some girl he barely even knew.
But Stiles had said he was good.
The words had haunted Jay for the rest of the school day. Despite how hard he was trying to push the whole ramble out of his mind and out of sight, he found himself thinking back to everything Stiles said to him. So much so, that the whole dilemma with Jackson antagonizing Scott to no end and Scott's inability to achieve Allison's necklace had fallen to the wayside.
The big points Stiles said about him were especially hard-hitting, making his heart slam against his ribcage every time Jay so much as thought about it. But, somehow, the smaller stuff Stiles noticed about him were the things that were really getting to him. It was all things he hadn't even noticed about himself that he was now realizing he did throughout the day.
At lunch, he found himself dismantling his taco like a true picky eater until there was only beef and cheese left in the shell. Later, he noticed the deep bruises of under-eye bags when he saw the reflection of himself through Allison's compact mirror as she was checking her makeup in front of him. During his small English presentation, he couldn't stop himself from biting his knuckles out of nervousness. How he felt like he wanted to stab himself with a nearby pencil when Danny complimented his hair afterwards. The random feeling of his mouth being dry and his lips being overwhelmingly chapped with no water in sight to quench his thirst. How the middle of his temples sort of felt strained from the annoyed furrow his brow had settled after being sat next to Greenberg during economics—a habit he picked up from Derek, apparently. Then there was how all the receptionist ladies couldn't seem to stop themselves from gushing over him when he had to go to the office when Harris caught him loitering in the hallways after Stiles' speech.
There were even his socks, mismatched with one being black and the other grey.
Each detail, once insignificant before Stiles felt the need to point them out, now stood out as evidence of his humanity in a way. It was all stupid little things, but Stiles had humanized him with the small facts, showing him aspects of himself he hadn't fully recognized. It made him feel both exposed and understood, a stranger in his own body rather than the mindless robot he always felt like before. He just didn't know which one he liked being more.
