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XVI. Avocado Toast. 777

[exhoetic333]

catastrophize

Stiles Stilinski x fem!Reader

[1.3k words] To you and Stiles, being forced to share a motel room during a school trip seems like a much bigger catastrophe than facing the supernatural.

Your bags sat in the corner of the the room and simmers in the spite that soaks the air. The window was cracked open and, every once in a while, you’d wish to throw yourself from it. At least it’d save you from the greater horrors that would catch up to you eventually: sharing a bed with Stiles Stilinski.

He’d somehow managed to go half the evening without looking at you, though he had to share a seat with you on the bus ride to the gloomy motel. In truth, it was a superpower you both shared, ignoring the obvious in that way—a person in the same room or a feeling taking up all the space in the world. You dealt with both. You didn’t discriminate.

Following the day’s heavy events, you’d decided to take a shower and was drying your hair by the time Stiles came back in the room, closing the door soundlessly behind him. You’d dropped a cup of coffee earlier when he came barging in, and it still sat on its side, over the dresser in the far end of the room. The various chocolate bars and chips bags stuffed in his arms were threatening to overspill and he tossed them all on what would end up being his side of the bed, then let his body crumble besides them. Whilst you were righteously drying your hair with a white towel (not the questionable one they’d provided), he was gobbling down his first chocolate, a bar of Snickers.

He looked at you and tried not to let his eyes drop much. You wore a top that didn’t do him any favours. “Do you like chocolate, spawn of Satan?” he questioned casually.

If it wasn’t one of his wild and kind of insulting nicknames he used, it would be your last name and the same went to you. In all your years of knowing and hating each other, you’d barely uttered each other’s first names once or twice.

“You’re so weird,” you said with a grimace, brows furrowed and lips pulled downwards.

“I’ll take this as a compliment,” he mumbled to himself, then tossed a bag of barbecue chips on your side of the bed. “There, your favourite. You can’t say I’m not a kind person.”

You rolled your eyes and tossed the towel aside on a rocking chair. “So sweet it rots my teeth,” you sarcastically countered.

If you weren’t such a pain in the ass, Stiles could’ve sworn you’d be the most perfect girl in the entire world. However, you flipping him off came blurring that fact quite quickly.

When you came to sit in the bed, your side evidentially, you noticed that Stiles’ energy had died down and you found his lack of sarcasm imbedded snarked remarks oddly irritating.

“What’s wrong with you?” you’d asked like you didn’t care, brows furrowed in the middle.

He didn’t reply right away, so you opened up the chips bag and shoved a handful in your mouth. “See, you do like it!” he exclaimed like a little kid. You offered him a deadpan, to which he scoffed and shook his head. “I’m just worried about Scott, all right?” he replied all of a sudden, refusing to meet her eyes.

“I’m worried about him, too,” you confessed. “And Allison, and Lydia, and Derek. I’m worried about all of them, but they’re looking at me for moral support so I can’t exactly express my irrational fear now, can I?”

Stiles’s breath caught in his throat. He looked up to meet your eyes and his features contorted in something similar to sympathy. “I always thought you were the fearless kind,” he said softly. It was a sentence that struck him, kind of like the moment you realize your role models are real people with flaws and feelings (not that you were his role model).

“You thought wrong,” you told him between gritted teeth. You were irritated at yourself for showing such vulnerability, especially to the boy you were supposed to despise.

“Hey, if it helps, I’m very scared too. Actually, I’m scared of practically everything. Hell, I almost started shaking when Coach said we’d share a room,” Stiles said, then tried to hide his nervousness with a laugh.

You laughed, you couldn’t help yourself. “Really?”

“Yeah!” Stiles exclaimed.

“Why?” You’d tried to hide your grin in your shoulder, which coaxed a small smile out of him.

“Because you’re, like, the prettiest girl in the school,” he justified. “And you hate my guts, so there’s that.”

You sighed. The bag of chips was done, so you’d crumbled it up and tossed it in the can besides your side of the bed. “I don’t hate your guts, Stiles.”

He froze with the candy bar halfway to his mouth. When he spoke, his mouth was full and he sounded genuinely shocked. “You… don’t?”

“I don’t,” you confirmed.

A long moment of silence passed. Stiles no longer wanted to eat his favourite chocolate and you’d long forgotten about the last chop in your hand awaiting to be devoured. There was a single lamp that illuminated the room and it was right on top of you, so while you could barely decipher the expression on his face, he could examine every inch of your figure. From the hair draped over the crook of your neck to the shadows your eyelashes cast on your cheeks.

A loud series of knock on the room door made you both gasp in surprise, all of a sudden pulled from such an entrancing haze. On the other side, Coach Finstock had announced a motel-wide shutdown. It was time for your curfew and you didn’t want to go crash Lydia and Allison’s room like you had planned earlier. They’d wonder where you were though they secretly had seen it coming. You’d stay in that room and sleep in that bed. You’d picked your side already.

You slid under the covers and told him to turn off the lights. Afraid to shatter the windowpane you’d built carefully in that moment, he’d refrained himself from saying anything snarky. You’d waited for it but it never came; that was the moment you understood that something had changed between you two. It was the subtlest of shifts.

Stiles took the other side of the bed, but laid facing you as you did on the other side. There was a sort of invisible wall between you two, a hellish line you couldn’t see but were still afraid to cross.

“Hey,” he whispered. It wasn’t a question nor a statement. Just a word floating in the room and circling the drain like a catastrophe.

“Hi,” you replied.

You closed your eyes. Your knuckles brushed against his and a faint smile carved itself delicately on your lips.

What begun as something you and Stiles couldn’t stop catastrophizing ended up as the end of a chapter and the beginning of another. You’d taken a shovel and dig up things you believed where they’re only for your search to come up empty; you’d found greater treasures instead.

“We’re still gonna pretend to hate each other though, right?” You could hear the smile in Stiles’ voice as he spoke.

You opened your eyes and and grimaced. “Who said I’d be pretending?”

Then you both burst out laughing, faces pushed into the pillows so it wouldn’t echo too far down the hallway.

You woke up the next morning with his face in the crook of your neck, hot breath fanning over the bare flesh. The metaphorical wall that stood tall between you two had crumbled and left nothing in its place. This was a kind of sweet catastrophe that you could get used to.

[exhoetic333]

white ferrari

JJ Maybank x fem!Reader

[1k words] A late night smoking session in your car reveals many old secrets.

The tip of your joint was the only thing that brought light to the night.

Outside the cozy car you’d borrowed from your father, rain was falling continuously as though it was trying to flood the island, wash off it all that was wrong and ugly. The windows were soaked and you could barely see the exterior of the Château from where you’d parked in its pressed-dirt driveway.

Usually, you and JJ would sit on the front steps and exchange smokes until the light went off and a pair of smiles was permanently plastered on your faces. Nevertheless, the unpredictable island weather couldn’t stop your midnight escapades. Everyone inside was probably already asleep, so you didn’t care that the music was blasting. It was a soft song anyway, the kind that rattled your bones with nostalgia. And with the rain in the background, you’d probably end up falling asleep in that white car.

A cough, then a laugh. You looked away from the rainwater condensed on the window to find JJ holding the smoke out towards you. The fingers of his other hand danced on your knee.

“Hey, Jay?” you mused, bringing the joint to your mouth. He nodded, adjusting his body so his cheek was pressed to the back of the passenger seat. “Where would you go if you had to spend your entire life in one place?”

The blonde boy genuinely thought about it for a moment. He’d never traveled before, the only trips he’d never made was up and down the island. He had the entire map of it hardwired into his brain. JJ had many places he dreamt on visiting, all housing some type of shore, beach or lake, some near and some very, very far away.

The moment stretched out endlessly, but you didn’t seem to mind. You took a couple drags of the joint as he thought, his eyes on you the entire time. He examined the curve of your lashes and the way only half your cheek was illuminated. He only came up with an answer when you shot him a bright smile, damn-near a grin, and held out the smoke to him.

“Where would you go?” he replied, his fingers brushing with hours.

“That’s not what I asked,” you laughed. You rested one of your hands on the steering wheel, but did not look away from him.

“I know,” JJ said, “but that’s where I’d go.”

You froze. Ever so slightly, your lips parted and you drew in a sharp breath. You couldn’t beat the smile that slowly crept up your face, brightening it. “What does that mean?” Your voice was barely a whisper, but you couldn’t keep the question in your throat.

“It means”—he exhaled the smoke in rings—“if I have to spend the rest of my life in one place, you’ve gotta be there.”

Another pause. He shook his head, laughed, then asked you the exact question.

You’d glanced at his hands, watching the way bracelets you’d made adorned his wrists. He took it as a request for the joint and casually placed it in between your lips, barely brushing them with the pads of his fingertips.

“Yucatán,” you replied. He spoke of that place so much the desire of visiting it had seeped in his skin.

If he’d been smiling then, he was grinning at the sound of your answer. You blew the smoke on his face and both of you exploded in a fit of hushed laughter. The hand on your knee stopped fidgeting, electrifying over bare flesh. You’d held your breath and you were pretty damn sure he was, too.

Slowly, he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, then twirled the end of it between his fingers. JJ’s eyes did not leave yours, not for a second, and you’d begun to drown in the ocean surrounding his pupil. His Iris was reduced to a thin ring you could barely see due to the low lights. It told you so many things, more than his words ever did. You assumed you looked just as entranced as him.

“I’m gonna clean up my act. I’ll stop drinking and make things right with my dad’s. I’ll even listen in school and shit,” JJ promised. A tuff of blonde hair cast shadows over his face, but you could see that he was unmistakably looking at you. “I’ll get you off this island.”

“Running away together, you mean?” you queried, unable to stop the small smile peaking on your lips. You’d long forgotten about the smoke by then.

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Just me and you.”

You laughed. It was only when you looked back up again that you realized just how close his face had gotten. The hand in your hair brushed your cheek and forgot all about the curl it had been toying with. With your free hand, you reached for the bottom of his shirt and balled it up in your first.

“Hey, JJ?” you whispered. Both of you were breathing heavily and the music was still low and slow.

You didn’t think the blonde boy could get any closer, but he did. “Yeah?”

“Kiss me.”

Hand at the nape of your neck, he crashed your lips together. You hadn’t expected his lips to be so soft and the moment he pulled away, you’d both craved more. There came a lingering moment following the long-awaited kiss during which neither of you opened your eyes. You basked in the moment only lit by the tip of the joint he’d rolled in a hurry. The rain was your choir.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do that,” he confessed like he was talking to a priest or something. He opened his eyes first and couldn’t look away from you.

A moment, then another. You started laughing first, a series of giggles, and buried your head in his shoulder. It shook as he chuckled, which eventually turned into laughter just as loud yours. His cheek pressed against the top of your head; your hands still clinging onto his shirt.

If you could entrap this moment forever, you would. Who would have known your favourite memory would be in that fucking white Ferrari?

[exhoetic333]

the rest is confetti

JJ Maybank x fem!Reader

[2.4k words] An insight on yours and JJ’s life, from the day you met to the day you made it.

He’d been about thirteen years old when he went to his first party. It was at the Boneyard, so no biggie, but it was the first one he’d ever attended for real, no sneaking in with John B and getting shit on by the older teens or nothing.

So JJ had worn clean clothes (not his), fixed his hair and had chewed gum the entire walk so when he’d kiss a cute touron girl, his breath wouldn’t smell bad. They’d gotten the invite through the eldest boy of the family that lived right across the Château, the Routledges’ humble abode—though JJ treated it like it was his—and John B had made fun of JJ for being so eager. “This is when our life starts, bozo,” the blonde had told his best friend in his defence.

The party was a ruckus: crumbled red solo-cups in the hot sand; vivid flames outstretched, touching the midnight sky; honey-melon moon basking the teenagers’ faces in a drunk limelight. Everyone was either drinking, smoking weed or doing hard stuff behind the sandbanks, and music was blasting loudly through multiple speakers placed strategically around the beach.

Enjoying one of his favourite songs and the island heat in the summertime, JJ had lit a joint and went to sit by the shore. He was pissed because John B has found himself a girl to talk to before he did, and he cursed him mentally for leaving him alone at their first party ever. The blonde boy had used up his false bravado on half the girls attending, and it had gotten him absolutely nowhere. He took another draw of the joint only to find it empty, so he let out a loud groan in frustration before tossing it away.

Loud laughter interrupted his fit and he looked up to find you standing in front of him, showing all your pearly teeth like a trophy. You had your hands on your hips, creasing the soft fabric of the fitted yellow sundress you wore, and thick curls that fell in cascades over you shoulders. In truth, you might have been the prettiest girl he has ever encountered in his entire lifetime. Maybe he was being dramatic, but he was just a kid anyway.

“You look like you’re having the time of your life,” you joked. Successfully, your sarcasm coaxed a laugh out of him and you could have sworn its boyishness was the most attractive thing you’d heard all night.

JJ flipped you off, then introduced himself. You extended an arm out for him to grab, then pulled him off the sand and by the bonfire, where his best friend was glancing at him with wide eyes and wiggling his brows suggestively. You’d laughed again and JJ melted at the sound and when he asked you to dance, you found yourself unable to deny his proposal.

By the end of the night, you’d shared two joints in addition to the one he started the night with, gained a new scar on your knee from where you fell in the sand after he tried to dip you and made a friend for the rest of the summer. You exchanged numbers just as your school friends urged you to go back home. Right as you got in the car, he had texted you, not wasting a second, asking you if you wanted to go surf in the morning.

From then on, you and JJ had become inseparable. Joint at the hip, really. He introduced you to the rest of his friend group, the Pogues, and you fit in like a glove. Every morning, he’d come pick you up from your house and you’d walk to the Château where everyone else was waiting in the backyard. Your mother grew to love him, your father a little less.

When the start of the school year rolled around, you were both delighted to find out that you had a bunch of classes in common. For two fresh high schoolers, it was about as blessed a miracle you could receive from the higher powers. It was written in stone apparently, you were in this together.

You begun to truly see him when you fifteen. The sky was purple and an angry storm had ravaged the island and, still, JJ had showed up at your window. He was all drenched, tears and rainwater alike, but it was the bruises that blossomed from the hem of his pants to his neckline, littering his torso like flower buds, that alarmed you the most. You offered him fresh clothes and shelter. When he sat in your bed, making it warmer than you’d ever known, he told you all about his father and the atrocities he survived living in the Maybank household.

As soon as morning rolled around, you’d given him a key to the front door and said: “This is your house, too, Jay. You can come whenever you want, even when we’re not home. You don’t ever have to endure your dad ever again.”

JJ had always looked at you different than how you looked at him, but the sentiment had only deepened when he saw just how much you cared about him. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before, like he wanted to lean in and never pulled away. When you hugged him that morning, he didn’t care that his entire body was on fire, that the bruises put on his body by the hands of his acerbically agressive father felt like gulley wounds, he wanted you close like that forever.

For a little while, he tried to drown those feelings by putting some distance between you two, but it ended absurdly. You caught onto his game immediately, called him out for it and left him standing with his feet in the sand and hot regret brewing in the pit of his stomach. He’d apologized that same night, and you’d shared a bed, entangled under the covers. JJ told you that he didn’t feel good, and you simply assumed that what fuelled his odd behaviour was his horrible home life. You’d never have guessed it was you.

Kie tried to point it out a couple of times and, when John B started dating Kook princess Sarah Cameron, she had told you the exact same thing. Pope was sick of the both of you not acknowledging the blatant chemistry that was close to burning every lightbulb in the room. John B, knowing exactly what his best friends had been feeling through all those years, was living off cheesy jokes and not-so-subtle innuendos. Long story short, you two might as well have been the blindest teenagers there ever was.

That point of view was shared by everyone on the island, who simply assumed that the two of you were together. Belonged to each other. When you’d say you weren’t, they’d use it against you. At parties, boys would flirt with you to rile him up and you knew girls often texted him out of nowhere just to get a reaction out of you. But you often were calm and collected, whereas JJ was a boy that shared his father’s anger and didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. When a boy got too close to you while dancing, enough to make you uncomfortable, he’d swing first and apologize later.

You discovered that part of him the hard way and it had taken you a while to get used to what exactly JJ Maybank could do. He could beat up a boy a hair from death for trying to spike your drink at a party, just like he could be the gentlest person and carry you to John B’s bed at the Château after you’d had one drink too many. He was duality in itself and you’d have to learn to live with it because, knuckles bloody or not, he would always be the same boy who asked you the dance with a wide grin and boyish, disheveled hair on the night you met.

By seventeen, it was shared clothes, hours on the phone and him constantly in your room no matter the season. Summer was your shared favourite season because it meant you could spent all day at the beach, fighting over the surf only to end up flipping a coin for the waves. On the way back home, he drove and you sat in the passenger seat with his hoodie covering your salt-drenched figure and him obviously trying to steal glances at you through the rear view mirror.

When you got a car, a real, functional vehicle that didn’t ressemble the van John B had to jumpstart every time you planned a trip, you’d hooked one of the bracelets that adorned JJ’s wrist from the dashboard. Your father taught the blonde how to drive in it under the golden summer sun, in a supermarket parking lot, and from then on you were exchanging the car back and forth, leaving it there and there for the other. You even planned a google calendar to make sure your appointments didn’t clash. The car was the first thing you owned together.

During your late teenager years, you and JJ had become a lot more domestic. At the Château, you’d cook and he’d wash the dishes, and vice versa. He would drop off his laundry at your house whenever his father forgot to pay the bills and you’d sit on the ground and separate the colours together, either listening to some soft reggae on the old radio in the your kitchen or watching a movie on your computer. When you told the Pogues that his favourite film ever was Mamma Mia, they hadn’t believed you. That night, JJ pinned you down on his bed in the Chateau and you had a pillow fight over it, with ended up with him getting way too close and the door swinging open, which made you both push each other to opposite ends of the room, breathing heavily.

But that was simply how things were between you two. Oftentimes, your mother would joke that you act more like a married couple than her and your father and you’d get upset whenever she said it in front of him. Perhaps that was because you were hiding feelings you didn’t understand, magnetic fervour that only called out for him and no one else.

It didn’t matter how many boys you hooked up with and if he was on top of a girl in the next room, you’d meet for a joint on the front steps of the Château right after, unable to look at each other but still craving the proximity. That entire dance you both were doing was ridiculous but there was no stopping the music.

You got JJ a signet ring with the first letter of your name engraved in the centre for his birthday and quoted an old song that had played in the garage of your house one day when you were playing cards with the Pogues. He hadn’t taken off since he opened the tiny box and hugged you tight enough to break your bones. But you’d enjoyed it and kept your hands in his corn-gold hair and a wide grin plastered on your face. When JJ blew his candles on the kitchen table of the Château, you had grabbed his hand and let him outside, and all of you had danced in the April rain. All of a sudden, you were children again and there was nobody in the world but you and him, grinning kids, with hummingbirds in your ribcages.

It was during the summer of your eighteenth that everything took a turn.

It begun with a sunny morning, humid heat turned up to the max, and ended with two fresh adults sitting on the shore with their hands interlaced, swollen lips and eyes crinkled with blissful, eternal smiles.

JJ picked you up at the same time he always did. You said you want to walk, so you left the car parked in the driveway of your house and walked to the beach instead. The sweat on your bodies made them shine like glitter and you smiled the entire way, catching stolen glances of each other as you crossed the island. Whoever you crossed shot you knowing glances, you and him, which you ignored like you always did. But something felt different and it was floating in the island heat.

After a couple of hours in the water, you found yourself sitting in the sand next to the boy whose eyes were bluer than the surf you’d just enjoyed. You’d shared a joint and, just as it ended, kept your hand over his and didn’t move it. He wanted to part his lips and question it, but was afraid you’d pull away and leave him alone. JJ was a miserable man when it came to you, no surprise, and he begun to see his feelings of desperation in you as if he was staring at a mirror.

When you leaned closer and grazed your lips with his, the softest of touches, he could have sworn he found his new religion. JJ slid his hand in your hair through the nape of your neck and crashed into you feverishly, like he had been waiting his entire life for it. And he was, anyway.

You were both awake and sober and aware. Nothing about the moment you were living was fake. For a second, you were sent back to a foggy night at thirteen when you picked the loneliest boy in the crowd and made a beeline for him hoping to make a friend. You’d found a lot more than friendship that night. The both of you took too long to pull away. Once the pair of you realized what had happened, it was as if a wave ofc relief crashed over your shoulders. Like you both had been stuck in purgatory for the lay six years and you were just now entering the gates of heaven.

The waves crashes at your feet. The ocean was fully aware of the moment you had shared and vowed to remember it forever. Blissful, you pushed him in the sand he tossed a handful at you as his lips twisted into the widest grin you had ever seen him wear, and your laughter echoed all across the beach, ricocheting off the ocean.

And the rest is confetti.