Stiles hits 35 and decides the thing he’s missing in his life is a spouse. Someone successful, attractive, who he can create a family with - he loves family, and he wants one of his own, maybe a big one! So - he needs a spouse. That’s step one.
Then again, it’s not like he has an incredible social life. He hasn’t had a serious partner since college, and the apps have gotten him nowhere. So he decides after a lot of soul searching - including getting wasted with his married friends - that it’d be smart to look back at people he never gave a proper shot to.
His various one-night stands. One of them, surely, is his soulmate. The future parent of his beautiful future children. (The viable candidates are only the ones who were good in bed, obviously.)
It takes him a while to make the list. His first year of college, there was Jenny and Heather and Caitlin. A quick Internet exploration tells him Caitlin is married - to a woman - and both Jenny and Heather live on the east coast now. Then there was his first time with a guy - Patrick. He was fun. Handsome. And he’s also married. Hm. Stiles will save his Facebook page, though.
His serious college girlfriend, Malia, left him with a lot of fond memories. But he doesn’t want to marry her. What he does want is to remember the name of the guy he used as a rebound hookup, a few weeks after Malia dumped him for his roommate.
His name was…Damien? Daryl? No - Derek! Yeah, Derek. Stiles met him in a bar near campus, and went from drinking to kissing extremely quickly. They had a lot of very good sex at Derek’s place - because Stiles was crashing on a friend’s couch while dealing with the whole thing where his roommate was fucking his ex - and then Stiles made a hasty exit before the sun came up. Wow. Derek. Stiles hasn’t thought about him in years.
He calls people. He sends messages to everyone he hung out with in college. He even scours the Instagram page of the bar they were in, just in case. He knows it’s crazy - what are the odds this guy is even around Nor Cal anymore? What are the odds he’s still single, given how ridiculously hot Stiles remembers him being!
Stiles makes the rest of his list and thinks a little bit about who else he could reach out to, other people he’d like to see again, maybe take to dinner. But he can’t stop thinking about Derek.
They had really good sex. Like, definitely the best sex Stiles had ever had up to that point, and maybe the best sex he’s ever had. He remembers laughing a lot, remembers thinking that Derek was entertaining, charming, a very respectable choice for a rebound. He remembers Derek’s apartment too, which seemed really put together for a guy in his twenties, clean and nicely decorated and homely. He remembers that it was on the third floor - the top of a building with no elevator. He also remembers where that building is! Oh shit!
It takes him minimal effort to locate on Google Maps and confirm that it’s been virtually unchanged in the last fourteen years. But that’s stupid, and crazy, and pointless - why would a guy in his twenties still be living that same apartment over a decade later? He was probably a student, like Stiles - oh, fuck. Duh. He was probably a student! So all Stiles has to do is track down all the people who attended a bay area university in the mid 2010s with the first name of Derek. (Maybe that’s still crazy, but this guy is gonna be his husband. Stiles is ready put in the work.)
For an entire month, Stiles spends several hours a day scrolling through alumni pages. (His coworkers think he’s insane. He’s more optimistic than they are.) He strikes gold the day he realizes that Derek might’ve been a grad student—it only takes him another week after that to find his photo on a UC Berkeley webpage, boasting the accomplishments of their History PhDs.
That’s him. That’s him with the stubble and the jet black hair and the smile that makes Stiles’ gut twist. Whoa.
Derek Hale. A doctor. Well - a professor. God, that’s hot. He teaches at a private Catholic university in SF. The city Stiles fucking lives in! Is he Catholic? That’s not a dealbreaker - maybe a little weird since he had a gay one-night stand fourteen years ago - but Stiles doesn’t want his kids to be raised religious. Hm. That’ll have to be a conversation.
Stiles can’t identify an Instagram account or any public social media - he has a LinkedIn, and a page on his university’s site, and a private Facebook page. That’s it. So he could be married. But Stiles doesn’t think so. There are no signs of a relationship on the various sites Stiles can see…
So now Stiles just has to ask him out. He could go the boring, safe route and send him a friend request. But it’d be much more effective to go talk to him in person. Which is how Stiles ends up lingering on a tiny college campus, waiting for Professor Hale’s HIST 202: Middle Ages in Context to finish up.
There’s an initial flood of students out of the building around 5:05, but Derek doesn’t appear for another fifteen minutes. And when he does appear, he hardly even glances at Stiles. Ouch. Definitely not the romantic reconnection that Stiles was expecting. But Derek looks really good, handsome, well-dressed in a nice shirt and a tie - a tie. What a grownup! So that takes some of the sting out of Derek walking right past him.
“Hey, uh - Derek!” He catches up easily, and smiles through the way Derek examines him, stalled on the sidewalk. “I don’t know if you would, uh, remember me at all. We met in, like, May of 2016? At that bar in Berkeley?”
Derek’s eyes go wide. “Oh my god.”
So probably not Catholic. “Sorry for completely blindsiding you like this,” Stiles tells him, even though he’s not that sorry. “I sort of looked you up and I live, like, twenty minutes away so - thought I’d come say hi. And ask you to dinner.”
“You looked me up,” Derek echoes. “Based on the extensive conversation we had about our lives that night?” His tone is thick with sarcasm, but he isn’t fleeing. That’s a good sign!
“I was extraordinarily motivated,” Stiles says with a shrug. “I’m Stiles, by the way. In case you forgot.”
They don’t shake hands. But that would probably be weird.
“Why were you extraordinarily motivated?” Derek asks.
Well. Why not go for broke, right?
“Because you were the best lay of my life and I wanted to see if you were single.”
The way Derek’s cheeks color is very satisfying. He looks back and forth around them, as if searching for eavesdroppers, or maybe his students. Yeah, maybe they shouldn’t talk about the anonymous gay sex they had while surrounded by a bunch of Catholics. Could be a little risky for Derek’s job.
Derek takes half a step closer, hunching his shoulders and lowering his voice when he says, “It’s been fifteen years.”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen years,” Derek emphasizes. “Are you having a midlife crisis?”
“I’m only thirty-five!”
“You realize this is objectively insane, right? You came to my job!”
“And I brought you coffee,” Stiles says, remembering his gesture. “If you want it. It’s got oat milk in it, and vanilla.”
Derek blinks. For a long moment, Stiles is sure that Derek is going to walk away - and maybe file a police report for stalking. Then, he adjusts the strap of his bag over his shoulder and says, “You were gone when I woke up.”
Stiles can’t help but be thrilled - Derek does remember him! “Yeah, and that was a total dick move, but in my defense, I’d just been dumped in a truly pathetic way, and I was about to finish the school year and go home, so I was being extremely myopic and not thinking about how I might wanna see you again in the future, which I do. Right now. In the future. Or present, as the case may be.”
“Fourteen years later.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Because I thought I’d be married by the time I was 35, he thinks but doesn’t say. “Because I was thinking about you. And I thought we had really good chemistry. The best.”
“If you thought that, you should’ve stayed. What happened now - did you just get dumped again? Lot of effort to go to for another rebound fuck.”
“I didn’t get dumped,” Stiles assures him. “I just started thinking about the people I’ve had brief encounters with and I remembered you and it turns out you live in the city I live in and - here we are.” When he says it out loud, it does sound a little stalker-y. Damn.
“So you’re tracking down your one-night stands,” Derek says. “That’s the plot of a bad movie.”
“Actually, I’d totally watch that movie.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Uh. How do you mean?”
“You’re tracking down your one-night stands for what? What’s the point? The plan.”
“Well.” He clears his throat, shifting his weight back and forth to try to ease some of his sudden discomfort. He can be confident! He totally can! “I’m not getting any younger. And I want to, like, get married and have kids one day. But dating is the worst, and I know I have chemistry with you, so - I just sort of wondered if maybe we have more than chemistry.” He winces at the look on Derek’s face, the one that says: you’re a crazy person and I can’t believe I’m talking to you. “At least nobody can say I didn’t shoot my shot. Sorry for bothering you, man.”
Derek sighs, a hand coming out to Stiles’ chest to stop him from walking away. “Gimme the coffee.”
He hands it over. “I don’t normally fuck off before sunrise, you know. I was particularly fragile when we crossed paths.”
“Because you were dumped.”
“Bad excuse, I know.”
“No, I get it. I’ve done stupid things after a breakup.”
Stiles can’t help but smile. “Maybe you could tell me some of those stupid things over dinner.”
Derek takes a sip of the coffee and then nods. “Yeah. Okay.”
(They have a June wedding and five kids. Their kids hear a very sanitized version of their romance. At least until they’re older.)
