PANTS ON FIRE ▹ Stiles Stilinski

chapter four

chapter four
FUEL TO THE FIRE
(season one, episode two; second chance at first line)

ELI MONTGOMERY, IN ALL HIS GLORY, WOKE UP THE FOLLOWING MORNING FEELING REGRET, even though he had no clue why he felt that way. He had no semblance of a clue why dread was eating away at his stomach lining and he had no remembrance of how he made it home from the party last night. As he stared at the popcorn ceiling above him with the faint beams of sunlight slipping through the slits of his blinds, he tried to recount his steps twelve hours earlier. The last thing he could recall was when he was chatting with Stiles — oh, shit! Did he make a fool of himself once again? Eli cringed at the thought of being a sloppy drunken mess in front of the one guy he wanted to impress.

"Ugh!" Eli groaned, flopped on his stomach, and threw his face into his pillow. One by one, images from the night before resurfaced. Each one was worst than the last and made Eli force his face deeper and deeper into his pillow, hoping that maybe the grey fabric would suffocate the embarrassment out of him.

But, no matter how much he remembered, Eli never remembered it all. After confessing how pretty he thought Stiles' eyes were, everything else went black. The rest of the evening was a blur, absent from his memory. A chunk of his life is just gone. Whilst he wished he could remember what had happened and he would have liked to know if he had done anything regretful, at least he was spared from any embarrassing moments that may have occurred.

"You have pretty eyes," Eli mocked himself from the night before, his voice an irritating high pitch. He cried out, "Fucking hell, Eli! You're so fucking stupid."

A groggy voice sounded from nowhere, causing Eli's heart to fall in his chest. "Can you keep it dow—"

Even in his hungover state, he recognized the voice immediately.

"What the hell, Kelsey!" Eli screeched and shot upwards to a seating position, the hairs on his arms standing up straight. His eyes glanced over his messy sheets and the bean bag chair in the corner of his room, but the redhead was nowhere to be seen. "Where even are you?"

A frustrated and sleepy sigh sounded from below. "Down. Here."

Eli furrowed his brows and leaned over the side of the bed, his elbow sinking into the soft mattress. Down on the floor in the three-foot space between the wooden bed frame and his pale blue walls was Kelsey. One of his pillows was pulled on top of her face, no doubt to block the late morning sunlight that trickled through his blinds, and another pillow rested beneath her head of messy curls. She was wrapped tightly in the dinosaur quilt his grandmother made.

"Why—"

"You pushed me off the bed," she responded prematurely, her words muffled by the pillow. "Twice."

Eli shook his head. "No, why are you here?"

"Ugh, can I sleep?" She whined. "I feel like I was hit by a truck, like a big one."