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 some fuck ass Alpha that seemed to have a particular interest in r...
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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX:
A Bit Obsessive, Don't You Think?
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Life was full of mysteries that Stiles could never quite wrap his head around.
Why do we pay for bottled water when it literally falls from the sky for free? Why does every kid just automatically buy into the whole tooth fairy myth—hypothetically, what would she even do with all those teeth? Why were aliens so obviously real, yet the world still pretended they didn't exist? And the one that really stumped him—why did one sock always go missing in the dryer, no matter how carefully you checked?
But those everyday conundrums he used to agonize over had recently taken a backseat to more immediate, baffling questions that had somehow become his reality ever since his best friend got bitten by a freaking werewolf: Why did Scott insist on doing his whole dramatic Romeo and Juliet routine with Allison, complicating literally everything for everyone? Why was Lahey suddenly everywhere, always showing up at the worst possible times, as if his sole purpose was to ruin Stiles' life? And why was a giant lizard roaming the streets in the first place—seriously, a lizard? Who comes up with this stuff?—and why, of all people, did it have to be Jackson fucking Whittemore?
And then, there was the enigma of James Hale, who somehow seemed to be tangled up in all those immediate questions.
But while Isaac blamed Jay for it all, Stiles was under the opposite impression. Maybe things would have played out the same way in a universe without Jay in it, or maybe things would have been completely different. But here and now, he'd undeniably made things better, not worse. And that was a truth that Stiles would stand by.
It was just a shame Jay never seemed to grasp the impact he had on them all.
Once upon a time, Stiles didn't understand it either, even though he thought he had Jay all figured out. Befriending him seemed like just another mission, another puzzle to solve in the chaotic game of supernatural life that he was suddenly transported into. He'd convinced himself that cracking the code of Jay Hale would be simple. But as he got closer—way closer than he ever intended—he realized something that threw him for a loop: Jay wasn't just some code to decipher. He was a person. An attractive, infuriating, sometimes-howling-at-the-moon person, but a person nonetheless. And people? People were complicated.
Stiles had a whole damn list of things that complicated Jay, but something he couldn't wrap his head around, no matter how hard he tried, was how Jay could go from zero to a hundred in the blink of an eye. One minute, everything seemed fine; the next, it was like the world was ending.
It wasn't until he glanced back into the house while Scott was confronting Derek that Stiles realized Jay was nowhere to be found. He'd made himself scarce again. And this time, Stiles had literally been right there, unable to do anything to stop the spiral that must have already begun.
