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 FORTY-EIGHT:
The Easiest Thing In The World Was Loving You
✧✧✧✧
The Stilinski house was about a twenty-minute walk from the Argent's. Jay, through sheer will and possibly divine intervention, made it there in a record seven.
And sure, maybe that meant his legs had liquefied into jelly somewhere around the halfway mark. Maybe he was gripping the porch railing so tightly that the wood creaked under his fingers. Maybe every inhale felt like it was scraping raw against barbed wire, and his whole body was on the verge of literal mutiny.
But none of that really mattered.
Not when he could hear Stiles in his bedroom. Alive, semi-functional, and seemingly screaming into a pillow.
And aside from the muffled screaming going on, his heartbeat was loud inside the house—erratic, anxious, like a drum solo played by a man teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Which, honestly, was an accurate description of Stiles in general.
But, despite Jay going into cardiac arrest outside, and Stiles going into cardiac arrest inside, all of this was kind of romantic—if you squinted and saw it through the delusional lens Jay had been walking through life with recently.
Instead of Jay standing outside with an obnoxious boom box, it was Stiles' obnoxious heart rate, on the verge of literally beating down Jay's eardrums, doing all the serenading and luring.
And if Jay listened past the overwhelming percussion, he could also pick out the tiny, featherlight pitter-patter of Hellspawn's little heart, curled up somewhere safe, a steady rhythm of comfort amidst the chaos. And the Sheriff's more solid heartbeat keeping the world from tilting completely off its axis.
Jay closed his eyes and let the rhythms ground him for a second, trying—failing—to force his own frantic pulse to sync with something, anything before he proceeded.
(Preferably not sync up with Stiles, unless he wanted to pass out on the damn porch.)
But even after catching his breath for a long minute, he couldn't bring himself to move any closer.
His body, which had just defied human and werewolf limits just to get here, had officially entered full-system shutdown. Like his brain had smacked into an invisible roadblock with a giant, flashing neon sign: DO NOT PROCEED. EMOTIONS AHEAD.
Because, well.
What if it was awkward?
Which was an objectively stupid thing to worry about, considering their lives were already a never-ending parade of chaos.
Life-threatening situations? Sure. Murderous Argents? Manageable. But an emotionally vulnerable conversation? Absolutely not. He'd rather die.
Clearly, his survival instincts were beyond broken.
