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The world hates him. It must. Why else would the obscenely enormous, generously fat-marbled steaks on sale for half price be right next to the lean chicken and turkey?
The Sheriff looks longing at the steaks for a second longer before manning up and grabbing half a dozen extremely dull chicken breasts. If he tosses them into his cart with a little more force than necessary, well it just serves them right for not being deliciously bad for him.
He sighs deeply and heads off towards the fresh fruit and vegetables. The list in his hand is in Stiles handwriting, neat but tiny and packed tight. He squints at it for a second before surrendering to the inevitable and slipping his glasses from his pocket.
Somewhere deep inside his inner macho guy weeps as he settles them on his nose.
Clearing his throat, he looks at the list again, ticking things off until he comes across ‘kale’ and the conversation with Stiles from this morning replays itself.
“Stiles, what the hell is this? I said i’d make dinner. I’m not auditioning for Top Chef.”
His son grinned at him. “Oh come on dad, it’s not that bad.”
The recipe was two pages long. “It says to ‘braise the kale’. I have to braise things, Stiles. And what the hell is kale anyway?”
Stiles gave him an incredulous look. “Seriously, Dad? It’s a leafy green vegetable. It’s full of-…look it’s healthy, okay? It’s good for you and your doctor said-…”
The sheriff held up a hand. “Alright, alright. I get it. Just tell me it’s not like that nasty cabbage you cooked last week.”
His son made a face. “Well…”
The sheriff folded the list again and frowned over the greenest part of the vegetable display.
“Did they mix up the labels again?” A voice said from over his shoulder.
The noise he made was totally manly. Manly, macho…other words beginning with ‘m’, but it absolutely, positively wasn’t a high-pitched squeak. Not at all.
He spun around to see Melissa McCall standing behind him.
“Oh god! I’m so sorry!” she said in a rush. “I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”
“No! It’s okay. You didn’t-…” he shook his head and tried to get his heart rate down from hummingbird speeds. “It’s fine.”
Melissa smiled tentatively at him. “Okay. Good. Great.”
The sheriff smiled back at her and the thought struck him, not for the first time, that Melissa McCall had a really nice smile. And nice eyes. And great hair. It looked so soft when she had it down like today. It’d probably be really easy to run his fingers thr-...
Okay, wow. This was not the time or the place to think those kind of thoughts about his son's best friend’s mother.
The sheriff coughed into his fist and tried to pull his mind onto a more socially acceptable track.
“So how are you?” He asked.
“I’m good.” Melissa nodded. “And you?”
“Yeah, no, I’m great. Really good.” He nodded.
The silence stretched for a few seconds before Melissa suddenly waved down at her scrubs.
“I’ve just finished at the hospital.” She said, shrugging one shoulder in a helpless little gesture.
“Same here.” He plucked at his shirt and sent up a silent prayer of thanks that he’d had a spare shirt at work after he’d dropped Stiles’s homemade chilli down himself at lunch. “Not the hospital, I mean. At the station.”
“Ah.” Melissa said and the world was once again filled with silence and polite smiling.
Dammit all. He used to be good at this. A sheriff was supposed to be able to talk to people, wasn’t he? And yet here he is, standing in front of a woman he’d really like to talk to with an absolutely blank mind.
He looked around himself for any conversational kickstarter, eyes lighting on his shopping cart. Sending up a silent prayer of thanks he leant in and grabbed something at random.
In retrospect the cucumber he ended up waving at her probably wasn’t the best choice he could have made, but he soldiered on regardless.
“Figured I’d make dinner for Stiles for once.” He said by way of explanation.
Melissa, because she was a kind and generous soul, ignored the hastily dropped vegetable but happily took the conversational gambit.
“Oh, me too! Not making dinner for Stiles, obviously!” she laughed a little. “I’m cooking for Scott. We’ve got a mom-son date. I barely see him these days if I don’t schedule it a week in advance, you know?” This time the laugh was touched with a hint of sadness.
He knew exactly how she felt. Stiles was out more than he was home these days. The pack – and don’t get him started on how weird it was that that word in that context was now part of his everyday vocabulary – was busy fixing up the old Hale house so Stiles had been spending his evenings and weekends out in the forest, coming back exhausted and smelling of sawdust and fresh paint.
So yes. The sheriff knew what it was like to miss your kid despite living in the same house as them. Still, that was preferable to all the lies and secrecy that had come before he’d known about werewolves and hunters and strange lizard things. It didn’t lessen the worry but at least he knew.
He realised with a start that he hadn’t actually asked after Scott. Clearly his common courtesy had flown right out the window along with his ability to hold a decent conversation.
“But, Scott, he’s okay, right?” He asked. “He’s-…”
“Still a werewolf?” Melissa blurted out at, judging by her horrified expression, a much higher volume than she had intended.
A soft thump behind him had the sheriff swinging around in time to see a head of lettuce rolling across the floor towards him, away from a shocked looking elderly lady sitting on her shopping scooter a little further up along the aisle.
As he scooped up her fallen produce, he wracked his brain for something that sounded halfway plausible. “Our kids…they’re-… um... ”
“They’re in the school drama club?” Melissa suggested from over his shoulder.
The sheriff grasped the lifeline with both hands as he handed the lettuce back. “Yes! Yes. They’re doing a play on, uh…ancient myths and legends.”
The old lady took the proffered vegetable, giving him a blank look before shaking her head and turning her scooter away from the obviously crazy person.
“You have a great evening now, Ma’am.” The sheriff called after her, giving her a little half wave as she drove away.
Well. That couldn’t have been more horrific. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get a strongly worded email from the county commissioner about this by the end of the week.
He schooled his face into something resembling an apologetic smile and turned back to Melissa.
Melissa who was currently doubled over her folded arms, making an odd wheezing noise. For a second he panicked and wondered if asthma was genetic – Scott had been severely asthmatic before…well before the kid had become one of those myths the sheriff just lied about.
It was only when he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder to straighten her up and check if she was okay that he realised she was laughing. Helpless, silent laughter was shaking her shoulders and when she looked up at him there were tears beading at the corners of her eyes.
“Werewolves!” She squeaked out before dissolving into another fit.
Suddenly he was grinning too because werewolves existed. A whole pack of them were out in the forest a few miles away from them right now fixing up their alphas wreck of a house so they could use it as their den. And the fact that he could think that entire scenario and know it was reality rather than the plot to some cheesy supernatural TV show was enough to startle a loud bark of laughter out of him.
The dam broke. Months and months of tension, fear, anger, sadness and a thousand other emotions bubbling up and out as laughter that stole his breath. Melissa was shaking her head, raising both hands to cover her mouth, trying futilely to rein herself in which, in the way of these things, only makes him laugh harder. He didn’t even bother trying to keep it in and their combined laughter rang loud around the store.
People were poking their heads around the ends of the aisles on either side of them to stare or give them both disapproving looks and the sheriff just didn’t care. He flapped a hand helplessly at them until they moved off, shaking their heads.
It took a few minutes, several of which made him fear he’d die of laughter induced asphyxiation, but the sheriff finally managed to get himself back under control. He cleared his throat taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes, slipping them back on just in time to see Melissa wiping away her own tears, smiling as little hiccups of laughter escaped her.
Considering the lack of help his brain had been so far in this encounter, he was shocked that he remembered the clean handkerchief he’d put in his pocket that morning. He fumbled for it quickly and offered it to her.
“Thanks.” She said looking up at him with bright eyes, taking it gratefully and dabbing at her cheeks before handing it back to him.
The last of the spectators drifted away and Melissa sighed, resigned. “Wow. So this is going to be around town in no time.”
The sheriff snorted in agreement. “The joys of small town life.”
“Yup. And before you know it, this whole thing will be because we were drunk or high or-...” Melissa cleared her throat and straightened up. “Okay!” She said with finality, reaching for her cart. “So! I’m going to finish up here and then go home and die of embarrassment. Yep. I think that’s a good-...”
“Have coffee with me?” The words were out before he could catch them.
Melissa froze. “Um. Did you just-...”
“I just... we should have coffee,” he said, raising and then dropping his hands helplessly. “Or something. To talk because I need to talk and I think maybe you do too. I mean if you don’t then that’s fine we can just pretend this all never happened - especially this part - but this whole thing weighs a ton and it must be a million times worse for you with Scott being all...” he made a vague gesture in the air between them, “And honestly? I’m really, really tired of carrying it around alone. So maybe we should just get it all of our chests and share the load, you know? And maybe we could do that together.”
The sheriff always said that Stiles got his complete lack of brain-to-mouth filter from his mother. Clearly he was deluding himself if this situation was any indication and now that he’d had that little revelation he’d be really grateful if the ground could just open up and swallow him whole, because Melissa was just staring at him, mouth open slightly and eyes wide.
Oh god. He should take it back and he should do it now because she was still staring and he couldn’t read her expression at all so he needs to give her an out and maybe this won’t get any more mortifying than it already is.
He opened his mouth to do just that but Melissa cuts him off.
“Yes!” She said urgently before catching herself and taking a breath. “Yes. I’d love to go for coffee with you.”
“Really?” the sheriff asked, because he was pretty sure he’d imagined the last ten seconds of the conversation.
A quirky smile turned up the corner of Melissa’s lips. “Really. Look, I’ve officially been on one date since Scott's father and that was a whole world of wrong because it turns out that Peter Hale is evil and also not exactly human. But you’re nothing like Peter Hale and that’s a really, really good thing.” Her face dropped a little. “And I just realised that I used the word ‘date’ but maybe you didn’t mean coffee as in coffee-...”
It was his turn to interrupt. “No, I did! I did. I meant coffee as in coffee. A coffee date. With you. If you’re okay with that?”
Melissa grinned. “I’m totally okay with that.”
“Great.” The sheriff said and he could feel the smile splitting his face. “I’ll call you?”
“Okay.” Melissa said brightly. “Good.”
“Okay then.” He nodded trying to school his features into something other than the goofy grin that he was pretty certain he was wearing at this point. He cleared his throat and waved his shopping list at her. “So I guess I should…”
Melissa’s smile turned rueful as she held up her own list. “Me too. Scott’ll start gnawing on the furniture if I don’t get back soon.” She said as she took a few steps back and bumped gently into her cart, steering it around and past him with a laugh.
The sheriff waved a little and couldn’t even be embarrassed about how dumb that looked because he had a date and his inner macho guy was doing victory laps.
A few seconds passed while he struggled with the urge to fist-pump right there in front of the vegetables but eventually he mastered it and actually looked at the greenery arrayed in front of him.
Now, what the hell did Kale look like?