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In the ten years that Stiles Stilinski has loved Lydia Martin, he has been kissed by her once, hugged by her twice (only one of which was of the side-arm variety), and smiled at (genuinely) thrice.
The romantic outlook, considered in terms of the raw data, might not look overly promising, particularly if one takes into account extraneous factors like panic attacks and near-death situations. Stiles, however, is operating on a 15-year plan, and the numbers are in fact already exceeding his expectations, because he hadn’t had their first kiss projected until 2015 (college, Stiles knows, is going to change things).
Stiles has always approached his courtship of Lydia with the general attitude that, while one should always be willing and able to take no for an answer, the “no” answering party should at least be fully informed before making his or her decision. Since Lydia is still inexplicably ignorant of the depths of his awesomeness, charm, and general potential to be the best thing that ever happened to her (future Fields Medal possibly excepted), Stiles considers it his duty to press onward.
He keeps a running tally of their encounters, and has worked out an accompanying level-of-romantic-recognition scale, not because the results make him feel better (they really, really don’t), but because he’s tried just about every way into Lydia’s heart he can think of, and so now he’s going to go a new route: appealing to her inner math geek.
He’s good enough at math that this seems like a workable plan. He’s accustomed enough to striking out that the likelihood of the workable plan turning out to be unworkable is no great deterrent.
“Plans, Scotty,” Stiles says as they battle the newest wave of pixelated zombies, “are how cities are built and conquered.”
Scott looks at him skeptically.
“Lydia isn’t a city.”
“No, she’s a whole kingdom. I dream big.”
Scott completes his demolition of a particularly persistent horde before turning to say, “But it’s all about the little things, right? Like—I offered Allison my pen. She—“
“—is not Lydia.”
Scott shudders.
“No casting aspersions upon the love of my life,” Stiles warns.
“Lips sealed,” Scott says. “And hey, you’re dead again. We could just ditch the game and paint our nails while we have this talk, if you want.”
“Eh, I’m done,” Stiles says. “Play again?”
Stiles knows that things can be over-planned, and that some things can’t be planned for at all (like ex-boyfriends turning into vengeful monsters, dying, resurrecting, and then moving to London, and yet somehow still managing to always be there, in the way).
Trips, though? They can be planned.
He pulls up a search engine and gets to work.
“What are you doing the third week in December?” he asks Lydia the next time he sees her.
“Highly important things,” she says.
“Do you want to maybe go with me—“
“No.”
“But, go to—“
“My scream could literally shatter your eardrums and your mind,” Lydia says blandly. “Are you sure you want to keep talking?”
“No,” says Stiles, who does occasionally accept (temporary) defeat.
He moves on to plan B: Consult experts.
Unfortunately, he’s a little short on friends with successful relationships, so the focus group’s results may be slightly biased.
“Lydia? Still?” Danny asks skeptically. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like Lydia. No one could keep Jackson in line like Lydia. But that’s—do you really want that?”
“Do I want that?” Stiles asks incredulously. “Do I—“
“Why do you keep asking these things?” Scott sighs. “You know—“
“Dangerous women,” Stiles muses, “are maybe even hotter than smart women. And together it’s—“
“Like they could murder you in your sleep and no one would ever know,” Derek says flatly.
“Yes!” Stiles says enthusiastically, as Scott nods dreamily.
“Sometimes I’m not sure why I even bothered coming back,” Derek mutters.
“Back to planning!” Stiles demands. “How to woo a genius strawberry-haired banshee goddess. Chop-chop, people.”
“Oh, I saw this exact article in a magazine once,” Isaac says. “’50 Signs You Might Be Turning into a Delusional Stalker.’”
Stiles is often reminded of why Scott had been his only friend for so long, and sometimes he thinks it had been a lot better that way. And then Scott snorts, slaps Isaac on the back, and Stiles knows: Even Scott has abandoned him.
He surveys the room bleakly.
“Anything? C’mon, guys.”
“This has been even less productive than our regular how-to-kill-this-week’s-monster gatherings,” Isaac declares. “I’m calling it a night. This one’s dead in the water, though, Stiles, really—leave it. And no booking plane tickets. That’d just be creepy.”
“Or maybe thoughtful?”
“Creepy,” all Stiles’s not-friends-anymore declare in unison.
So Stiles doesn’t book plane tickets. He hadn’t been planning on it, anyway—the drive to Monterey is the perfect length for a romantic road trip, in which they stop by parks for picnics and delight in new discoveries together and maybe pick up a quirky hitchhiker and generally build the romantic tension until everything snaps into place. Stiles has seen this in movies; it’s a proven method.
He pulls out his dad’s old atlas of road maps, and begins plotting.
“West Coast Number Theory Conference,” he says to Lydia the next day at school. Initial response is somewhat unpromising, as the subject of his attentions looks at him as if he has no reason to be by her locker, which—he totally does, even if he isn’t expressing it particularly well at the moment. “It’s in California again this year. Just after exams. I thought, maybe—you might want to go?”
“Hmmmm,” Lydia says thoughtfully. “I might. Maybe Allison could come with me.”
“But I—“ Stiles watches his plans fall into sad little sad shreds upon the floor.
Lydia waves him off, and Stiles listens as her heels strike down the hallway. In the echo of each click and clack he hears another no.
Stiles takes some comfort in the fact that at least this proves he has accurately anticipated something Lydia would be interested in. Even if it isn’t an interest in him, it is at least some small validation to keep him warm on long, cold, lonely nights.
“What do you mean lonely?” Scott asks from his sleeping bag on Stiles’ floor that night, looking a little hurt.
“I was being melodramatic,” Stiles says, kicking his legs against the bed morosely. “I’m allowed. The love of my life has, yet again, turned to another. Turned to—hey, to your girlfriend! Do you think you could convince Allison not to—“
“No.”
Stiles sighs deeply and exaggeratedly, and when Scott tells him to leave the huffing and puffing to wolves, he tumbles off the bed just so he can blow in Scott’s face.
“You’re so weird sometimes,” Scott says, and Stiles doesn’t bother denying it.
So when Allison calls at the last minute to say she can’t make it, and asks Stiles to go in her place so Lydia won’t have to drive and stay alone, it’s one of the best surprises of Stiles’ life. (He calls her back later to apologize for his overenthusiastic cheer at hearing that she was bedridden with the flu.)
When Stiles pulls up in front of Lydia’s house in his Jeep that Saturday morning, she’s already waiting for him at the door, leaning on two astonishingly large and alarmingly pink roller bags.
“Finally,” she says. “And are we really taking that…thing…all the way to Monterey?”
“I’m exactly on time! And this is—as you know—the only mode of transportation at my disposal. So, yes. We’re taking her. And she’s going to convert you to her wonders.”
Lydia snorts, but she climbs in. It’s a promising start to their trip, Stiles thinks.
The GPS had promised Stiles that it was only a bit over five hours to Monterey, and his dad’s scoffing noise had made him estimate six to account for traffic, but by their third stop on a detour into the bowels of Old Sacramento “to just check this shop to see if they have what I’m looking for, for my mom’s present,” Stiles is beginning to despair of ever reaching their hotel by nightfall.
“Are you complaining?” Lydia asks archly.
“Yes.”
“Because you’re the one who insisted on coming.”
Lydia’s emphasis has a way sometimes of sounding more than a little vicious, which, all things considered, makes a lot of sense.
So Stiles remains quiet (for him, at least), and treads carefully, and all told he only accidentally breaks one small, overly fragile Christmas ornament. He presents it, after the obligatory purchase, to Lydia, and she says, in gracious response, “Just what I always wanted, Stiles, a health hazard.”
Stiles considers a quip about the shards of his heart, after her many rejections, but in the holiday spirit, but he lets it pass by. When they finally get back on the road, he even lets her change the radio station with a minimum of snark about her love of pop music.
He likes to think that, by the time they’re coming up on San Jose, they’re in accord about the joys of road-tripping, and the superiority of vintage Jeeps, and the relative merits of classic rock as a soundtrack for highway travel.
He turns his head for confirmation of this glorious meeting of their minds, delighting in the fact that this is possibly the longest Lydia has ever gone without correcting him or asking who he is again. He’s only slightly dismayed to find Lydia asleep.
Dismayed, because this means that if awake, she’d probably have countered all of his statements with cutting logic and brutal derision, but only slightly, because Lydia asleep is kind of adorable.
Stiles switches the radio back to classic rock, but he turns the volume down first.
When Lydia wakes up and asks, “Are we there yet?” in a tone that’s half-sarcastic, and all scratchy with sleep, Stiles replies, “I thought we’d just go straight to Vegas so we could get married, actually,” and she glares.
“Kidding,” he says. “An hour more, tops.”
Lydia reaches over to switch the radio back, and says, “Joy.”
But then she keeps talking.
She says, as if she’s narrating her life to some outside force, some psychotherapist behind a desk, and certainly not to a Stiles in the driver’s seat, “My dad’s moving away, out of state.”
Stiles makes a noise that he hopes sounds sympathetic.
“He’s…I know he’s never going to live with us again, you know, and that’s for the best, really. I know. But…”
But Stiles gets it. He knows the need to keep the family you have as close as you can, even when it hurts.
Sometimes Lydia’s voice gets a little higher, a little more nasally, a tone right on the edge of shrillness that shows she’s worried, and that in turn worries Stiles, both on behalf of her, and on behalf of the world, because if Lydia Martin is genuinely worried, there’s usually a problem, possibly accompanied by a dead body. And then she veers off in a different, far less serious direction, and Stiles—who is, to his surprise, not the main content-contributor to this conversation—charts the turns and misdirections in his mind, with the focus of a blindfolded teen detective determined to escape from his kidnappers and find his way home by the mental map.
Somewhere, at the heart of all the hairpin curves, is Lydia, completely without pretense. Someday Stiles is going to find that Lydia, because he knows she’s worth searching and waiting for.
Finally, they arrive at the hotel. Not the conference resort—because even Lydia’s parents apparently have a limit as to how much money they’ll throw at her—but a perfectly respectable hotel that has no evident suicide-count notice on display, is impeccably clean, and has a well-dressed receptionist who says with beautiful elocution and complete politeness, “I’m so sorry, but the room we had reserved for you is undergoing some maintenance. We do have a room for you, but not with two doubles like you requested—we’ve only got a queen available. We would, of course, be happy to give you a 10% discount to thank you for your understanding.”
And Stiles can’t say no to that, but apparently Lydia, who’d waited in the Jeep, would have said no.
“There’s only one bed,” Lydia repeats skeptically after he delivers the news and presents her with a key.
“Umm, yes,” Stiles says. “Sorry. I know it sounds bad—“
“Do you? Because it sounds really bad.”
“—but it’s totally coincidental and not at all pre-arranged by me, and we can definitely go to another hotel except it’s past the time they’d refund the reservation and I kind of don’t have enough money for another—“
“Fine,” Lydia says. “Fine. You’re sleeping on the floor.”
“Yes. Right. Of course.”
Stiles wonders if it would be overly manipulative and somewhat douchey to make an elaborate show of tossing and turning all night, but in the end he’s too tired to make that sort of effort. So he decides he’ll be classy, because classy he can be, especially when it’s the easier route.
He wakes, neck and back stiff but otherwise well-rested, to find Lydia looking down at him with something that might be a thoughtful look or might just be appalled awe at the state of his bedhead.
“They have coffee in the office,” she says. “I’m going to be getting ready for approximately the next 45 minutes, so feel free to go be there instead.”
“Coffee,” he repeats fuzzily. “Yes. Lydia, you are indeed a goddess. And how are you not already ready? Your hair is—“
“Always perfect, yes. That takes maintenance. Out.”
Stiles, coffee in hand, loiters in the lobby and nods awkwardly to a family of four walking by, side-eying him as they roll their bags past. He wishes Lydia’s morning-hair could be a little less perfect, that she herself could be a little less perfect (perfect even in being flawed, perfect for how she’d somehow gotten past all the crazy and the tragedy and kept being the person she wanted to be). If she were less of a shining prospect, a glittering hope, he could maybe set his sights on someone more in his league, and hope that they weren’t killed off by some murderous supernatural creature before he got a shot at an actual romantic relationship.
When Lydia emerges, looking just as utterly perfect as ever, Stiles resigns himself (again) to always longing after her, his bright green light, his Beatrice.
They spend the day on the beach, being tourists, and it’s kind of glorious despite the fact it’s too chilly to actually set foot in the ocean. (When he dares Lydia, her look freezes him more than the water might.)
And then it’s over too soon, and Lydia abandons him to go off to the opening banquet. He imagines her charming all the academics, and the wait-staff, and everyone who comes into her orbit, and then as the clock ticks toward nine he imagines her winking at some young PhD candidate and heading off to his room for some fun. He tries to focus on his chat with Scott, but finally he says he has to go, and ignores Scott’s message of “STOP OBSESSING OVER LYDIA ALREADY,” shoving the laptop closed and away from himself.
But then there’s a whir of a card at the door, and Lydia’s there, not with some other guy, and she’s grabbing the remote and announcing it’s time to watch something about cooking, because she’s full and that’s the best time to watch such things.
Later that night, when Stiles is starting to entertain ideas of a world in which Lydia brings home strange challenge ingredients and he cooks them into marvelous fusion dishes for her, he starts to pull the comforter off the bed to make a nest for himself on the floor, but Lydia stops him and says, “Just—stay on your half of the bed.”
So Stiles does. He concentrates on thoughts of stillness, of board-straightness, of one-side-of-bed-only-ness, and by the time he finally falls asleep (to the smell of Lydia’s shampoo, the traces of her perfume, the impossible magic of her nearness), he is confident that he has convinced his body to carry on with these thoughts during unconsciousness.
It’s probably to be expected that he wakes up draped over Lydia, nuzzling her hair. It’s a really nice way to awaken, actually, until she wakes up as well.
“I realize your math skills aren’t quite at my level,” Lydia says, “but I thought you understand basic fractions. Like halves.”
Stiles rolls over hastily, wincing as he hits the nightstand on the other side. “Yes. Understood. Good morning?”
If Stiles were less observant, he might have missed the eye roll that accompanies her drily sarcastic, “That has yet to be determined.” But he misses nothing with Lydia (except for that time, when she was being sort of mind-controlled by Peter, and the thing where she was a supernatural creature), and he sees it, and knows it’s just another sign of how compatible they are. He, too, is a master of the sarcastic eye roll.
That morning, he brings her back coffee, and their fingers brush as the cup changes hands. In the way that your hands might brush against a complete stranger’s as you were carefully handing them something hot, but—touch, nonetheless.
Stiles thinks longingly of that solitary touch as he wanders the conference grounds and wonders why he’d decided bluffing his unpaid way into the conference instead of just hanging out at the beach all day was a good idea. Lydia had left him as soon as she’d registered, distractedly saying something surprisingly fan-girly about some theorist from UBC she wanted to talk to about additive combinatorics, and Stiles has been…bored. There are nice views from the windows, staring at the arches of the ceiling beams during the first talk was surprisingly hypnotizing, and his brief foray onto a nature trail during the break was nice, but…he’s bored.
Immeasurably bored, and that’s a dangerous state for him to be in. He recognizes some things being discussed, and if he cared enough he was sure he could follow along, but more and more this was seeming like a bad idea. He contemplates how long it would take someone to notice if he just started drinking coffee straight from the carafe, since someone’s cruelly taken the last of the cups.
“Stiles!”
Stiles turns around, even more delighted to hear Lydia’s voice than usual (and it is a voice he’s quite fond of hearing, distinctive if not quite beautiful, because a beautiful voice on top of everything else might have felt like too much, but hers was right).
“Stiles!” she says again, more excited than he’s ever seen her. “I’m heading to dinner with a group of grad students from Stanford! One of them will give me a ride to the hotel, so you’re free to do whatever you like.”
“Oh,” says Stiles. “Right, sure, thanks for letting me know.” He’s beginning to entertain the idea that maybe he isn’t what Lydia needs at all. Maybe she needs a grad student whose life study is the pursuit of mathematical truths. Maybe she needs that rather tall and muscular grad student, who’s really too tan for someone who ought to be studying all the time. Maybe—
“Unless you want to come with us?”
And it strikes him, then, that beneath the enthusiasm, she seems almost hesitant, and despite the past few years and the horrible stuff she’s been through, it will never cease to feel wrong to see Lydia Martin feeling less than completely confident.
As soon as he says, “Hey, sure, sounds fun,” though, the moment is gone, and she’s just tilting her head in a gesture that says, Why aren’t you moving already, then?
It isn’t exactly fun—there are people talking about things he knows nothing about, and people he doesn’t know. What’s worse is that only half of it is even math-related; the rest are other things and people he doesn’t know. He wants to say, But what about werewolves? I know something you don’t, but he has some sense of self-restraint. Instead he just entertains himself by watching Lydia in her element. This is a Lydia who says what she knows and doesn’t amend it with Isn’t it? or I think I read it somewhere? or Right?, or any ofthe million other qualifiers she tags on when she realizes she’s sounded smarter than she meant to.
He’s somewhat surprised, though, by how quickly the evening’s flown by when the checks arrive, and his surprise means that he doesn’t think to correct the waitress, who has separated all the checks except his and Lydia’s.
Lydia quirks her eyebrow in what might be disapproval, but she doesn’t say anything when Stiles pays it. Stiles thinks he might save the receipt forever. (The first time, dear children, that your grandmother let me buy her dinner.)
When they split off from the group to head back to the hotel together, one of the guys waggles his eyebrows suggestively at Stiles, and Lydia doesn’t even contradict the implication.
Later, Stiles flops onto the bed (a strategic flop, with his limbs’ sprawl wholly restricted to one side of the mattress) and says, “So, they all totally thought we were dating.”
“It’s a perfectly logical assumption for them to make, given the circumstances,” Lydia says, chewing at her pen as she looks over her conference program and circles things.
“Sure, I just thought you’d just have something to say about people jumping to conclusions, not looking at all the data, etcetera, etcetera.”
She doesn’t look up from her efforts. “I have low expectations of others, even those pursuing graduate degrees.”
Stiles is trying to figure out whether that’s a good or a bad thing for him when she shoves a small spiral notebook at him and says, “Here, make yourself useful and type up my notes for me.”
Her conference notebook is full of equations, names, references, and doodles, much of which he can’t decipher and certainly can’t type up, but it’s nice to see that at least none of them are eerily identical trees.
The look Lydia gives him out of the corner of her eye when she thinks he’s not watching makes him think that maybe she wanted to show him proof of that, of how things have returned to a relative normal. He doesn’t say anything, though, just starts typing in a document he titles “Math Gibberish” and intersperses liberally with wingdings.
“There’s a desk right over there, you know.” Lydia sighs when Stiles’ bouncing leg jolts the mattress yet again.
“Yeah,” he says, tilting over to nudge her with his shoulder, “but you’re not there.”
“Utterly useless,” Lydia complains as she looks over his shoulder at the wingding extravaganza on the screen. But strands of her hair are brushing his shoulder, and her breath is hot against his ear, so it comes across as more affectionate than she might mean it to.
The more Stiles gets to know Lydia, to hear her geek out about math, to debate with her about which reality TV shows are acceptable as actual entertainment and which can only be watched for mocking purposes, to overhear her phone conversations with Allison, full of reminders to take her medicine and drink tea with honey (and to make Scott run errands for her), the more he likes her. It doesn’t surprise him, exactly, but—his attraction to Lydia is something he’s often questioned (and had questioned by others), because it’s provided relatively little in the way of positive feedback or emotional support for him, and at times he’s wondered if Lydia was even capable of truly liking other people. He couldn’t stop, though, and now he’s pretty sure he’s utterly doomed, because he likes her as a person as well as an unattainable ideal.
The problem is that she’s still fairly unattainable, at least long-term, for him. He’d thought the shallowness might just be a front, to get her through high school, and to an extent it is—Lydia Martin has depths no one will ever be allowed to explore, he’s sure. But her social ambitions—those, he thinks, might last. And he’s not sure he can fit in with that.
He’s not a lacrosse star, and although she knows that, and he knows she knows that, he’s not sure what she expects from him. He almost says so, in between kisses that come out of nowhere, greeting him as he steps out of a much-needed cold shower, because even though that’s really not important right now and he’d rather not be thinking about it right now, suddenly it’s stuck in his head.
The pressure to make this perfect is leaking through his words and his movements until they’re all too self-conscious and he doesn’t know where to put his hands, even though they were moving quite of their own accord just a second ago.
He’s trying to be a gentleman, he’s trying to be what she wants (or what she doesn’t know she wants), but she moves his hands to her hips and says, “God, what’s wrong with guys these days?”
And at first he sees it as confirmation that he’s doing it all wrong, and then it throws him, that she wants this, so soon, and then he can’t think anymore, so he doesn’t question it, because it’s what he wants, too. When he does think, though, he asks why it matters so much, why she wants this now, out of nowhere, and she says, “It makes me feel alive.” She doesn’t say it in the way he’d hope for, though—doesn’t say it like his touch exhilarates her, makes her high on life. She says it like it’s all that’s keeping her grounded—like it’s a stopgap, a temporary cure. She says it without romance.
But Stiles doesn’t need romance if he has Lydia, so he lets her put his hands where she wants them, lets her push and pull him as she needs. She seems to know what she’s doing, so he concedes to her experience and lets her take charge.
It seems to work pretty well for them.
“Some people think a banshee’s touch is dangerous,” she says idly, as her fingers trace across his back, the scrape of her fingernails disrupting his afterglow. “That it can be deadly, even.”
“Uh,” replies Stiles, because he is always eloquent in the face of danger. “But they’re wrong, right?”
“I dunno,” she says lightly, though he’s beginning to realize that this does not always mean she doesn’t care. “But you’re not dead yet, so, probably.”
So Stiles reaches back, pulls her hand around and intertwines his fingers with hers, to show it doesn’t matter. To show he trusts her.
She looks at him consideringly, and he’s not sure what he sees, but she nods, and doesn’t try to pull away.
Their last night at the hotel, Lydia stuffs clothes and conference freebies into her bags with a glow about her Stiles isn’t used to seeing, and he’s not vain enough to think it’s because of him. He doesn’t want to see that light dimmed when they go back to Beacon Hills and she feels the need to pretend, again, if only for just the next few months until graduation.
Stiles wonders, too, what else is going to change once they’re back home. He wonders if conference flings are a thing, like summer flings, and if this was one, just an aberration.
“You’re thinking too loudly, Stilinski,” Lydia says, sing-songingly. “Spill.”
“It’s just—“ Stiles decides to just put it out there. “It’s just, I think we can really work, long-term. This doesn’t have to be some temporary thing, although we can continue on a trial basis if you want. I mean, this could be, like, the preliminary trial, but we can extend it, and show that it can work when we’re back at school, too. I mean—“
“You don’t have to tell me why we work, or prove things to me, Stiles,” she says. “It’s not math. It’s a relationship. It doesn’t have to make sense, or have anything to do with logic, or theory, or data. It has to do with people, and what’s between them.”
Stiles nods. He knows this. He’d always thought Lydia’s approach to romance would be a bit more calculated, that’s all. Her relationship with Jackson had always been at least half about social power structures, and her relationship with Aiden at least half about exploring the notion that sex could be something entirely apart from whether your partner was a vicious shape-melding werewolf or not. His working theory was that any hypothetical relationship between the two of them would be at least half about her getting tired of rejecting him.
“OK,” he says. “Yes. So—between us, then? There’s something, right?”
Lydia reels him in by the shirt collar, and Stiles lets himself be pulled. “With you, Stilinski—there’s always something,” she says, pulling him down for a kiss.
He’s been kissed by Lydia Martin before—even their not-quite-the-real-thing first is on the highlight reel of his life, despite the less-than-optimal surroundings—but it had somehow never prepared him for this—for Lydia Martin putting her complete concentration into a kiss.
The surprise of it makes it the most perfect thing in the world, although maybe, objectively measured, it is not. Subjectively: It ranks as the single most perfect event in Stiles’ life, and it makes him greedily want it to be superseded by each second to come.
Lydia Martin is immune to the bite of a werewolf, to the venom of a kanima, to the madness of a draught of wolfsbane. But Lydia Martin has succumbed to the wiles of Stiles Stilinski, and so: It is a perfect day.
As Stiles checks the hotel room over for any valuables that may have slipped in crevices, hidden in drawers, Lydia says, “You didn’t even bother to unpack anything.”
Stiles says, “Yeah, but you did,” and Lydia looks almost fond.
“I don’t forget things, Stiles,” she says.
Stiles looks longingly at the bed. “Yeah, me neither.”
Lydia swats his ass as they walk out. “Refresher course when we get home, just in case.”
The drive back home feels a lot shorter than the drive down, possibly because Stiles is speeding (but only a little).
When the credit card reader at a gas station is out of order, Lydia insists on going inside with him as he pays, and then she insists on him buying her sunflower seeds. As they drive, she spits the hulls out the window with all the aplomb of a drunk trucker as Stiles looks on, aghast.
“You said we were dating,” she says blithely. “That means the magic is gone, Stiles.”
“Guess so,” he agrees, but he can’t bring himself to care.
There is a point in many romantic relationships, Stiles has heard, at which the romance is lost. It’s a metaphor, probably a euphemism, but maybe sometimes love is made corporeal. And maybe one day you forget where you laid it to rest, because maybe someone else comes along and moves things around, or maybe there’s just an earthquake, a nobody’s-fault-act-of-God, and it just goes missing. Stiles has this point planned into his relationship graphs, too. An event-horizon type thing that he hopes is never reached, but realizes the potential for. Because people change, and circumstances change, and sometimes all the phenylethylamine wears off, and that’s why planning is all in projections and possibilities.
So, maybe it’s not going to work, Stiles thinks. But maybe it is. And when Lydia goes to change the radio station again, he puts out his hand, not to stop her, but to wrap it around her own. He lets their hands rest there, above the gearshift, like they fit together, like they fit there. A little awkward, a little uncomfortable, but nice, all the same.