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She’s something of a mystery to him, short skirts and long hair and it makes him hum that song.
There’s something wrong about seeing her, immaculate and perfect in his shabby broken down house in the woods. Derek wants to ask her, "aren’t you supposed to be at school or laying by the pool or doing whatever it is that teenagers do?" He’s got a pack of them, they’re the only things he has that could pass as friends, and he still doesn’t know what they do when he’s not forcing them to be better, stronger, smarter, tougher than he had been at their age.
"It’s summer vacation." She says like she can read his mind. It’s worrying.
That explains where Erica and Boyd haven’t come back yet, why Isaac is barely around, only showing up to sleep before rushing out almost the minute he’s awake again.
But she doesn’t say anything else, so he has to ask, “And?”
"And. I want to get away from this place." She’s got a hip jutted out, and a pair of high heels on that make her seem so much taller than he knows her to be.
"I assume you have a car? Or a friend that could go with you." He seems to recall Stiles having a hunk of junk that he almost died in once.
She speaks in that way that teenagers always do, with a tone that’s half made of eyerolls, and the way that she has her arms crossed. ”Jackson left, and Allison’s on vacation. I want you to take me.”
Derek thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be too bad to get away for just a little while. He doesn’t know when the alpha pack is gonna show up, doesn’t know how much trouble they’re going to cause, doesn’t know how many people will die, but at least this time their deaths will be less directly his fault.
Plus, she shifts her weight from one leg to the other, like she’s trying to draw attention back to her from where he’s staring off into the woods contemplating, life and consent and whether he really wants to be this person.
It doesn’t really matter once she stars walking towards where he’s sitting on the step of his house.
There’s a sway to her hips that makes him wonder when girls learn that kind of confidence, because it can’t be right that it happens so young, she shouldn’t be able to act that way if he can’t act accordingly in response.
(He wants to pull her down into his lap, put his hands on her hips and hold her close, wants to put a hand into her hair and kiss her in a way that sixteen year old boys haven’t learned yet, but he thinks that that would be letting her win, and maybe they shouldn’t start whatever this is going to be like that quite so soon.
Because he knows he’s going to give in, knows it when she steps up to stand on the step just beneath the one that he’s got his feet on, knows it when she looks down at him and is so sure of her answer that he can feel the success radiating off of her.)
She takes one of her feet and raises it between his, like she’s going to start walking up the stairs. “So, are you in or not?”
He has to scowl up at her, even though there’s a smirk curling around her lips. He can’t see anything more than the pale skin of her thigh, but he’s going to have to keep her from saying things like that if they’re ever going to survive this trip.
"Good." Lydia takes his silence for the yes that it is. Then she’s stepping down from the steps, and walking back to where her car is parked on the edge of the clearing that was once his lawn, right where he had always parked when he’d borrowed the car. "Be at my house in forty-five." She rattles off an address, and then she’s sliding in the car, pulling away.
Derek has to sit for a moment and think about what could have made her choose him to go with her. He tried to kill her once, and she almost killed him when she was brainwashed by his uncle. He also remembers that he never really had any problem getting girls to go home with him the few times that he went to bars and tried to do more than get drunk.
He chocks it up to that and goes to throw some clothes into his duffle.
He leaves a note for Isaac on the newly painted door that he should probably find somewhere else to stay for a few weeks, because Peter is not someone that he should be alone with and he knows that from a lifetime of experience, before he’s heading away from the house and into town.
When he gets back, maybe he should look into getting an actual apartment of some kind.
-
He shows up to her house a few minutes late having stopped to fill up on gas and get a soda when he’d been running a little early. He’d been sure that she had some romantic escapist notion of how their leaving town would be, and having to stop for gas fifteen minutes out probably wasn’t a part of that picture.
He’s trying to decide on if he should honk the horn, or go knock on the door, or drive away before she can realize that he’d been there at all when she opens the door and strolls out.
Lydia’s got a suitcase rolling along behind her, and he pops the trunk without hesitation, getting out to help her stow it next to his duffle. She’s got a smaller bag sitting on top of it and a purse slung on her shoulder. He doesn’t know what she has planned, or what she packed for, but he also knows that his sisters always packed too much stuff back when they had the opportunity, so it’s probably just a thing.
"Where did you have in mind?" They’re standing in the middle of the street outside the house where for all he knows her mom is waiting for them to drive away so that she can call the cops and have him arrested for kidnapping, but now that she’s standing next to him, looking up even though her shoes are break your neck tall, he doesn’t regret it.
"I’m not sure. I’m thinking maybe Mexico. I hear they have beautiful beaches." Derek thinks that it’s not like her to be unsure, to not have a plan. He’s heard Stiles ramble about how smart she is, heard Scott and Allison be sure that they should have let her do something to help them in their plan to save Jackson.
(He wonders if he knows so much about the lives of random teenagers because of the fact that all teenagers are gossips or because he pays so much more attention now that he wishes he could go back to that time.)
But he doesn’t do anything cliche or pointless like move to hold her door open, but he does slam the trunk and let her mess with the radio once they’re in the car. They roll their windows down, and he focuses on the wind trying to break his hair free from the gel he habitually uses, the way that she’s got a nice singing voice, the green of the sign that says they’re leaving Beacon County.
Anything to distract from the way her skirts ridden up so that it’s almost not there, the way that her knees are spread just enough to be distracting, the way that she laughs when he won’t look at her.
A glance at the clock shows that it’s been fifteen minutes, and he has to wonder what he’s gotten himself into.
(Lydia just sings louder, throws an arm out the window, and let’s the wind mess her hair up, looks at him more than she doesn’t and feels lighter than she has since Jackson left two months ago. It’s a good feeling.)