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Seven.
That’s how many minutes had passed since Lydia found her seat in Calculus, and it was roughly the amount of times the new teacher - a Ph.D. student - had to restart the projector before he was able to pull up the syllabus. He seemed like a nice guy, for the most part, but he induced a yawn out of Lydia the second he tried to play the ‘cool’ card. There was no way Lydia would be able to morally respect the man that was supposed to prepare her for college if he insisted on her calling him, ‘CJ.’
Instead, she flipped her printed out version of the syllabus over and began doodling her name in various scripted fonts. Lydia, Lyds, Lydia Elaine Martin, Ariel, and everything in between made its way onto the paper until she heard a soft snort off to her left.
She should have guessed it was Stiles. There he was, not so subtly passing what looked like a hastily scribbled note to Scott who was trying to muffle his own laughter. On any other day, she would have rolled her eyes, but a small part of her - the part that whispered pack quietly in the back of her mind - simply made her look on with a fond smile.
The notes between the two continued, and it wasn’t long before Stiles rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and started to compose something that was steadily reaching essay-length. Lydia stared on in fascination, watching the veins jump in his wrist and the way the fingers on his free hand curled over the edge of the desk as if to steady him while he wrote. On a good day, one could call Stiles energetic, but with the final bell of the day looming over them (thirty seven minutes, and counting), it was taking every ounce of Stiles’ willpower to focus on his message to Scott. Lydia could see that energy vibrating through him, pulling the muscles in his arms as taut as they could go.
She could have watched him write for the rest of the class; and she might have done so, had it not been for Stiles himself waving her out of her trance and giving her a concerned look.
‘What’s wrong?’ he mouthed, and Lydia felt her entire body blush when she realized she’d been caught. She simply shook her head, waving a hand absently and quickly writing ‘SPACED OUT’ in big letters on the mostly blank paper in front of her. She lifted it up for him to see with a tight smile as if to say ‘See? Everything’s fine,’ and she sighed with relief when he gave her a small smile before returning to his letter.
It had become something of a pattern, lately; Lydia would stare at Stiles, Stiles would catch her, and she’d play it off like it was nothing. It was easier to do during the summertime, when no one - least of all, Stiles - would legitimately suspect her of longing for him, but this was Beacon Hills High. People had started rumors about her with less ammunition, and the last thing that she needed was a thousand teenagers running around talking about how the tables had suddenly turned. Especially because they wouldn’t even be a little bit wrong.
Lydia was never one to dwell, however, so she pulled out a blank sheet of paper from her binder before she let that train of thought derail itself and began to draw. She drew eyes, thankful that she only had a pencil in her hand to stop her from shading them in with the same shade of chocolate that haunted her every day. She drew plants, careful not to draw a tree or any particular kind of flower - especially not the one that was re-planted over Laura Hale’s new makeshift grave. Then, she flipped the paper over and drew hands; a set of freckled hands, still on the paper but full of motion in Lydia’s eyes. She put so much detail into those hands that she had to clap her own over her mouth when the bell finally rang, scaring her out of her own concentration.
Scott picked up on the spike in her heartbeat immediately, she could tell by the way his head snapped in her direction almost instantly - Stiles’ not far behind. She tried to shove all of her papers back into her binder quickly, but it was just her luck that her elbow slid the paper she was drawing on right off the edge of her desk. Lydia watched in horror as it sailed onto the floor, and after two or three of her classmates had crumpled it under their shoes, Stiles dove to its rescue.
Lydia refused to be mortified. Even as the look of realization flickered across his face, Lydia simply packed up her things and practically sashayed over to Stiles with her hand outstretched.
“I’d like that back, please.”
Instead of handing it over, Stiles just looked up at her with an unsettlingly wide grin. “These are my hands.”
“Very astute,” Lydia said. “Give it to me.”
“Is that what you were staring at earlier?” he asked, holding out the paper which Lydia snatched as quickly as she could.
“Yes,” she said, only because Scott was standing less than ten feet away from them and would absolutely tell Stiles if she lied. “Goodbye.”
It only took three steps after Lydia had turned on her heel before Stiles was pulling her back gently. “Hey, whoa, wait. We’re not done here.”
Lydia fixed him with a cool look. “I’m sorry. What else did you need?”
“You’ve been looking at me,” he said, without even remotely beating around the bush. Stiles was clever. Stiles noticed things. But Lydia always assumed when it came to these sorts of things, Stiles was just like any other guy - painfully unaware. “For a while now,” he continued, pulling her away from her thoughts.
Well, not for the first time lately, Lydia was wrong.
“Is that a problem?” she countered. “You used to look at me all the time.”
“I still do,” he admitted, with a shrug. Since when did Stiles get so confident?
Malia, Lydia’s mind supplied - but no, she wasn’t going to let herself go there, either.
Lydia huffed out a small, only slightly cynical laugh. “Not like you used to.”
To his credit, Stiles nodded in agreement. Lydia watched as he looked at the floor, his mouth twitching slightly while he gathered his thoughts. “Well, maybe not exactly the same,” he admitted. “But things have changed.”
She had to agree with him there.
“You’re not wrong,” she said. “But what does that have to do with you looking at me? Or me looking at you?”
“I think you know,” Stiles said, the but you just don’t want to admit it hanging silently between them.
Lydia had two options. See, she was known for picking the most logical solution - the one that made the most sense for her, at the very least. She figured this was why most of her romantic endeavors ended tragically, because she tried to applied reason in a space that reason had no business being in. So, there she was, with the ridiculously un-logical and completely terrifying decision between keeping Stiles as a friend but always wanting more, or jumping into what could possibly be the first real, genuine, and romantic connection of her life.
After several long, and what seemed to be agonizing moments if the look on Stiles’ face was anything to go by, Lydia finally spoke.
“Do you want to come over?”
She would never admit to anyone the sickening adjectives that she used to describe the smile that practically exploded across his face, not even to Stiles himself in the middle of the night months later when she curled up next to him in bed for the first time (and definitely not the last).