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It started back on the first day after the lacrosse season ended. Scott had left straight from school to “study” with Kira back at her place. Nobody in the pack believed that thinly-veiled lie for a minute, but no one had the gall to call them out on it. After the final bell rang, releasing them from their misery, Stiles ambushed Lydia at her locker, appearing and tapping her shoulder so suddenly and silently that she dropped the mountain of books she’d been funneling into her backpack, letting out a surprised yelp. She turned around to glare at Stiles, who was looking at her sheepishly.
“Can you give me a ride home?” He asked, grinning as she maintained her stony look.
“Why do you need a ride? Didn’t you take the Jeep in today?” Lydia said irritably, crouching down to pick up her books.
“Well, the Jeep was having an off day and wouldn’t really turn on all the way, so Scottie gave me a lift. And now he and Kira are making up for two and a half months of sexual deprivation, so I figured I wouldn’t get in the way of that.” He continued to look at her with a hopeful smile, and she rolled her eyes as she zipped up her bag.
“Fine,” she relented. “Next time try not scaring the living daylights out of the person you’re trying to get a favor from.” Despite her clipped tone, Stiles gave a brief exhale of amusement. He knew her well enough to know what her teasing sounded like.
So they’d loaded up into the hot car, Lydia cranking up the air conditioning while Stiles stole the aux cord, putting on some peppy pop songs just to annoy her further. It worked flawlessly, and Lydia grumbled about it all the way to Stiles’s house.
When she pulled into his driveway, there was an awkward, pregnant silence between them. Before Malia, they used to hang out here all the time together. When Stiles’s girlfriend came into the mix, that had stopped abruptly, and Lydia was, for all intents and purposes, shut out of the Stilinski house. But now the two had broken up, and the question on both of their minds seemed to be… what now?
Stiles fumbled with his bag, trying to disentangle it with the aux cord while he was clearly distracted with the uncomfortable elephant in the room. As his hand went to the door, he paused briefly, turning back towards Lydia.
“We have those, um… those pita chips and hummus you like in the house right now. You know, like for my dad and stuff like usual. But if you wanted to come in, we could maybe like… have some of those and study together? I think you could really help me out in AP Chem right now.” His words were as clumsy as his movements had been a moment earlier, and Lydia was surprised by how endearing it was.
“Sure,” she said casually, as if she was waiting for him to ask. Stiles smiled brightly as she put the car into Park and turned off the ignition.
They’d gone inside and, as Stiles had promised, they had some of the Sheriff’s pita chips and hummus, and Lydia clarified a few difficult chemistry concepts for Stiles. But as they approached an hour of their snacking and studying, it became abundantly clear that they didn’t have that much schoolwork left to do. Stiles had intervened and declared it “break time.”
“We have to give our minds a rest at this point so we can refresh a little before we move forwards,” he insisted, a knowing grin on his face. Lydia decided to play along.
“I think that’s a pretty good idea,” she said.
“Great. Because I finally have all the seasons of The Office on DVD and I think some comedic relief would be good for morale.” Lydia made to refuse at that point, but something inside her wouldn’t allow it. So she let him grab her arm, his grip sliding down until it was holding her wrist, and then her hand. It felt natural, but it still caused her pulse to race.
He dragged her into the living room and stopped off at the sectional, L-shaped couch that faced the TV.
“Sit,” he instructed. She complied out of sheer curiosity, sitting back in the corner of the bend in the couch, propping her elbow up on a pillow and swinging her legs up onto the section of the couch that was angled straight towards the TV. When Stiles had the DVD and TV all set up, he’d turned around and narrowed his eyes.
“The corner is my seat.”
“I’m already here,” Lydia said flippantly, letting her fingers trail down the pillow just to rile him up.
“Umm, well, it’s always my seat,” He repeated, covering the space between the TV and the couch in one stride.
“Are you asking me to move?” Lydia said, her eyebrows raised and her dimples deepening as she suppressed a smile.
“I’m not asking, Lydia.” Stiles said. He looked down at her, maintaining his air of total seriousness.
“Well that’s not very polite. I’m not moving.” Lydia smoothed her skirt down and looking up at him defiantly.
“Ooh, wrong choice, Martin.” Stiles grimaced with exaggerated sympathy. She didn’t have the chance to ask him what he meant before he bent down and scooped her up off of the couch, one hand under her knees and the other around her back.
“Stiles!” Lydia squeaked. “Put me down!” The bare skin of his forearm was warm against the back of her thighs, and both of them seemed extremely aware of the contact. Stiles grinned through his blush.
“Whatever you say, Lyds.” He dropped her unceremoniously on the other side of the corner so that she was lying perpendicular to her previous position. Stiles then flopped down in her old spot, their arms touch as they both tried to lean back into the corner.
“At least give me the corner to lean on,” Lydia whined.
“My spot,” Stiles echoed. Lydia rolled her eyes and scooted down a couple of inches from the corner, sitting up, cross-legged.
They ended up watching four hours of The Office that day before Lydia checked the time and said she’d have to go home for the night. Her mom was actually in town and they were getting dinner together.
But the next day, his Jeep was still out of commission, and he asked her in Chemistry if she’d do him a solid and drive him home again. Apparently Scott and Kira were spending the afternoon together again. She agreed, less grudgingly than the day before, and she was unsurprised when they ended up camping out in front of the TV at his house once more.
It became a pattern over the last few weeks of school. She’d drive him home, even when his Jeep was fixed, and Scott was able to give him a ride home again.
Eventually, they finished The Office, much to their mutual dismay. But in a stroke of genius, Lydia brought her laptop, HDMI cord, and her Netflix account, insisting that Stiles needed to watch another comedy show of the same era: 30 Rock.
And when the final exam week came upon them, there seemed to be this palpable tension between them, and a desire to increase the time they spent on Stiles’s couch. Neither of them knew what would become of this habit when the summer rolled around. They couldn’t keep up this act of pretending that they were spending the time together studying. So their binge watching turned into full out marathons. Their schoolbooks cluttered the floor and the coffee table, and their takeout containers and half-drank cups of water were squeezed into the mix as well. Lydia had taken to wearing leggings to school under her dresses in spite of the heat, because they allowed her to shed her dress, pull on a comfortable shirt she brought in her bag so that she could really be comfortable when combining studying and TV marathons.
And then the last night of studying rolled around, the last night before their last day of exams. They’d driven home in relative silence from their exams of the day, and made awkward small talk as they walked through the front door. Stiles dumped his backpack in the living room and headed to the kitchen to get them some snacks.
Lydia dropped her bag by his and then unzipped the bag in order to grab her t-shirt. She leafed around under her books and chapstick and realized with dismay that she in fact, did not bring a t-shirt. She was breaking their pattern.
“Hey Lyds, do you want pretzels or popcorn?” Stiles called out from the kitchen. Lydia straightened up and followed his voice into the next room over, bracing herself.
“I forgot to bring a t-shirt,” she began nervously, picking at her nails. “Can I borrow one?” Stiles balked and froze, staring at her with a bag of pretzel twists in his right hand and an un-popped packet of popcorn in his left. When he found himself capable of speech again, he nodded vigorously, dropping both snack options on the counter.
“Yeah! I mean, yeah, absolutely I’ll go get one… now.” Stiles backed up a few steps before turning and moving full-tilt towards the stairs.
When he returned, Lydia had the pretzel twists in a bowl and she was watching him with a slight smirk.
“Thank you,” she said calmly, quirking one eyebrow up at him to acknowledge his frazzled state. Before he could quip back, she turned on her heel and walked back towards the living room where she quickly changed into the shirt before he re-entered the room.
“It looks good on you.” Lydia was already hooking her laptop up to the TV when he spoke up. She turned back to him and smiled widely.
“It has to look good on someone,” she shrugged, turning back to the TV, beaming with pleasure at the indignant noises coming from behind her.
They set up in their regular positions, books splayed out on the table, as if they were actually going to study for more than an hour or two. He sat in the corner of the sectional couch, and Lydia sat just to his left, upright, hugging her knees into her chest. Almost four hours flew by without incident, as they alternated studying and laughing at their show.
They opted out of ordering takeout for dinner, and instead made a box of animal-shaped macaroni and cheese, since Lydia had admitted that her mom had never given in and bought it for her when she was little. While their dinner was cooking, Stiles took shots at Lydia’s cooking abilities and Lydia sat up on the counter, pretending to whack Stiles with the blunted knife-sharpener in her hands.
Then it became the game of don’t touch the floor and simultaneously don’t overcook the pasta, with both of them standing on the counters, trying playfully to knock the other off-balance. After a couple of minutes, Lydia shoved Stiles hard enough that he had to jump back down to the floor, but only seconds later, she took a wrong step and ended up falling into the kitchen sink in a humbling fashion. It took Stiles over a minute to stop wheezing with laughter, pointing at Lydia wordlessly while laughed and moaned in alteration.
Eventually Stiles took pity on her and moved over to pull her out of the sink, giving her a wrangling one armed hug. Neither one of them seemed to mind that Stiles then left his arm around her shoulders as they looked at the pasta. It was only a little past al dente, so they ate it anyways.
The hours continued to tick by, and the two of them sat on the couch, not talking about anything but the show, as if that was enough, as if they didn’t still have so much to say between them.
Lydia’s posture grew more and more slumped, but she was so intent on sitting up. So much could happen between two people on a couch when they were both lying down, she knew that. But when they returned to their TV at 12 AM after spending two straight hours studying for calculus, her resolve started to crumble. Stiles watched in amusement from his comfortable position under a blanket. Her eyes would draw shut, only for her to startle awake as she began to slump down to one side. After one of those awakenings nearly had her falling off the couch, he reached out to her from where he was comfortably reclined in the corner of the sectional. He sat up a little and gently guided Lydia’s shoulders down onto the cushions next to him, her head brushing the outside of his upper arm when he relaxed down onto the couch again.
He had just gotten settled again, eyes on the screen, when Lydia shifted beside him. Her eyes looked back at him blearily in the dim light projected from both the TV and the lit hallway.
“You good?” Stiles asked quietly, meeting her gaze. She squinted at him a little, looking at their proximity critically.
“Almost,” she whispered back. With that, she lifted up his blanket and crawled over to his spot on the sectional, her back pressed up against his chest, her legs stretching down to tangle with his. Tentatively, Stiles reached out and draped his top hand around her waist, and smiled silently to himself when she twined her fingers in with his and led his hand down to wrap more firmly around her, pulling her in closer to his chest.
“Now?” He checked.
“Perfect,” she replied. Then after a moment of hesitation, she spoke up again. “You know, we haven’t even started on Parks and Recreation yet. Maybe I could come over again tomorrow, and we can start watching that?” Stiles bit his lip to keep his excitement down.
“I think tomorrow would be excellent,” he said. “How about every other day this summer? Does that work for you?” Lydia gave a satisfied sigh.
“Sounds like a plan.”