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Lydia’s exhausted. She’s in pain and she’s so tired all she wants to collapse on the nearest soft, flat surface and sleep for a week, sleep until she forgets the way that death follows her around, the way she can feel it weighing on her, the way it always makes her want to scream.
Every time they go out to fight the latest threat, she’s scared one of them won’t come back. They’ve been lucky so far, but that’s all it feels like: luck.
“Here,” Scott says, pushing a steaming mug toward her. “Drink this.”
Lydia shakes her head. “I’m not thirsty.”
He gives her a crooked smile and sits down beside her. “For when you are, then.”
He opens the first aid kit and starts pulling out bandages, alcohol, and antibiotic ointment, setting it all on the table. Lydia watches listlessly and wraps her hands around the mug, for lack of anything better to do with them. It’s shockingly, soothingly warm, and she pulls it close. She hadn’t realized she was so cold.
She sniffs the mug. “Peppermint tea?”
Scott half-shrugs and dabs alcohol on a cotton ball. “You always drink it after a stressful week. I figured tonight counted.” He holds up the ball. “May I?”
Lydia wordlessly turns her head, giving him better access to the cut along her forehead. Scott scoots closer, dabbing the cotton ball along the cut with the same intense expression she’d seen when he was facing down the wendigos in the preserve.
This close, she can’t help but stare at him, remembering the boy he was not so long ago and wondering at the man he’s becoming, one who can stand proud and strong at the forefront of his pack.
It hits her then, in the silence after the storm, with the smell of peppermint and alcohol in her nose and Scott’s gentle touch on her cheek: the dawning certainty that she is actually in love with this man.
Oh, Lydia thinks. Oh, no.