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She’d been off since she walked through the front doors of Beacon Hills High School. Her makeup had been minimal, there were slight bags under her eyes and a consistent, heavy scowl on her face. Stiles slid up to her at the end of their third-period Calculus class to get started on the homework early, but when he smiled at her, she just narrowed her eyes at him, lips set in an intentional and dismissive pout.
“What’s wrong?” He made the mistake of asking her that question and almost instantly she scoffed at him, turning her attention to the weather app on her iPhone. The ultimate dismissal. He leaned back in his desk, confused, but nothing if not persistent. He reached out with one foot and nudged her leg. She turned back to face him, eyes wide and moderately homicidal.
“Stiles, I will not hesitate to stuff your TI-93 Calculator up your goddamn ass if you don’t drop it,” Lydia swore, her words slow and deliberate. Stiles stared at her with mild horror, slowly retracting his foot from her personal space. He then tucked his calculator into his backpack for good measure.
“I’m just trying to help,” Stiles muttered, folding his arms on the desk and laying down his head on his arms so that he was facing her, sulking. She closed her eyes and seemed to grudgingly consider this possibility.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m not feeling well. I think that I might just go to the nurse and see if my mom can call me out of school,” she said, her head sagging down onto her arms on the desk, mirroring Stiles, but with her face buried down in her arms, as if she was planning to fall asleep right there. Stiles nodded empathetically, but then realized that she couldn’t see him nodding.
“Do you want me to go with you?” He asked. She turned her head to face him, her lips twisting into a thin smile.
“Oh definitely not. Allison’s going to meet me halfway and go with me,” Lydia explained lamely, her voice trailing off. Stiles shrugged casually, as if her rejection didn’t sting. The bell rang just then, releasing their class into the hallway. Lydia groaned, standing up but remaining somewhat hunched over, face braced into a mask of well restrained pain.
“Okay, seriously, are you sure you don’t need help?” Stiles asked, his eyebrows drawing together, eyes darting worriedly between her face and her stance.
“No.” Lydia’s response came through her teeth, but she gave him a forced smile, as if that would sell her facade.
“I’m going to anyways,” Stiles informed her, picking up her bag and hanging it over one shoulder, offering her his hand. She stared at the hand momentarily as if weighing her options. Ultimately she forced herself entirely upright, but let her fingers lace together with Stiles’s, as if for comfort alone. When they walked out of the room, the encountered Allison almost right away.
“I thought you died somewhere between the classroom and the C Hallway,” Allison said, giving Lydia a knowing smile.
“Yeah, well, some people don’t know how to take a hint and just let a girl die at her desk in remedial calculus.” Lydia said, looking fixedly at Allison while yanking Stiles’s hand up to shoulder height as if to identify the aforementioned culprit. Stiles smiled openly at Allison who just returned the look with raised eyebrows and rolling eyes.
“I’ll take it from here,” Allison assured Stiles, reaching out for Lydia’s bag. Stiles reluctantly handed it over, and carefully retracted his hand from Lydia’s grasp.
“I’m going to come see you after school,” Stiles informed Lydia as she started off down the hallway, arm and arm with her best friend. The only response he got was Lydia groaning underneath the sound of Allison’s uproarious laughter.
Stiles tried to text Lydia when she didn’t show up at their fourth-period class together, but all he got in response was I’m home now, I’m going to sleep. You don’t have to come over after school, I’m gross. The response intrigued him, as did Allison’s bemused reaction when he asked after Lydia for the third time.
“Seriously, Stiles. Just let it go, I promise you she’s going to be fine,” Allison said, twitching her mouth to stifle her smile.
“Are you sure?” Stiles asked, more genuine concern than anxiety. Allison sighed as he stopped at her side at her locker, only inches off of her shoulder.
“Is this what you do to Lydia every day when she’s here?” Allison asked Stiles, her eyebrows shooting up, a smile on her lips but disbelief on her tongue. Stiles considered the question for a second before just shaking his head, dismissing it.
So what if he was? She never said it bothered her. Neither of them had even really noticed before.
“How are you so sure she’s fine? It could be a tumor or something.” Allison broke out into hysterical laughter at this proposition.
“Oh. My. God,” She gasped, shaking with laughter. “Stiles. No, just no. It’s just… you know… her monthly cycle.”
“The moon’s not even full. Is there some weird banshee thing I don’t know about?” Stiles asked seriously. Allison’s laughter evaporated and her expression of genuine concern and disbelief returned.
“Are you kidding right now?” Stiles shook his head and sighed, so Allison grabbed his collar and pulled him towards her so that their faces were inches apart. “She is bleeding out of her uterus, Stiles. She’s having her period. That’s all.”
When Allison released Stiles’s shirt, now crumpled at the collar, she revelled gleefully in the deepening shades of red flooding across his skin.
“Oh. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense,” Stiles said nodding, looking very intently at Allison’s shoes. But then his head snapped back up to look at her, his features contorted with disgust. “Are you telling me that every single month girls have to deal with that shit?”
“Oh my god. Go read a book Stiles, I’m not giving you a comprehensive Sex-Ed course right now.” Allison shut her locker and shot Stiles a stern look, throwing her backpack over her shoulder. “But I think… I think that Lydia wouldn’t really mind seeing you. You know how she is. Pushes people away the more she needs them.”
“Except you,” Stiles grumbled. Allison’s lips tightened into a strained smile.
“Not all the time, but usually she keeps me close, trusts me instead of pushing me out. And because she does keep me close, and tell me stuff, I have all the intel. She wouldn’t mind you being there. Trust me,” Stiles gave Allison a genuine, small smile back, bobbing his head in gratitude.
“Thanks, Al. I’ll go over.”
Allison returned the gesture with a nod of approval and a pleased smile. Lydia might not have admitted to liking Stiles yet, but Allison wasn’t in the mood to wait around for those two idiots to figure themselves out.
Lydia had spent the better part of the afternoon in the fetal position. She moved around a lot, yes, but it was just to find another orientation in which to sulk in the fetal position. She’d been on her back, on both sides, with her legs twisted together, head down with her butt in the air, and everything in between. She had first gotten her period when she was eleven, and most months she was able to soldier through the discomfort, but every now and again, she found herself facing off against a much bigger beast.
Her cramps felt like they were coiling up every tendon in her body, and drawing it closer to her lower stomach. If she tried to stretch back out from her balled-up position, her traitorous body would counter with sharp, pulsing pains that seemed to only escalate rather than fluctuate.
She kept a heating pad tucked up against her, and it had slowly been cooking her insides all day from its fixed position between her hip bones. The cramps had kept her awake for most of the night before, and she was done with it.
The hunger and cravings that she experienced during most of her periods had been replaced by nausea regarding anything food related. She tried to eat some pretzels earlier. The offending snacks had ended up in the toilet less than ten minutes later as her stomach rejected them.
She had bled through two pads in less than six hours.
She was unkempt, devoid of makeup and wrapped up in some Soffe shorts and a tattered old UCLA sweatshirt that was torn down the side and missing the front pocket. She felt disgusting.
She wanted to punch her own uterus and then take a fucking nap.
She did not want a visitor.
But someone knocked on her bedroom door anyways.
“Fuck off,” Lydia snapped over her shoulder. The door opened anyways. Probably Allison. That meant she could throw dismissals at the intruder to mask a deeply ingrained neediness in her psyche. “I said fuck off. I’d like to die with some dignity.”
“You’re not actually dying.”
Stiles’s low, distinctive voice cut through the muggy, angry haze that had been buzzing around Lydia’s head all day. She turned to look over her shoulder, wishing that her banshee powers had equipped her to spit venom at will. Or maybe self-destruct in the name of self-preservation.
Seeing as she was endowed with neither, she settled for petty spite.
“You don’t know that,” Lydia scoffed, turning back over onto her side, back to the door. “This morning you thought I had a tumor or something. Maybe I do have a tumor.” She clenched her jaw and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head before drawing her knees as close as they could come to her chin in hopes of stemming the pain that pulsed steadily through her core. Stiles puffed out his cheeks, restraining a biting remark.
“Allison texted you, didn’t she?”
“About the tumor comment. Not about your impending presence.” Another barely repressed sigh from Stiles before he softened again.
“Well,you don’t have a tumor, Lyds,” he tried to reason with her gently. Lydia laughed spitefully, refusing to uncoil from her position to look at him.
“What are you, an MRI?”
“Oh come on,” he said, his voice flitting somewhere between sympathy and humor. “I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
Lydia swallowed silently, bobbing her head slightly to force the reflex through her throat. It was finally registering that Stiles Stilinski was in her bedroom. She was throwing a hissy fit, bent out of shape about her cramps, but he was still there. It dawned on her that he might actually care.
In a slow, deliberate movement, Lydia rolled over onto her other side, knees still drawn up towards her chest, letting her now benign gaze drift over to focus on his face. The muscles of his face relaxed slightly at her small concession, and the corner of his mouth quirked upwards in a tentative smile.
“I feel awful.” Her ego was clawing at her throat in desperation, but Lydia forced it down as she glanced up at Stiles. The shame that pulsed through her veins was undoubtedly evident on her face as well.
The confession, the painful process of admitting vulnerability, was not lost on Stiles. It looked physically painful on an already worn down visage, and whatever irritation she had inflicted on him was lost in the genuine aspect of the moment. Stiles felt his awkward timing and humor building up into an unbreakable force in his throat, and he decided to release it in order to simultaneously release Lydia from her unusually honest confession.
“Well, this is better than you being sick some other way.” Lydia raised an eyebrow sharply at him, daring him to put a toe out of line in his explanation of this reasoning. In response, he strode to the bed with a small, but confident smile on his face. “At least it’s not contagious, so I can stick around.”
In a turn of events, his comment made Lydia snicker under her breath, lip curling up into a smile as she looked critically at him through pale, chestnut lashes. She looked so different without her makeup, but she didn’t look bad. Her features were paler, more delicate, but in the same breath, the lighter color of her eyebrows and lashes gave new, powerful depths to her dark, hazel eyes..
Determined to stay focused, Stiles put his backpack down on the bed in front of Lydia.
“What are you doing?” Her nose wrinkled in distaste as she eyed the dirty bag.
“I brought my laptop so we can watch Netflix.” He began unloading his bag in front of her, a fierce determination alighting the warm brown embers of his eyes. “I brought these adhesive heat pads. They’re supposed to help with muscle soreness but I figured they’d work for this too, if you need them. I got some Reese’s peanut butter cups and M&M’s to sustain us, and…” He paused for dramatic effect. “Based on that sweatshirt you’re wearing, you’re pretty lucky, because I brought you the warmest most comfortable hoodie I own because it makes me feel better when I’m sick.”
His words were met by gaping, open mouthed silence, so he cleared his throat, blushing slightly.
“I mean, I thought I’d offer it since you seemed to feel so bad-”
“You…” Her voice was weak with disbelief. “You brought all of this to make me feel better?” Stiles chanced a hopeful smile, cheeks tinged pink.
“Yeah, of course I did.”
Face burning from the warmth of the bed and the sudden blooming of joy in her chest, Lydia forced herself to sit up. Her knees were still bent in front of her, but she reached out a single hand expectantly. When Stiles looked with confusion between the tokens he’d brought, Lydia lips twitched.
“The hoodie?” Stiles fumbled with the oversized Beacon Hills Police Department sweatshirt as Lydia shook her head in the affirmative. Once he handed it over, he busied himself with finding a suitable Netflix movie, giving a single, short laugh as he passed over the movie Carrie.
Lydia clawed her way out of her own worn-out sweatshirt, only getting momentarily entangled with her electric heating pad’s cord in the process. Stiles glanced over and then did a double-take, slow curiosity crossing his face as he stared at the half-bared, splotchy, reddened skin of Lydia’s lower stomach.
“Um… I’m not an expert at this or anything-” He cut himself off as Lydia froze to give him another dangerous look. With a short breath, he continued. “But aren’t you supposed to like… take a break from the heating pad at some point.” He nodded in the direction of her inflamed skin, and Lydia surprisingly showed no shame.
“The day you start to menstruate, you can comment on my pain relief methods,” she said with an air of prim condescension, returning to the process of putting on his sweatshirt. Flushed, Stiles sat down on the bed next to her, laptop in one hand and M&M’s in the other.
“Okay but… Are you using that heating pad to get rid of cramps or boil your intestines? Because I’m pretty sure that only one of those things is really happening, and it would appear that you still have cramps.”
There was silence and then, “I'll bite you.”
“I’m just saying, maybe try taking a break while we-”
“Stiles.”
“Right, okay, no break.”
Stiles grimaced and then put the laptop on the bed between them as Forrest Gump started up. He was really trying not to stare at the sight of Lydia Martin wearing his hoodie. And not just any lacrosse hoodie or blank, zip up sweatshirts, she was wearing his sick hoodie. He’d stolen it from his dad when he was still in middle school, and it truly was a source of comfort for him.
And there she was. The girl of his dreams, sitting balled up on the bed next to him, makeup off, hand full of M&M’s, and wearing his hoodie.
On the other hand, Lydia could practically feel Stiles’s eyes burning a hole through the side of her face, but she did her best to resist looking at him. She knew that if she looked at him, it would undo all that she had done to cover up her feelings for him.
She knew how she was going to feel, and to her dismay, she was powerless to stop it. She looked over anyways.
His eyes were locked on her face, and he seemed surprised to see her actually looking back at him.
“You okay?” His words were quick, but somehow soothing. It was as if he really did want to help. She never really understood that concept before, and it was confusing to have the sensation worming its way into her head now.
“Yeah…” she paused, surprisingly comfortable with their prolonged eye contact. It was warm and it made her feel safer, more content, than she had felt in a long time.
“Is there something you need?”
He was so kind that it hurt.
“No, just… thank you. Only Allison’s ever come by when this happens. You’re… you’re really awesome, Stiles.” She intentionally restrained herself from calling him a “good friend.” That would have been too limiting of a definition given how she felt about him.
“It’s no problem, Lyds.” His smile was like a balm, the throbbing in her stomach lessening slightly at the sight of it.
They settled in to watch the movie with comfort in the air between them. Lydia knew that she could have made a move, could have pushed herself onto him further. God knew she needed the support, Allison was only one person after all. Despite her interests, she restrained herself. Well, she did the best she could.
As her cramps slowly started to subside, Lydia sensed a drowsiness falling over her. She scooted closer towards Stiles, close enough that their arms were touching. Stiles didn’t even look over at the contact, but just shifted the computer a little to make room for her at his side.
She fell asleep within the next 10 minutes, and her head ended up on Stiles’s shoulder, unconsciously nudging closer to Stiles’s neck.
This time he did look at her, and the sun-bright grin he'd been suppressing finally emerged.