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Lydia Martin was greedy.
And she knew this.
“You hungry?” Stiles asks, twirling out of his computer chair.
Lydia looks up from her lying position on his bed and locks eyes with him. “A snack would suffice.”
Stiles smiles and says he’ll be right back, before leaving the room to go downstairs.
They’d been studying and working on their AP Chemistry project together after school for a good two hours when Stiles suggested they take a break. And then Lydia, who had been eyeing around Stiles’ room every so often, glanced at his DVD collection, said out loud that she had never seen Kill Bill. Stiles’ face was incredulous and he demanded that they stop immediately so that he could show her the amazingness that was Uma Therman with a samurai sword.
Lydia Martin was greedy, and she was a liar.
It wasn’t something that she had dwelled on in a long time. Mainly because she didn’t need to – she was a different person now. She had changed. They had been through enough – she had been through enough – to know that faking it wasn’t going to make anything easier. The superficial Lydia Martin that had entered Beacon Hills high school searching for the perfect life didn’t exist anymore. She had been replaced by a girl who could hold her own, a girl whose validation wasn’t measured by popularity.
But there were still parts of her that were the same. There always were. And lately, those deep deceptive parts were the ones coming back to the surface.
And they’d leave her panting when she thought about it too hard.
The door to Stiles’ room creaks open and there he is, holding a pack of pop tarts in one hand and a bowl of pretzel twists in the other. He steps into the room and kicks the door closed behind hi before putting the snacks down on the floor in front of her. Lydia stays propped up on her elbows as she watches him crouch down and flip through his DVDs.
Stiles skims through his movies and his hands instinctively fly up to his hair she watched as he began tugging on it subconsciously, fingers raking from front to back and then back to front. Stiles growing his hair out during the summer turned out to be some sort of phenomenon at school; both for Stiles and for those that pretended they didn’t notice. Stiles, who was still getting used to having hair to comb his fingers through when he was nervous, barely noticed the stares. People took double takes in the hallways now, and Stiles was oblivious to it maybe 90% of the time.
“Hold on a second, I saw it here somewhere…” He scratches absently up his scalp, making the veins in his hands more apparent. Lydia blinks.
The first day back at school was a lot of fun for Lydia. She had met up with Stiles in front of her locker before first period. Stiles had rambled on about electives, unaware of how much attention was actually on him, while she tried very hard to bite her lip and nod. Lydia could see every dumb expression on every ignorant face of every student that passed by, and it took a lot of will power to refrain from smiling knowingly. Stiles had been waving his hands around, gesturing something bogus about syllabi, while people stood there comparing the Stiles they knew last year to the Stiles they knew this year.
Lydia’s gaze falls on his fingers moving deftly through his hair, in and out, pulling and twisting-
“Ah! Found it!” Stiles says suddenly, waving the DVD above his head. Lydia drops her notebook and pen on the ground, kicks off her shoes, and forces herself to sit up. She feels compelled to sit on her hands for some reason.
She didn’t know how it happened, but once school started again, Stiles had become her friend. It was weird to say it out loud, but that’s what it was – a friendship. Or, it at least started out that way.
Lydia wasn’t the only one that changed since last year. Stiles was different, too. He held himself differently. He was more assertive, she noticed, when discussions between the pack were being held. He walked more, tripped less. Made the cross country team. Of course, he was still the same Stiles, with the same outlandish mannerisms, the same mouth, the same dry humor, and the same nerdy wit, but… he was just… different.
Stiles also stopped pining after her, which alleviated the tension between them quite a bit whenever they habituated the same room. Lydia was nothing if not relieved that Stiles had let go of his schoolboy crush. With that awkward elephant in the room gone, they had actually gotten to know each other better.
And when they found themselves assigned as lab partners for AP Chemistry (Stiles shocking Lydia into remembering that yes, he had been sectioned into her same science class, and yes, he definitely belonged there), they fell into an oddly comfortable friendship bubble. Inevitably, Lydia and Stiles had eased into an easy routine that consisted of studying at Stiles’ house every Thursday night. Which was what they were doing until Lydia knew exactly what to say.
Stiles puts the movie in the DVD player and shuts off the lights.
He plops down next to her on the bed, a few inches between them, and reached for the snacks. His eyes never leave the screen as he hands the pretzel twists to Lydia automatically.
“The beginning is the best part,” he says, a small smile adamant on his face. His voice comes out a little scratchy, the way it usually does when he hasn't spoken for a long time. It's makes Lydia itchy all over. Stiles bites the pop tart wrapper open with his teeth and starts rambling aimlessly. “Damn, does Tarantino know how to tell a good story...”
The darkness in the room makes everything quiet, and Lydia leans back on her elbows to get herself comfortable as the movie plays. Every so often she sighs and sits up, fixates her stare on the carpet, or her notebook, before leaning back on her elbows again, dangling her feet off the edge of the bed.
Becoming friends with Stiles made Lydia appreciate who he was as a person, and not as some boy who would step in sync with the bounce of her curls down the hallway during sophomore year. He was intelligent, and had good instincts. He was (surprisingly) very aggressively protective of the people in his life. He cared about his dad. Always made sure he was there for Scott. Always answered Isaac’s texts. Never made Lydia feel like a freak for what happened last year.
Lydia realized a while ago that Stiles was, in a lot of ways, selfless.
She narrows her eyes at the television, willing for them to pay attention to some woman with an eye patch, but unfortunately for Lydia, her visual endurance starts to diminish with every Kill Bill chapter sequence. She keeps finding herself actually looking back at Stiles in the dark. And then she realizes how ridiculous she’s being, huffs, shakes her head, and stiffens her neck, before turning back to the film.
But no matter how many times she fixes her posture, her eyes always end up falling to her pretzel twists, to the box of pop tarts in his lap, and then up at Stiles. Stiles. Whose face currently seems, as far as Lydia can tell, soft to the touch. Still boyish, but tough, in an understated way. And the cheeks, the ones that go red so easily for her, covered with random freckles and barely there moles that travel and disappear suspiciously down his neck and into the v-neck collar of his shirt.
Ten minutes pass.
Lydia catches herself eyeing the boy next to her for the seventh time before the sight itself makes her swallow thickly. Stiles’ profile is covered in a soft glow, dark shadows highlighting under his jaw and down his neck. It's a glow projected from the phosphorescent lights being omitted from the television screen. Obviously.
“Do you like it so far?” Stiles asks abruptly, turning to her in the dark.
Her eyes snap up to his and she gives him a small smile. “Mmmhm,” she hums, and then waits until he turns back so she can continue to watch him. It takes Stiles two seconds until his complete and total attention is back on the movie.
Lydia Martin was greedy in her own way, yes.
She was greedy with the way Stiles would lean across the table at lunch to pick up his books, making his shirt ride up to reveal the dimples in his lower back. She was greedy with the way she took her time applying lipstick in his car, knowing he’d sneak glances at her while he drove them to his house after school. She was greedy with letting Stiles rant and talk off topic long enough for his eyes to start traveling around the room, so she could pretend to not stare at the way his t-shirt would pull slightly at the shoulders.
Someone slices someone else on screen and blood splatters everywhere.
Stiles chews on his pop tart and every jaw movement is magnified under her gaze. Her eyes travel down from his jaw to his neck to his collar bone to the shirt he’s wearing now. A tight, short-sleeved gray V-neck that pulls across his chest. Something inside Lydia’s stomach burns at the sight. Oh, she remembers. Oh, yes. T-shirts.
Stiles wore t-shirts very, very nicely. They always looked so soft, and he’d wear them like a fucking open invitation. They gave his torso shape, too. Shape that made Lydia feel absolutely betrayed. How had she not known? It felt like someone had kicked her in the gut when the AC broke down on the second week of school and Stiles had to peel off his plaid button down. There was a dark spot on his t-shirt, right on the center front of the collar, where sweat had pooled during first period. She tried so hard to keep from looking at him that she almost broke an acrylic.
The room feels hot now. Stifling. Lydia has to keep her mouth open in order to breathe silently. Apparently, thinking about Stiles while also sitting next to Stiles is getting her hot at an alarmingly embarrassing rate. She tries eating a pretzel twist but it feels dry in her mouth. She swallows it anyway and it goes down like sawdust.
Stiles has these eyelashes that are just… she doesn’t understand them. They almost make her jealous. They’re like something out of a cartoon. Every lash is defined and pretty and his eyes. His stare is just… it didn’t occur to her until she started paying attention to him in AP Chemistry. The slight incline of his neck, the way he’d look at her through the tips of his eyelashes, the way his mouth would close into some kind of pout when he was thinking over his response. Every time Stiles spoke, it felt like he was an inch away from Lydia’s face – even if he was sitting in the desk next to her three feet away. He would just fill up all the space in the room, even if it was just the two of them.
Lydia’s heartbeat starts to pick up its pace.
Stiles brings another strawberry pop tart piece up to his mouth, and pauses with it right in front of his lips when Uma Therman cuts the arm off of some woman in a restaurant. “Oh, shit,” he whispers, before he puts it in his mouth and eats it. She tracks the movement with her eyes and thinks about how many times she tossed and turned in her sleep thinking about his hands. How they’d feel if they held her, or skimmed up her shirt. Skirt. Underwear.
She takes her right hand out of her lap and lays it next to the edge of the bed, right beside her knee. Her fingers brush against Stiles leg, feather light. He doesn’t even blink. On the television screen a schoolgirl is holding a chain with a metal ball hanging at the end of it. Stiles practically tracks every swing with his face as she attacks the blonde woman viciously.
Lydia quietly sets down the bowl of pretzel twists. She shifts, gets one knee on his bed, and puts her other foot on the ground. She turns her body slowly, and once she sinks back fully onto the bed, she throws an anxious glance up at him. To Lydia’s relief, Stiles is so absorbed into the movie he doesn’t notice her actions. Small sparks of heat and excitement surge through her.
It’s a small victory, not getting caught doing very instigative things.
Lydia leans over a tiny bit on her hands. Her lips are an inch away from Stiles’ neck when she hears it - the slight gasp that comes out of his mouth when he feels her breath on his skin.
Lydia draws out the journey to contact with agonizing slowness. And when her plush lips finally land on the soft skin of Stiles’ neck, a fire travels down her own neck and expands in her chest.
Stiles doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.
She crouches, moves cat-like, until she’s behind Stiles on the bed. Her knees push up against his lower back. His neck visibly stiffens. On the television, dozens of men in masks barge into the restaurant. There’s some screaming. More blood.
Lydia’s heavy lidded eyes take in the back of his neck, to his prominent shoulder blades, down to the curve of his lower back. She pulls herself up with her hands on his shoulders, her body pushing up against him. She’s taller than him this way.
“Lydia,” he croaks, paralyzed.
She feels drunk, closes her eyes. She noses his hair and sniffs, “Hm?”
It’s so faint she barely hears herself make the sound.
A beat later, she’s moving her hands forward, off his shoulders and down the front of him. Stiles inhales sharply when her hands slide to his chest. She revels in the feel of him, finally getting to touch. He’s hot like a furnace through his t-shirt.
When she reaches down to his toned stomach, her chest pushes up against the back of Stiles’ burning hot neck. The pack of pop tarts fall to the floor.
Stiles is heaving labored breaths as Lydia continues to push her body against him and roam her hands all over him.
Time begins to laps and then suddenly Stiles slides both of his large hands behind him until he’s grabbing the back of Lydia’s thighs, pushing her impossibly closer. The touch is so intimate it makes her feel scandalized, shameful, sinful. The sensation sends a wave of heat traveling up her body.
His hands, Stiles’ hands, are on her skin and she can’t stop herself from bending her head down and pressing an open mouthed kiss to his neck. She sucks on him then, like a ripe piece of fruit, eliciting the softest groan from Stiles. Almost a whimper. His fingers flex and tighten their grip on the back of her thighs. She grasps his gray t-shirt tightly into two small fists before continuing to suck, his breathlessness giving her all the motivation she needs.
The reality of the situation eventually hits Stiles, because yes, this is happening, and yes, he should probably let his body react the way it wants. So Stiles drops his posture, lets his shoulders loosen, and soon the will to sit up straight leaves him entirely. He relaxes back into Lydia, head cocked to the side to let her do whatever she pleases to his exposed neck.
Lydia sees him do it, tilt his head to give her mouth more room, and pulls back enough to look at him. Seeing his eyes closed tightly in bliss, eyebrows tense in mental concentration, mouth open with an expression on his face that looks almost pained… it makes her suck harder, with more fervor. She stops only to begin laving at the bruise on his neck over, and over, and over again.
Had she ever tasted something so sweet?
No, she thinks. Not quite.
She opens her mouth loosely, lets the tip of her tongue trace around the bruise in small, torturous circles, the pout of her lips never fully leaving his skin. His chest heaves with a large shudder. She drags her mouth lower until she finds the spot where neck meets shoulder and bites down hard. This time, he moans. It’s short and cracked, broken like an old record – but its there.
Every sound he makes sends Lydia over a loop, her body thrumming.
One minute her eyes were closed, her teeth leaving marks in his skin. And the next minute, she was looking up at him.
Stiles had turned around, hooked his arms under her legs, and flipped her on her back.
She doesn’t have enough breath in her lungs to even gasp appropriately. His eyes are just staring right back at her. His mouth open, his chest heaving. He’s so close.
Stiles’ eyes travel over her face, searching. He’s slotted in between her legs, her thighs wrapped lazily around his waist. His elbow rests above her head, and his other hand has a firm hold on her upper thigh. His neck looks flushed and his cheeks are tinted pink. The view alone makes her stomach flip something fierce.
Lydia Martin realizes with a small shiver that, in this moment, she is vulnerable. She knows she can’t hide now. She’s being studied, and her face is giving her away. Her thoughts are on the verge of escaping, and she can’t even trust herself to say the right thing.
It’s a split second choice she has to make, to decide to be vulnerable again, to accept the way her body feels – or to push it deep down in her chest and get up and leave, to forget about it. She can’t do this… not again. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to test her like this.
Stiles closes his eyes slowly, for only a second. And when he opens his eyes, he looks over her face again, and it’s like he’s never seen her before. As if he can’t already paint a picture of her face out of memory. He’s breathing heavily out of his nose, mouth closed and jaw tight.
Lydia’s chest constricts. She stares right back at him. His gaze holds a tenderness she wasn’t expecting. It still holds heat, still holds lust, still holds determination, but it’s vulnerable too. Open. Willing.
Lydia cups his face with both hands, pulls him down that one inch that it takes for their noses to touch. She closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. She tries to focus on anything that isn’t Stiles, but she fails.
The race of her heart proves that this feeling exists, that it can exist, with someone else and it scares the shit out of her. Because she knows she made the decision as soon as she stepped inside his bedroom.
“Kiss me.”
Stiles let out a breath, hot and openmouthed, before plunging his lips to hers. It’s a scorching kiss, passionate and rough, and she’s determined to give back as much as she receives. Stiles arches his back into it, brushes his chest against hers. He wreaks havoc on her mouth with every push and pull of tongue she gives him. It drives Lydia absolutely wild. He’s sucking her bottom lip and then he’s sucking her tongue into his mouth and she’s struggling to keep up, taken back by his ferocity.
Realizing that Stiles isn’t as inexperienced as she thought he was gets her unceremoniously hot. This is raw natural talent at its best. Stiles is gifted. That mouth of his – of course that mouth, with its sarcastic quips and inappropriately timed comments – is made of pure gold. The way Stiles works his mouth against hers has Lydia sweating.
The body heat that collides when Stiles pushes his chest flushed against hers leaves them both winded. They pause and pull away not even an inch. They’re both panting against each other’s mouths, their heavy breaths mingling together like a scene from a dirty movie.
Another thing to be greedy about, she thinks. Stiles’ secret kissing skills are now on top of her list.
Takes her a while before she can get control of her lungs. The post-kissing stare between the two of them is only slightly less intense than the actual kissing. There’s a sense of familiarity between them, like they had done this before maybe except no never not at all, and a shiver runs through her as she thinks about how natural this feels. Lydia has to blink a few times before she snaps out of it, and follows his eyes as they veer downwards to her swollen lips. She’s looking at him stare at her mouth, like…
Like he hasn’t done enough damage yet.
Her hands, which have been grasping onto Stiles’ shoulders this whole time, loosen and slide down under his jaw line. Her thumbs rest on his chin for just a small second while she transfixes on Stiles’ open mouth to see the damage she did herself. His top lip is still glistening where she just finished licking it and she feels deeply satisfied at the sight. She can see, even in the dark, how his lips and the area around his mouth are the same color. Stile’s mouth is so swollen and red it looks like someone almost punched him. And it makes her feel like she could definitely do more with that mouth. Lydia was definitely late to the mouth staring party. No wonder Stiles was looking at her like this – her mouth probably looked the same to him. Wet and promising.
“There are a thousand things I could say right now,” Stiles begins, voice utterly broken. “But it’s really hard to focus on anything else,” his eyes flutter up to meet hers, “but you.”
It almost breaks her, the look on his face. Adoration and despair and heat mingled into one.
She slides her thumbs up to his mouth, tugs down his bottom lip. Her body is screaming more more more more I want MORE because this mouth, these lips, hold honesty and understanding and utter compassion and she wants to dive in and swim.
Stiles holds his stare, face still. His hot breath tickles the tips of her thumbs.
She wants to say something, to answer him, to get that hesitant expression off his face. But it takes Lydia by surprise how hard it is to give her voice any kind of strength. Her throat makes a clicking sound when she swallows. She doesn’t want to tell him how every little thing about him has her twisted and torn and it’s turned her wanton and aching. She doesn’t want him knowing how she’s memorized the crooked curve of his smile and how she hopes to be the reason behind every single one. She can’t say how badly she wants him, in every way. Not yet.
But she thinks maybe she can tell him how much she cares.
“I feel better when I’m here with you, when it’s just us. It’s hard sometimes, leaving,” she confesses.
She lets go of his bottom lip and it falls back beautifully. There is a pause, and it borders on being too long, before he sighs. Without breaking eye contact, Stiles grabs one of her hands from under his face and pulls it towards him as he tilts his head down slowly, kissing her open palm sweetly. The gesture tightens something in Lydia’s chest. And then Stiles’ eyelids flutter closed as he bows his head lower, dragging his open mouth wetly down her hand until he reaches her wrist. He plants his lips firmly on her pulse point.
He deserves more than this, Lydia thinks. But for now, it will do.