Burning Slowly

Chapter 14

Lydia nearly dropped her phone as she rushed in through the back door. Whatever the plan had started off as, what was about to happen on the beach had not been a part of it. She was less than twenty yards from them when she saw what was going on. She'd given up on waiting for Derek. She hadn't agreed to the plan, to help orchestrate it, just to have Derek go off script, especially so close to the closing act.

Stiles was supposed to have a short conversation with Derek before the Alpha led him to where she was waiting so that she could take Stiles to lunch. If holding him down on the ground and looking like he was about to get a mouthful of Stiles's spinal cord had been in the game plan, she would have vetoed it immediately, glowing red eyes or no glowing red eyes.

She was a flurry of designer clothes as she made last minute calculations. If she factored in the amount of time that Stiles would spend staring after Derek confused as hell, along with the distance back to the house, and Stiles general inability to stay in one place for very long, she imagined she had less than five minutes to come up with a new strategy. She unlocked the screen to her phone and glanced at her text messaging list. The last one she'd sent said, 'Don't eat him!'

Thank god she had quick fingers. She had approximately three minutes left if she was anywhere near as good as she thought she was. Her fingers with their impeccably manicured nails flew across the digital keyboard of her phone sending a mass text to all the members of the pack save Derek and Stiles.

'Derek messed up, the game is changing, skip part a, I'll update in two hours, steer clear of big bad wolf if you see him.'

She hit send, had just enough time to drop her phone into her purse, retrieve her compact from the emergency makeup compartment in the side, and arrange herself on the couch as if she had not just been running. Five minutes had passed, the new act was about to begin. A sixth minute passed. She tapped her foot impatiently. Another minute went by.

She cautiously looked towards the back door. An eighth minute ticked by. She sighed. In the ninth minute she realized she'd forgotten to consider that Stiles had a not mild case of unpredictability. She was just about to stand when she heard the back door open. She improvised by executing a lazy stretch instead, acted as though she was just getting up from a cat nap.

Stiles entered the living room, looked at her with his big brown eyes. He looked like he was out of breath, his face was flushed red. He was moving a bit more awkwardly than he normally did. That was fairly impressive considering he already moved like a drunken duck most of the time.

She narrowed her eyes at him. He shifted nervously. He looked guilty of something. He always looked guilty of something but this time it looked like he was ashamed of what he was guilty of. She wondered what it was that he was hiding.

"Hey," he said. He was blushing. He shifted nervously under her calculating gaze.

It hit her; she replayed the scene in her mind. At first she'd thought Derek was pinning Stiles to the ground having been forced into a rage by any number of ridiculously infuriating things he could have said. What if that's not what was happening when she saw them. What if Stiles had needed the extra minutes to calm down from an entirely different set of circumstances?

Tricky, this was about to get very tricky. This was going to change everything if it hadn't already. As it turned out, tricky games were her favorite. She'd already formulated a new strategy in the moments that Stiles stared at her as though he realized she had caught him with his hand in a cookie jar. She was ready to act. She would just play dumb, playing dumb was her specialty.

"So," she began. "Considering how rude you were to me last night, I think that it's only fair that you come shopping with me."

He blinked at her, mouth hanging open in a sort of dull bovine expression.