Tether ⌲ Stiles Stilinski [2]

two

As Lydia, Allison, and I walked down the Beacon Hills High School hall the next morning, I felt a comforting sense of familiarity between the aisles of lockers I had once worried I would never see again after last April.

Since leaving the school system and rejoining again, our records had been re-entered into the computers as if we were completely new students again and our locker locations had therefore been shuffled around. Allison's new locker was closer to Lydia's and mine was notably closer to Stiles' - an idea that was extremely pressing in my mind when I made my stopover this morning. I had stuffed my supplies away as quickly as possible before ushering the girls down the hall and around the corner to our next locker stop.

I shouldn't have been nervous. He was still Stiles after all. But four months without communication seemed like an impeccably long time and seeing his face out on the road the night before made all of the dormant nerves bubble up to a boiling point inside of me. I guess it didn't help that the last time we had seen each other before the break we were at a level of closeness where we could make out for an hour in his Jeep.

Now, however, I felt like I forgot how to function normally around him. I assumed I couldn't just jump on him and pick up where we had left off, but I was confused where that left us. The thought of being back to 'just friends' again broke my heart.

Finishing up at Lydia's locker and moving onto Allison's as our last stop before English class - the first class of the day and school year - I noticed a large bandage on the side of the strawberry blonde's ankle.

"Hey, Lydia? Are you alright?" I pointed towards the injury. "Is that from the accident?"

"Wait, hold on, I thought you said you weren't hurt?" my sister crossed her arms with a concerned look on her face.

"Relax, this is totally unrelated," Lydia insisted. "Prada just bit me, that's all."

"Does she usually bite you?"

She shrugged. "She used to all the time when she was a puppy."

"But not since then?" I asked.

"Whatever. She just gets on edge around people she doesn't know so she was angry when I had a boy overnight."

"You had a boy overnight?"

"Yes," Lydia grinned. "Unlike you purists who didn't touch a single Parisian boy in four whole months, I've been having some fun over the summer break."

I rolled my eyes. "Well is he anyone we know?"

"Unimportant, I'm already over it. What's important is who's next," she applied a final coat of lipstick and smacked her lips together before sighing complacently, scanning the hallway. "Don't you just love freshmen? Tons and tons of fresh men."

My sister scoffed, filing away a few books into her newly assigned locker. "You mean boys. Lydia, they're fourteen."

Our friend simply shrugged.

"Well, some are more mature than others."

"You know, it's okay to be single," Allison stated, closing her locker door tightly. "You can focus on yourself for a little while, work on becoming a better person."

Lydia rolled her eyes. "Allison, I love you, so if we need to do that thing where we talk about me and pretend we're not actually talking about you, it's totally fine. But I don't want a boyfriend. I want a distraction."

I followed the strawberry blonde's gaze over my shoulder as she surveyed the crowd of students in the hallway for her next diversion. The corner of her lips turned up when her eyes locked on someone walking our way.