Broken Kiss (a Teen Wolf story)

Part 5

            “Five more minutes.” Lydia threw her arm over her eyes when the overhead light burst on.

            “Not tonight, princess,” Peter Hale said, closing the door behind him and glancing out the small window to the hall. “We need to go now.”

            Lydia squinted at him, then peered around the room. She was in the hospital. It only took two seconds to figure that out, she’d been here so often over the last year.

            “Is something attacking us?” she asked, throwing the covers back and grimacing when she discovered she was wearing a baggy pink gown. Her shins were shiny and sticky, covered in some kind of ointment.

            “Not yet.” Peter smirked. “But your mother has been calling your phone relentlessly, and the good sheriff just called to advise that she flagged down a passing patrol car to ask how to file a missing person’s report. I’m going to take you home before she drops in here like a hurricane.”

            “A passing patrol car?” Lydia tested her legs. They still worked, which was a plus. “She’s at home. Why were the police there?”

             “Home? Is that what she told you? She was at Club Solange.”

            Her mom had grading to do, but instead she’d gone out. And to a pretty scuzzy club at that. Lydia scowled at the floor. She didn’t like the guy her mom was seeing right now, with his year-round tan and “Just for Men” dark hair, and how he pretended he was decades younger than he was. He always smelled like cigarette smoke and, before her mom had even introduced them, he’d criticized her for staying out too late. Beauty would fade, he’d said, making her lip curl, so she needed to study more. The joke was on him in that regard, but her mother hadn’t even stood up for her. She hadn’t mentioned Lydia’s 4.0, which actually had been difficult last semester with all the classes she’d missed while Stiles was sick. Beauty. That was the least of her worries these days. A girl could be beautiful, but smart enough to stop a nogitsune? That was worth something. It would be worth more if her mom knew, or if she’d have cared.

            Lydia tore her plastic ID band off her wrist, gripped the back of the gown closed, and stomped into the bathroom. She unwrapped the cheap, hard-bristled toothbrush and brushed her teeth, then wiped away globs of mascara with the rough, bleach-smelling washcloth. Then she retied the stupid gown so that she didn’t have to hold it closed.

            “I take it you disapprove?” Peter asked when she came back out.

           “She’s forty-five,” Lydia said, wheeling on him. “And this is the thirteenth man she’s dated since Dad. Each one’s older and meaner than the last, and each one makes her sadder. It’s a school night. She had grading to do. She shouldn’t be out…carousing.”

            Or getting too drunk to teach in the morning. She needed this job. They needed it. Maybe that was the worst part, how helpless Lydia felt seeing her mom sacrificing a job she liked while trying to be what these losers told her they wanted. They didn’t deserve her.

            “How are they mean to you?” Peter asked it quietly, but she picked up on an undercurrent of aggression. He was standing with one shoulder leaned against the wall, his chin lowered as he pretended to study the band she’d thrown on the floor.

            “Not to me,” she said, taking a deep breath as tears threatened. “To her. She bends and bends for them and they…” She didn’t want to air the family’s dirty laundry to Peter, who would turn around and use it against her. “They can’t ever say anything nice,” she finished, turning away to gather her clothes, neatly folded on a rolling tray.