Summer's Darling

• Chapter Six •

"We need to talk... like adults." Lydia sighs. She pushes her hair behind her ears, avoids eye contact with him. God, she looks exhausted, Stiles thinks. He wants to reach out to her, hold her, take her hand and lure her towards the beach.... He knows he can't.
"Obviously." Isaac scoffs under his breath, but they all hear.
Lydia is immediately enraged, "shut the fuck up Isaac." And before he can process it, Lydia has yanked Stiles outside and slammed the front door behind them, her once delicate hand now clutching his wrist like an enraged mother dragging her child away from a broken vase. She begins to walk down the driveway, carelessly letting go of his arm once they are a few feet away from the house, and he trails after her without questioning it.

And, as Stiles would later look back upon this day, he notes that she never hesitated to confront him. He knows she spent their week of silence rehearsing these lines.
"You never told me about Malia Tate." She's stern, whipping around to face him at the edge of the driveway, a sin on her mouth, a filthy tune from her lips. He can't even look at her, he feels so pathetic, his eyes tracing over the cracks in the concrete below him. "She's in practically all of my classes," her voice cracks slightly but she doesn't falter, "she's not known around school for sleeping with people or anything, she's actually a good person, maybe I'm just an idiot. . . the whole second semester I'm sitting with her at lunch and we're talking and talking and she's telling everyone at our table about this Greek god of a boy she'd hooked up with one summer," Stiles nearly gets whiplash from how fast he looks up at her. Her voice quiets and she shakes her head as if she doesn't want any of this to be true. Because she doesn't, "and she said 'he doesn't go to our school. He doesn't even live here' and then turns to me and looks me straight in the eyes, like it's our little secret. Like we had planned this out or something. . . I didn't know then why she did that, just thought she had looked at me like she had everyone else at the table when she had told the story." there's a pause, "I put two and two together the other day.... Saw her at Lolly's and she told me to tell you she said hello and I thought, how would she even know you? I wasn't even mad. Maybe I should have been. And that night I was gonna call you and cry and yell and beg you to love me. . . but then I remembered: I'm summer's darling. I belong to summer, I am consumed by summer, I am nothing but summer. And I used to think that was so great but now, I don't know."
Stiles longed to tell her it was still a good thing; that the salt in her hair and the sand in her shoes were his favorite part of vacation. He wanted to tell her that during the long winter breaks he thought of nothing but strawberry blonde curls and the ocean. Saying that didn't feel like crossing the line at all, it just felt like something she wouldn't care to hear at the moment. Nothing could fix this.

"I should have told you." He says, and he means it so deeply.
"Yeah. You should have." She's scowling, "Stiles, I'm not even mad that it happened. I mean, I am mad, I'm furious, but we've never been exclusive, that's obvious. You've made that very obvious." And now her tone shifts slightly, as if she's the one that's done something wrong, but her voice is still solid.  "you could have been honest. It would have saved me a lot of time obsessing over the fact that I thought we could be a permanent thing. But now I know, and you're here. You're going to be here for two more months, how the fuck am I supposed to look at you?"
His heart shatters completely. He's the one that messed up and yet he can tell there's some part of her that feels as though she caused this... as if she wasn't enough. He has to leave. He has to leave before he ruins this more.

He says it.
"I can leave."
She looks at him for the first time. "What?"
"I can leave. You don't have to look at me for two more months, I'll leave."
She nearly rolls her eyes, "and what? Convince your dad to do it? What will be the excuse?"
"I don't know, but I'll think of something. I can't be here if it's going to fuck with even more, I can't do that to you. I've already fucked it up so bad, I know I have. I-" his head burns.
"That's what you want to do?" She's tearing up. Some part of her deep down wants him to fight and grovel and beg to stay and fix it. But he's running.
"No," her heart skips as he says it, "no I want to stay but.. but you don't need me right now, it won't help... you need time t-to decide if..." he can't finish the sentence yet she understands exactly what he means. And he's right.

"Don't leave... just stay away from me."