Summer's Darling

• Chapter Three •

And the way he looks at her, she knows. She just knows. His eyes are lazily drawing over her features, like he's too tired to keep them open but she's too pretty to stop watching. He's grinning, even when her lips are on his, she can feel the way they pull upward in a smile. He's thriving in the way she's wrapped around him, legs around his waist, fingers in his hair, his name softly spilling from her mouth. It all makes him feel too alive and he's just so overwhelmed by her. He doesn't need to say it; she knows. He loves her.

"Ocean," he whispers and mimics the way the waves crash against the shore in her ear until she chuckles, "c'mon lets go to the ocean."
"Drown in the salt water?"
"Mhm."
"Get eaten by sharks?"
"Have you surfed yet this year?"
"I haven't surfed since I was like twelve." She says. He frowns just to make her laugh and presses soft lips to her freckled cheeks.

It was a regular occurrence for Stiles to sneak out in the middle of the night to visit Summer's Darling. He would knock on her window to stir the girl from her sleep until she allowed him to climb inside her room. He kept her awake until the sun rose and cast orange and pink shadows across salt soaked sheets. More often, now that senior year was approaching for Stiles, Lydia would timidly ask about school. The subject made him uncomfortable so he usually tried to avoid it. She noticed.
"no ones telling you what to do."
"Yeah, but I know what's expected of me."
"What's expected of you and what you actually want are two very different things. Do you want to spend the rest of your life pleasing other people or doing what you want to do?"
Stiles mumbles, "what I want to do..."
She smiles, tired but happy, and reaches a hand up to play with the curly bits of his hair, "you're smart,"
"You're smarter,"
"This isn't a competition," she warns and he listens, "you're smart, Stiles. Maybe not when you're forced to be, like in school setting, but I know you. Right? Don't I know you?" He nods before she continues, "so I know you'll be okay, wherever you go, whatever you do."
He takes her compliment to heart and, thinking of no better way to reply, begins to imitate the waves again.

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Scott has his nose wedged in a textbook the entire day; when they're fighting over donut flavors at breakfast, when they lay out towels to sunbath on the sand, even on the walk to a snow cone stand further along the beach. He doesn't stop reading at the offer of chocolate turtles or taffy's and barely gives a sideways glance to anyone who isn't helping him study. So he's basically only spoken to Lydia. She's tired (since a certain friend crept in her room and kept her up until the literal crack of dawn) but politely helps with any questions Scott throws her way. They're all laid out on towels, right at the waters edge and have only bothered to move when the tide gets a little too close.
"It's summer," Stiles finally begs, because seeing that textbook reminds him way too much about school.
And how he hasn't applied for scholarships.
Or taken the SATs.
Or looked at colleges.
Not to mention he's repeating several courses.
He's not sure he'll survive.

There's five textbooks in total: trigonometry, history 101, physics, English 4, and art history.
"What are the two eras of the Stone Age?" Scott asks. Stiles blinks, waiting for Lydia's answer.
"Paleolithic and Neolithic."
"What does that mean?" Stiles asks. He's not really interested but he's been trying to read a book for the past hour and he's still on the same page he was when he started. Isaac is curled up with his game boy and hasn't said a word since they came back from getting snow cones. Frankly, he doesn't care either.
"Well, they're just technical terms for the old and New Stone Age. People in Paleolithic era hunted while the Neolithic era was more agricultural. Right?" Scott says.
"Yup." Lydia confirms and Stiles is officially dumbfounded. He's not good at school, or more, he could be but he doesn't put in the effort. He's a professional procrastinator, pushing away his adult life, avoiding the future and all of its seriousness. He's desperate to follow the suggestion Lydia had made earlier: drown in the salt water.

He tries to go back to his novel when Mr. Stilinski opens up the back door of the house and yells down to them, offering multiple options for dinner until the teens shout back their favorites. But Stiles isn't hungry at all and the snow cone in his stomach churns wildly as his mind runs with the idea of college. The wheels are spinning too fast in his brain, threatening to malfunction at any minute. Scott is definitely getting into a nice college, Isaac is secretly a computer whizz and will probably do something with that (though no ones ever heard him talk about attending a university before), but Stiles is lost in the void. He wants to go to school, he honestly does, but his grades say otherwise. His GPA definitely won't look good on applications, he probably won't get any scholarships he applies for, he—

"Are you okay?" Lydia asks because he's started to hyperventilate just a little but is trying to keep quiet so as not to alert anyone. He can't talk, only raises a thumb up for her. She doesn't buy his bullshit for one second. "Maybe we should go up to the house?"
He shakes his head.

He isn't dying, per se, but his legs are numb and he's listening but he's not hearing and his lungs are malfunctioning as the minutes go by.

He never wants this summer to end because that means returning to his life as a failure.

And here, he's a king.
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Authors note:

I kind of get the feeling the concept for this book is stupid soooooo....I might end up starting over...
Comment read enjoy!