A/N: Five months later, I finally update because I'm a fantastic updater. And, I almost finished this a while ago and hit the back button and everything went away because I was using the copy/paste method instead of using Drive or Word like a normal person.

Beta read by the fabulous tobestardust aka em aka the most em-portant person in the whole freaking world.

Thank you to imashuckingwolf0728, Guest/Ariane (I actually find my plot kind of cliche, but I really love cliche love stories, and really? Haha, I haven't read that, you should link me!),

LetTheWindTakeYou, miizx3ela, Guest, Guest, Guest, BlackWolfe, RomanticTerror (I feel the same—I'm absolutely in love with Jackson and Colton Haynes, but I chose more of a jerk-ish approach because I couldn't find a nice way to have him kick her out), Carlito1988, FindMeInTheDark, kaisha, Ariee, malia tate (thank you thank you ilyxx), Nic, Nic, Nicole (Haha, guessing you three are the same person? :)), and amber for the reviews! And thank you to every favorite/follow/read, here's the next installment!

Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf or the song title in which the chapter name was taken from "Something I Need" by OneRepublic.

Lydia couldn't sleep.

She had no reason to be alert—Stiles had given her water and extra blankets and his bed without her even asking, and she quietly accepted to all. If she was in a normal mood, she would have posed some argument to him about how she wasn't some damsel in distress, and she didn't need to be treated as such, but she was tired, and more than a little heartbroken.

She thought about texting Jackson, but that would make her weak, and she didn't want to feel weak. All throughout high school, she had let boys chase after her, and she would pretend to ignore them and their pining. It was a fun game, and it made her feel desired, but the habit of letting boys chase her had stuck.

I'm pathetic. I'm thinking of chasing boys while I'm married to the boy that's been chasing me since we were little kids.

Lydia didn't know why she had let Stiles chase her for so long, but more than that, she didn't know why he hadn't given up on her already. In all reality, she was a complete screw up, and the only thing she had going for her was the chance at getting a MacArthur Fellows Genius Grant. Other than a genius mind and a fairly pretty face, she had nothing to show for herself, and nothing for boys to chase her over.

But Stiles hadn't stopped—as far as Lydia was concerned, he had never had a proper girlfriend, let alone romantic feelings towards anyone other than herself. She was pushed towards him often, and even her best friend thought that Stiles' crush on her was adorable, and she should "Give him a chance. You should try everything once." (Lydia had retorted with suggesting for Allison to try the bottle of hot peppers in her cupboard, and the subject was dropped.)

And it was true, in all honestly, that Lydia should've given Stiles a chance—it would've surely changed his mind about her—but she was stuck on the fact that he wasn't her type. In her eyes, boys with beautiful exteriors and slightly asshole-ish personalities were her type, and she clung onto them like the way rain clung to windowshields.

And then, she started crying for the third time that night (though technically it was the next day), and wrapped the covers more tightly around her body. They felt nothing like a romantic embrace, and were annoyingly inhuman to the touch. She pouted her bottom lip out, and glanced around the room. "Stiles?"

At her command, the door swung open, and 150-something pounds of awkward male fell through her door. She had a suspicion that he had heard her crying, and pressed his ear to the door to try and figure out why she was upset.

In a normal mood, she would've snapped at him for eavesdropping, but she was in no mood to turn down human companionship. "Sit," she said, patting a space on the bed.

Stiles scrambled to his feet, and ran to Lydia's side, sitting in the exact spot she had touched. "Hey."

"Hey," She echoed, and for a moment, she wondered if it was a bad idea to invite him in when she had no need for anything. A moment of silence fell over them, and she looked to Stiles, half-expecting for him to make some awkward excuse and leave her room.

"Do you want to play a game?" He asked, and she looked at him quizzically. "I have Monopoly, and Uno, and Life. And video games, too, but they're mostly based on zombies and stuff. Or we can play charades."

Lydia laughed—it was so strange, to be in front of a boy in such a vulnerable state without said boy trying to get into her pants. She could count half a dozen times that she had gone to boys in times of heartbreak, and they simply coaxed her into doing something that she would most definitely regret the next morning.

But Stiles? He was so different, it was hilarious to her. The girl he had a crush on was so, crushingly vulnerable in front of him, and instead of taking advantage of her, he offered to play charades with her. Even now, he was looking at her questioningly, but the question wasn't why she was randomly laughing, but more of 'What game do you want to play?'

Eventually, she dried the wetness from under her eyes with her sleeves, and looked up at him. "I like Life. Can I be the purple car?"

He smiled hugely, and did a half-walk, half-run for the board game. When he got to her door, he stopped, and turned around. "I, uh, know that you usually eat healthy food and no carbs and stuff, but do you want cookies? I baked them when we got back because I was bored, and I washed my hands and stuff and there aren't any germs on them. Or I can get you a celery stick."

"Cookies are fine." Lydia noticed that he had a tendency to ramble a lot around her—it was similar to how he was in high school, and he had no clue what gift to get her for Valentine's Day, so he 'anonymously' bought her five pounds of assorted kinds of chocolates and candy. She guessed it was him in instants, but she decided against telling him that.

After about three minutes (she was fairly certain he was running), he was back in her room, armed with a tray of cookies and a fairly new board game. He placed the game next to her, then crawled into her bed, a few inches from the other side of the board game. "So, here's cookies. Do you know how to play?"

"Of course I do," Lydia said smoothly, and spread out the board games. Stiles stuffed three cookies into his mouth at once, and she suspected it was a trick he picked up on from Scott.

They started the game, and like in real life, they both went to college. Stiles drew his card, and started arguing with her that you weren't supposed to show the other player your career cards and home cards.

"How do I know you aren't cheating? What if you pay yourself $100,000 on pay day and you're just an accountant?"

"This is Life, Lydia! You can't go around assuming the worst in people!"

"You also can't pay someone double what they deserve because they claim to be a doctor." Lydia plucked the card from his hands, and after an indignant noise from his end, she handed the Teacher card back to him.

"I wasn't planning on it. It's your turn to spin." Stiles pointed at the board, and Lydia did as told, forgetting about the marriage and Jackson for a minute. When Stiles calmed down, and argued with her rather than rambled on, he was amusing to talk to, albeit a bit frustrating. He was nearly as stubborn as her—he wasn't stupid, and she assumed that people who were (or thought they were) intelligent were more adamant on being right.

Lydia spun, drew a card, and playfully wiggled it at him. "I'm a doctor." He made a sarcastic comment about how the game predicted out your actual life, and she argued back that she had a good chance of becoming a doctor if she so desired.

They played more, and as before, they argued about the rules. Lydia was fairly certain that she was right about most of them, and in the end, she won by a landslide. He complained about the game being rigged (seeing as he ended up with debt), and they settled with playing Egyptian Ratscrew.

It was a bit more difficult to play with only two people, and on Stiles' end, it was more awkward. Every time they both recognized a good card and slapped it, their hands touched, and he pulled away quickly with an extremely red face.

After Stiles lost three times in a row, he willed himself to pay more attention to the game, and a bit less to how soft her hands were, and how she didn't look like she was about to start crying at each given moment.

"Maybe we can change the rules. Like no sandwiches." Every time a card came up, a different one, and then the same as the first (hence the name sandwich), he completely missed it, and she claimed the stack.

"We can't change the original rules," Lydia countered. "But we can add additional rules. Like... every time a six, and then a nine comes up, we can slap it. It seems like you and Scott practiced spotting dirty jokes in everything possible while we were in high school."

"I reject that." Stiles crossed his arms over his chest, and gave her a pointed look. She easily rivaled it.

"On a scale of one to one hundred, how cool am I?" Lydia mimicked in a voice that he assumed was her Scott impression. "God, Scott's lucky that Allison didn't know him while he was in high school."

"I'm sure she'd still be in love with him, teenage stupidity and all." Both Stiles and Lydia, barely 21, didn't have much right to mock what they were three years ago (and what they acted like currently), but talking about the past was easier than talking about the present. Neither of them really knew how to appropriately approach the subject, and even though it had been less than a day since they found out, they were good at pretending it didn't exist.

"I guess so," Lydia shrugged, "I mean, I knew you guys back then, but I'm still in Scott's Pack."

In their sophomore year of college, before Allison and Scott started officially dating, they wandered into the woods after watching Twilight for the first time to see where Scott had parked his car. He, in all his dim logic, had insisted on parking it in an ungodly place in the woods rather than inside the theater to save a few bucks, but when midnight came, they still hadn't found his car.

So instead, they broke out the movie snacks that Stiles had hidden in his pockets, sat on a grassy patch, and made fun of just how ridiculous the movie was. Scott had defended Taylor Lautner and his character to no end, and when the full moon shone over them, Scott had said something sentimental about how he was glad he had his own pack of amazing people (Scott was always more mushy when he was tired). They made fun of him for it the next day, but the nickname for their group stuck.

"Not really," Stiles argued. "You basically ignored Scott and I back then, and hung out with Danny and Cora and the really stupid people."

"They made my brain burn." Lydia grinned, but it was more fond than rude. "They weren't stupid, really, they just 'couldn't give two shits about school', as Danny put it."

"He was quite eloquent." Stiles put a nine down on top of Lydia's six, and promptly slapped it with a proud noise. Lydia pushed the cards over to him, and his childish smile only widened.

They played like this for a while longer, and when they changed games to Blackjack, Lydia fell asleep right before Stiles asked her to hit him.. For a moment, he was a bit surprised—he thought people only fell asleep like that in movies: talking amiably and smiling one moment, then flopped back and fast asleep the next. After a moment of checking to see if she was asleep, he packed everything into the Life box (including the cards), and draped her blanket all the way over her.

His movements were almost automatic: make sure Lydia is comfortable, tuck her in, place her glass of water within arms length, and leave without making a loud noise. Even while she was dating Jackson, and before she knew he existed in high school, he was always by her side when she needed help, and ready to aid her.

A few moments later, he went into a state of complete mental panic upon the realization that her stay was semi-permanent, and his sorry excuse for an apartment was a complete wreck.

Immediately, he went into a state of mental-shutdown, and scrambled around the kitchen to find cleaning tools. Usually, Allison did this sort of thing for him—she could never stand to see the messy state it was perpetually in—and absently cleaned while he talked about his problems. He never quite paid attention to how she could make it clean and pretty—he'd always assumed that you had to pick one.

Desperately, he grabbed a cookbook in one hand, and a feather duster in the other, not sure why he owned these objects because he neither cooked nor dusted. He quickly dusted off a countertop, mostly spotless due to his misuse of the kitchen, and elegantly styled the book on the counter. He then proceeded to clean up around the microwave, and moved onto wiping down all the glass and mirrors in the house with Windex, and plucked his pair of boxers from the heating vent. He made a quick note to either figure out how to use the dryer, or find a better place to dry his clothes than a heating machine.

When he made his way to the bathroom, he cringed, and grabbed a weird mop that he had bought from a commercial when he and Scott were hopelessly drunk off of spiked jello. It was some kind of "Swift Sweeper" or whatever the hell the weird company named it, but it had a long pole and some kind of pad at the bottom, and he settled for trying to mop the bathtub without actually touching anything. So far, it wasn't worth it, and he was starting to realize that to Lydia's nose, his bathroom might not be the most pleasant-smelling thing.

"Ew ew ew," He dryly gagged as he mopped away lint from around the toilet, and then stabbed around in the bowl with the toilet thing, making a quick mental note to look up proper terminology of common household supplies.

The entire endeavor of Stiles' frantic attempt at making his home livable was much louder than he thought a regular 'bout of cleaning should be, but after a moment's thought, he chalked it up to the fact that he had no clue how the hell he was supposed to clean things. His panic sent his brain into a kind of autopilot, and when Lydia appeared at the door a bit later, he was frantically using the weird mop to clean a vase he had bought at a garage sale.

"Are you, um, having a nice time there?" Lydia's eyebrows quirked up at the sight of the grown man looking like he was having a one-sided fight with a glass vase (and losing), and her lips curved into a smile.

Stiles jumped, and plunged the mop to the point where the vase shattered on the ground, "I, ugh, oops." He ran a hand through his hair, infinitely grateful that it was no longer buzzed, and he could actually use it when his hands had nothing to do.

Lydia's smirk didn't drop, and she turned towards the kitchen, "Do you have a dust pan?"

"For?"

"You knocked a glass vase over. Are you planning on leaving that there?" After a moment's pause, she slightly mimed sweeping glass shards into a bin with her hands, and Stiles jumped up, as if just now understanding what she meant..

"No! No, no, I'm a very clean person. I have one of those." He exited towards the kitchen, and Lydia bit back a grin as she leant against the wall. Again, she thought of Jackson, but it was becoming somewhat a mental loop: talk to Stiles, think of Jackson, talk to Stiles, think of Jackson. It was infuriating—she had no desire whatsoever to become one of the stupid, brainless girls who did nothing but think of their boyfriends.

Lydia groaned, and ran her hands through her sleep-mussed hair. "God, stupid, stupid, cheating...floozy." Another sound of annoyance left her lips, and she ignored Stiles as he swept up the shards of broken glass (with his hands and a paper box).

"Floozy?" Stiles questioned, but Lydia buried her face into her hands as an answer and cringed at the teenage girl, cliche-ness of the situation.

"God, I could become a shitty screenwriter," Lydia was sure that her brain would criticize her for such bleak language when she was running on more than three hours of sleep, "A college girl with the perfect boyfriend cheats on said boyfriend with...a childhood friend. Oh, and marries him, if that wasn't enough!"

"Maybe Jackson should write a screenplay on how to be a perfect boyfriend. Step one, kick your girlfriend out of your house. Step two, be a jerk who—"

"Stiles, not now." Even in her current state, she couldn't help but hear the jealousy in his voice, a kind of bitterness loosely concealed by layers of sarcasm.

"Lydia, you're better than Jack—"

"I said, not now, Stiles." An annoying voice told Lydia that it was her first marital argument, and she told the voice to shove it's head up its ass. Then, the voice of reason told Lydia and her vulgar language to get the hell to sleep, and she slumped against the walls. "Maybe later."

"Yeah?" And damn, the hope in Stiles' voice was painful to hear, and her gut twisted uncomfortably. She couldn't pinpoint the feeling exactly, and let herself slide to the floor.

For the first time, she noticed that her usually striking hair was in tangles, she probably had bags underneath her eyes, and her face was clear from makeup. She felt slightly self-conscious, and hung her head in a way that let the shadows bathe her face.

"I know Jackson isn't perfect. But I'm not either, so that makes him perfect for me." Lydia's voice was so, so weak in that moment, and she hated herself for how vulnerable it sounded. She didn't know who she was trying to persuade, but there was a note of persuasion in her voice rather than the clear, confident tone she would use when stating a fact like "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," and without another word, she blankly let herself go back to her bed.

As she slid back into Stiles'—or, her—bed and fell asleep, the last thought that touched her conscious disturbed her more than it should have:

Maybe...maybe I'm trying to persuade myself.

A/N: i'm sorry x20 that i never got around to updating this, i'm just a piece of poop and ugh, i don't really have an excuse. this chapter was a bit of fluff and a bit of a filler (heh double f's (like my grades)), but i wanted to post something in between this and what goes down next chapter. small spoiler: it involves an angry arrow-wielding allison argent (stop me with the alliteration please)

another note: i'm keeping this all human! it was my original intentions, and i'm glad the majority of my reviewers agreed that it should remain all human.

all right, i'm out to write some more, and drop a review in the box below if you have the time!