It's one o'clock in the morning, the neighborhood is blessedly silent, and the thought of sleep doesn't even cross Lydia's mind. She's in bed, stretched out on her belly with pillows hugged to her chest, surfing the net on her laptop in bed. She alternates between two tabs effortlessly. There's an online fashion catalogue in one and a recent science journal article in the other.

She's silenced her phone, but only because she is able to hear the faint hum of the screen lighting up whenever there's a new notification. For a second, her eyes narrow, because she's in the middle of a particularly technical paragraph, when she notices the tell-tale rumble of a certain Jeep's engine two streets away. She glances over at her window, at the lock (unlocked), then leans over and grabs her cell. Sure enough: "1 NEW TEXT MESSAGE FROM Stiles." She opens the text with a tap of her finger – the touch is impossibly gentle; she'd hate to damage anything of hers.

Knowing Stiles, he's probably spent no less than ten minutes agonizing over each and every character that he sent in the message: "Make sure your window's open. Not a creep. Just want to say hi. Hi. I mean in person."

Texting while driving is dangerous. She decides not to reply.

Five minutes later, Lydia has to suppress a wince at the way her window protests being opened. Stiles heaves himself over the sill and onto her bedroom floor with all the grace of a hogtied hippopotamus. He smells faintly of unfortunate cologne, sweat, denim, grass, and dirt. He situates himself so that he's sitting cross-legged, then grins at her.

"You didn't even ask me if I was asleep." Her tone is observant, but not accusatory.

"You're logged into AIM." Stiles shrugs.

Lydia glances at the task bar on her computer. "Touché."

She closes her laptop and slides it away, then catches his eye. She's good at that: staring. Staring down, that is. Derek – alpha – is the only one in the pack who can beat her at that game. She can spirit entire meals away from any of her subordinate packmates if she wants to, drop a conversation if it's boring her, draw any attention she sees fit, and yet, if Stiles sees fit to notice any of that, he's never shown it. He holds her gaze with no expectations. Something pleasant curls inside her, because she knows the spike of nervousness to his scent has nothing to do with the wolf beneath her skin. Stiles has no idea that if he were actually challenging her, human or not, she'd give…

"Didn't you come here for a reason?" She asks, quiet, and in another life that might mean she's worried someone will overhear, except no one will. Well, unless another werewolf's in the vicinity and is spying on her, but she'd probably have sniffed them out pretty quick already if that were the case.

"…Yeah." He says, voice lowering a bit before he dares to speak at a normal volume, "Yeah, yeah, I did." Stiles scratches the back of his neck and jumps to his feet, before pausing, like he's not sure why he just did that – everyone's got something, everything, to hide, and so many faces are faces schooled into careful expressions, guarded and misleading. Stiles is none of that. He keeps wetting his lips, goes like he might look away, except he doesn't, and she indulges the thought that that might be because he thinks there's something worth looking at. "Hi," he says.

Lydia laughs warmly. She's a thing that can kill, that can maim, that can rip throats out and smile pretty all the while; she's the one to drop her gaze to the ground, the one of them two with the flush to her cheeks. She sits up, draws her knees to her chest, then pats the blanket beside her invitingly. "Is that all?"

"No." Stiles sits down next to her, quick for a human, but in the same amount of time it takes for him to do so, she could already be down the stairs, through the hall, out the door and halfway across the street. Lydia doesn't miss the slight jitter to his hand as he reaches for her, is struck by how she could slash his wrists with her teeth before he even– contrition washes over her, just for the mere thought, and she moves into the touch, rests her cheek against his palm. He's tentative, almost stilted, but that's okay.

She guides his other wrist up, until his hand is on her shoulder, and leans back so he leans forward, over her. When her shins bump his abdomen, she lets her legs fall harmlessly, apart and out before she wraps them around his waist. She grins, in spite of herself, at the way his breath catches, and revels in the jackhammer of his heartbeat when he dips down for a kiss that's as time-meltingly slow as it is all too brief.

He's getting with the program, as any teenage guy is oft to do, though it's not as though they haven't mapped out each other's bodies plenty of times before already. It's not enough, though, to have done it once, twice, countlesstimes. It always feels new, and so what if she's a little greedy? Sue me, she thinks dazedly, half-drunk on their mingling scents.

She pulls him closer, pushes them closer, bares her throat and falls a little farther.

It's one o'clock in the morning, the neighborhood is blessedly silent, and the thought of sleep doesn't even cross Lydia's mind.