Okay everyone, here it is. The final chapter. I hope it satisfies, it's for everyone who hung on and showed me love for this little thing. And if you've read it through and through I would so adore to hear your thoughts on the story as a whole or any little portion you wish. It'd mean the world to me, and happy 3B, loves.

"What are you doing here?" her voice raised an octave and she hated it. He startled her and she mentally chided herself for being such a girl. But he was standing right there, near the window where he had first arrived drenched with rain, and the image nearly bowled her over.

"I'm early," he said sheepishly and looked away. She was in her towel, fresh out of the shower. "I'll um.." he scratched his head. "I'll wait in the…uh…hallway. Dodge bullets from your dad."

She squeezed out a tight smile as he passed by her in the door frame, awkwardly fumbling for his limbs to take him out of her room as fast as possible.

Seventeen days, but who was counting. Seventeen without a word spoken, until just then. Allison released a heavy sigh and stepped into sweatpants and a T-shirt when she heard the doorbell ring and muffled words beyond the walls.

"Honey," her dad called down the hall. "Scott's here."

Allison rolled her eyes. This would be no fun at all. She'd been minding her own business in Physics, staring at the blackboard with a surly expression and slumping in her seat when both Scott and Isaac turned in their desks to look at her.

They'd been assigned a group project together.

She crept up the hallway in her socks so as not to make a noise, but when she found they said nothing but gentlemanly boy things to her dad she grew irritated and padded into the kitchen. "Should we do this?" she said flippantly and filled up a glass of water so violently that is sloshed over the rim and onto her wrists.

So there they sat, at her kitchen table, trying to work on a Physics presentation. She was between them, their chairs flanked diagonally towards her at the round table, and she wondered how gravity worked. She hadn't really been paying attention in class lately.

Her head was pounding and felt like metal. It clanged and thrummed and clamored until a thigh brushed ever so slightly against hers. Her eyes widened and her mind went silent. It was Isaac. She looked over at him, but he quickly adjusted his long legs and coughed. It was probably an accident, but Allison was looking for any reason. Any reason at all.

"Look, why don't we just do this the normal way? I'll do it, you guys show up and say your paragraphs I assign to you and I get you an A?" Allison stared both of them down, dumb looks on their faces. "Huh?" The boys scrambled to figure out who should say what first. She slammed her textbook closed. "Good," and stalked off towards her bedroom.

Allison ate lunch with her back up against the wall in between the bookshelves in the library. Sometimes if they swarmed her way in the hallways she'd hide in the bathroom, cupping her mouth with her hand and willing her eyes not to sting. She hated the way they looked at her. Lydia with worry and pity. Stiles with frustration. Isaac with fleeting, lost yearning. And Scott…

The night she'd stalked Isaac down in the locker room she'd gone to Scott's first. To cut her deal.

"Are you hurt?" she asked plainly.

"I feel fine." he said with blank matter-of-factness.

"Are you hurt? Did I hurt you?" She looked him in the eye but she tugged on her sleeves all the while.

Scott's jaw seemed a little more off kilter than usual. It did that when he thought deeply, when he was troubled. His eyes flicked red before being stamped out by brown. "Yeah," she whispered throatily. "Yeah. I am."

"Do this for me, and please don't blame him. I did it. I chased him-"

"Don't, Allison," he said. He would barely speak above a whisper, standing at his front entrance and she on the top step. He hadn't invited her in. "I already said yes. My mom made up his bed, but that doesn't mean I'll-"

"Yes it does, Scott," she pressed. "It's over anyway. You guys need each other more than you need to be fighting over a girl."

Scott stared at her without saying anything more, his face unreadable. Finally Allison nodded in surrender and turned to walk down the concrete pathway to her car.

"You're not just a girl," Scott said to her back.

She tilted her head back and looked to the stars, turned back to him. "Just remember that he loves you…." she paused, strumming her lips together before, "…and I don't."

Scott looked at her with sadness. And resignation.

But her plan was working. She would see them walking together, laughing, talking. And she would smile, truly, earnestly smile. Just because she'd let the tears seep into her pillow at night didn't mean her smile wasn't genuine. She could do both.

On day twenty-two she e-mailed Scott and Isaac their portion of the Physics presentation. On day twenty-three their teacher assigned them detention for plagiarizing. And at 4:23pm on day twenty-three, Lydia came in with a note that called for Scott to be excused to the Principal's office, and for Mr. Henderson to join a faculty meeting in the next room. She assured him she'd make sure detention was honored.

Allison bulged her eyes at Lydia, don't leave me alone here, but Lydia flipped her hair and followed Scott out of the room with purpose. At 4:25, the door latched and the knob clicked from the outside: locked.

Isaac and Allison stared at each other in their desks before jumping up at the exact same time and rushing to look through the small paned rectangular window, where Lydia waved a key in front of of them cheekily.

"Lydia, what are you doing?" Allison said, panicking and rattling the knob.

"You two need to talk. So do it," Lydia said.

Allison rattled the door knob harder, but Isaac stood silent behind her. She turned back to look at him, casually standing there with his hands in his pockets, leaning on the teacher's desk. She scoffed in disgust.

"Scott?" she pleaded, but he shrugged behind Lydia.

"You…do need to talk," he mumbled and kind of see-sawed his head back and forth in a bargaining manner.

"I can just break the knob off," Issac said smoothly, apathy in full play.

Lydia smiled. "Yes," she said in a sing-song voice. "But the entire science department is in the next room and I don't think you want a vandalism suspension. Mrs. McCall would not be pleased."

Scott muffled a laugh behind her as Isaac's jaw clenched.

"Toodleloo," Lydia waved and disappeared from the window.

Allison slammed the door with an open palm. "Dammit, Lydia," she yelled.

"Is it really that terrible?" Isaac said. "To talk to me?"

Allison crossed her arms and slouched against the door. "Don't," she said but her voice cracked horribly.

Isaac threw his hands up, rolled his eyes. "Alright then. I guess we'll just wait," he said and slid himself down to sit on the cold tile and lean up against the desk. Allison stared down at him for a long while until she conceded and slid her back down the door to sit opposite him.

Isaac drummed his fingers against his knee for a while, made some air sounds with his lips, and memorized every crack on the wall just above her until he finally piped up. "God you're so stubborn, you know that?"

"You're irrational," she spat back.

"I'm not," he said with a slight smile.

"What would be your solution, then?" she asked.

Isaac looked down. "We could go back to being friends."

"Please. We were never friends," she said.

"We could try," he said quietly, lifting his gaze to her from hooded lids that were intent on staring at his shoes.

Allison thought. No, no they couldn't try. And she'd prove it. She leaned forward and touched her palms to the dusty floor and began crawling towards him on her hands and knees to close the gap, swaying sensually like a panther. She reached him in a few strides and swung a leg around to settle in his lap. His chest rose and fell mightily. She traced a finger along his jaw bone.

"Ok, Isaac," she said, low and sultry. "Let's be friends."

His hands gripped her waist and inched up her rib cage. His finger pads trailed her spine up and up and up. She curved back, but it brought her torso closer to him. She leaned in, tilting her head back, her hair tickling his hands at her shoulders and allowing him to inhale her. She knew he felt it too. The magnetism. It's what compelled her to touch him the night he came through her window; her hand on his chest when she had barely known him.

"Still wanna be friends?" she sighed as her eyes closed and she allowed herself to feel the tickle of his nose against her collarbone and the permeation of his hot breath along it.

"Yes," he said into her skin. "But I don't know how." Her palm traveled along his chest and she mewled, sighed, let the tension escape and let his touch heal her and engulf her.

"Well then I rest my case," she said breathily, trying to be assertive but it didn't exactly turn out that way.

"And what if I love you?"

Allison froze. He looked up at her and brushed her hair away from her eye, cupped her face delicately in his hands.

"I don't want you to," she whispered.

"Not up to you," he said and the corner of his mouth turned up.

On day twenty-six Allison was holed up in her usual library hideaway between bookshelves that towered and enclosed her and gave her comfort. She was reading Jane Eyre for English class and Jane was just about to leave Mr. Rochester when a book to her left started to wiggle. It fell off the shelf and onto her lap and through the slit prodded a bright blue eye.

"Hey," Isaac said and flashed a dashing smile.

Allison sighed. "Go away."

"What?" he said innocently. "I need to catch up on the English reading. What chapter are you on? I'll start there."

"You're not making this any easier, Isaac," she said and inserted the book back in its place.

Another one fell on her. "Oh I know," he said and beamed cheekily at her through the new space. "But I'll tell you what," he said and a folded piece of paper slid across the space in the shelf towards her. "I'll let you get back to it."

The note read I'll be here.

And it went on like that for weeks. It wasn't incessant, but every now and then she'd open her locker and find a wistful Come back. Sometimes she'd open a textbook and there would be another that simply read Hi. Some were more urgent, like Come on. Others were cheeky, like the drawing with twenty arrows piercing a heart. Jackass.

At first Allison hated them. They made her ache and then she turned that ache into anger and she'd crumble them up or rip them into tiny pieces on her desk during a class she knew he'd be in. She didn't know when it happened, but at some point she stopped aching and started smiling when one fluttered from her locker onto the floor. She started keeping them, stockpiling them, but sacrificed a few to continue to shred in front of him in class. For novelty. Though now it was done with tongue shoved in cheek, and a silent dare from his raised eyebrow and a twinkle in her eye as she pulled the paper into tiny strips as he looked on. They made a show of it, an entire session of foreplay played out in that torn paper and its poor, shredded fate. You wouldn't one of them read in her Physics textbook. Oh, but she would. And her tongue curled over her teeth as he stared at her from across the room.

But she still kept all the distance in the world. Lydia said they all missed her, that she couldn't just take herself out of the equation without causing structural damage. But her presence had caused collateral damage before so what was a foundational crack compared to collateral? She didn't see another fixable solution, even if hers wasn't a very good one, it was the best one she could find. She shrugged Lydia off.

No one could break through her resolve, that is, until Stiles got to her.

He cornered her coming out of the bathroom. "We need to talk," he said.

"About what?" she said, but kept walking towards her next class. It was all the way in the other wing of the school. "Hi Stiles, by the way." They hadn't talked much. She had felt his judgment loud and clear in the hospital room.

"You need to stop this," he said.

"Stop what?" she feigned innocence, and smiled when his mouth tightened up in frustration like it always did.

"Being an idiot," Stiles said and she came to a halt, turned to him with a skeptical twinge of her brow.

She had the speech prepared. She was so used to doling it out that it dripped with condescension. "I'm making the best possible decision, even if it's not a very good one, Stiles. And why is everyone so invested in my romantic business anyway?"

"Jesus, Allison will you stop playing the martyr for like two seconds and listen to me," he blurted out loudly and bombastically.

Allison balked.

"You're making literally everyone miserable, including yourself. Will you just stop being so goddamn stubborn and wake up. You're allowed to reverse a decision, you know."

"You don't know that," she said.

Stiles scratched his head. "Know…know what? Which part because I had a lot going on in that-"

"Making everyone miserable. It'd be worse if I chose the selfish thing," she said.

"Oh my God who am I even talking to!" Stiles practically yelled. "You are being selfish. You're being entirely selfish. You're making everyone else's decisions for them instead of letting them decide how to handle anything. You're denying Isaac the choice to be completely freaking crazy in love with you and you're denying me the chance to judge you severely for it and be a good friend because Sc-"

"Scott," she cut him off, and looked down to pick at her thumbnail. "Come on Stiles you know what we did to Scott…"

"Yeah," he said, softer now. "But Allison the guy's happiest when the people he loves are happy. You know that. He's torn up that his friends are unhappy. He sees it all the time and that…that is more suffering for him than anything else."

Allison's eyes pooled and she gasped for an intake of sharp air to try and stop them from welling up. "Stiles…" she started but trailed off.

"Come on," Stiles rolled his eyes playfully. "You don't need to punish yourself that much longer for making goggly eyes at Isaac "Greek God" Lahey."

Allison giggled, but when she did it released the tears down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her sleeves.

Stiles rubbed her arm up and down soothingly and she nodded in silent thanks.

"And I mean who of us isn't in mortal danger on any given day," he said with his usual drip of sarcasm. "Stop beating yourself up, kid. You can't make your decisions based on that either, or you might as well go be a...a nun in a lepor colony...or something." And he left her with a playful punch to her arm.

She exhaled. God, she had really been an idiot.

The floodgates opened. Everything she had kept at bay was pouring in and if she didn't move right this second she'd drown. Her chest swelled with urgency and her mind raced. Where would he be? She rushed against the hallway traffic and pushed and shoved her way through the crowds of students she didn't know. The more she looked at faces that weren't his the more fervent she became.

Allison finally barreled through the heavy steel doors that gave way to the parking lot and wind whipped at her face and blurred her vision with her hair. She rushed down the steps and into the center of the lot, where she whirled around and around and couldn't find him. The wind helped spin her around until she thought she'd spin out of control.

"Isaac!" she finally called out and turned once more, only to find him just there before her, appearing like an apparition.

Her flurried, frantic movement stilled and she stood assured, even as angry gusts of wind crashed against her. Isaac's hair thrashed and his shirt pulled away from him as he strode towards her, slicing through the sideways roar of of air. Once upon her, he stroked her wild hair away from her face and held her, following his thumbs along her cheeks.

"Isaac…I…I…." she searched his face, hers trying to convey everything she couldn't say.

"Hi," he said with a lopsided, half smile.

"Hi," she said back.

"Told you I'd be here," he said.

"Impeccable timing," she said and smiled a broad, deep smile that she hadn't smiled in so long.

A lock of hair flew in her eyes and he brushed it back with his palm before leaning down and kissing her softly.

fin

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