Long Time Coming Home (gift for htbthomas) - part 2
[Continued from Part 1]
Allison stood at her locker the next morning listening to the excitement from the previous night’s win rumble through the halls. She unwound her scarf slowly and hung it carefully from the hook in her locker to give alibi to her eavesdropping. Her fellow students bounced down the hallway, recaps of the game’s highlights careening off their lips in one breath with favorable forecasts for the rest of the season thrown in on the next. In her short time at Beacon Hills High, she had come to discover that the fanfare she’d seen given to the lacrosse team in her first days was capable only of escalation.
Jackson’s “death” had slammed a damper on the school spirit. The rumor mill had churned so furiously about the two minutes after the championship game that much of the student body became convinced that Beacon Hills had lost the game.
With the start of the first season without Jackson’s leadership, the student body’s cheer was louder than ever. Allison sensed a note of effort to it, though, like the students were crowing their support of the team to prove that they still could.
Yet, she wondered, how many of those same fans would be so proud of their school if they knew why the team had the success it did.
She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time. Before tucking them into the pockets of her coat, she took out the large rings she liked to wear that she couldn’t wear under the restricting cloth of the gloves.
Her fingers fumbled and the filigreed ring with the green stone--a ring that had been her mother’s-- clattered to the floor. She started to bend down to retrieve it, one hand catching her long brown hair to keep it from tumbling into her face when a new hand swept into view.
Danny picked up the ring and held it out to her on his open palm. “Here,” he said, by way of greeting.
“Thanks.” Allison smiled, her dimples impressing themselves deep into her cheeks. She took the ring, checked it quickly for damage. It showed none so she slipped it on her index finger. “You guys had a great game last night.”
Danny nodded, the compliment not fazing him one way or the other. Ever since Jackson’s death, Danny had become even more reserved. He had on a pair of black jeans and a well-washed formerly-black t-shirt for The Matrix. With so many of the other team members wearing their jerseys, his choice of wearing street clothes stuck out. “So, I’m supposed to give you a message. From Coach.” He had his backpack slung over one shoulder which he shifted to his other.
Allison squashed the tremble of worry that tried to run through her body. Coach Finstock only thought he was someone to be feared, and he had no power over her anyway. “Oh?” A moment of concern flashed through her that Danny had more candles in his backpack and that she’d have to explain...something...to him about why Coach wanted her to have them.
Danny took a deep breath and let it out, his eyes crinkling in a preemptive apology. “I’m supposed to tell you-and these are his words-‘Good job last night. Now keep your witchy fingers to yourself until I give you the all clear. Those bastards at the CIAA aren’t going to find anything to run me out.’” He rubbed his hands against his legs as he finished the recitation and quirked an eyebrow up. “Should I even ask if you know what that means?”
Now it was Allison’s turn to sigh. She finished hanging her coat in her locker, taking care to smooth out how the fabric draped. “You probably understand it as well as I do,” she replied. She kept her face turned into her locker so that he wouldn’t catch her tracing her eyebrow. Damn Scott for enlightening her about that tell. Now she caught herself doing it on those occasions when she still had to lie. No effort worked in unlearning the habit.
“I get the CIAA part,” Danny mused. “We’re supposed to be having drug testing today in practice. Some people are coming in from the state board to make sure we’re all on the up-and-up. Coach is worried that he’s going to lose his job if the tests come back positive.”
“Aren’t drug tests supposed to be a surprise?”
Danny shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Issac overheard Coach talking on the phone, and he told Scott, who told Stiles. You know how those guys are.”
As if hearing his name summoned him, Isaac appeared out of the flow of passing students and settled next to Danny. He wore his jersey, though he kept his arms crossed over the front like he was trying to cover up the number. “You know how which guys are?” he asked. He cocked his head at Danny and smirked, already knowing the answer. “So you think that Scott and Stiles talk too much?”
Allison withdrew a step at Isaac’s appearance, one hand going to her locker door in case she needed to slam it or hide behind it--for all the good a cheap piece of metal would do against werewolf strength. She had tried to kill Isaac, had stabbed him repeatedly and for no reason except to hurt him as badly as she could. His gaze swept over her now and she could feel him passing judgment. The tension ratcheted and Allison felt her face and upper chest growing warm under the scrutiny.
Danny cut the mood with a hard kiss on Isaac’s lips, which had the side-effect of also erasing the smirk. “If we don’t get moving,” Danny told him, “we’re going to be late for class.”
For an instant, Allison thought she saw Isaac’s eyes flash gold. She blinked and all she saw was blue, human eyes. Danny didn’t know about werewolves, didn’t know about Isaac or Scott. Or Jackson. It wasn’t her business to tell him, and Isaac probably had his own reasons for waiting. Eventually, she knew, Danny would find out and the weight of all the secrets being loosed would probably crush him the way it had crushed her. Until then, he got to enjoy his time with his boyfriend, and that made her envious. Allison grabbed her textbooks out of her locker and shut the door with a loud clang.
“Are you sure you don’t want to cut?” Isaac whispered, placing the words along Danny’s cheekbone in an obvious invitation.
“Can’t be at practice if we miss school,” Danny reminded him, “And today’s the wrong day to miss. We’d get kicked off the team.”
“I’m willing to pay that price,” Isaac said. He dropped his hand onto Danny’s shoulder and gave a light squeeze that made Danny’s heavy-lidded eyes go wide.
Danny shook himself free from Isaac and once again shifted his backpack, putting it on the shoulder between him and his boyfriend. “Tempting though the offer is, this is not how I want to end my lacrosse career. Coach says I’ve got what it takes to go to the next level. Besides, I’m not worried about a drug test. Are you?”
“No!” Isaac replied, a little too fast, a little too loud. Allison frowned at the response. Steroids wouldn’t work in his system, but the test itself could turn out to be a problem if he couldn’t control his healing--a detail which Allison suspected he was more concerned about than he was letting on. As if to disabuse her of the possibility that he worried about anything at all anymore, he cast a meaningful look at her and added, “All my talent is totally natural.” The smirk started to spread again, like it was his default expression.
Danny glanced from Isaac to Allison as if he could catch their in-joke with the skill that he caught attempted goals, then gave up with a shake of his head. “Do you have any messages to send back to Coach? If he’s going to pay me the big bucks...”
“I’m fine,” Allison answered, remembering Lydia’s comment about the toad. If she were feeling braver, she’d try that one. It would only work, though, if she were able to spy on Coach when he got the message. “I’ll keep myself...to myself. I guess.”
“I’ll let him know you said that,” Danny said.
Isaac rolled his shoulders, his impatience with the conversation obvious. “Come on. It’s bad enough that you’re making me behave. I don’t need to be bored to death, too.” He started down the hall, Danny falling into step next to him, a final glance back at her offering one more apology that wasn’t his to give.
“Don’t worry, Isaac,” Allison called after them. “I’m sure the blood test won’t hurt at all.”
Isaac stuck his hand behind his back and flipped her the bird, never once faltering in his step. She giggled, not even sure what method the drug test was going to use, but liking how normal his response was. She didn’t think they could be friends; she’d ended that when she had rammed the knives in his chest. They’d fought together since then as reluctant allies, so she knew he didn’t completely hate her. If they could be teens now, just highschoolers who ran with the same overlapping groups, that would be real progress.
She watched as Isaac slipped his arm around Danny’s waist, casual yet hesitant like he was trying not to get caught. The boys’ heights matched, though Isaac was lankier and prone to slouching. Danny was broader and more confident. He brought his hand to rest on Isaac’s ass, no hesitation at all.
Hugging her books to her chest, she started toward her classroom. The hallway was abuzz with activity, which made navigating it troublesome--especially since her mind wasn’t really on the task. Out of nowhere, she had the disconcerting sensation of every first day walking the halls of her new schools, all rolled into one. The other kids rushed to their classes or dawdled for a few more minutes by their lockers or congregated with friends in the hallway, and none of them had time for her. Her step started to slow, the edges of her books started to dig into her chest.
“It’s not Peter,” Scott said, appearing at her side from out the stream of traffic. “I was so sure it was him.”
Allison tripped, a startled “oh” forming on her lips. She regained her balance quickly, but not without old doubt rearing up: She half-expected someone in the crowd to start a slow clap at her clumsiness. She shook it off as Scott’s comment penetrated her brain. “Where did you come from? How do you know it’s not him?”
He wore his backpack on both shoulders, his lacrosse stick strung through the straps and bobbing behind him. His hoodie hung open over his jersey. A large grass stain marred the front of the hoodie and a streak of mud stained the thigh of his jeans. The cuffs of both legs looked wet and his shoes left behind muddy tracks. “I had a talk with him,” he answered. He gripped his brown hair with both hands, briefly locking his fingers behind his head.
Allison raised her eyebrows, assuming that the ‘talk’ had involved some violence if Scott’s dishevelment was anything to go by. Any wounds he had acquired had long since healed, though smudges on his face and neck showed where they probably had been. As much as she wanted to know more, the school hallway wasn’t the place to press for details. She made a mental note to ask him later; any excuse to hear about Peter losing a fight was a good one. “And you believe him? Are you sure he’s telling the truth?”
“I know he’s not lying,” Scott answered. “Why is this so hard? Why wouldn’t she just tell me?”
“She must have a good reason. Maybe she didn’t want to get your hopes up until she knew if the relationship was going anywhere. Do you know if Coach Finstock has a class first hour?”
Scott pulled a face, though in response to which question she didn’t know. “Maybe? I don’t know. Why?”
Allison came to a stop in the hallway, dragging Scott to a halt with her. Pairs of fellow students swerved around the sudden blockade, though Allison didn’t care. “Because I need to talk to him. He thinks I can... do...things.” They’d been walking toward Finstock’s office, away from the academic wing of the building. At this juncture the lingering smell of sausage patties and eggs from the school cafeteria competed with the pervasive scent of sweat and air freshener from the locker rooms. Allison wrinkled her nose against them.
“You can do things.” Scott answered.
“No, like--” Allison glanced around furtively, lowered her voice. “--Magic. He thinks I can do magic.” She pursed her lips while she gathered her thoughts, then gave him a brief rundown of her interactions with the coach over the past day. The candles, the conversation with Danny. On retelling, the events struck her as little more than those an overactive imagination might concoct.
Scott never doubted her. He listened to the whole thing without so much as cracking a smile. When she was finished, he summarized: “He thinks you’re a witch?” He thought about it for a moment, his hands tightening and loosening their grip on the straps of his backpack. “Yeah, OK. I guess that makes sense. Every time you come to a game, amazing things happen.”
“I’ve been to all the games. Except the last one.” She fiddled with her ring while she tried not to think too hard about what she had missed and why. With all the commotion at the game, her absence wouldn’t have been noticed. “Which he probably assumed I was at,” she concluded.
“Exactly. And all the strange things started to happen right after you moved here.”
“Strange things that I didn’t even know about!” She rocked back on the heels of her boots, arms thrown out in exasperation.
A look of guilt flashed across Scott’s face and Allison reassured him with a light touch to his face that she didn’t hold his secrecy against him. Considering how knowing about werewolves had turned out, sometimes she wished that the secret had never been broken, that she had never been tasked with carrying the burden of that knowledge. Scott’s navigation through those waters had been rough; hers had been rougher. How different their lives would have been if the supernatural didn’t exist.
“I think it makes sense,” Scott confirmed. “It’s wrong, but it makes sense.”
“Which explains the candles. He wants to make sure the team keeps winning and he thinks I’m the one responsible for that.” Allison shook her head. “And, yet, I’m perfectly ordinary.”
“I think you’re magical,” Scott countered. Allison blushed, the warmth brightening her face so much that she was surprised it didn’t reflect off Scott’s eyes. He let go of the straps and took her hands in his, like he’d wanted to all along and just now lost his ability to resist. His skin was dark against hers, the contrast so familiar and right that she couldn’t believe she’d gone so long without it. Tangling their fingers together, she brought their clasped hands up for a gentle kiss.
The bell rang, shattering the moment. Students began to filter into their classrooms, rapidly emptying the hallway. Scott and Allison stayed unmoving, a token attempt on Allison’s part to pull away abandoned because she’d have to go a different direction than Scott and she didn’t want to.
“I’m going to tell him,” Scott said, suddenly. His voice was too loud for the nearly empty hall. He cleared his throat and repeated, softer and more earnestly: “I’m going to tell him.”
Allison blinked. “Tell who what?”
“I’m going to tell Coach about…you know.” A pained expression crossed his face then, as if even he couldn’t believe his words. He cringed, but didn’t pull away.
“Are you sure you wanna do that?”
With his eyebrows twisted together, Scott nodded. “I think I have to. He obviously knows something is up and now that he’s looking for supernatural explanations, he’s going to notice things. Plus there’s the drug tests, and those will come back negative--at least on me and Isaac--and we’re the ones most under suspicion. So, yeah.”
“Then we’ll go together,” Allison stated, the decision sudden yet obvious. Whatever you’re going to do, do with confidence, she remembered her mother telling her. If they were going to confront Finstock, then they needed to do it without fear. For a second, Scott looked like he was going to argue; something in her expression ended the protestation before he could make it. Instead, he took a small step back so that she could lead the way.
With her mother’s voice echoing in her head as her guide, she squared her shoulders and headed down the last stretch of hallway to Coach’s office, hand-in-hand with Scott.
--
Finstock’s office was empty when they got there. Allison peered through the window at the messy interior-papers stacked on the desk, coffee rings imprinted on the wooden desk, an overflowing garbage can-before trying the knob. It turned easily.
“Last chance to change your mind,” she said to Scott.
He tipped his head back and groaned at the ceiling. For a moment, Allison thought he might actually change his mind. She watched his face carefully, searching for expanding sideburns or a glimmer of yellow in his eyes: some sign he wouldn’t be able to emotionally handle outing himself to his coach. Nothing happened.
Allison pushed the door open and stuck her head inside. “Mr. Finstock,” she called. No answer. A half-drunk cup of coffee sat cooling on his desk. His brown pleather jacket was slung over the back of his chair. He probably did have a first hour class, which would really throw a wrench in the works because then she and Scott would have to come back. Getting her nerve up once had been hard enough. Doing it twice seemed unfathomable.
From next to her, Scott peered around the messy office. Then he stuck his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Anything?” Allison asked.
“Nah. He’s got a peanut butter sandwich rotting in the bottom of his garbage can and most of his markers are dead, but.... He must really have a lot on his mind. This isn’t like him.”
That information didn’t help. Allison sighed. “I guess we wait?” She turned a slow circle looking for a chair or even a relatively clear patch of wall to lean against. Aside from Coach’s desk chair, there wasn’t anything. It had to be a ploy to get people to leave, Allison thought. Without a chair, no one would sit and chat. She could see that appealing to him.
Scott drifted over to the desk and began looking at the papers from his upside down vantage point. A moment later, he motioned Allison over. “I think Coach is really in trouble.” He gestured to the paper underneath the coffee mug.
Though some of the letters were obscured or smeared with the coffee ring, she was able to get the gist. The CIAA was basically accusing the Beacon Hills lacrosse team of drug use on the grounds that their win against the Sycamore Beavers was unbelievable. If, the politely phrased letter continued, drug use was discovered, the team would be suspended indefinitely and their trophy retracted. Further, the CIAA would begin proceedings against Finstock to get him fired.
“Wow,” Allison breathed. “No wonder he’s being so weird.” She slipped the page back under the coffee mug, doing her best to align the ring so that their spying wouldn’t be discovered.
“Not any weirder than normal. It does explain the mess, though. I definitely need to--” Scott’s head shot up. He tracked his eyes to the desk, but didn’t otherwise move.
“What?” Allison asked.
“His phone.”
Listening hard, Allison picked up on the faint staccato buzzing of a cell phone’s ring coming from within the desk drawer. Before she knew what she was doing, she crossed to the desk and slid the drawer open. The expected cell phone was crammed in among more papers, its face lit up with the green glow of active use. She should have closed the drawer and walked away; they hadn’t come into the office to snoop and they’d already done more than she was comfortable with. She should have, but she didn’t.
She read the text message on display--
--and swallowed hard. Her fingers grasped at the edge of the desk in a desperate bid for stability.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asked. He was at her side so fast that the corners of the papers on the desk fluttered.
Wordlessly, she pointed to the display.
Scott leaned over her to read it. He froze. Allison couldn’t even feel his exhalations against her ear.
From out in the hall, she heard the distant thunk of a door slamming shut and the squeaking wheels of a custodian’s mop bucket going past.
Then, from Scott, came a hollow, “Crap.”
“Well, I guess that answers that question,” Allison commented. She read the text one more time just to make sure that she and Scott weren’t both misreading it. They weren’t. She quietly slid the drawer closed so that she wouldn’t keep reading the screen. Twice was bad enough. She was never going to be able to unsee what it had said, or see Mrs. McCall in same way again.
“I would have been happier if it had been Peter.”
“Not true,” Allison countered.
Scott swallowed, then forced out a hard breath. “Okay, not true,” he conceded. He dragged his hands through his hair, gripping the back of his head. “What am I going to do?”
“We could be wrong,” Allison suggested, grasping for any consolation. “Wouldn’t you have smelled him on her?”
A visible shudder passed through Scott. “I probably did. With all the time I spend around him, I never thought about why his smell...” He shuddered again. “Oh, god.”
The office door banged open. Allison and Scott scrambled to the other side of the desk, guilt painting their faces, at the sight of Coach standing in the doorway. He had his clipboard tucked under one arm and a water bottle clenched in his hand. A scowl twisted his mouth.
“Do I even want to know?” Coach demanded.
“We, uh. We came to talk to you,” Allison stammered. She had to force herself not to grab Scott’s hand again, not to hunker down into her own shoulders or to apologize and try to escape without doing what they’d come here to do.
Coach stood stolid, his expression unchanging as he looked back and forth from Allison to Scott. “I probably don’t want to know. What you kids do on your time is your business. Rumor has it that the school has some excellent counselors who can--”
“It’s not...that,” Scott interrupted. “Whatever you think that is. It’s not. It’s--” He squeezed his eyes shut and gnawed on his lip. The question, when it finally came, spilled out in one rush: “Did my mom tell you about me?”
Coach crossed to his desk, tossing the clipboard onto a stack of papers that started to topple over and setting the water bottle down next to the coffee cup--right on the letter from the CIAA. He clearly wasn’t impressed with their threats. “McCall,” Coach answered. “Mc. Call. You think I wouldn’t know who you are? What goes through that head of yours? Your mother is not the kind of woman to lie about having kids. Kid. I have nothing against kids. She’d better not want any more, though, because I--”
Allison cleared her throat loudly. The panic flooding Scott’s face frightened her and she had to do something before he fled the room and left her alone with the coach. “That’s not what he meant.” She couldn’t help but note that Coach wasn’t surprised by Scott knowing about him. She wondered what Scott’s mom had told her new boyfriend.
“What else could he mean? Most women my age have kids. It’s something you have to accept if you’re going to date. You got an issue with me dating a beautiful woman, McCall?”
“No,” Scott squeaked. “It’s just...I’m…” He looked at Allison for support. All she could offer was a wan smile and reassuring thoughts that he hoped he could sense. “I’m a werewolf.”
Coach picked up his coffee cup and took a long, loud swallow.
“And I’m not a witch,” Allison chimed into the silence. She folded her hands behind her back and tried to stand up straighter. Her knees wouldn’t stop shaking. She’d faced down an Alpha werewolf, a kanima, and her own grandfather, and this is what was making her nervous? She willed her knees to stop, to no avail.
Coach returned the mug to its circle on the desk and lowered himself into his chair. It rolled back slightly under his weight. Something crunched under one wheel.
“I’m not the only one, either,” Scott added. “On the team, I mean.” Or in the school, Allison mentally added, though she didn’t think Coach needed to know about that.
“Werewolves?” Coach stated, the word flat like he had no idea what it meant. He nodded slowly, processing. “On my team? More than one?” The rhetorical questions hanging in the air, he pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head heavily. “For the love of God, McCall, you’d better not be talking about Greenberg.”
“Uh. No?” Scott glanced at Allison again and she shrugged. Unless Derek had gone on another biting spree, the only werewolves in the school were Scott, Erica, Boyd, and Isaac-with were already too many, as far as both of them were concerned. “No, not Greenberg.”
“That’s a relief. That boy is barely human as it is.” Coach blew out a breath and started tapping his fingers on his desk, his gaze turned inward as he worked through his new information. “So, what you’re saying is: the team doesn’t have a drug problem; it has a full moon problem?”
“That’s…one way to look at it,” Scott answered, his confusion echoed in Allison’s expression.
Slapping the desk, Coach exclaimed, “Well, that’s a relief. Just tell me one thing: Are you certain that the-“ He whirled a hand in the air as he sought to yank the right word from the ether-“whatever it is that makes you what you are won’t show up in a urine test?”
“I-I don’t think so?” Scott replied. His eyebrows quirked up in surprise at the question.
“Coach, don’t you want some proof?” Allison asked. She cast a glance at Scott who had his bottom lip captured between his teeth. No fangs showed, but a glint in his eye told her that he only needed a little push and they’d emerge.
“Proof? I’ve seen all kinds of proof! How about a blood test?” Coach bulled on. “Will it show up in a blood test?” He was leaning forward onto the desk now, his shoulders tensed.
Scott shook his head in the negative, though Allison wondered if anyone had answered that question for sure or if Scott was just guessing. He raised his arms as if to add something, maybe offer a correction, then dropped them without comment.
Coach hummed in thought, his finger tapping, tapping against the DVD case for The Craft. Finally, he pushed himself upright. Yanking open one of the lower desk drawers, he withdrew a compact book which he proceeded to flip through. Its pages were heavily marked with index tabs and colored with yellow highlighter. He found the section he wanted, scanned the contents, then threw the book down onto the desk. “Werewolves aren’t against the rules,” he proclaimed.
Both Scott and Allison’s eyes went wide. Neither of them wanted to bring up the ethical issues with fielding supernaturally enhanced people, yet the point did need to be addressed now that the rule book was officially being brought into play.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Finstock interrupted. “If Sycamore is allowed to have a mutant like Abamowitz on the team, then I’m allowed to have werewolves. There’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t, and I don’t want to hear one word from either of you!”
Scott made a zipping motion over his mouth.
“And, you,” Finstock added, aiming a finger at Allison, “I expect your continued support of the team. You need herbs or rocks or anything, you just let me know. But don’t go asking me for eyes. I won’t do eyes. That’s just disgusting.”
Allison opened her mouth to correct him, again, but a small shake of Scott’s head stayed her. Let him, Scott’s expression seemed to say. It makes it easier.
“OK,” she said instead, “No eyes.”
“Good. Now get out of here. Don’t you two have classes to get to?”
“Can we, uh…” Scott licked his lips. “Can we get a pass?”
Coach scoffed, but reached for the pass booklet anyway. For a moment, his normal energy diminished and Coach, and the mood in the room, turned serious. “McCall,” he started, “your mother’s a good woman. Don’t you worry about me treating her right.” As he handed the signed slips of paper over, he added, “Not a word of what we discussed leaves here. What we said in here, stays in here. Loose lips sink ships, you know.”
Allison and Scott accepted the passes without comment, neither quite sure what to say. If Allison was reading things right, Coach had not only adapted to the idea of werewolves with all the effort it took for dead skins to slough off, but he’d promised to keep Scott’s secret. She had no idea he was capable of being like that. Maybe he and Mrs. McCall did have potential.
Thoughts once again buzzing, they left the office, closing the door softly behind them. Before it finished shutting, Allison heard Coach mutter, “God damn werewolves.”
Allison bumped his shoulder with hers and whispered, “He’s still not Peter.”
The expression on Scott’s face was…one Lydia would love to have evidence of. Strictly for scientific purposes, of course. She left her phone in her pocket. Some things she wasn’t willing to share.
--
Getting through the rest of the morning without seeing Scott and without chewing her nails off took Allison more self-control than she could have imagined.
Scott texted her frequently since they had no classes together until after lunch. “Thinking of you,” he sent at 8:53. Eight minutes later, his next text said only, “Coach?”
“Coach Step-dad,” she teased back.
“I forgive you,” he returned. Her eyes got misty at that one. She knew he meant for the joke, but it was hard not to take it in reference to everything.
“Because you love me,” she texted back at 9:32, when Harris’s back was turned.
“It’s fate,” he replied. That text came through in less than 20 seconds.
She saw Scott at lunch, where they sat next to each other at one of the long cafeteria tables, trading shy, secretive glances. The hum and clatter of the cafeteria made the kind of conversation she thought they needed impossible. Stiles sat across from them systematically removing the little onions that came with his peas to an empty part of his tray. “Can you believe the school is actually trying to give us onion breath?” he complained. “It’s like they don’t want us to talk.”
“They could just be trying to cut down on kissing,” Allison suggested, shooting Scott a sideways look through her lashes.
Scott yanked his head back toward his tray like he knew he’d been caught staring. “I don’t think these kinds of onions cause bad breath,” he commented. Even so, he, too, started to push his into a separate pile to be ignored.
“It doesn’t matter,” Allison added. “A little bad breath wouldn’t stop me. Not that you have bad breath.”
“You don’t either,” Scott said. “Not that I’d care if you did.”
“God, you two,” Stiles replied. He stabbed another onion and saved its formerly adjacent peas from its contamination. Whether or not he would eat the peas remained to be seen. The small bowl in which the vegetables were served was soon cleared. In that time, Allison and Scott’s hands had found each other under the table. Their fingers wove together with Scott’s canted over hers so that the ring pressed into her skin as a solid reminder of its presence. Stiles caught the tiny look she graced Scott with from beneath her eyelashes, bent over and peered under the table. When he returned upright, he had a wide smile plastered on his face. “It’s about freakin’ time,” he laughed.
Allison had to agree. The year had been a long one with ups and downs of such extremes that only someone who had been there with her would believe it. She gave Scott’s hand a light squeeze which he met and matched. Across from them Stiles was still busily organizing the rest of his food into ‘eat’ and ‘don’t eat’ piles.
Lydia slid into the seat on her other side and reached across her to waggle her fingers in greeting to Scott who rolled his eyes back at her. “So, this is what I was thinking…” Lydia began. Allison tuned her out, but only for now. She knew she’d get the full plan again later with revisions to account for any points Stiles brought up that Lydia deemed worth listening to.
She spotted Danny and Isaac at the next table over. They were staring at whatever was on the screen of Danny’s laptop, which was open in front of them. Isaac’s eyes flickered up when Allison gaze landed on him, and he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t appear uncomfortable or defensive either, and that seemed like real progress. She offered a small smile, which he returned with a quirk of an eyebrow before going back to what he had been doing. His eyes stayed human-blue the whole time.
In the last year, she’d gained and lost her first boyfriend, had her heart broken, made friends, lost family, come into her legacy, lost her mind and struggled to find it again. She’d learned about werewolves and been accused of being a witch and seen what people could do when they were desperate enough.
None of this was what Allison had expected when she’d moved to Beacon Hills and so much of it she would undo in a heartbeat if she had the chance. Still, sitting at this table on this day with these people, she couldn’t deny how good it was to finally be home.
Allison stood at her locker the next morning listening to the excitement from the previous night’s win rumble through the halls. She unwound her scarf slowly and hung it carefully from the hook in her locker to give alibi to her eavesdropping. Her fellow students bounced down the hallway, recaps of the game’s highlights careening off their lips in one breath with favorable forecasts for the rest of the season thrown in on the next. In her short time at Beacon Hills High, she had come to discover that the fanfare she’d seen given to the lacrosse team in her first days was capable only of escalation.
Jackson’s “death” had slammed a damper on the school spirit. The rumor mill had churned so furiously about the two minutes after the championship game that much of the student body became convinced that Beacon Hills had lost the game.
With the start of the first season without Jackson’s leadership, the student body’s cheer was louder than ever. Allison sensed a note of effort to it, though, like the students were crowing their support of the team to prove that they still could.
Yet, she wondered, how many of those same fans would be so proud of their school if they knew why the team had the success it did.
She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time. Before tucking them into the pockets of her coat, she took out the large rings she liked to wear that she couldn’t wear under the restricting cloth of the gloves.
Her fingers fumbled and the filigreed ring with the green stone--a ring that had been her mother’s-- clattered to the floor. She started to bend down to retrieve it, one hand catching her long brown hair to keep it from tumbling into her face when a new hand swept into view.
Danny picked up the ring and held it out to her on his open palm. “Here,” he said, by way of greeting.
“Thanks.” Allison smiled, her dimples impressing themselves deep into her cheeks. She took the ring, checked it quickly for damage. It showed none so she slipped it on her index finger. “You guys had a great game last night.”
Danny nodded, the compliment not fazing him one way or the other. Ever since Jackson’s death, Danny had become even more reserved. He had on a pair of black jeans and a well-washed formerly-black t-shirt for The Matrix. With so many of the other team members wearing their jerseys, his choice of wearing street clothes stuck out. “So, I’m supposed to give you a message. From Coach.” He had his backpack slung over one shoulder which he shifted to his other.
Allison squashed the tremble of worry that tried to run through her body. Coach Finstock only thought he was someone to be feared, and he had no power over her anyway. “Oh?” A moment of concern flashed through her that Danny had more candles in his backpack and that she’d have to explain...something...to him about why Coach wanted her to have them.
Danny took a deep breath and let it out, his eyes crinkling in a preemptive apology. “I’m supposed to tell you-and these are his words-‘Good job last night. Now keep your witchy fingers to yourself until I give you the all clear. Those bastards at the CIAA aren’t going to find anything to run me out.’” He rubbed his hands against his legs as he finished the recitation and quirked an eyebrow up. “Should I even ask if you know what that means?”
Now it was Allison’s turn to sigh. She finished hanging her coat in her locker, taking care to smooth out how the fabric draped. “You probably understand it as well as I do,” she replied. She kept her face turned into her locker so that he wouldn’t catch her tracing her eyebrow. Damn Scott for enlightening her about that tell. Now she caught herself doing it on those occasions when she still had to lie. No effort worked in unlearning the habit.
“I get the CIAA part,” Danny mused. “We’re supposed to be having drug testing today in practice. Some people are coming in from the state board to make sure we’re all on the up-and-up. Coach is worried that he’s going to lose his job if the tests come back positive.”
“Aren’t drug tests supposed to be a surprise?”
Danny shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Issac overheard Coach talking on the phone, and he told Scott, who told Stiles. You know how those guys are.”
As if hearing his name summoned him, Isaac appeared out of the flow of passing students and settled next to Danny. He wore his jersey, though he kept his arms crossed over the front like he was trying to cover up the number. “You know how which guys are?” he asked. He cocked his head at Danny and smirked, already knowing the answer. “So you think that Scott and Stiles talk too much?”
Allison withdrew a step at Isaac’s appearance, one hand going to her locker door in case she needed to slam it or hide behind it--for all the good a cheap piece of metal would do against werewolf strength. She had tried to kill Isaac, had stabbed him repeatedly and for no reason except to hurt him as badly as she could. His gaze swept over her now and she could feel him passing judgment. The tension ratcheted and Allison felt her face and upper chest growing warm under the scrutiny.
Danny cut the mood with a hard kiss on Isaac’s lips, which had the side-effect of also erasing the smirk. “If we don’t get moving,” Danny told him, “we’re going to be late for class.”
For an instant, Allison thought she saw Isaac’s eyes flash gold. She blinked and all she saw was blue, human eyes. Danny didn’t know about werewolves, didn’t know about Isaac or Scott. Or Jackson. It wasn’t her business to tell him, and Isaac probably had his own reasons for waiting. Eventually, she knew, Danny would find out and the weight of all the secrets being loosed would probably crush him the way it had crushed her. Until then, he got to enjoy his time with his boyfriend, and that made her envious. Allison grabbed her textbooks out of her locker and shut the door with a loud clang.
“Are you sure you don’t want to cut?” Isaac whispered, placing the words along Danny’s cheekbone in an obvious invitation.
“Can’t be at practice if we miss school,” Danny reminded him, “And today’s the wrong day to miss. We’d get kicked off the team.”
“I’m willing to pay that price,” Isaac said. He dropped his hand onto Danny’s shoulder and gave a light squeeze that made Danny’s heavy-lidded eyes go wide.
Danny shook himself free from Isaac and once again shifted his backpack, putting it on the shoulder between him and his boyfriend. “Tempting though the offer is, this is not how I want to end my lacrosse career. Coach says I’ve got what it takes to go to the next level. Besides, I’m not worried about a drug test. Are you?”
“No!” Isaac replied, a little too fast, a little too loud. Allison frowned at the response. Steroids wouldn’t work in his system, but the test itself could turn out to be a problem if he couldn’t control his healing--a detail which Allison suspected he was more concerned about than he was letting on. As if to disabuse her of the possibility that he worried about anything at all anymore, he cast a meaningful look at her and added, “All my talent is totally natural.” The smirk started to spread again, like it was his default expression.
Danny glanced from Isaac to Allison as if he could catch their in-joke with the skill that he caught attempted goals, then gave up with a shake of his head. “Do you have any messages to send back to Coach? If he’s going to pay me the big bucks...”
“I’m fine,” Allison answered, remembering Lydia’s comment about the toad. If she were feeling braver, she’d try that one. It would only work, though, if she were able to spy on Coach when he got the message. “I’ll keep myself...to myself. I guess.”
“I’ll let him know you said that,” Danny said.
Isaac rolled his shoulders, his impatience with the conversation obvious. “Come on. It’s bad enough that you’re making me behave. I don’t need to be bored to death, too.” He started down the hall, Danny falling into step next to him, a final glance back at her offering one more apology that wasn’t his to give.
“Don’t worry, Isaac,” Allison called after them. “I’m sure the blood test won’t hurt at all.”
Isaac stuck his hand behind his back and flipped her the bird, never once faltering in his step. She giggled, not even sure what method the drug test was going to use, but liking how normal his response was. She didn’t think they could be friends; she’d ended that when she had rammed the knives in his chest. They’d fought together since then as reluctant allies, so she knew he didn’t completely hate her. If they could be teens now, just highschoolers who ran with the same overlapping groups, that would be real progress.
She watched as Isaac slipped his arm around Danny’s waist, casual yet hesitant like he was trying not to get caught. The boys’ heights matched, though Isaac was lankier and prone to slouching. Danny was broader and more confident. He brought his hand to rest on Isaac’s ass, no hesitation at all.
Hugging her books to her chest, she started toward her classroom. The hallway was abuzz with activity, which made navigating it troublesome--especially since her mind wasn’t really on the task. Out of nowhere, she had the disconcerting sensation of every first day walking the halls of her new schools, all rolled into one. The other kids rushed to their classes or dawdled for a few more minutes by their lockers or congregated with friends in the hallway, and none of them had time for her. Her step started to slow, the edges of her books started to dig into her chest.
“It’s not Peter,” Scott said, appearing at her side from out the stream of traffic. “I was so sure it was him.”
Allison tripped, a startled “oh” forming on her lips. She regained her balance quickly, but not without old doubt rearing up: She half-expected someone in the crowd to start a slow clap at her clumsiness. She shook it off as Scott’s comment penetrated her brain. “Where did you come from? How do you know it’s not him?”
He wore his backpack on both shoulders, his lacrosse stick strung through the straps and bobbing behind him. His hoodie hung open over his jersey. A large grass stain marred the front of the hoodie and a streak of mud stained the thigh of his jeans. The cuffs of both legs looked wet and his shoes left behind muddy tracks. “I had a talk with him,” he answered. He gripped his brown hair with both hands, briefly locking his fingers behind his head.
Allison raised her eyebrows, assuming that the ‘talk’ had involved some violence if Scott’s dishevelment was anything to go by. Any wounds he had acquired had long since healed, though smudges on his face and neck showed where they probably had been. As much as she wanted to know more, the school hallway wasn’t the place to press for details. She made a mental note to ask him later; any excuse to hear about Peter losing a fight was a good one. “And you believe him? Are you sure he’s telling the truth?”
“I know he’s not lying,” Scott answered. “Why is this so hard? Why wouldn’t she just tell me?”
“She must have a good reason. Maybe she didn’t want to get your hopes up until she knew if the relationship was going anywhere. Do you know if Coach Finstock has a class first hour?”
Scott pulled a face, though in response to which question she didn’t know. “Maybe? I don’t know. Why?”
Allison came to a stop in the hallway, dragging Scott to a halt with her. Pairs of fellow students swerved around the sudden blockade, though Allison didn’t care. “Because I need to talk to him. He thinks I can... do...things.” They’d been walking toward Finstock’s office, away from the academic wing of the building. At this juncture the lingering smell of sausage patties and eggs from the school cafeteria competed with the pervasive scent of sweat and air freshener from the locker rooms. Allison wrinkled her nose against them.
“You can do things.” Scott answered.
“No, like--” Allison glanced around furtively, lowered her voice. “--Magic. He thinks I can do magic.” She pursed her lips while she gathered her thoughts, then gave him a brief rundown of her interactions with the coach over the past day. The candles, the conversation with Danny. On retelling, the events struck her as little more than those an overactive imagination might concoct.
Scott never doubted her. He listened to the whole thing without so much as cracking a smile. When she was finished, he summarized: “He thinks you’re a witch?” He thought about it for a moment, his hands tightening and loosening their grip on the straps of his backpack. “Yeah, OK. I guess that makes sense. Every time you come to a game, amazing things happen.”
“I’ve been to all the games. Except the last one.” She fiddled with her ring while she tried not to think too hard about what she had missed and why. With all the commotion at the game, her absence wouldn’t have been noticed. “Which he probably assumed I was at,” she concluded.
“Exactly. And all the strange things started to happen right after you moved here.”
“Strange things that I didn’t even know about!” She rocked back on the heels of her boots, arms thrown out in exasperation.
A look of guilt flashed across Scott’s face and Allison reassured him with a light touch to his face that she didn’t hold his secrecy against him. Considering how knowing about werewolves had turned out, sometimes she wished that the secret had never been broken, that she had never been tasked with carrying the burden of that knowledge. Scott’s navigation through those waters had been rough; hers had been rougher. How different their lives would have been if the supernatural didn’t exist.
“I think it makes sense,” Scott confirmed. “It’s wrong, but it makes sense.”
“Which explains the candles. He wants to make sure the team keeps winning and he thinks I’m the one responsible for that.” Allison shook her head. “And, yet, I’m perfectly ordinary.”
“I think you’re magical,” Scott countered. Allison blushed, the warmth brightening her face so much that she was surprised it didn’t reflect off Scott’s eyes. He let go of the straps and took her hands in his, like he’d wanted to all along and just now lost his ability to resist. His skin was dark against hers, the contrast so familiar and right that she couldn’t believe she’d gone so long without it. Tangling their fingers together, she brought their clasped hands up for a gentle kiss.
The bell rang, shattering the moment. Students began to filter into their classrooms, rapidly emptying the hallway. Scott and Allison stayed unmoving, a token attempt on Allison’s part to pull away abandoned because she’d have to go a different direction than Scott and she didn’t want to.
“I’m going to tell him,” Scott said, suddenly. His voice was too loud for the nearly empty hall. He cleared his throat and repeated, softer and more earnestly: “I’m going to tell him.”
Allison blinked. “Tell who what?”
“I’m going to tell Coach about…you know.” A pained expression crossed his face then, as if even he couldn’t believe his words. He cringed, but didn’t pull away.
“Are you sure you wanna do that?”
With his eyebrows twisted together, Scott nodded. “I think I have to. He obviously knows something is up and now that he’s looking for supernatural explanations, he’s going to notice things. Plus there’s the drug tests, and those will come back negative--at least on me and Isaac--and we’re the ones most under suspicion. So, yeah.”
“Then we’ll go together,” Allison stated, the decision sudden yet obvious. Whatever you’re going to do, do with confidence, she remembered her mother telling her. If they were going to confront Finstock, then they needed to do it without fear. For a second, Scott looked like he was going to argue; something in her expression ended the protestation before he could make it. Instead, he took a small step back so that she could lead the way.
With her mother’s voice echoing in her head as her guide, she squared her shoulders and headed down the last stretch of hallway to Coach’s office, hand-in-hand with Scott.
--
Finstock’s office was empty when they got there. Allison peered through the window at the messy interior-papers stacked on the desk, coffee rings imprinted on the wooden desk, an overflowing garbage can-before trying the knob. It turned easily.
“Last chance to change your mind,” she said to Scott.
He tipped his head back and groaned at the ceiling. For a moment, Allison thought he might actually change his mind. She watched his face carefully, searching for expanding sideburns or a glimmer of yellow in his eyes: some sign he wouldn’t be able to emotionally handle outing himself to his coach. Nothing happened.
Allison pushed the door open and stuck her head inside. “Mr. Finstock,” she called. No answer. A half-drunk cup of coffee sat cooling on his desk. His brown pleather jacket was slung over the back of his chair. He probably did have a first hour class, which would really throw a wrench in the works because then she and Scott would have to come back. Getting her nerve up once had been hard enough. Doing it twice seemed unfathomable.
From next to her, Scott peered around the messy office. Then he stuck his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Anything?” Allison asked.
“Nah. He’s got a peanut butter sandwich rotting in the bottom of his garbage can and most of his markers are dead, but.... He must really have a lot on his mind. This isn’t like him.”
That information didn’t help. Allison sighed. “I guess we wait?” She turned a slow circle looking for a chair or even a relatively clear patch of wall to lean against. Aside from Coach’s desk chair, there wasn’t anything. It had to be a ploy to get people to leave, Allison thought. Without a chair, no one would sit and chat. She could see that appealing to him.
Scott drifted over to the desk and began looking at the papers from his upside down vantage point. A moment later, he motioned Allison over. “I think Coach is really in trouble.” He gestured to the paper underneath the coffee mug.
Though some of the letters were obscured or smeared with the coffee ring, she was able to get the gist. The CIAA was basically accusing the Beacon Hills lacrosse team of drug use on the grounds that their win against the Sycamore Beavers was unbelievable. If, the politely phrased letter continued, drug use was discovered, the team would be suspended indefinitely and their trophy retracted. Further, the CIAA would begin proceedings against Finstock to get him fired.
“Wow,” Allison breathed. “No wonder he’s being so weird.” She slipped the page back under the coffee mug, doing her best to align the ring so that their spying wouldn’t be discovered.
“Not any weirder than normal. It does explain the mess, though. I definitely need to--” Scott’s head shot up. He tracked his eyes to the desk, but didn’t otherwise move.
“What?” Allison asked.
“His phone.”
Listening hard, Allison picked up on the faint staccato buzzing of a cell phone’s ring coming from within the desk drawer. Before she knew what she was doing, she crossed to the desk and slid the drawer open. The expected cell phone was crammed in among more papers, its face lit up with the green glow of active use. She should have closed the drawer and walked away; they hadn’t come into the office to snoop and they’d already done more than she was comfortable with. She should have, but she didn’t.
She read the text message on display--
--and swallowed hard. Her fingers grasped at the edge of the desk in a desperate bid for stability.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asked. He was at her side so fast that the corners of the papers on the desk fluttered.
Wordlessly, she pointed to the display.
Scott leaned over her to read it. He froze. Allison couldn’t even feel his exhalations against her ear.
From out in the hall, she heard the distant thunk of a door slamming shut and the squeaking wheels of a custodian’s mop bucket going past.
Then, from Scott, came a hollow, “Crap.”
“Well, I guess that answers that question,” Allison commented. She read the text one more time just to make sure that she and Scott weren’t both misreading it. They weren’t. She quietly slid the drawer closed so that she wouldn’t keep reading the screen. Twice was bad enough. She was never going to be able to unsee what it had said, or see Mrs. McCall in same way again.
“I would have been happier if it had been Peter.”
“Not true,” Allison countered.
Scott swallowed, then forced out a hard breath. “Okay, not true,” he conceded. He dragged his hands through his hair, gripping the back of his head. “What am I going to do?”
“We could be wrong,” Allison suggested, grasping for any consolation. “Wouldn’t you have smelled him on her?”
A visible shudder passed through Scott. “I probably did. With all the time I spend around him, I never thought about why his smell...” He shuddered again. “Oh, god.”
The office door banged open. Allison and Scott scrambled to the other side of the desk, guilt painting their faces, at the sight of Coach standing in the doorway. He had his clipboard tucked under one arm and a water bottle clenched in his hand. A scowl twisted his mouth.
“Do I even want to know?” Coach demanded.
“We, uh. We came to talk to you,” Allison stammered. She had to force herself not to grab Scott’s hand again, not to hunker down into her own shoulders or to apologize and try to escape without doing what they’d come here to do.
Coach stood stolid, his expression unchanging as he looked back and forth from Allison to Scott. “I probably don’t want to know. What you kids do on your time is your business. Rumor has it that the school has some excellent counselors who can--”
“It’s not...that,” Scott interrupted. “Whatever you think that is. It’s not. It’s--” He squeezed his eyes shut and gnawed on his lip. The question, when it finally came, spilled out in one rush: “Did my mom tell you about me?”
Coach crossed to his desk, tossing the clipboard onto a stack of papers that started to topple over and setting the water bottle down next to the coffee cup--right on the letter from the CIAA. He clearly wasn’t impressed with their threats. “McCall,” Coach answered. “Mc. Call. You think I wouldn’t know who you are? What goes through that head of yours? Your mother is not the kind of woman to lie about having kids. Kid. I have nothing against kids. She’d better not want any more, though, because I--”
Allison cleared her throat loudly. The panic flooding Scott’s face frightened her and she had to do something before he fled the room and left her alone with the coach. “That’s not what he meant.” She couldn’t help but note that Coach wasn’t surprised by Scott knowing about him. She wondered what Scott’s mom had told her new boyfriend.
“What else could he mean? Most women my age have kids. It’s something you have to accept if you’re going to date. You got an issue with me dating a beautiful woman, McCall?”
“No,” Scott squeaked. “It’s just...I’m…” He looked at Allison for support. All she could offer was a wan smile and reassuring thoughts that he hoped he could sense. “I’m a werewolf.”
Coach picked up his coffee cup and took a long, loud swallow.
“And I’m not a witch,” Allison chimed into the silence. She folded her hands behind her back and tried to stand up straighter. Her knees wouldn’t stop shaking. She’d faced down an Alpha werewolf, a kanima, and her own grandfather, and this is what was making her nervous? She willed her knees to stop, to no avail.
Coach returned the mug to its circle on the desk and lowered himself into his chair. It rolled back slightly under his weight. Something crunched under one wheel.
“I’m not the only one, either,” Scott added. “On the team, I mean.” Or in the school, Allison mentally added, though she didn’t think Coach needed to know about that.
“Werewolves?” Coach stated, the word flat like he had no idea what it meant. He nodded slowly, processing. “On my team? More than one?” The rhetorical questions hanging in the air, he pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head heavily. “For the love of God, McCall, you’d better not be talking about Greenberg.”
“Uh. No?” Scott glanced at Allison again and she shrugged. Unless Derek had gone on another biting spree, the only werewolves in the school were Scott, Erica, Boyd, and Isaac-with were already too many, as far as both of them were concerned. “No, not Greenberg.”
“That’s a relief. That boy is barely human as it is.” Coach blew out a breath and started tapping his fingers on his desk, his gaze turned inward as he worked through his new information. “So, what you’re saying is: the team doesn’t have a drug problem; it has a full moon problem?”
“That’s…one way to look at it,” Scott answered, his confusion echoed in Allison’s expression.
Slapping the desk, Coach exclaimed, “Well, that’s a relief. Just tell me one thing: Are you certain that the-“ He whirled a hand in the air as he sought to yank the right word from the ether-“whatever it is that makes you what you are won’t show up in a urine test?”
“I-I don’t think so?” Scott replied. His eyebrows quirked up in surprise at the question.
“Coach, don’t you want some proof?” Allison asked. She cast a glance at Scott who had his bottom lip captured between his teeth. No fangs showed, but a glint in his eye told her that he only needed a little push and they’d emerge.
“Proof? I’ve seen all kinds of proof! How about a blood test?” Coach bulled on. “Will it show up in a blood test?” He was leaning forward onto the desk now, his shoulders tensed.
Scott shook his head in the negative, though Allison wondered if anyone had answered that question for sure or if Scott was just guessing. He raised his arms as if to add something, maybe offer a correction, then dropped them without comment.
Coach hummed in thought, his finger tapping, tapping against the DVD case for The Craft. Finally, he pushed himself upright. Yanking open one of the lower desk drawers, he withdrew a compact book which he proceeded to flip through. Its pages were heavily marked with index tabs and colored with yellow highlighter. He found the section he wanted, scanned the contents, then threw the book down onto the desk. “Werewolves aren’t against the rules,” he proclaimed.
Both Scott and Allison’s eyes went wide. Neither of them wanted to bring up the ethical issues with fielding supernaturally enhanced people, yet the point did need to be addressed now that the rule book was officially being brought into play.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Finstock interrupted. “If Sycamore is allowed to have a mutant like Abamowitz on the team, then I’m allowed to have werewolves. There’s nothing in the rules that says I can’t, and I don’t want to hear one word from either of you!”
Scott made a zipping motion over his mouth.
“And, you,” Finstock added, aiming a finger at Allison, “I expect your continued support of the team. You need herbs or rocks or anything, you just let me know. But don’t go asking me for eyes. I won’t do eyes. That’s just disgusting.”
Allison opened her mouth to correct him, again, but a small shake of Scott’s head stayed her. Let him, Scott’s expression seemed to say. It makes it easier.
“OK,” she said instead, “No eyes.”
“Good. Now get out of here. Don’t you two have classes to get to?”
“Can we, uh…” Scott licked his lips. “Can we get a pass?”
Coach scoffed, but reached for the pass booklet anyway. For a moment, his normal energy diminished and Coach, and the mood in the room, turned serious. “McCall,” he started, “your mother’s a good woman. Don’t you worry about me treating her right.” As he handed the signed slips of paper over, he added, “Not a word of what we discussed leaves here. What we said in here, stays in here. Loose lips sink ships, you know.”
Allison and Scott accepted the passes without comment, neither quite sure what to say. If Allison was reading things right, Coach had not only adapted to the idea of werewolves with all the effort it took for dead skins to slough off, but he’d promised to keep Scott’s secret. She had no idea he was capable of being like that. Maybe he and Mrs. McCall did have potential.
Thoughts once again buzzing, they left the office, closing the door softly behind them. Before it finished shutting, Allison heard Coach mutter, “God damn werewolves.”
Allison bumped his shoulder with hers and whispered, “He’s still not Peter.”
The expression on Scott’s face was…one Lydia would love to have evidence of. Strictly for scientific purposes, of course. She left her phone in her pocket. Some things she wasn’t willing to share.
--
Getting through the rest of the morning without seeing Scott and without chewing her nails off took Allison more self-control than she could have imagined.
Scott texted her frequently since they had no classes together until after lunch. “Thinking of you,” he sent at 8:53. Eight minutes later, his next text said only, “Coach?”
“Coach Step-dad,” she teased back.
“I forgive you,” he returned. Her eyes got misty at that one. She knew he meant for the joke, but it was hard not to take it in reference to everything.
“Because you love me,” she texted back at 9:32, when Harris’s back was turned.
“It’s fate,” he replied. That text came through in less than 20 seconds.
She saw Scott at lunch, where they sat next to each other at one of the long cafeteria tables, trading shy, secretive glances. The hum and clatter of the cafeteria made the kind of conversation she thought they needed impossible. Stiles sat across from them systematically removing the little onions that came with his peas to an empty part of his tray. “Can you believe the school is actually trying to give us onion breath?” he complained. “It’s like they don’t want us to talk.”
“They could just be trying to cut down on kissing,” Allison suggested, shooting Scott a sideways look through her lashes.
Scott yanked his head back toward his tray like he knew he’d been caught staring. “I don’t think these kinds of onions cause bad breath,” he commented. Even so, he, too, started to push his into a separate pile to be ignored.
“It doesn’t matter,” Allison added. “A little bad breath wouldn’t stop me. Not that you have bad breath.”
“You don’t either,” Scott said. “Not that I’d care if you did.”
“God, you two,” Stiles replied. He stabbed another onion and saved its formerly adjacent peas from its contamination. Whether or not he would eat the peas remained to be seen. The small bowl in which the vegetables were served was soon cleared. In that time, Allison and Scott’s hands had found each other under the table. Their fingers wove together with Scott’s canted over hers so that the ring pressed into her skin as a solid reminder of its presence. Stiles caught the tiny look she graced Scott with from beneath her eyelashes, bent over and peered under the table. When he returned upright, he had a wide smile plastered on his face. “It’s about freakin’ time,” he laughed.
Allison had to agree. The year had been a long one with ups and downs of such extremes that only someone who had been there with her would believe it. She gave Scott’s hand a light squeeze which he met and matched. Across from them Stiles was still busily organizing the rest of his food into ‘eat’ and ‘don’t eat’ piles.
Lydia slid into the seat on her other side and reached across her to waggle her fingers in greeting to Scott who rolled his eyes back at her. “So, this is what I was thinking…” Lydia began. Allison tuned her out, but only for now. She knew she’d get the full plan again later with revisions to account for any points Stiles brought up that Lydia deemed worth listening to.
She spotted Danny and Isaac at the next table over. They were staring at whatever was on the screen of Danny’s laptop, which was open in front of them. Isaac’s eyes flickered up when Allison gaze landed on him, and he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t appear uncomfortable or defensive either, and that seemed like real progress. She offered a small smile, which he returned with a quirk of an eyebrow before going back to what he had been doing. His eyes stayed human-blue the whole time.
In the last year, she’d gained and lost her first boyfriend, had her heart broken, made friends, lost family, come into her legacy, lost her mind and struggled to find it again. She’d learned about werewolves and been accused of being a witch and seen what people could do when they were desperate enough.
None of this was what Allison had expected when she’d moved to Beacon Hills and so much of it she would undo in a heartbeat if she had the chance. Still, sitting at this table on this day with these people, she couldn’t deny how good it was to finally be home.