EIGHT LETTERS || Liam Dunbar [2]

TWENTY THREE

As the sun rose the next morning, glowing its way through Katherine's relatively thin purple curtains, she really wished that was what had woken her up. But it wasn't. The thing that had woken her up, was Stiles.

Their Dad had already left work work, getting ready quietly as to not wake his children up when they didn't need to be up. But the minute the door closed behinde him Stiles had loudly made his way into her room and, while chattering away at a mile a minute about their plans for the day, yanked a pair of sweatpants and a teeshirt from her dresser and onto her bed.

"Rise and shine, up you get, you cranky little human-shaped caffiene demon," he yelled, clapping his hands together as loudly as he could. "Get up, we have things to do."

Katherine immediately groaned and tried to hide her head under her pillow to get away from him, only to have it ripped from her grasp and feel it fly into her abdomen. She grunted it and rolled to the other side of her bed, nearly rolling right off. But she balanced herself and curled further into her blankets.

The sleeping pill she'd taken the night before when she got home at 12:30 — the explanation to Hayden had taken them a lot longer to get through than had been expected — hadn't quite worn off yet, and she still felt unbelievably drowsy. "Stiles, do you really like irritating me at 7:30 on a Saturday morning?" Katherine groaned sleepily, trying to use the blankets to cover her eyes from the light as he flung her curtains wide open.

"Yes, actually, I do," he hummed, tone unbelievably sarcastic. "It's to make up for all the times baby-you woke toddler-me up in the middle of the night 'cause you needed a new diaper."

"You don't even remember being a toddler, dumbass," she grumbled, rolling over again to glare at him. "So it doesn't count."

"Okay, maybe I don't remember, but if I did I'd be offended," Stiles promised, pointing at her. His eyes landed on the uncapped bottle of sleeping pills on her bedside table, and his sarcastic expression softened. "It hasn't worn off yet?" He asked, sitting next to her.

Katherine rubbed the sleep from her eyes and yawned. "Well, it's good for around ten hours, I took it at 12:30, it didn't kick in until around 2, and it's 7:30 right now and that's only five hours so no, not yet."

"It helped with the nightmares though, right?" He asked, and she could practically hear him switch from annoying teenage boy to protective older brother.

"I slept like a baby," she confirmed.

"Okay, well, you can sleep when we're at the school, I promise."

"Why're we going to the school at 7:30 on a Saturday morning?" Katherine questioned, though part of her knew she probably didn't want to hear the answer.

Stiles smiled sheepishly. "We're actually going there at 9:30, but I know it'll take you at least half an hour to get out of bed and you'll procrastinate having a shower because you're texting Liam or Mason or something, so I figured I'd give you extra time."

She raised her brow at him. "Extra time to kill you?"

"And, on that note—" he abruptly stood and stumbled his way out of the room, muttering something about his leg falling asleep way too quickly.

She laid in bed for a little while, playing Candy Crush and swearing until she felt like she was ready to get out of bed. But she was mostly trying to not think about the conversation she'd had with Mason the night before. Because that was stressing her out immensely.

It took Katherine nearly half an hour to get out of bed, and then she grabbed the clothes Stiles had gotten out for her — grey sweats, a red bandanna headband, and the pride tee-shirt Danny had been kind enough to get her for her birthday two years earlier — and went and had a forty-five minute shower. Then she blow dried her hair, got dressed, and went down stairs.