The Banshee In Question

Chapter 13: Where I Stood

Where I Stood

I don't know what I've done or if I like what I've begun

but something told me to run and darling you know me, it's all or none

There were sounds in my head,

little voices whispering, that I should go and this should end

Oh, and I found myself listening

- Missy Higgins

 After a relatively quiet drive, Lydia expected nothing more than for Stiles to anxiously jump out of her car and slam the front door to his home as he retreated into his safe space far away from her. But when the car came to a slow stop by the curb, he made little movement at all.

Lydia edged her nails along the wheel, side-eyeing him carefully. "My car is low on gas, so you should probably go now."

Ever since she left the Easley's, she'd been existing in a foggy bubble of solitude, unable to accept that she'd really seen the horrible things hidden in the shadows of Calvin's room, in places that should have been more secretive then they were. Her hands had unconsciously gripped the wheel tighter when her thoughts returned to the images of her scattered along the wall in his closet, the hair-raising description of the women he terrorized in every city he moved to scribbled in his journal. His apparant search for "the one" was fruitless, because even without whatever small nonexistent thing that caused him to feel betrayed, he'd feel it anyway. He'd find something about each of these women that made them just as fake and worthless as the rest. He was unrelenting and pushy, forcing his victims to give up their hands in a game of life threatening cards where he always held the Ace.

But this wasn't a game. This was Lydia's life, and the lives of so many others that had already been lost. This was the life of any other girl that would come next.

She knew it had to end with her.

Stiles' tense jaw unclenches and his hand moves to the door handle. "Come inside, we need to talk."

Lydia realized that she kept making excuses for herself; finding reasons to put off this inevitable conversation because she just wasn't ready to open up about all of it. She was so afraid of telling him, not because of what he might do or what Calvin might do, but because the words were so hard to get out. She didn't know where to start, how to form her mouth in the correct shape to let the truth tumble out. She felt fear and anger and more than anything, she felt shame. Lydia was supposed to be strong, but she was constantly letting scary things that hid under her bed grab her ankle and pull her down with them. For the first time in a while, Lydia felt unbelievably small.

"We already talked," her heart thumped painfully against her ribs. "Remember? You said we're not friends anymore," she repeats his earlier statement bitterly.

Frustration leaves his mouth in the shape of a grunt, his hands flattening along the dashboard and his head discretely shaking. "Lydia," he almost growls, "you're coming inside and we're going to talk. About everything."

Lydia scoffs with a roll of her eyes. "I'm pretty sure people who aren't friends don't go to each other's houses and spill all their secrets."

The look he gives her is somewhere between disbelieving and fiercely irked. "This is serious, Lydia."

"Right," she laughs sardonically. "Just like you seriously ended our friendship earlier this evening." Her head throbbed with an oncoming migraine. "I can't believe you would just give up on me like that."

"Give up - " Stiles throttles his head to clear his brain as if he couldn't have heard her correctly. "Give up on you!?" His teeth chomp down on his lower lip to release some of his anger. "I have never given up on you! I have tried - " he swallows hard, inhaling deeply like he'd run out of air. "...sohard to get through to you, to be there for you."