It’s a full five seconds — that feels like five minutes while her brain sputters in overdrive — after Stiles’ stammered words before Summer realises how she sounded. She’s sure she must be unflatteringly beet red. “I meant — not for me to help … just, sharp toes … you might be bleeding. … ” Nothing she says makes it sound any better.
Giving up on not sounding prurient, she just repeats, “You should come inside and make sure he didn’t claw you by accident. Besides, I owe you some kind of reward for going to all this effort.”
Stiles feels a little bit like the pair of them are caught in some terrible downward spiral of awkwardness and flailing, and he’s never been able to keep himself from that kind of thing, much less help anyone else out of it. He stares up at Summer’s face for a few moments, rubbing both of his kneecaps and thinking maybe she looks like how he feels, which is completely discoordinated, which is almost a relief because he’s used to being alone with that feeling.
He looks back at his knees, down at the tiny little holes in his jeans, and finally finds himself reaching to take the keys out of the ignition of the Jeep before he even really knows what he’s doing. His free hand goes to open the door, provided it won’t bowl poor Summer over when he does. “I don’t need a reward but—yeah, uh. Maybe. Uh. I don’t…I mean my knees, maybe, some ice, I kind of…”
God, how does he makes this sound like he isn’t trying to accept an offer to ‘go inside for some coffee’?
It’s almost disturbing, how hard it is to tell the difference between /her/ embarrassment and /his/ embarrassment. Summer steps back easily from the car door, though; she’s not clumsy or … well, graceless the way he seems to be. Years of dance does that for a person. Helios protests faintly and she rubs at his ears and murmurs, “Hush, fuzzy man.”
It helps that she’s long perfected the ability to find the right key and unlock the door one handed, because now that he’s coming inside she’s oddly unwilling to seem any more awkward than she already has. She’s just going to keep going forward and ignore the awkwardness now. Or try to, anyway. “So, uh, you know my name. What’s yours?”