She manages a wry half-smile. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what friends do.” Hearing him say that helps a lot, with some of it anyway. She doesn’t feel so hideously embarrassed anymore. It can be so awkward, knowing what someone is feeling in contrast to what they do, what their logical mind does — and hidden sympathy doesn’t do her much good. She learned the hard way not to assume that what someone feels and what they do are going to be related.
So as much as she thought of Stiles as a friend, it helps to know that he thought it too, not just felt it. She closes her hands, opens them again, staring down in the the palms. “How do you … control yours? Maybe I need to try something different.”
The smile she gives is partially bitter, Stiles notices, before he smooths his fingers through his hair and nods at her awkwardness. Honestly, there’s a couple of reasons that Stiles finds he doesn’t mind her attitude. For one, she was probably just as awkward as he was. He was used to that nature, used to how hard it was when you were someone who was awkward. Second, she was going through something frustrating and that was definitely…something that would affect her mood.
She opens and reopens her palms, going from a fist movement to a regular hand movement. He looks at her and licks his lips, swallowing and thinking about how he can answer her question. He taps his temple, “Concentration all day every day. It used to give me headaches.”
She blows out a sigh and puts her head down on the top of her backpack. “That’s no different from me, then.” She pulls out the heavy metal clips holding the mass of her hair on top of her head, and adds, “Something changed this summer, then, and I don’t know what it is.” A soft grunt of relief escapes her as the red locks tumble down her back.
“It’s like I got stronger, somehow. I can pick up more, farther away, more sources, and sometimes if I touch people I see things. Today — it was like my shields weren’t there at all. Everyone was just so — it was too much.”
