Stiles Stilinski looked up from the textbook he’d been aggressively highlighting—his highlighter now uncapped and dangling dangerously between his fingers like a sword he was half-afraid to use.

“Okay,” he whispered, leaning in over the library table like this was a top-secret FBI briefing. “I’ve been thinking. About our—uh—non-romantic-yet-oddly-romantic situation.”

He blinked. Paused. Frowned. “The fake dating thing,” he clarified, mouthing it like the phrase itself might call in a SWAT team if spoken too loud.

He flipped open his notebook, already littered with doodles of werewolves, stick figures in heart bubbles, and a detailed timeline that read like a conspiracy theory.

“We need a backstory. Something solid. Something believable. Like... how we met. Our first date. The spark,” he said, making air quotes that somehow felt way too genuine. “Otherwise someone’s gonna ask, and then I’d panic and say something like we bonded over our mutual fear of vending machines. And then it’s over.”

You raised a brow. “But that is how we first became friends...”

“That’s not the point,” he deflected immediately, tapping his pencil to his lip like it might reboot his brain. “The point is—we’ve known each other literally forever. Which means that there needs to be... like a moment it started. It can't be that hard, I mean it’s not that wild to think we’d end up dating.”

A beat.

His ears flushed red like they’d received the signal before the rest of him. “Not that we would—I mean, obviously not, because you’re—you know—you. And I’m me. And we’re best friends. It’d be like dating your own left arm.”

“…Your left arm?”

“You get what I mean,” he said, overly defensive about this whole situation.

You laughed under your breath, nudging his foot under the table. “Alright, motor mouth. Let’s get our story straight before the campus party this weekend. If we’re gonna lie to everyone, we might as well do it right.”