New Summary: College student Beth really didn't need the supernatural to add to her list of things to worry about but when Derek Hale, who had apparently been in her biology class all semester, becomes her new lab partner, it's almost inevitable.
Beth felt a familiar flare of anger in her bones. The initial shock of seeing such a beautiful human being was starting to wear off and she was being left with her original feelings of the day: anger, sadness, and annoyance.
This time when her heart beat picked up it wasn't because of attraction. It was because she gearing up for a fight.
"Listen," she started as she began drumming her pen on her notebook. "The last thing I need is to sit here and do the work for the both of us. So either you can start communicating with your mouth, because I can't read minds, or we can work separately and leave when we're done."
When she was done with her rant, she abruptly stopped hammering her pen against her notebook. She shoved her bangs off her face before looking up at him. He still had the same blank look on his face as if he hadn't heard a word she had just said. She raised a single eyebrow at him, silently asking him if this was how it was going to be.
A few seconds later, he reached out and pulled his duffle bag towards him. At first, she thought he was going to pack up and just leave her hanging, Professor Lee be damned. But instead, he unzipped his bag and blindly reached a hand in. He rifled around for a bit before pulling out a notebook and dropped it on the table in front of himself. He flipped it open and when he had found the page he was looking for, he pushed the notebook towards her and then looked up again.
"I did it during class."
A few things surprised her at that moment. Number 1: his voice was like velvet or silk. It was like one of those materials that gave you goosebumps whenever it moved over your skin. It literally made her shiver at how delicious it sounded.
Once she had gotten over the initial shock of hearing him finally speak, she realized she hadn't seen him in class tonight or any night for that matter. And that really puzzled her. Professor Lee knew whom he was which meant he definitely wasn't in the wrong place but how could he have gone almost half a semester without being seen? To put it simply, it was odd.
And the last thing that seemed to register with her confused mind, was that he was giving her the answers to all of the pre-lab questions. He had finished them in class while Lee was lecturing and just handing them over for her to copy.
She quickly skimmed his answers. His handwriting was small and messy. The only thing she could think to compare it to was doctors' messy handwriting her and the other nurses were always complaining about having to decipher. As she quickly read through what he had written, she noticed that the first three answers he had were the same as the ones she had finished in the first fifteen minutes of the lab period. Still, the three correct answers were enough for her to know he knew what he was doing.
When she looked back up at him to ask him why he was so free to just share all his hard work with her, Beth found him staring again. All the staring he had done in the last ten minutes made her not so apologetic about the staring she had done earlier.
"I can't-I can't accept these. I really don't like to copy."
It was a lie. What college student didn't like to copy? Hell, if she could, she would copy every single answer for every piece of homework she had ever been given. It would save a lot of time, especially when it came to biology classes like this one.
"Why?" He was blunt and he was raising that damn eyebrow at her again.
She had a fleeting thought of waxing it off before she made her mind return to the task at hand.
"You've had a rough day. Just copy the answers and we can both get out of here and enjoy the rest of our evenings." He brought a hand up and shoved his notebook closer to her.
How in the hell had he known she had had a rough day? Was it just the way she acted? Was she really being that bitchy? Suddenly she felt horrible again. More than a few of her friends from back home and college had told her she suffered from bitchy resting face. They said the face she wore naturally during the day was so intimidating, that it made it almost impossible for strangers to approach her. One friend had even gone as far as telling Beth her bitchy resting face was the reason she never got any guys. She wondered if her bitchy resting face was intimidating the mysterious Mr. Hale, but at the same time she thought he was way beyond being intimidated by the likes of her. Not only was he ripped in the muscle department, but he also had the aloof, devil may care attitude down pat. Besides, he was pretty intimidating himself the way he did nothing but stare.
"She's not being too hard on you is she, Derek?"
The sound of Professor Lee's voice interrupted her internal monologue and she jumped. She swung her head to the right where Professor Lee was standing at the end of the table next to Mr. Hale, Derek.
"I know her attitude can be quite intimidating but once you peel back the layers she's quite a marshmallow underneath. I assure you."
She groaned. Little comments like that were definitely a draw back of taking smoke breaks with your professor.
She didn't really expect Derek to answer. She really she just expected him to stare at Professor Lee until Lee decided to move on to harass the next group. But she was pleasantly surprised when Derek actually gave Lee a thousand-watt smile.
And Derek's smile was almost as disarming as his muscles.
"Not at all," Derek answered smoothly, as if the two were old friends. "I understand she's had a tough day." Derek turned to nod at her and her mouth fell open in a gap. "I was actually just suggesting she copy my answers down so she can go home and get some rest."
Her mouth fell open even more. Was this guy seriously admitting to their professor that he was suggesting she cheat off of him? At that moment, Beth decided Derek Hale had a pair of brass ones, big brass ones.
Just as she started to open her mouth and tell Professor Lee that she was going to do no such thing, Professor Lee interrupted her with a large smile of his own.
"Excellent idea, Derek!"
"You've got to be kidding me!" She said under her breath. She shook her head at the pair of them. Professor Lee had always been cool, but she had never pegged him as that type of professor. Did Derek have some kind of sway over their professor she didn't know about?
"Don't worry about it, Beth," Professor Lee continued. "They're just pre-lab questions. I know you understand the lab so there's no need for you to waste the time. Besides, I know you're on call at the hospital tomorrow. You should get some rest in while you can."
Another draw back of getting to know your professor. Beth had talked to him so much about work, that he had caught onto her schedule, which consisted of Friday's on call. That meant the hospital could call her in at any time no matter what she was doing. It wasn't really typical of a hospital but because Beth didn't have any classes or a shift at the hospital on Friday, she had told them to call her if they needed her. She would gladly take the hours if they could afford to give them.
"Do you work a desk job at the hospital or something?" Derek asked. His voice was almost sickly sweet and almost immediately she caught on that he was only really speaking because Professor Lee was around. Derek didn't actually care about her life or what she did when she wasn't in class.
Regardless, she tried to hold back a sneer. It was a common thought that just because she was a college student, she couldn't have a job of significance at the hospital.
Just as she opened her mouth to clue Mr. Hale in on the fact, Professor Lee caught her off again.
"Beth is a certified nursing assistant." Professor Lee crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the lab table. It was a sure sign that he wasn't going anywhere any time soon. "I keep trying to convince her to go on to be a physician's assistant or a doctor but she's determined that a nursing degree is for her." Professor Lee smiled down at her and she tried to smile back.
Dear lord! She probably looked like the biggest brown-noser to Derek. Professor Lee knew almost too much about her.
"Beth," Professor Lee tried to regain her attention and she raised an eyebrow at him in question. "You should really get to know Derek. He had a job as an orderly at the hospital on the psych floor. His main focus is psychology but he's a biology minor like you. I think you two could learn a lot from each other.
Hold the phone, Beth's mind screamed at her. Was her professor trying to hook her up? What the hell was going on here! Lee was basically shoving them at each other under the pretense that they both had great minds. Granted, that was always a good start to attraction but she really didn't like the idea of Lee trying to get her romantically involved with someone.
A tense silence seemed to settle over the three and Beth wondered if Derek was thinking the same thing as she was or if maybe she had taken the whole thing out of context. Lee, however, was staring down at the two expectantly. Almost as if he was thinking they would fall in love on the spot.
"Umm…what do you plan to do with that?" She found the words pouring out of her mouth. She cursed herself. If she had kept quiet and just put her dead to work, Lee probably would have left them alone. Unfortunately though, she often found herself cracking her social pressure no matter how much she liked to think she was a social butterfly.
"Social work," was the curt reply.
Immediately she thought there must be more to the story but Derek wasn't sharing and she wasn't about to ask. His facial expression and the way his shoulders had suddenly tightened, made her think he really didn't want to talk about it.
"Well," Professor Lee announced, "I'll leave you to it. Feel free to be each others' permanent lab partners. Just let me know if you decide to switch so I can inform the others."
He left as abruptly as he'd shown up and Beth found herself dropped her head in mortification.
"Teacher's pet?"
She turned towards Derek at the sound of a smile in his voice. It was small and nothing like the one had had given Lee, but it was still good enough to melt her heart a little. And she didn't even know this guy!
His smile was also contagious, as she found herself smiling softly back at him. "We both smoke," she mumbled in a way of explanation. "So we run into each other a lot on campus. Not a lot of designated smoking areas, you know." She rushed on with her explanation when she realized it could have been taken in several different ways.
"You shouldn't smoke." She should have known that was response he would give. "It'll kill you."
"Thanks," she snarked as she turned back to her notebook and his answers. "Like I didn't know that from the commercials, the laws, the warning on the pack, and the radio ads."
She could have sworn he chuckled beside her but the breathy noise was gone as quickly as it had started.
The next day found Beth taking the elevator in the hospital up to the psych floor. Her and Derek had agreed that she just take the answers home with her so neither of them had to waste any more time in the lab room. He had told her before they parted ways that he worked the next day and she could just drop the answers off with the nurse at the front desk.
As the elevator climbed higher, she grew more nervous. She twisted her fingers around the extra fabric of her scrub shirt as she looked up at the glowing number that told her what floor she was passing. She had never been up to the psych ward. She had never had to go up for a patient or take a patient down. She had been lucky according to the other nurses but Beth was convinced it was because they saved all the psych ward patients for the more experienced nurses. She didn't know if it was true or not, but that's what she told herself to quell the fear of having to go up.
Much like death, she had never experienced insanity or any degree of it. Sure, her mother took medication for depression but these days who didn't? The thought of insanity and insane people, scared Beth. She knew the fear was mostly unfounded because not everyone on the psych floor was clinically insane, but Beth still couldn't shake the irrational fear.
The hand that wasn't twisting her scrub shirt into knots was holding Derek's pre-lab answers. She had stuck a post-it note to the piece of paper that said "Thanks for the answers! I really appreciated it! –Beth". She wasn't expecting to see him and really her goal was to hand them off and get back down to work as fast as possible. She really didn't want to spend her whole lunch break sweating in fear.
The elevator gave a loud 'ding' and then the door slowly parted. The psych floor looked exactly like the rest of the hospital except for the huge white double doors that had metal in front of what were usually windows and a shield of plastic surrounded the nurse's desk. Beth shivered just looking at it.
She took slow, small steps towards the middle-aged woman sitting behind it, as if walking any faster would draw unwanted attention from people who weren't even in sight. The only person she even saw was the nurse sitting behind desk, surround in plastic shielding.
"Ex-excuse me," she stuttered when she finally stopped in front of the desk. She kept her voice low, so as not to disturb anyone.
"Yes, dear, what can I help you with?" The nurse smiled brightly at her and it put Beth's fear at ease, if only a little bit.
"I'm just hear to drop this off for Derek Hale. We're in the same biology class." Beth held up the piece of paper in her hand and waved it back and forth slowly. Her eyes alternated between looking at the nurse and watching the huge, ominous double doors wearily.
The nurse seemed to be laughing at Beth from her perch.
"Oh!" She exclaimed as her smile grew wider. "Derek Hale! Such a nice young man," she started to gush. "He's on break right now. If you turn around and go past the elevator and go to the first door on your right, he'll be in there. It's an employee break room, honey." The woman's honey-colored curls bounced as she nodded her.
Beth couldn't help but think the woman was entirely too happy to be on this floor but she smiled back at her before turning on her heel. She hadn't exactly expected having to take the paper to Derek herself but at least she had caught him on break and could make sure it got back to him. She knew she would feel awful if the answers got lost somewhere.
As she walked past the elevators, she tried her hardest to make sure her Puma tennis shoes didn't squeak on the white tile floor. She hoped, as she moved, that she didn't look too stupid but she found the squeaking noise to be quite annoying and whenever possible tried to make sure she didn't have to hear it.
She turned to her right after the elevators and found the break room right where the nurse said it would be. She cautiously stuck out a hand and turned the knob. Instead of going completely in, she opened the door as little as possible and instead just stuck her head in. She really didn't want to hear it if she interrupted some doctor on his break. Some of them got really touchy about it.
But, to her relief, she only saw Derek sitting in the break room. He had what looked like a Subway sandwich sitting next to a rather large textbook and he was hunched over them both, reading and eating at the same time. She was struck by how much this complete stranger was actually like her.
"Knock, knock," she said softly as she pulled the rest of her body through the door.
Derek didn't immediately look up but instead seemed to finish the paragraph he had been reading before her arrival. When his sharp green eyes fell on her, she thought she saw recognition flash through them.
"I just came to drop this off," she explained, waving the paper in the air like she had in front of the nurse. She thought better of it a few seconds later and quickly dropped her hand. It seemed like today, when she was finally in a better mood, her brain was going to cease all functioning in front of Derek, leaving her to be utterly embarrassed.
"Did you check the answers?" He didn't get up. Instead, he motioned to the plastic chair across from him, silently telling her to take a seat. She hesitated for a few seconds and then finally moved towards the table. The chair legs made a loud scraping noise as she pulled the chair out from under the table and she visibly winced. After she had all but thrown herself in the chair, she looked up to meet his gaze hesitantly.
"I trust you," she whispered, as she once again found herself getting lost in his green eyes. Her heart began the familiar dance it had done the first time she had laid eyes on him and unconsciously she brought a hand up to rest over her breastbone. It was only after a few deep breathes that she realized how bad what she had just said sounded. "I mean," she stuttered, "I trust your answers. You seem like a pretty smart guy…" she trailed off before she could dig herself an even deeper whole.
Author's Note: Thanks for all the follows guys! I can't really complain about not getting many reviews because I've also been known to follow a story and not leave a review. But, if Derek seems out of character or if I get something wrong about Teen Wolf, please let me know!