Chapter 2: Her Secret Crush
** Harper **
An image flashed in Harper's mind. A figure of a young man draped in a black and gold graduation gown, smiling at her as she raised her camera. She still remembered the dazzling sunshine that day, the crisp scent of summer breeze drifting in the air as everyone swarmed him with congratulations. That picture she snapped was still sitting at the bottom of her desk drawer, locked away together with the brightest memories of her teenage years.
She shook that image out of her head. Nah, that Eli she grew up with had left for a different city four years ago, and he wasn't an editor. This must just be some other guy with the same name. A funny coincidence.
Then she saw the next message with the phone number. The same number that she had only texted a handful of times in the past four years, but still recognized with a mere glance.
No way. It was really Eli Sterling? Her Eli Sterling?
Harper gawked at her screen, dumbstruck. Eli should be thousands of miles away on the west coast of the country, not here. He should be working his nine-to-five job at a big finance company, not editing amateur web novels. So how could it be him? Why was he back, and when did he become a freelance editor?
Did Chelsea send him a link to the book already? Did he read it?
That last question drowned out all the others as soon as it came into her head. No no no no no. He'd better not have read her book ... He'd better not have seen those horrendously written intimate scenes!
Harper jolted from her seat, all worries over her book's future replaced by a new fear. Gosh, this was even more mortifying than seeing those comments from her readers. At least, her readers didn't know who she was in real life. But Eli, the boy on the next block whom she had been friends with since middle school? Whom she had been secretly crushing on throughout her teenage years? No way she'd let him read those Chapters knowing she was the one who wrote them! How was she ever going to fix her ruined image in front of him if he did?!