Chapter 10: Childhood Sweethearts
** Harper **
What?!
The words boomed in Harper's ears like thunder. To think that it was even a possibility for Eli to ... "No no no no," she rejected the thought immediately, as if afraid to consider it. "You got the wrong idea, Chelsea. We're not childhood sweethearts. He's four years older than me!"
Chelsea stared at her. "So? Is that supposed to be a lot?"
... Oh, maybe not anymore. Now that Harper was twenty-two, it didn't seem that far off from twenty-six anymore. But back home ... "Well, it was a lot when we first met," she explained. "I was nine, and he was thirteen. It was unconventional enough for us to even be friends with that age gap."
The gossiping light in Chelsea's eyes turned curious. "Hmm ... then tell me about it! How did you become buddies against all odds?"
Harper hesitated. She took a pull of her Guinness. It felt a bit awkward to talk about her silly teenage crush, especially after the disaster last night. But the alcohol was helping, and wasn't this the very reason why she wanted to meet up and chat with a girl friend?
"He's the same age as my brother," she said at last. "When he moved into our neighborhood, he started at the same middle school my brother went to, and they became friends pretty quickly. The rest of our family met him at my brother's birthday party that year ... and then my mom started inviting him over a lot. Probably because he lived with a single dad, and I guess she felt bad for him. She tried to include him in our family gatherings as much as she could."
"Aww, that was nice of her," Chelsea said. "So you just naturally started hanging out with him?"
Harper nodded. "Well, remember I like video games? I was apparently good enough at it that the boys didn't mind including me on their team. It turned out that we got along really well in the basement ... then on vacations too, whenever my mom decided to take us on a weekend road trip."
She noticed belatedly that she was smiling. Those were really some of her favorite memories — she and Eli ganging up together in a game against her brother, or her parents sitting at the front of their SUV, the three of them dozing off in the back.
They were just friends at the time, innocent kids that enjoyed each other's company. It wasn't until much later that she discovered her attachment to Eli had gone deeper than she thought. It wasn't until when he and her brother left for college, and she missed him so much more fiercely than she did her brother, that she realized her feelings had started growing in a different direction.