His Naughty Lessons

** Eli **

For a moment, Eli wondered if he should consider drowning himself in the pool. In a spur of blind and brutal honesty, he had just admitted to the girl in front of him all those shameful thoughts that he never intended to tell another soul. And now, the girl was staring back at him with huge eyes as if his words had just shocked the life out of her.

She must be seeing him as a complete creep now, even worse than that coworker of hers.

This was it, then ... At least he got to be completely truthful with her before she fled for good. If his chest wasn’t feeling so heavy to the point that he almost couldn’t breathe, he would’ve laughed at the irony. Turning away to save himself the pain of watching those familiar, beautiful eyes slowly fill up with revulsion, he started propping his weight up the pool’s edge.

"Why didn’t you do them?" A voice so soft that it was almost a whisper sounded behind him.

Eli paused, flipping himself back around. "Do what?"

"The things you said you wanted to do to me ... Why didn’t you do them?"

It was his turn to gape this time as if the words had just shocked the life out of him.

Harper was smiling. When he finally met her eyes, he saw that they were twinkling, though not with the sly sparks that he had grown used to over the past weeks. There was something more to the light within them now, something new.

But ... What the hell did she just say?

"I mean ... It should go without saying that I’m ... not experienced enough to tell that you had those thoughts," she added when neither of them spoke for a long while. "I ... wish I knew. Why did you assume that I’d be opposed to it?"

Surely he must’ve heard it wrong, even though she had just said it twice and elaborated it unmistakingly. "You can’t be serious?" Eli asked, disbelieving. "We’ve set boundaries, Harper. There were clear rules from the very beginning—"