His Naughty Lessons

** Harper **

Perhaps she still had a lot to improve on massaging skills, judging from the fact that Eli’s tense shoulders didn’t seem to have gotten any better after half an hour of her hard work. Harper wondered if she should load up on some youtube videos and follow them as she went ... or maybe she should just request more massages for herself and copy it more closely step by step.

Or, maybe she simply needed more practice. Just like what she needed with cooking. It wasn’t until Eli joined her in the kitchen later in the evening that she realized how much she had yet to learn on that subject — she was totally going to add in the meat without browning it first! And she had prepared the wrong type of cheese to top the dish with! Thank goodness that the expert chef was patient and thorough in getting everything back on the right track, helping her narrowly avoid making a complete disaster with their dinner.

Harper made it her personal midyear resolution to brush up on both of those skillsets, starting with carefully taken notes and lots of practice. However, when she offered to try everything again from scratch the next day, the slightly strange expression that she received from Eli made her wonder if she was truly so bad that even such a patient guy had to think twice before giving her a second chance.

So maybe she shouldn’t be too surprised when the second chance never came for her the next day. Instead, she came home to find someone already there ahead of her, greeting her with ... a puff of dust rising in the living room like a giant mushroom cloud.

"... Eli?" she gasped, searching the chaotic debris for her boyfriend’s whereabouts.

"Shit. Don’t come over here, it’s a mess." Eli poked his head out from behind the couch. "Since when do you leave work before six now? What happened to my workaholic Harper and what did you do to replace her?"

Harper giggled. "Well ... since the day I decided to surprise you with a horribly homemade dinner, I suppose?" Then she scanned the disastrous living room that was almost upside down. "Though I guess that’s not happening today anymore. Geez, I thought I made a complete mess of your kitchen yesterday, but even that couldn’t compare to what’s happening to this place right now! What did you—"

Oh.

She stopped mid-sentence, and her jaw fell as she slowly began to process the sight before her.

The minimalist TV stand was gone, replaced by a large entertainment center that already had quite a few items sitting nearby. Everything was still scattered all over the place and utterly out of order, but from the vague outline of an arrangement, she could see his plan if she looked closely: on one side was the newest Xbox, Playstation, Switch, Oculus ... and of course the proprietary headset from Future Vision; on the other side was an almost worn-out collection of N64, GameCube, Atari Jaguar, Wii ... with a stack of disks and cartridges that she immediately recognized as their old time favorites.