His Naughty Lessons-Chapter 217: Adrenaline Rush

** Eli **

It took the better part of an hour to go through a brief recount of the past two months. Eli kept a good portion of details on his "lessons" to himself, letting Tyler use his own imagination to figure out how exactly the workshops went, though that didn’t mean the conversation was any less awkward ... especially not when he mentioned the semi-date that he agreed to go on with Vanessa.

He had expected Tyler to lose it again at some point, or at least have to pace around the room to let out some steam. But to his surprise, the guy remained pensively silent almost the entire time, and when they were done, he simply stared out of the window, as if contemplating a new profound dilemma in life.

Eli wasn’t sure if he preferred that reaction to getting himself flung against the wall.

"Pass me the whiskey," Tyler said in the end when he finally turned back from the window, gesturing at the open bottle on the table. "No, don’t pour it. Just give me the whole damned thing."

... Great.

"Try not to whack me on the head with it, please." Eli sighed as he handed over the bottle that was still half full.

Tyler said nothing in return, pouring a huge gulp straight down his throat. The burn seemed to have helped him reorganize the thoughts in his head, and when he set down the bottle again, the sulky pensiveness was slowly fading from his face, replaced by something else that was a bit more difficult to read.

"You know Harper hadn’t talked to you for years before this," he said.

Well, that wasn’t the type of comment Eli had expected at all. "Yes?" He glanced at Tyler, slightly puzzled, unsure what the sudden turn of topic had to do with the conversation at hand. "I did try to stay in touch, though she seemed busy with college. I suppose my calls never caught her at a good time." frёewebηovel.cѳm

Intriguingly, Tyler shook his head. "It’s not that. You probably don’t know this, but there was one day when I texted you about something shortly after she missed your call. Since you mentioned it to me, I called her afterward to check, and she picked up immediately. Turned out she was home all day that day and wasn’t busy with anything except watching youtube."

Eli knitted his brow slightly. What did that mean? Was Tyler suggesting that Harper had been ignoring those calls on purpose?

"Neither of us has seen her a lot since she started college," Tyler continued. His tone was a little different now, like he was reminiscing the days when the three of them were always close together. "She didn’t even come home for Christmas her freshman year. Then the second year, she started dating her first boyfriend, and the kid invited her to spend the winter break together in Europe. We all thought she was going to skip the family Christmas again and go with him instead, but guess what happened?"

Eli was completely at a loss about where this tangent of a conversation was going, but he went with the flow. "She invited him home?" he ventured. The thought didn’t make him unreasonably jealous, not at all.

"Hell no." Tyler chuckled. "She ditched him and came home by herself, claiming that she didn’t want to go on an ’ambiguous trip where who knows what might happen when a girl is stuck with a guy for a whole week’. Those were her own words, by the way. So I wasn’t surprised at all when they broke up a few months later, and she never got herself another date again since then."

That didn’t sound particularly like the Harper who Eli had grown to know over the past couple of months, though he had absolutely no complaints about how much she had changed.

Tyler reached for the whiskey again, taking another big draw. "My point here is — I know you think I shouldn’t keep seeing Harper as my baby sister who never grew up. And you’re right to a large degree there too, considering how quickly the years pass. But the truth is, even after all that time in college, she really did stay the same girl she was in a lot of ways. She still isn’t the experienced type when it comes to certain things, such as that relationship she clearly wasn’t ready for."

Now Eli was finally starting to pick up the hint. "Tyler—"

"I’m not saying that I’m assuming the same between the two of you." Tyler waved a hand in an obvious gesture of "let me finish", and Eli fell quiet. "I’ve never seen her protect anyone so fiercely like the way she did last night. She’s completely serious about you. After sleeping on it for a whole day, I think I’ve come to terms with the facts now, but it does make me wonder — what made things change so drastically? How did she go from not wanting to talk to you for four years, to suddenly being in a serious relationship she never dared try before, in a mere few weeks?"

Eli blinked. He definitely hadn’t realized that was where Tyler was going.

"I know she would call me judgmental again for saying this," Tyler continued, "but I still have to say it. Inexperienced young women can be too easily impressionable. Especially when a man has good looks, sweet talks, and whatever else you’ve got in your package. When she started this ’novel workshop’ arrangement with you, maybe she had simply trusted you with your experience, but what if she got carried away afterward by the brand new world that opened up to her for the first time? Even if it was with someone she hadn’t cared to so much as talk to for years? I don’t want to see her make such an important life decision based on an adrenaline rush, and then regret it when she looks back on it a year from now in the future."

The last few words stunned Eli into complete silence.