His Naughty Lessons-Chapter 220: The Boy and the Girl

** Harper **

"Gosh, Harper. You’re even pushier than your brother." Eli groaned helplessly, trying to avert his eyes from his girlfriend’s piercing gaze, but failed.

It was a good sign though. Harper could tell from his face that he had questions for her, and he simply needed a little nudge to let it out.

"As I should be. And have every reason to be." She pressed her forehead to his, trying to calm his nerves with a little intimate touch. "We need to start getting used to this, Eli. The fact that there are two of us in this together. I know it’s new for you to talk about this kind of stuff — and really, it’s new for me too — but if you keep hiding whatever is troubling you, then we won’t ever get past it."

She hoped she had picked the right words. Relationships weren’t her expertise in any way, and she didn’t know if asking him to open up to her would scare him off again, but she did know that she wasn’t a fan of those novels where the couple couldn’t simply sit down and talk to each other. Stretching out misunderstandings for hundreds of Chapters might be an easy plot device to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but the forced angst coming out of character stupidity had never appealed to her, and she certainly didn’t want to see it happen in real life.

Maybe she did do it right, or maybe looking away from his eyes made things easier. Eli was quiet for a long moment, then took a deep breath in. His hands came up behind her, lightly holding her shoulders after only a brief hesitation. "You’re not going to like what you hear," he sighed.

"Try me."

A delicate silence hung between them for a few seconds. "Have I ... ever done something that annoyed you?" he asked carefully in the end. "Or offended you?"

... What?

Harper had no idea where that came from. Had they tricked each other and got angry at each other back in the days when they were little brats? Sure, plenty. Had they disagreed and argued on trivial topics in the past two months, such as him being a stubborn idiot? Sure, as they were currently doing right at this moment. But he obviously wasn’t referring to either of those.

"Be specific," she demanded. "What made you ask that? Is Tyler still convinced we aren’t getting along somehow?"

Eli hesitated again, as if trying to make up his mind on something life-changing that he was about to say next. "No. But he did bring up a fair point. You weren’t picking up my calls for the whole four years when I was on the west coast ... and I never bothered to ask why."

Harper raised an eyebrow. Again, she had no idea where that came from. "Why would he randomly bring that up again?" she asked, puzzled. "We’ve already talked about it at dinner last week, and I thought he’s seen pretty well with his own eyes that the story is long in the past."

"It’s not in the past if it’s only shadowed by other things now." Eli inhaled deeply once more. "Harper. Even if four years have passed, I am still the same person I once was. Whatever it was that you didn’t like about me then, it’s most definitely still there now, and I don’t want you to simply choose to ignore it just because ... just because we’re physically closer."

It took Harper almost a full minute to process what he meant. When she did, her mouth literally fell open.

"Y-You’re saying that you think I wasn’t talking to you because I didn’t like you?" She pulled back to stare at him incredulously. "And that I had a change of heart now because we—" The thought was so ridiculous that she couldn’t even utter it. "Oh, my, God. That’s what Tyler talked to you about and that’s what’s bothering you?"

She couldn’t decide if she wanted to roll her eyes or laugh until she suffocated. These two idiots, they should go find a mirror on the wall and ask who was the dumbest of them all! How did they even manage to turn the situation a hundred eighty degrees and actually make sense out of those ridiculous assumptions?

She didn’t end up laughing until she suffocated, though, because the look on Eli’s face was so confused and stricken that it tugged on her heartstrings, making her feel a pang of sorrow. This man still didn’t believe in himself. After all this time they had already spent together, it was just as easy as ever for every little doubt to creep into his fragile heart. He was still holding on to the judgment that he wasn’t enough for her, that her feelings for him were only a misguided impulse of a hormonal rush.

What an idiot. And she loved him all the more for it.

"Let me tell you a story," she said softly when he didn’t respond for a long time. "I’ve wanted to try that trope for a long time, by the way. Don’t characters like to tell each other stories whenever it’s hard to get the point across? It’s one of my favorite clichés."

Without giving Eli an actual chance to say no, she went on. "There was once a girl, who met a boy when she was nine. He was a few years older than her, but he never treated her like a little kid whenever he came to visit her house with her brother. She liked him, and they had a lot in common, so they became best friends over the years as they grew up together like one happy family."

Eli blinked.

"Time passed by quickly. The boy turned eighteen and went to college in a different city, leaving the girl behind. It was hard for her to get through high school without her favorite friend around, and she wished she could call him every day, to hear about his exciting new life and tell him all the cool games she had learned to play since he left. But her mom told her not to distract people from their studies, so she had to learn not to be so clingy."

Harper placed her hand on his chest. She could feel his heartbeat picking up speed the moment she touched him, though she knew that wasn’t the change of rhythm she was looking for yet. "She made new friends in high school," she continued, "and she liked them a lot. But with every passing day, she felt as if there was a strange emptiness in her heart that kept growing. There was a strange loneliness that she couldn’t fix, no matter how many new friends she made or how much fun time she spent with her family. A strange loneliness that only went away on Christmas, when the boy came back on winter break and visited her family like he always did before."

She looked into Eli’s eyes, and she smiled at the undisguised shock in his eyes. "It wasn’t until then that she realized how fiercely she missed him," she said softly. "It wasn’t until then that she realized ... that at some point in time when she wasn’t aware, the boy was no longer just a friend or family to her. He was more, so much more."