Day 175 of 365 Days of Writing Prompts: Write a romance between two childhood friends.
Erin: “Do you ever regret that we waisted so much of our lives apart,” he asked seeming upset.
“What?”
“We were the lucky ones. We were given our soul mates from a young age and waisted it.”
“That’s not how it is,” I accidentally started laughing.
“How is it then sweetheart?” His frown turned to a scowl.
“I was not in love with bugger eating, mud fighting pull, pull my hair loser. I’m in love with this man who is completely different.”
“You like when I pull your hair now,” he winked and finally started smiling again.
I just rolled my eyes and walked into another room.
Shannon: We’re getting too big to keep hanging out in this tree house,” I grumbled as I tried to get my legs in comfortable position.
“Awe, but this is our place. Maybe we should expand,” Zach flared his arms, knocking me in the shoulder.
I shook my head with smile, “Oh sure, I’ll speak with the tree tomorrow about growing some more sturdy branches, and we’ll knock that wall right out. We’ll have it all done right in time for us to start high school. You know around the time when we’ll never use it again,” I joked.
“Exactly. That’s all I’m asking for,” he responded as if he were serious. I loved how we were so familiar with each other we never had to explain ourselves. Everything was effortless.
“Do you think high school is going to be completely different,” I asked unable to keep ignoring it for the rest of the summer, because I didn’t want to think about how everything was going to change.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, he’d been avoiding bringing it up too. “My brother told me they like to pick on the freshman, but other than that we’re just leveling up from middle school. We’ll get used to it after a while.”
“Do you think we’ll still be friends?” I got to the question I was actually concerned about.
He looked up sternly, “We’ll always be friends,” he explained with complete certainty.
“You can’t know that,” I shook my head. “We could move away from each other, you could find better friends, you could get a girlfriend and forget about me,” I listed off the possibilities.
“No I won’t,” he stated, again without wavering.
“Yeah but you probably will,” I narrowed my eyes at his irrational response.
“Well there is only one girl I want,” he blurted out before he could stop himself. “So…” he shrugged, nervous now as he stopped looking at me, “I promise that’s not going to happen.”
I tried to hold myself back from smiling too obviously. “Good,” I revealed and his head immediately perked up again.
Give your character a chance at puppy love.
Pelky Sisters 
As it turned out, as long as your roommate kept her mouth shut, it was pretty easy to keep up a façade of not being a freak who could defy gravity; everyone in university was too busy with their own problems to notice when I accidentally got too relaxed and floated a few inches off my chair. Though that didn’t happen as often as I was worried it would, though that may have lessened the number of times I was relaxed enough for it to be an issue, the few times it did happen, I was terrified and immediately snapped myself out of it. I began practicing in our dorm every minute I wasn’t sleeping, taking classes or doing schoolwork. Everything appeared to be going really well and I was to the point of settling into that state of clear mindedness during yoga without levitating at all.
As I said, everything was going fine. Then, I got a huge surprise.
Beth was just finishing up a paper at her desk, chewing the end of her pen so hard I kept cringing when I thought it might squirt ink all over her face, when there came a gently knock at the door. Without glancing up from her review, Beth called distractedly, “It’s open,” before her eyes continued their rapid movement across the page. Unfortunately for whoever wanted to enter, Beth didn’t actually leave the door unlocked, so the next thing that happened was a loud thud followed closely by a muffled curse.
Bolting off the comfortable bedsheets, I fiddled with lock and opened the door, prepared to apologize profusely. “Sorry, she’s been at that essay for-” I caught myself, did a double take and shouted at the visitor, “Jack!” With a grin spreading across his thin lips, though he was wincing and holding his shoulder gingerly, he leaned forward to kiss my forehead.
“I missed you so much I had to visit,” he sighed, clearly in excruciating pain. I reached up on my tiptoes to kiss him, being careful not to touch his arm, and stepped back to let him into the room. “Well, your mom was right; this is a nice room,” he murmured, pressing down on the mattress and taking a seat, “it even has a great view of the trees.” Pointing out the window as though his shoulder was fine, he glanced round to Beth, who was still studiously checking over her paper for the eightieth time. “You must be the roommate who forgets whether the door is locked or not,” he joked with his jester grin pulling at one side of his lips.
When Beth turned with a greenish tinge in her face and looked at the way Jack was still holding his shoulder, she made a short, high squeak and gushed, “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t even paying attention at all. I was the last one in ‘cause I needed water, but that feels like days ago so I just wasn’t even- I’m really, really sorry-” she blathered on like that for a few minutes as Jack smiled at her, shifting his shoulder around uncomfortably.
He could take it no longer, though, and put his hand up, a ring glistening on his finger. “Beth, seriously, it’s fine. I was in a couple classes at our local college,” he reassured her, grabbing my waist comfortably, “and I couldn’t tell the difference between a textbook and a laptop after the first week. I was completely hopeless; then I realized I needed to learn something if I was going to end up anywhere other than my aunt’s hardware store.” Realising something, he quickly added, “Not that I don’t love working there, but I’d really like to, you know, have a big career where I can spoil my doll here rotten and buy her that farmhouse she’s always dreamed of.” When he looked at me with joy so ingrained in his face, I couldn’t help but blush and giggle; that’s how he got me, I suppose.
After an awkward minute of mushy crap between Jack and I, not that I don’t love mushy crap unless there’s another person around, Beth cleared her throat and got back to her notes. Though I was almost certain she was finished with reviewing the paper, I didn’t want to call her out on it. But, lo and behold, Jack had other ideas in mind, anyhow.
“Oh, Aria, I have something to show you,” he sang in his deep baritone, as he rose with my petite hand gripped in his burly ones. Kissing the top of my fingers, he bowed low and exited the room with not a glance in Beth’s direction. Even with the door closed behind him, I could hear the echoing of his voice thundering as he continued to carol.
Sniggering as she shut her book, Beth turned her deep caramel eyes on me and spoke with a hint of jealousy, “So, that’s Jack, eh? He seems quite the catch,” she laughed, spinning a ruined pen around in her fingers. “Was that a ring? I never noticed that you were wearing one,” she noticed suddenly, her eyes narrowing dangerously under tired lids.
Waving her off, I slumped onto the edge of my bed and began calmly, “Yeah, that’s my Jack. He’s a year older than I am; I mostly came here because I wanted to prove that anything he could do, I could do too. He went in for computers, just like I did, but he realized, as the last person in our town to know, that he loves working with his hands.” As I spoke, I twirled the band around on my finger, letting it hold my calmness in. “So, he went back to Aunt Lou’s shop and he builds birdhouses and stuff out back on his days off. And, yeah, it is a ring.” I noticed her eyeing the ring hungrily and took it off, throwing it into her outstretched hand easily. “When I was five, we met in the sandbox. Since then we’ve been close. That is the most permanent kind of ring we’ve had, but it’s the fourth iteration. The last ones were made of scrap wood, but they were magnificent.” Though I couldn’t take my eyes off the circle of copper, that wasn’t why I was continuing to fidget painfully with my fingers.
“So, you guys are engaged?” she asked, tossing it back to me. A light silence followed as I felt the comforting effects of my ring sink in.
Laughing to myself, I replied, “Oh, no, nothing so official as that. They’re like promise rings. I suppose they may as well be engagement rings, but we haven’t really discussed it yet.” I got up and stared out the window into the forest, thinking about what the surprise might be. “I haven’t told him about that thing I can do yet. Should I?” I asked the world that lay just out of my reach, hoping that the answer would settle the fluttering butterflies holed up in my stomache.
Silence dragged on like mud until Beth piped up, having obviously thought about it, “I’d tell him. You clearly love him and if he finds out later on, he’s gonna be hurt, right?” she posed the question as though it were obvious; he was going to find out eventually, won’t he? But I didn’t want that to be the correct answer because it was the hard choice.
If she’d said I should keep it to myself, I wouldn’t have doubted it for a second. At the same time, though, it was clear that I couldn’t keep this kind of secret forever, even if I figured out how to control it. Then there was the strange goings-on with that other group of students; the White Rose Society poisonings or whatever. Really, I needed as many people as possible to know about what I could do so if anything happened to me there would be a trail. Shivering at the thought, I finally turned back to Beth and whispered, “Did you hear about that girl who got really sick?” I hadn’t really thought much about it until that moment.
When she answered, her voice was straining against tears, “Yeah. They talked about her in class the other day; the professors are claiming she took something that was worse than whatever that party had going on. But I don’t think anyone believed them. No one realizes how bad it was, but they know a load of crap when they hear it.” Beth was in a strange position, I thought, because she was privy to information only the Dryad Society knew, but not everything I learned was funnelled to her. If it had been me, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself asking about what was going on with the secret societies on campus, but she never once brought it up.
“I’m worried about-” I cut myself off as the door swung open to reveal my boyfriend triumphantly waving a bike horn around in his hands as though it were a hunting trophy.
“Aria, we are going on a ride up to the very top of the mountain so we can watch the sun set! That’s the surprise!” he shouted, beaming with ever cell in his body. If he’d been any more excited he might have been bouncing off the walls, until he read the room and tamped down the enthusiasm to a more stable level. “Is everything alright?” he asked, glancing nervously from Beth to me and back again, lowering the bike horn.
Waving off the dread that hung in the air, I mirrored his smile and attempted to bring the emotion to my eyes. “Oh, it’s nothing. We were just talking about a couple of the students that are bad influences. We’d better get a move on if we wanna get to the top before sunset, honey,” I yawned, suddenly very tired. Carefully pulling my purse out of my closet, I linked my arm through Jack’s and we pranced through the open door.
When we reached the top, a good half hour before the sun set, we leaned the rental bikes against a tree and wandered over to the cliff, glancing nervously at the immense drop into frigid, writhing waters. I’d never been big on heights, but I was beginning to get used to since I began practicing levitating; sometimes I went to the top of our dorm building in the middle of the night and hovered just off the edge to test myself. Pretending to be frightened of the cliff’s edge, I leaned into Jack’s arms for comfort and breathed deeply. We stood there for a while, the gentle, briny ocean breeze whispering through the trees and whipping up the tide water far below us.
“This is so nice,” I commented, keeping my breathing steady with some effort. When I’d soaked up enough of Jack’s warmth, I turned to look him in the eye and promptly chickened out, “Hey, why don’t we go sit on the bench?” Motioning to the rough-hewn pew and shifting to half-pull him toward it, hiding my watery eyes from his interested glances.
As we sat on the uncomfortable seat together, Jack leaned around to look into my face, which I was now hiding in his shoulder. “Okay, Aria, what’s up? You’re acting weird.” Pushing me forward so he could see my face, he wrapped an arm around my shoulders comfortingly as his eyes scoured every inch of me for some clue.
Shaking my hair from my face, I came clean, “Look, I found out something when I arrived here. Uhm, it’s something about, uh, well, about me. I found out that I can do things that most people can’t. I don’t mean that in a rude way or anything. Uh, it’s easier to just show you,” I ended, unable to look him in the eye. I began breathing steadily with my eyes shut tightly, tears running from them silently.
It took a few minutes to be calm enough, but I suddenly felt Jack’s arm slip from my back and the breeze was shoving against me harder, threatening to knock me off course. Continuing the calm breathing, I glanced down at a Jack, who was grinning so widely it split his face, and almost fell out of the air with shock. With his feet on the bench, he reached up to grasp my hand, pulling me sideways so our faces were almost touching. When he kissed me, I fell into him, dropping dangerously before I remembered to keep buoyant.
We parted, still holding hands, and I landed gently on the bench, with a statement on the tip of my tongue. “I was worried you’d leave me because I’m a freak,” I breathed anxiously.
Chuckling, he answered, “I was worried that you weren’t different.” With our fingers still intertwined he held up a stone, closed his eyes and the fragment disappeared, only to reappear inside our closed fingers. “It’s killed me not being able to tell you,” he whispered, leaning in to kiss me more passionately than we’d ever kissed before.
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On a rainy day, Rick and Jacey were stuck at the Evert house. And, somehow, the family photo books were taken out. Jacey flips through, hearing the stories from Mikio. Then there’s a picture of young Josh and a little girl. “Josh, who’s this?”
Josh sees the picture, then groans to himself. His mother looks at the picture and smiles wider, “That was Josh’s childhood crush.”
“Mom!” Josh buries his face into a pillow.
“I heard from Adelise that he was so frustrated because this little girl was so cute, but he didn’t know what to do because girls had cooties,” Mikio continues.
“Awww~!” Jacey leans closer to Josh, to which he replies by grumbling. “Do you miss her?”
“I don’t even remember her,” Josh says, “but apparently everyone else does.”
“What was her name?” Rick asks.
“I don’t know, Josh never told anyone,” Mikio states, “They only got that picture at a school event. …I think she liked him, too.”
Josh endures the teasing, but knows he’ll never live down the mystery girl down.
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