rain ✧ lrh

7. stay far, far away from luke hemmings

It was glorious for Ruth to see, so she never revealed what she saw every morning. She would walk in, sit in the seat across from the one that the blonde boy had just occupied a few minutes ago, and talk to her best friend.

"Ruth, are you listening to me?"

Her girlfriend's voice snapped her out of her intrusive thoughts once more, "Sorry," she spoke sheepishly, "What were you saying?"

"Me, your girlfriend, Harper, was asking what time you get off tonight."

Ruth smiled lightly, "I get off at eleven."

Harper rolled her eyes and stood up from the barstool she had been sitting at for the last half hour, "Once you get off, call me. Let's go see a movie tonight."

"It's a Monday night," Ruth deadpanned.

"So?"

"I have class tomorrow morning."

"So?"

The one thing Harper and Ruth never related on was school. Harper had dropped out after her first year to pursue a start-up business on her own. She had gotten lucky and found a spot in South Bend, Indiana - three hundred miles away from her home in Cincinnati - to open her own bookstore and coffeeshop. It was a cute little place - the first floor was a maze of tall bookshelves and the stairs led up to the coffeeshop area where the few customers read their books and sipped on their overly-specific lattes.

It was actually how Ruth and Harper had met in the first place. She had found the place her freshman year; when she was feeling a bit lonely and wanted to explore town. She hadn't been able to connect with anyone other than Nova yet, so she was hoping she might be able to forge connections with fictional characters to make up for the lack of social life that plagued her every time she opened any social media app. She had thought the place looked charming and she deemed it worthy of her interest. She had found a book to read and sat in one of the coffee shop chairs when she saw Harper for the first time; blonde hair above her shoulders, green eyes, a pair of glasses resting on the tip of her nose.

Back then, she was still so far in the closet that she almost convinced herself she wasn't immediately attracted to the girl. And when Harper sat down next to her and asked about the book she was reading, she assumed it was because the store was dead and the owner was desperate for any social interaction - like Ruth was. She mistook her flirting for niceties (because really, in this day and age, it's hard to decipher when girls are being nice or intentionally flirty), and their friendship went on for months. They never saw each other outside of the bookstore, but Ruth had made sure to make her visits more frequent; each time she spent a few minutes longer in that chair.

The first time they kissed was in February of Ruth's freshmen year. She had come by the shop to help Harper set up Valentine's Day decorations - which involved taping paper hearts to the windows and emphasizing the variety of romance novels in various sections of the store. They had eventually decided that the coffee wasn't cutting it anymore and they decided to sneak into the bar close to campus and get black-out drunk together. However, it didn't lead to a black-out - it led to Ruth finally working up the courage to tell Harper how she felt and it gave Harper the courage to kiss Ruth right there.

So their relationship was still less than a year old; that's the reasoning Ruth always provided Harper whenever she asked why she hadn't been able to meet her friends yet. And that was why she let Nova feign the idea of having privacy; Ruth didn't pry and ask about why she was sitting at a table with the one guy Ashton had told them never to speak to because she knew it would be hypocritical.

"Let's do Friday night," Ruth smiled at Harper, "I have something I need to do before then."

She didn't realize just how dangerous Nova's and Luke's interactions were until she decided that she needed to intervene - not with Nova and Luke, with Nova and Ashton.