Strawberries || H.S.

S E V E N T E E N

"Tell me something you've never told anyone else," Mia whispers in the cover of the dark, humid night. They had made it back to the cabin, deep in the field. They had thrown off their shoes, laying upon the wooden floor in the living room. They had pushed back the furniture, feeling constrained by it. They wanted the coolness of the floor, but at the same time, they craved each other's touch. So as Mia whispers her words into the heavy air that filled the cabin, Harry reaches from across the floor and slightly touches the top of her hand with his own. She smiles at his touch, flipping her hand and intertwining her fingers with his.

He yawns lazily as he thinks about what Mia had just said, "Something no one has ever known?" He asks.

"Yes."

"The first girl I kissed, I didn't actually kiss."

"How so?"

"I chickened out."

"She kissed you then?"

"Yeah."

"How old were you?'

"Ten."

Mia laughs, "You were young."

"It was just a peck."

"But she told everyone you kissed her."

"Yeah, she did."

They quiet down, the lull of the ceiling fan making Harry doze off for a minute or two. He feels Mia moving on the floor, her hand leaving his for a moment and then coming back as she turns on her side to face him. She props herself up on an elbow and stares at him with her large, oceany eyes. He wondered how he could make out the color of her eyes in that darkness, how he knew that she was looking at him when he wasn't even facing her.

"Mia?"

"Yeah?"

"Will you tell me something that you've never told anyone else?"

She stays quiet for a second before whispering, "I love you."

Harry tilts his head slightly, waiting for his strawberry girl to smile, to giggle, to give any sign that she was joking. But she didn't. She wasn't.

"Yeah?" He tries, clearing his throat.

She comes a bit closer to him, the heat from her body starting to radiate towards Harry, "You told me to tell you something I've never told anyone else."

"You've never told anyone you've loved them?"

She shakes her head.

Silence. Pure silence filled the room. All Harry could hear was a loud buzzing in his ears and the sound of the rain hitting against the window panes. His heart raced, pumping life into the butterflies that started to take over his abdomen. He knew what he had to respond, he knew that he wanted to. He knew that it was right, that for the first time when someone told them they loved him that he believed them. That he wanted to reciprocate it. He had found what he loved, who he loved. He loved Mia with the entirety of his being. As crazy, and foolish, and stupid, and cliche as it may have been he had fallen in a love so pure and so deep that just hearing her say that she loved him brought his crazy, foolish, stupid, cliched daydreams to life. It was no longer a silly fleeting thought that had kept him entrapped in the wonderful dream like state he had been in since he and Mia had met. That world he had imagined had come to life. He was living in it.

Harry smiles, hugging Mia's body to his own. Forgetting that they were both covered in sweat, that the fan barely made any difference in the temperature of the stuffy room. He wanted so badly to stay in this moment. To relish his first real 'I love you'. He just wanted to replay it again and again.