My Wildest Dreams

Chapter One

Harper's POV:

Life in small town USA wasn't for everyone. But for me, it was all my little country girl heart had ever wanted. Everything from the smell of freshly turned dirt to the sounds of crickets at night when you looked up at the stars made this the perfect life for me. When I say that I literally couldn't imagine living anywhere but in the small town that I was born, raised, and now had my own business in, I mean it with all my heart.

Woodington, North Carolina -my hometown- was just like any other small, one stop-light town across the country, complete with the diner that everyone congregated at on a daily basis, the small grocery store that had been in the same family for generations, and the little gas station that was just as much there for convenience as it was for social gatherings. But as good as all those things are, outsiders looked at my little hometown as if there was nothing here, that it would be pointless to set down roots and live a simple life, all because it didn't have the big box stores and offer the countless number of chain restaurants to grab a quick bite to eat. The people that needed those amenities would rather live in a big city, make an enormous wage every week, and deal with the hustle and bustle of city life rather than make less money and have the things that are most important in life: Love, respect, loyalty, and friendship. Or at least that's the things that I consider to be the best things in life. I know everyone looks at it differently.

Not that I am condemning anyone for choosing a different life than me. I'm glad that leaving the town that shaped them makes them happy. I'm glad they get to flaunt their big checks and buy the finer things in life. If those are the things that make them happy, then that's their choice. It's just not something that I could ever consider doing. Which is why I decided to open my own beauty shop here in my small town versus moving it to a bigger city only a few minutes away. Setting up shop here might mean that I have more of an older clientele than I do a younger one but I was perfectly fine with that. Plus, the old ladies always have all the gossip that's making its way around town.

But if I had to pick one thing that I really didn't like about small towns, it would be the slim pickings when it came to men my age. All of the ones that had stuck around had either married their high school sweethearts and started a farm or they were committed to living the bachelor lifestyle, preferring to screw all the young college girls at the local college in Murfreetown. And if they were single, it meant that they had had their heart broken and were now gunshy when it came to letting a woman get close. Not that I blame them because I was in the same boat myself.

But in order to understand what I mean by that, we have to take a little trip down memory lane. You see, in high school, I'd fallen hard and fast for Dawson Harris, someone that I had been friends with for as long as I can remember. From Kindergarten right though our senior year of high school, Dawson and I had been in the same classes. But not only that, we were neighbors. We spent every waking minute of our childhood playing together with the rest of the neighborhood kids. But then it happened. In all those cheesy rom-coms from the 90's and early 2000's, the actors always made it seem as if you developed feelings for someone out of the blue. And just like everyone else, I'd thought that they were full of it. But I'm living proof that you can be best friends with a guy one day and the next it's like someone smacked you in the head and made you see said best friend in a different light. Suddenly you notice the reasons all your friends have been ogling over him, why they have been jealous of how close you are to him, why they want you to hook them up with your best friend. Before you know it, you start dreaming about kissing him, about holding his hand as you walk through the halls, dancing with him at prom and being crowned prom king and queen; and if you are really imaginative, you start dreaming about what your kids could look like if you were to get that far in life as a couple.