Promising Memoirs | soft h.s.

Chapter 31.

Harry's POV*

We picked up after our stop and continued to walk down the street-lighten path. Aubrey asked few more questions about how I enjoyed my school years growing up, which were all quite decent. There wasn't much to tell her; they were all the same story on repeat for each year. All the same except for the last three years when I did take on the activities and became more known as the 'popular' kid. I was more or less the boy that didn't really go out much person. My mum let me go to a lot of my classmates' birthday parties as a kid and even in my early teen years. She would always tell me that I was her special student, because I always did well in school. She knew that I didn't study or get the grades for her; it was all for myself — at least, that's what she taught me to believe.

I asked Aubrey the same question in reply to hers. She wasn't the kind of girl who was considered popular at all. She told me that she was quiet and studied almost all the time when she was younger. Never left a textbook unread. It reached the point where after everything adding up, her parents constantly fighting, not having any true friends, being completely secluded from the outside world, she almost gave up on school before she graduated high school. It all changed just around the time she met Natalie. She kept mentioning her as her saviour through life. A saviour after several years since the time she thought I'd died.

Her years did constantly involve Eleanor, they were close through letters, and more when social media kicked into society. They would tell each other basically everything, but Aubrey said that she still felt at a loss with no one physically being by her side. All of her classmates had their own group of friends and she was never invited or felt like she fit in anywhere within them.

She didn't join any programs or extracurriculars all to avoid other students who intimidated her. It made sense that's why she mentioned the fact she thought she wasn't confident enough or that she cared about what others thought of her. Her thoughts remembered back to her high school years. A few of the years she was constantly bullied for being known as a nerd who didn't know how to dress. I told her that she had great fashion taste, but she laughed and said that I wouldn't have thought so a few years back. Again it all related back to Natalie.

We started to walk back at towards the car, but were still a distance away, when she saw a lit up baseball field. It was empty, but her eyes were gazed in that direction. I rerouted our path and she smiled. When we reached the field, she was about to run onto the gravel, then decided otherwise since they were Gemma's shoes. I laughed, pulled her towards the bleachers, and we both sat at the top step. She sat still for a while as she looked out at the tan gravel, then at me.

"Harry?"

"Yeah, love?"

"How is it that all of this seems so surreal?"

"What seems surreal?"

"Our relationship, it just seems like a complete dream? You're too perfect to be human. You're the definition of a dream boyfriend."

"I don't think so. I have flaws. We all do, Rhea." I told her as I searched in her eyes trying to figure out why she was thinking about this.

"I know, but still. Our relationship seems fake sometimes."

"Fake?"

"No, no. I didn't mean it like that. I love what we have; but because it just seems too perfect to be real."

"Rhea, there is no such thing as a perfect relationship. We have something precious that we both don't want want to lose. We take care of, like how we take care of each other."

"I know but —"

"Love, we've both been through so much. So much just since the time we started dating. So much since before that. I think that if we had a bad relationship, we wouldn't be able to survive. Like I said, because of everything, we take care of the time we have together." I said sincerely.