It was 4PM when the knock I'd been dreading all afternoon came. I opened the door to reveal Harper, arms crossed, waiting impatiently. She still wore her school uniform, though in the hour since our last class together she'd transformed from a clean-cut senior student into a delinquent. Her blouse was untucked, and the top three buttons of were undone, letting the shirt hang open to show off her considerable cleavage. She'd let down her hair: instead of the neat bun she'd worn it in all day, it now draped loose around her shoulders, wild and untamed. Her knee-length socks were bunched around her ankles, leaving her tan legs on full display. The transformation was almost startling, though, I had to admit, it was a cute look on her.
I turned my gaze downward, afraid I'd already let it linger too long. The last thing I needed was to provoke her.
Harper was my classmate—that was to say, we were seniors in the same class at high school, but the two of us were far from friends. Harper was a popular socialite; the kind that have their fun at the expense of others. Me? I was her favorite 'other'. Scarcely a day went by when she didn't find a reason to tease, insult, or humiliate me, and of course, I couldn't retaliate. Harper was the kind of girl that could get away with just about anything—and she knew it, too. She was the very definition of a wolf in sheep's clothing: between her wide-eyed doll-like face, her short stature, and the faux sweet attitude she affected, she was easily mistaken for defenseless prey rather than the social predator she was. Any time I dared stand up to her, a deliberate quiver of the bottom lip was all it took to sway people to her side.
"You found the place alright then, I guess?" I offered in an awkward attempt at conversation, studying the ground beneath her feet intently.
"No, I got lost." Harper sneered sarcastically, rolling her deep blue eyes at me.
"We could have just walked here together from school." I muttered defensively.
"Like I'd wanna be seen walking anywhere with a virgin like you." she snarked. "C'mon, let's just get this over with. I don't know how I ended up stuck with YOU for a partner, anyway."
I stood aside to make way for her to enter, ignoring the way she looked down her nose at me. Neither of us were exactly happy about the arrangement; Paired projects like this were a recipe for conflict even among friends, let alone two people who hated one another as Harper and I did. I'd asked the teacher to let us switch partners, but he'd been adamant about working with the people he'd matched us to, lecturing me about how I wasn't always going to get to picked who I worked with when I graduated next year. I was eager to get the project out of the way as quickly as possible, and Harper seemed to share the sentiment.
With a flick of her platinum-blonde hair, the young woman strutted across the living room and made herself comfortable. She half-sat, half-flopped onto the couch, sprawling herself out across it sideways so she took up both seats.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed two things: that Harper had immediately pulled her phone out and begun idly flicking through it, and that as she had lay down, her skirt had slid down her leg to bunch around her hip, exposing a scandalous spread of her smooth caramel thigh. My pulse began to race, as much with excitement as with fear. I wanted to look away, to turn back to my work—but I couldn't. That fleeting glimpse of Harper's tanned flesh had taken a strange hold over me, one that gripped my heart with an icy hand even as it beckoned me closer with the other. Slowly, trying to make as little motion and noise as possible, I turned to look at her—bracing myself all the while, expecting her to look up from her phone and catch me staring at any moment.
"So what do we do first, loser?" she suddenly spoke up.
My heart leapt into my throat at the sound of her voice, and for a second I thought she'd caught me oogling her—but she hadn't moved or even looked up from her phone. I took a deep breath to calm myself, gathering my wits.
"Er... we need to research before we can do anything." I stammered, hastily turning away from her.
"Whatever. You're a nerd, you can just do that stuff yourself." she drawled, clearly less concerned with our grades than her instagram feed. "You don't need my help, right geek?"