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“Hah!” Harper crows triumphantly after Kate’s avatar drops to the ground. Kate groans and rolls her eyes but her small smile is visible nonetheless. “Take that!” she teases, punching her girlfriend in the shoulder.
“Unfair!” Kate exclaims at the TV. “When I catch up—which will be soon!—you’ll be sorry, you know.” She turns toward Harper, hiding her grin behind her hot cocoa (her watery—not milky!—hot cocoa with no candy canes, whipped cream, or even marshmallows because she’s a crazy person).
Harper licks the top of her whipped cream tower. “Sure I will.” She scoots closer so that their bodies are pressed together from shoulders to feet and says, “You know, I thought you’s be better at this.”
“It’s my first time!”
“Yeah, yeah, but you have good hand-eye coordination and all that junk—you’ve done all these things IRL, even. You’re slacking, Kane.”
“You’ll regret those words by our third round.” Kate elbows her. “And you’ve got a whipped cream mustache.”
Harper wiggles her eyebrows. “Then lick it off.” Kate grimaces and says Gross but does it anyway, and Harper pulls away after a moment to taunt, “I guess you were a jock in high school… I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”
“I’d argue less jock and more outcast,” she states wryly.
“Yeah. All that time you spent training during lunch breaks, I was probably playing video games.”
“Huh. Can you… make a video game?” Kate asks, adorably uninformed. “Have you?”
“You’re asking if I can code: yes. Never put my effort towards making a video game, but I bet I could with some free time. Actually, that could be a good present for Cullen’s birthday: I’m writing that down.”
The idea goes into her tiny notebook filled to bursting with too-big messy cursive. Most of the notes are from her scribbling them down middle of the night after a dream, and those ones almost always prove useless or thoroughly incomprehensible in the morning, but living with Kate helps—in a lot of ways, but this one in particular is pretty great. It’s been a while since Harper had someone to bounce ideas off of who isn’t her brother. She’s been tinkering more than ever.
“Another round?” Kate asks. Harper puts her hot cocoa down and grins a sharp-toothed smile.
“Get ready to lose!”