an untitled, early draft and a "The Hub" tie-in

There's the way it's supposed to be and there is the way that it always worked out for him. The hero in pop culture would meet the girl of his dreams at the beginning of the story. They wouldn’t see the attraction but the audience or the reader would. It’s always so apparent, there’s the fluttering of her hair, the twinkle in her eyes a rush of wind as she steps into the perfect lighting and says SOMETHING PROFOUND AND GIMMICKY. Through the course of the story the two find a mutual attraction aside from the obvious physical and lo, through struggle our two star crossed lovers invariably end up together at the end, if they both survive.

KEVIN wasn’t so lucky, the first time he saw Rachel there were no fireworks, no orchestra in the background. There were no slow motion camera movements to augment her flawlessness. In fact Kevin very nearly knocked her on her butt as he ran to clock into work on time. They’d been friends ever since which sounded like a good idea at first. Then Kevin made a remarkable
discovery.

He couldn’t get her out of his head. He would go to work and all he could think of was her, he’d go to school and think of her, when he went to bed of course she was all he could think of but he knew when he awoke, she’d be there in his mind waiting as she always was. In fact, the only time she wasn’t on his mind was when they were in the same room. It was infuriating.

She’d made it clear weeks before that she had no desire to get involved in a romantic relationship and in his mind he was totally cool with it, or he had convinced himself that he was. He understood her frame of mind, as her last venture into the world of dating was overwhelming at best.

In his mind he understood it, it’s too bad his heart said otherwise. Was it his heart? Or was his mind playing games with him? In his mind he understood it, the logic was flawless, she was dedicated to a man (let’s be honest he was a boy) for the last few years of her young life, in which her trust was betrayed and her privacy violated. She had been ridiculed and demeaned, though never hit and she had used that as the cornerstone of prolonging the longest relationship she’d known. He understood all that and still, he wanted to have her as his own.

He felt petty, dirty. Knowing that what he felt was not wrong, or inappropriate just – unfortunate. He didn’t know who to talk to about it either, he’d always gone to her to talk, and his friends just didn’t quite get it, they were good guys but everything always boiled down to sex with them and that’s just not how he saw things. It wasn’t about sex it was…. Well it was something else