Prompt: No one understood how they fell in love, but there was no denying that what they shared was untouchable.
Word Count: 649
Date: November 21, 2012
Author's Note: I know that it was expected that I'd write Seblaine and I promise I will go back when I'm in the right frame of mind and do that. But for now, this is the story I needed to tell.
They were best friends in Kindergarten. They would hold hands in the lunch line and sing together in music class. Whenever he got in trouble and had to stay inside for recess, she would misbehave so she could stay too. He gave her a ring from the bubble gum machine and she promised to always love him.
In third grade he pulled her pigtails and called her names, running back to his friends who would laugh and slap him on the back. She gossiped with her girlfriends that he had cooties and stuck her tongue out at him. The girls all thought he was gross. The boys thought she was stuck up.
In junior high school she had the lead in the school play and he played defensive back for the school football team. He watched her from the corner of the school gym during the 8th grade prom as she danced with the richest boy in school. His friends told him that a socialite like her would never date a working class boy like him, but it didn't stop him from wishing she'd at least look over and remember how they'd loved each other once.
On the high school cheerleading team, she'd stare at him as he played, wishing that things were different, that her parents and friends would accept him, that he'd even look her way. But she was just a stuck up rich girl. How could he possibly ever stay in love with her. Her friends would tease her as she stared. They knew the feelings she had always felt for him since those early days on the playground. None of the years had made her love go away. It was only society that had forced it underground.
It was their senior year when her car broke down in the school parking lot after a football game one day. There were only a few stragglers still around and he noticed her crying alone on the hood of her car. Years melted away and he remembered the little girl crying at the swings because her friend Rebecca had called her a mean name.
"What's the matter?" he asked her.
"My car won't start, all my friends are gone and I have no way home," she cried.
"Let me take a look," he said immediately and took her hand, leading her off the hood so he could lift it. He'd grown up in his father's garage, had been fixing cars nearly since he was born, and he had her engine revving perfectly in no time. He wiped his hands on his pants, looking at her sheepishly as soon as he'd realized what he'd done. He offered a slight smile. "All set. You going out with your friends now?"
"No," she said, staring at him. He was still every bit the boy she knew. Mischievous, smart, thoughtful. Her friends would never understand, but she'd loved him for 12 years and she'd love him for as many more as he would let her. "I want to go out with you," she said confidently.
He looked at her anxiously, his eyes sparkling with excitement, but lowered in fear. He'd spent a lifetime trying not to love her, but he never could. "I still really care about you," he confessed. "I don't want to screw this up."
She took his face in her hand and kissed him softly. She stopped caring what everyone else thought. "Don't worry," she said. "You won't."
Three years later, on a beautiful summer day, before family members and friends who doubted them but could not deny their love for one another, Burt and Elizabeth Hummel were declared husband and wife.
They couldn't know then, and Elizabeth never lived to know, that someday soon they would have a son who would defy all the odds and find a love that was every bit as untouchable as their own.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!