Flower Girl | h.s.

19.

Daisy

"Brooks, it looks so good!"

The little boy moves from his spot on the bathroom floor which was directly in front of me, to turn and look at himself in the mirror. He had to pull himself up on the sink a bit to get a full glimpse of what we were working with.

"Where are my teeth?" Brooks looks around the counter top, but they're sitting in front of me on the floor.

"Here, bud," I hand him the small vampire teeth before I'm standing up and facing him in the mirror, too. He places them in his mouth and scrunches his nose to show the teeth to himself.

He gasps when we both stare into the mirror, and I laugh a little bit at the way that he shifts the teeth in his mouth.

This wasn't exactly the interaction that I thought that we'd be having today, but nonetheless, I'm a bit excited for what the evening has in store for us.

I arrived at Harry's house a little over an hour ago now.

Harry had told me this morning that he had to work tonight, but in passing, stating that he'd asked Lottie to take Brooks and his friend trick-or-treating tonight when they got home from school. From the words that I gathered from him, she had screamed at him when he asked, then refused to do what he asked, proceeding to slam the door in his face.

I knew that Harry had a lot of guilt for not being able to take Brooks trick-or-treating– well, guilty for a lot of things he wasn't able to do for them but this one seemed to be the biggest right now. He didn't want to promise Brooks that he could do things for him, because he knew that there was a chance that he couldn't. So, he tried his best to just convince Lottie to help him out when he needed her to. What he didn't realize was that convincing a teenager to do something they didn't want to do almost never worked.

With a bit of insisting, I convinced Harry that I wasn't busy that night and would be able to help out. He told me over and over that I didn't have to, but I just hung up on him when he wouldn't stop telling me not to and drove over as soon as I could.

Harry and I had been in a good place since our meeting a few weeks ago. We had come to a certain understanding of being more open, asking each other for what we needed, and coming to terms with the fact that we both had broken pieces we needed to mend. There was still so much that we didn't know about each other, as trust and vulnerability came with time.

But I was so, so hopeful for it. Harry made me feel so special and so looked at, and I couldn't help but want him to stare longer and deeper. We were in a really good spot, and these were small things that I wanted him to see that I cared about– I wanted to take Brooks trick-or-treating, not because Harry would ever ask me to. I wanted to spend time with the people who meant the most to him, and this felt like a perfect opportunity.

When I was on my way over, I decided to stop for some dinner for us too, bringing carryout from my favorite Italian restaurant with a few pastas and some chicken parmesan to share. It occurred to me that I'm sure that Harry didn't even think about getting candy to hand out for his own house, so I picked up a bag when I could find one at the convenience store.

When I had gotten home from teaching, I had changed into a small, black t-shirt that had an outline of a pumpkin in orange, with a black tennis skirt and some white sneakers. I figured that we'd walk around the neighborhood once and be done relatively early in the night.

When I arrived at their house, Harry looked completely exhausted. His hair was pinned up in a small claw clip, his eyes were dark around the edges, and his jaw was tight whenever Brooks would whine at him for something.