The Search for Lily Myers ✓

33 | Beautiful Ghosts

Friday afternoons meant counting down the seconds until she was done with work and could see Henry again. Tonight, he'd told her that he could be at her place by six, which gave her a comfortable amount of time after work to drive home and freshen up a bit.

It was a little hard to dress for a date when she wasn't entirely sure what they'd wind up doing, but she was sure that she'd probably need something warmer than the long-sleeved tee shirt and leggings she'd been in all day. The sun hadn't completely sunk under the horizon yet and it was already down to a brisk forty degrees outside, so she was sure it would only continue to get colder.

Perhaps she could make them some hot chocolate—that'd be the perfect, cozy treat to end their week with, wouldn't it? She didn't actually know for certain that Henry even liked hot chocolate, but considering that he'd enjoyed every other sweet thing she'd seen him eat, she figured it was a pretty safe bet.

She was still daydreaming about cocoa and fluffy marshmallows when the doorbell rang and though she intended to immediately ask him if he was a fan of hot chocolate, her breath caught in her throat when she pulled the door open.

"You brought me flowers?"

The luxurious-looking bundle of pink roses in his hand suggested that the answer was yes.

"I did," he agreed as he stepped inside. "Is that okay?"

"Of course it's okay." The air finally left her lungs in the form of a surprised laugh. "But why?"

Henry almost seemed to be teasing her now, his eyebrows quirking upwards. "Do I have to have a reason?"

"No, but..."

"They just reminded me of you when I saw them," he offered as an explanation as she stood on tiptoe to fetch a vase out of her kitchen cabinets. "I mean, there's the fact that they're roses, obviously. But I don't see the pink ones all that often and for some reason the color made me think about that sweater you wore on our first date."

Her lips broke into a smile before she'd even turned back towards him to place the vase on the kitchen table.

"That is one of the cheesiest things I've ever heard," she informed him. "And one of the sweetest."

He didn't mind her poking fun at him—in fact, he grinned at it. "We both already knew I'm cheesy. That date was a Disney concert, remember?"

Amelia carefully took the bouquet from his hands to arrange it in the vase. "I couldn't forget," she murmured as she did it, then looked back up at him when she was done admiring her handiwork.

If there was anything she enjoyed looking at even more than the flowers, it was him. She lifted a delicate hand to his cheek and drew him in for a kiss, slow and sweet.

"Never change," she whispered to him. "You're wonderful the way you are, cheesiness and all. And the flowers are beautiful."

"I'm glad you like them." He stepped around the corner of the table so that he could come and wrap his arms around her from behind instead, dipping his chin to rest against her shoulder. "These past few weeks, it's felt like one hard thing keeps happening after another without us having much time to breathe in between. And I don't know how much it's been affecting you, but I realized I've been feeling...heavy, I guess. I wanted to do something nice for you."

"If you don't stop being so precious I'm literally going to start crying," she told him, her throat already feeling tight, but she slowly nodded at his statement. "I've been feeling it, too."

"I also might have come up with a bit of an unconventional suggestion for what we could do tonight," he admitted.

"Ah, so the flowers were really to soften the blow."