Flower Girl | h.s.

18.

tw: drug abuse mention

Daisy

The seat under my legs is getting a bit cold. I move my legs over a bit so I can get them to stop touching the faux leather, the squeaky plastic of the diner seat before I'm pulling one of my legs up to hug it behind the booth table.

October had started to take a toll on SoCal. People started to migrate back into their homes rather than spending their days lounging by the beach or their pool, fundamentally preparing for chill and the ocean breeze to cool their skin. Once the sun went down, it felt crisp– I could imagine what it would look like if the trees changed colors the same way it did across the globe, and I missed the aesthetic of browns and oranges littering the streets and yards.

Harry told me that he was able to meet me here at about eight, but I decided to get here a little bit early so I could plan what I wanted to say to him. There had been such a gap in our communication that finding any words wasn't hard, but finding the right words were.

I didn't expect what happened between us to happen. I didn't expect there to be a sudden change in the way that he looked at me, or the way that I felt like anything I said couldn't have made it better.

That was the thing: I knew why he was mad.

I had certainly gone to a place that he wasn't comfortable with, and I didn't want to push further than that. But it seemed that there was more to how he felt, and maybe it didn't have anything to do with me. Maybe it was that I was involved at all that made it harder to swallow.

The time that Harry and I had spent together was special, I felt like he was starting to open up and feel that he had a space in my thoughts. A space where he could be himself, he could talk about things that troubled him. I wanted to be that person for him– I tried hard to keep our conversations light, to make him feel empowered to trust me when he obviously felt such a need to close himself up after feeling an ounce of vulnerability.

After reflecting, I knew that there was so much that I didn't know. There was a lot that Harry wouldn't say yet, and I know that it wasn't my fault by the way that he reacted.

I just... I didn't know about his past, or the things that triggered him into this spiral of lack of communication. And I couldn't be faulted for that, right?

But I wanted him to say it tonight. For this relationship to work– for us to work, there had to be openness, there had to be a space where Harry could share things that hurt. If there wasn't, I was going to be the one to hurt him unexpectedly and, fuck, did it hurt to do that.

I never wanted to hurt Harry again. And if he wasn't honest with me, I would– I knew that I would. But my expectations of him were high, and I had to hold the same for myself.

I had to be honest.

There had been a bit of anxiety leading into this, and the levels of anticipation were coated in a bit of sweat that rested in my palms. I would have blamed it on the hot coffee mug between my hands, but I knew that the nerves overtook all of that. I hadn't experienced a comfort in a relationship like this before, and losing it was something that scared me to almost no end.

When the sound of the door opened, my eyes gravitated towards it immediately. The gray of his sweatshirt was worn, bits of his curly brown hair were hanging underneath his light green Packers beanie

As if he knew that green was his color, the color that made his eyes stand out the clearest when they looked this way.

When he sees me, my breath hitches in my throat for a second. I hold the cup of coffee between my hands, releasing it as I move to stand up before him. I find that there's an air of awkwardness as he approaches, but I fall into it.