Amelia felt a little bit like she was playing dress-up as she stood in her bra in front of the full-length mirror that hung from her closet door, going back and forth between holding two sweaters up to her chest—one pink and one brown—because she couldn't decide which one she wanted to wear for her date with Henry.

Her first date with Colton had been back in January and it was only now October, so it really shouldn't have felt like she'd lived for another whole lifetime since then, and yet her last first date seemed astoundingly far in the past. She could remember what she'd worn, a tiny black dress and heels. They'd gone out for drinks and dancing and he'd introduced her to so many of his friends that she'd lost count. She hadn't wanted to meet any of them right then, much less the whole crowd, and she remembered feeling exhausted when she tumbled into her bed at the end of the night—or rather, early in the morning. She'd told herself that the fatigue was just from the dancing and not that her social battery was completely drained or that she wanted to cry a little bit because he hadn't wanted to spend their first date only with her.

It had taken a couple of months for her to even build up the courage to request that they do something that she enjoyed for one of their date nights instead of listening to the same shitty DJ again. When he hadn't put up any fight and amicably went along with it, she took it as a confirmation that he must really like her instead of questioning if they were even a good match if they did none of the same activities for fun.

She'd turned herself into a completely different person around him, scared that the real Amelia was too boring, and in a sense, she still felt like the failure to get over that insecurity was a personal shortcoming on her part. But he'd also hardly done anything to assure her that she was allowed to exist as she was.

She made the arbitrary decision that her outfit should have a pop of color and went with the pink top, tossing the brown one onto the floor instead of hanging it up like a responsible adult. She evaluated her reflection in the mirror. The jeans and sweater look was definitely an understated one, but Henry hadn't told her what they were doing tonight. When she tried asking him what sort of clothes would be appropriate for what they were doing, he told her that whatever she felt good in would work, which was nice and all but not actually helpful. Her current plan was just to spruce her outfit up by adding some jewelry, but she truly didn't need to be worrying about it as much as she was. He was picking her up, so worst case scenario she could always just change if he got there and was much more overdressed than she was.

Her heart pattered in her chest when the doorbell rang (right on time—she was getting the sense that Henry was rather punctual). She was nervous in the best sort of way, so she took a couple of intentional breaths to steady herself as she hurried over to answer it. And when she pulled the door open, she was relieved to see that he was dressed as casually as she was, wearing jeans and a black shirt layered under a suede jacket.

His lips broke into an unbridled smile when he saw her, and the fact that his natural reaction to her was to look at her like that made her flush in the cheeks.

"You look amazing," he told her so earnestly that she wanted laugh giddily like a child.

"You're not too bad-looking yourself."

"You ready to go?"

Amelia nodded. "Yeah, let's do this. Except I still don't know what this is."

When she reached for his hand on the way out the door, his fingers spread apart without hesitation, creating space for her to slide hers in between. She liked this slightly familiar, slightly foreign sensation, the way they fit nicely together like two halves of a whole. After the months of miscommunication, the months of constantly second-guessing herself and questioning her worth, another person's touch went a long way. The simple pleasure of someone wanting to hold her hand, that gentle gesture of emotion, was something she really needed right now.

It wasn't that Colton had never wanted to be affectionate. But his passion, whether anger or desire or both, blazed infinitely hotter than even he himself knew how to extinguish. And Amelia had been right in the dead center of the path of the inevitable consequences: that what started as little more than the flicker of a warm flame rapidly spread like a disease until it was a festering wildfire that razed everything in its path. All she could do now was try her best to climb out of the ashes.

"Do I finally get to know what we're doing now?" she asked as they were getting into Henry's car.

"You have to be honest and tell me if you don't want to do it."

"I promise to be honest with you," she said genuinely.

He glanced over at her, almost looking shy about announcing his intentions for the night. "It's possible that we have dinner reservations if you want to show up for them. I tried to pick a place that has a little bit of everything—I wasn't sure what you like."

"A little bit of everything," she quipped; he grinned at it. "But I sense there's something else coming since I'd obviously want to go to dinner."

"Yeah," he nodded, fingers fidgeting on the steering wheel. "The symphony is doing a concert of Disney music tonight. I thought it'd be fun."

Her mouth fell open. "Seriously? That sounds incredible—did you really think I wouldn't want to do that?"

"Some people think the symphony is boring," he shrugged. "It's not like it had come up in conversation with you, but I didn't want to ruin the surprise, either."

"I am not one of those people. And it's Disney."

"And it's Disney."

Amelia had reached back over for his hand once he put on his seatbelt and started the car; now she gave it a soft squeeze. "Really, this is awesome. I've always wanted to go to the symphony, I've just never gotten around to it."

He couldn't glimpse at her for longer than a second while he was driving, but she saw him smiling at the road ahead. "Tonight's your lucky night, then."

"But, let's say I had no taste and told you that I didn't want to go—were you gonna just let all that money go to waste?" she questioned. She knew that those tickets couldn't have been cheap.

He opted for total transparency. "I probably would have lied and said they were refundable. Not that lying to you would be an ideal way to start our first date, but I don't know—I think I'd be too embarrassed not to downplay it."

Amelia stifled a giggle—that sounded exactly like what she would have done if she were in that position. "Me rejecting your very sweet offer to take me to the symphony also wouldn't be an ideal way to start our first date."

His thumb carefully trailed along hers while they waited at a traffic light, the windshield baptized in its red glow. She closed her eyes for a moment, soaking in the feeling of him, warm and steady.

The inside of the restaurant hummed with a pleasant amount of background noise—people chatting, glasses clinking against one another, a stray strand of laughter floating through the air—as Henry and Amelia were seated at a cozy little two-person booth.

In a way, she still felt a little bit like she was drifting through a strange universe, an alternate timeline from the one where she'd been feeling utterly crushed just a couple of weeks ago. It was bizarre to think about how she wouldn't be sitting here with him right now had she not made the decision to show up at that search party for Lily, the search party that Colton of all people had pointed her towards.

And yet she and Henry also felt somewhat inevitable, like at least a small fraction of her heart had known from that second she first saw him that they would eventually end up right where they were now.

"You okay?" he asked her. "You're staring at me."

She resisted the urge to hide her face in her hands, internally cringing at herself. "Sorry. Just thinking."

"About what?"

"This is just...different. You. Me. On a date." She gestured vaguely.

Understandably, his eyebrows shot up. "Good different or bad different? I promise I'll still let you keep your symphony ticket if you've decided you want this to not be a date."

"God, no—good different. It's good different, I promise. That just came out wrong. I just—I was completely miserable a month ago, you know? And now I'm finally starting to feel like myself again...you help me feel more like myself. "

His expression softened. "I feel that way, too."

Amelia's smile returned. "I think it's possibly a little bit depressing that we know all of this emotional baggage about each other and I couldn't even tell you what, like, your favorite color is."

Henry laughed. "It's purple."

"Purple," she thought out loud. "That's nice."

"Is it?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "I feel like a lot of men are still almost sort of scared of liking pink and purple. As if a color is somehow going to make them more feminine, or that it'd even be a problem if it did."

"I'm not afraid of purple or pink," he confirmed very seriously. "What's yours?"

"Pink, I think. Some days it's blue—it's hard for me to choose. Since my job entails me picking colors for things I feel like I've come to appreciate all of them in different contexts."

"Now I feel like purple wasn't a very good answer."

"Purple's a great answer," she assured him. "I love all of my children equally."

Though Amelia's stomach was much fuller when they were leaving the restaurant than it'd been when walking in, the same giddy butterflies continued to flutter about inside of her.

Her lips were hurting from all the smiling she'd already done tonight as Henry held the door open for her and then took her hand in his again. For about the fiftieth time this evening, she had the revelation that this was a real date, that they weren't just hanging out as friends.

A cool wind brushed against her face when they stepped outside, but her sweater and the glass of wine she'd just had were keeping her pleasantly warm. If they hadn't had a show to catch, she would have stopped and closed her eyes and prolonged this feeling as long as possible. She felt light, free, like there was nothing in the world that could bring her down right now.

As they walked the remaining couple of blocks to the Symphony Center, she realized that her sheer ability to hold Henry's hand in public without caring about what anyone else might think was contributing to why she suddenly felt so liberated. With Colton, it had always been so obvious that he was older than her, and the fact that he was movie-star handsome while she found herself to be rather ordinary-looking meant that she'd constantly felt a need to justify her existence at his side. He probably could have been with any girl he wanted; occasionally she'd wonder if he was with other girls and then scolded herself for it.

But right now, she was buzzing from the amazing dinner they just had, the way the conversation and the laughter had come so easily even though she was quite introverted. Henry had a way of watching her while she talked like he wasn't thinking about anything else in the entire world.

She'd told herself that she wasn't the sun at the center of his universe, but he looked at her like she could be, and for far too damn long she'd been an object stuck in someone else's orbit.

It struck her that she was really, really eager to tell Nat about how happy she was feeling. Henry had obviously come up in conversation at work after she'd owned up to her about kissing him, but she'd tactfully omitted the part where they decided to actually go on a date. It'd felt too good to be true.

Now that she was here, it still felt too good to be true. And yet it was. It was real and it was tangible and it was good.

This was what a first date was supposed to feel like—not any of that sad bullshit.

"Just warning you, I might cry tears of joy," she informed him as they approached the front entrance of the Symphony Center.

"I might cry with you."

The lobby was even more luxurious in appearance than she had expected, with marble floors and tall ceilings supported by elegant columns, which only made it all the more delightful that it had also been decked out with an explosion of brightly colored Disney-themed decorations, unashamedly garish. The dress code appeared to be whatever made your heart happy—three little girls scampered past them in adorably poofy princess dresses and she spotted several adults who'd come dressed up, too.

They'd probably only been there for thirty seconds before Amelia noticed that they were selling Mickey and Minnie ears at the concessions counter. Her eyes drifted back to Henry.

"How much bribing would it take me to get you to wear those?"

She wasn't sure if he thought about it for a second or was just pretending to. "I feel like I should maybe be embarrassed to say none at all, but..."

She gleefully tugged him over to get in line.

As if it wasn't already generous enough of him to take her to the symphony, Henry had dished out the money to get them good seats right in the center. The concert hall itself was just as glamorous as the lobby, with large, globelike chandeliers dangling down from the ceiling like suspended orbs of light. The orchestra was already onstage tuning their instruments.

There was something about live music that touched the soul in a way that nothing else could, that could make you dance for joy or break your heart, that could lift you up to incredible heights or bring you down to your darkest low.

Or, in the case of Disney, could make you believe that the world was at least a little bit magical.

Goosebumps started trailing up her arms as soon as the lights were dimmed and the first, soft notes of "Part of Your World" floated up into the air, but Amelia managed not to shed any tears yet. She genuinely hadn't been joking when she said that she might cry tears of joy, but she managed not to do so for over half of the show, at which point she started to let her guard down and think that she was going to be able to hold herself together after all.

She was doing so well, and then the overhead lights were dimmed as lanterns at the edge of the stage started illuminating one by one along with the beginning notes of "I See the Light", and then her eyes were suddenly very misty.

With her shoulder already touching Henry's, she only had to tilt her head the slightest bit to glance over at him. Unless the change of ambiance was playing tricks on her eyes, his were shining too.

"Are you crying?" she whispered to him.

"Maybe a little bit," he swallowed.

Brimming with incredible fondness—for him, for freaking Disney songs, for everything about this night—Amelia contentedly leaned over to rest the side of her head against his. "Your secret's safe with me."

"You're gonna have a hard time topping this date, Henry," she was giggling, gripping his hand as they stepped back out into the real world.

But he appeared pleased as he looked over at her. "Am I hearing that you want to go on another one, then?"

"As long as you do, too."

His lips curled up into a grin. "I thought I was being pretty obvious."

"I thought I was being pretty obvious."

She didn't know how to explain to him that she wasn't used to being in such agreement with the person she was on a date with, but that hardly mattered—for once, she didn't feel like she had to explain herself. God, it felt so nice. She was entranced with how different he was from any other boys she knew, how refreshingly honest and unafraid of his own emotions.

And cute. He made a little squinty face against the wind as they waited at a crosswalk and she found something about it to be so endearing that she couldn't help but lean over and give him a swift kiss on the cheek. The corners of his mouth pulled back up into a bashful smile as he glanced down at the ground, his cheeks going rosy, as if she'd caught him redhanded in a crush on her and he'd been the one to instigate the kiss. It made her want to do it again, but they were walking again and also in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, and she quite frankly wasn't that inconsiderate to the strangers around her in public.

So instead, she leaned in closer to him and said, "Seriously, I think this is the most fun I've ever had on a date. Thanks for everything."

"Me, too. I'm glad you had fun."

Once his car was back in eyesight, Amelia felt the beginnings of disappointment start to flicker up in her about the impending end of their date. She didn't want it to be over. She could have stayed up all night just talking to him about everything and nothing if he would let her, as if they could stop the clock from ever striking twelve and let their fairytale night stretch on forever.

The rest of the parking garage was practically silent as he unlocked the car. She slid into her seat and closed the door behind her, unsure of what she was going to say until she looked over at him and finally processed that he still had his Mickey ears on.

"Let's get these off of you," she suggested, leaning over to carefully lift them off of his head and set them in the middle console.

Self-indulgently, she let her fingertips linger in his hair to adjust it in the middle where the headband had been pressing down on it, and he used the prolonged moment of proximity between them to do exactly what she wanted him to do.

She let her eyelids drift shut, her fingers tighten just slightly as he tilted his chin to press a gentle kiss on her lips, then another one. Amelia's breath went a little unsteady; she felt him start to smile against her mouth, and it nearly made her start giggling again.

"Sorry," he murmured. "Did I ruin it?"

"I don't think you could ruin it for me right now if you tried."

"I'd dare to say that you're wrong on that one, but I can't say I'm interested in testing that theory right now. I think kissing you again sounds much more fun."

Her fingertips slowly trailed along his skin to come to a rest on his cheek. "I agree."

The time seemed to lapse, suspended in space like the taut string on an instrument in those milliseconds before the first note of a song is played. It could have lasted for minutes or seconds or hours—she didn't know. Once he came back to her, all she knew was Henry. All she knew was Henry; the feeling of his mouth on hers, the curvature of his jaw as her fingertips traced along the traces of stubble on his chin, the rhythm of his breathing, gradually uneven.

"I'm probably coming on way too strong right now," he whispered against the corner of her mouth when they were done. "But I genuinely don't know if I've ever liked a girl this much."

Amelia drew back enough to look at him; he didn't shy away from being looked at. He steadily returned her gaze, not appearing to be embarrassed or like he wanted to abandon responsibility for the words that had just come out of his mouth, and her throat was suddenly tight with emotion.

"You should never have to be embarrassed about liking someone," she said quietly. "And it helps me to hear that from you. I...I don't really think I've ever felt this way about someone so quickly either. I've kind of been beating myself up about it because of the timing with my breakup and everything. Like I don't fully believe that I deserve to be happy right now—maybe you've felt that way, too."

She swallowed. She didn't feel like she was as good at voicing her thoughts as he was, but he gave her a small nod, and it was the encouragement she needed to keep going.

"But tonight, I just—I really felt allowed to feel however I wanted to, I guess. If that makes sense. I barely even felt like myself with my last boyfriend and I'm just now starting to get to know this new version of myself that exists after all of that."

"I'm, um, I'm sorry I keep bringing him up so much," she added, nervously glancing down for a second. "I know he's probably the last thing you want me talking about at the end of our first date. It's just fresh on my mind. I don't want you to think that I only see you as you exist in relation to another person."

Henry's eyebrows scrunched together. "I wasn't thinking that at all. I know that this—whatever we are to each other right now—is brand new, and that was recent. I don't want you believing that you have to forget your past just to exist around me."

And she was back to smiling like an idiot. "You might be one of the most patient people I know," she mumbled.

"I try." She felt his fingers delicately wrap back around hers. "I can try for both of us."

On the car ride back to her place, the piece of Amelia that never wanted tonight to end started struggling against the piece that was telling her that it was getting late and her body was getting tired. Her eyelids started to feel heavy as the soft stream of air from the vents cocooned her in its warmth.

Henry walked her back to her door, grinning at her when they lingered on the doorstep.

"What?"

"You're still wearing these," he murmured, lifting a hand to the top of her head where her Minnie headband still remained.

Henry gingerly took them off of her, placing them in her hand and gently curving her fingers around the band.

"Thanks," she whispered, and he pressed a slow kiss on her forehead. The fluttery feeling erupted in her stomach again; she closed her eyes a breathed a small, content sigh. "Be safe getting home. Will you text me when you're there?"

"Yeah, of course," he softly promised. "Sweet dreams, Amelia."

"You, too."

She had no doubt that he would fill her dreams. As she watched him reluctantly return to his car, she hoped that he might dream of her, too. 

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A/N:

I know this was a long chapter, but I hope you enjoyed it! First date chapters are always fun to write ♡