"You can't tell me you don't think her voice is just a little bit annoying."

"I can, actually, and that's exactly what I'm doing."

Through her phone screen, Amelia watched Henry's lips curl into a grin. "Are we having our first fight right now?" he teased.

"Over Grey's Anatomy? Absolutely the hell not. It's not a fight if one person was obviously losing to begin with."

"So you're admitting I'm right, then?"

Amelia covered her face with her free hand. "Don't make me actually get worked up about this, Henry," she smiled through her fingers.

Their laughter tapered off as he stifled a small cough. She moved her hand so she could look at him again. "You feeling any better?" she murmured.

Henry nodded. The whole reason she'd miraculously been able to convince him to watch the first episode of Grey's in the first place was because he'd been feeling under the weather for the past couple of days and decided to stay home from work today to try to shake it off. He was clearly still in bed right now, propped up against his headboard and a whole barricade of pillows. A frayed and faded AC/DC tee hung off his lean frame, the sort of shirt that probably should have been tossed out ages ago but had likely been around long enough to hold sentimental value at this point.

"Yeah, I'm back to feeling almost normal."

Amelia asked hopefully, "Does that mean you can still come over for dinner tomorrow?"

"I wouldn't miss it," he promised. "That is, as long as you're fine with the risk that I actually have a cold and it isn't just stress getting to me."

"Catching a cold and knowing that you didn't literally stress yourself into being sick doesn't sound so bad."

"It's not as uncommon as you think for stress to make you sick," he pointed out. "Our minds sort of like to screw our bodies over in every way possible."

"When it rains, it storms," she sighed. "Since you're much closer to being a doctor than I am, I'll trust you on this one."

"That's the only reason you trust me? I'm flattered."

"I wish you were here in person so that I could throw this pillow at you."

Henry pretended to shield himself from her by lifting an arm in front of his face; Amelia was grinning again as she shook her head.

"Dinner tomorrow," she repeated. "Don't be late and don't strain yourself trying to help me with the cooking—it's the least you can do after not letting me bring you any medicine."

In reality, Henry probably could have come down with tuberculosis and still cook better than Amelia did on her best day, but she was so stubborn to make something that didn't taste like it had come out of Shrek's swamp that she'd already asked her mom for some of the fool-proof comfort recipes that she used to conjure up when Amelia was sick. Except she hadn't mentioned the whole part where she had a boyfriend who wasn't officially her boyfriend yet, and her mom would have had a conniption and insisted on coming to take care of her if she said that she was the one who was sick, so she threw Nat under the bus instead. It was a forgivable crime.

"It's not like I couldn't find any medicine at that pharmacy I conveniently happen to work at."

Amelia narrowed her eyes. "I'm cooking," she said firmly. "...Unless I burn something. Then I'll forfeit my chef duties, deal?"

He laughed. "Alright, deal."

Amelia was stirring her soup when the doorbell rang, the sound of it startling her enough that she dropped her ladle into the pot even though she'd been expecting him to show up any minute. Maybe she hadn't intended for half of the handle to get coated in the mixture, but it wasn't actually going to hurt anything, either.

Her face was warm and reddening from working over the hot stove, but there wasn't time to tidy herself up at all before she hurried over to let Henry in.

"I made soup," she said as he peppered a swift kiss on her cheek, nudging the door shut behind him with his foot. "I hope you like the baked potato kind, though, because chicken noodle isn't nearly as good as people enjoy acting like it is."

"It's not even that it's bad," he agreed as he shrugged his jacket off. "But it's not very substantive. I'd have to, like, drink an entire gallon of it to actually feel full. Which I guess is maybe the point—I suppose you don't always want to eat a lot when you're sick."

Amelia's nose wrinkled. "I'm not saying you're wrong, but please don't put that mental image in my head ever again."

"Sorry," he said very unapologetically.

"But I do think I probably have a can in the pantry if you decide you want to go team chicken noodle."

"And let your work go to waste? Definitely not."

She had never understood why some people made such a fuss about only eating food at the table—she consumed an embarrassing amount of her meals in the living room compared to the kitchen—but since soup was tricky to eat without a solid surface to set your bowl on and she wanted to put forth more effort for Henry than she would when she was alone, she'd already set the table with silverware and a pan of rolls that she'd warmed in the oven.

It wasn't until she'd already prepped them two bowls and they were seated at the table that it occurred to her that her soup-eating habits were a bit...slurpy.

"I guess something you should know about me is that table manners aren't exactly my forte," she admitted after trying her first spoonful as quietly as possible, which was not nearly as quiet as she would have liked for it to be. On the bright side, it didn't taste like garbage.

"You're not going to scare me away by eating your dinner," he assured her. "It's like pasta—there isn't really a way to do it that isn't messy."

"Did you ever read that story 'The Slithery Dee?'"

He lifted his eyebrows. "From Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? I think basically everyone read that at some point or another. I haven't thought about it in forever, though."

"I was just thinking about slurping."

Henry started to chuckle, softly shaking his head in a way that indicated she was amusing him. "I don't think I fully understand what goes on inside your head just yet, but..."

For suspense, he paused long enough to take another bite of his soup.

"But what?"

"But I'm looking forward to figuring it out. That's what we're here to do in a sense, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she smiled. You fascinate me, she wanted to say, but she didn't want to come across too strong. "I'm looking forward to figuring you out, too."

I wouldn't mind staying here forever, she thought later as they were snuggled up on the couch. The Prestige was still playing on the TV even though they were hardly paying attention anymore. She'd put the subtitles on at Henry's request—his hearing aids were sometimes finicky about which background noises they tried to tune out, he explained—so she'd barely even been listening to it. No, she'd been listening to his voice, soft in her ear as they murmured back and forth to each other about whatever thoughts happened to be drifting across the open skies of their minds.

His arm was around her, the rest of her body nestled underneath a comfy layer of two blankets. His fingers tinkered with the edge of the fabric, drew delicate little shapes on her shoulder. She found the gentleness and repetition of the motion to be extremely relaxing, as if she were slowly floating across the waves of a sea and into the arms of sleep.

She very well might have accidentally drifted off had her phone not started ringing. Her eyes, which she'd allowed to flutter shut just a moment before, abruptly shot open.

Her mother was calling. Amelia silently stared at the illuminated screen for a prolonged moment, unsure of what she wanted to do.

"It won't bother me if you answer that," Henry mumbled, also sounding drowsy.

She didn't know if she had unconsciously been looking for the confirmation that taking the call in front of him wouldn't be impolite of her, but she reached forward and grabbed her phone. She was frankly too lazy to get up and go talk anywhere else, so she was just going to hope that Henry wouldn't—God forbid—start trying to talk to her mom. She knew he had abundantly more common sense than that, but on the other hand, she hadn't actually made very clear to him yet how much she had or had not told anyone else about him.

"Hi, Mom," she answered.

Amelia wasn't looking at Henry—she thought it might start making her giggle. Even though she was a fully independent, twenty-four-year-old woman, this still felt slightly like she was sneaking around with a boy behind her parents' backs.

It was fun. She'd never been brave enough to do anything of the sort while she'd still been living under their roof. She'd been reserved, a rule follower, what the other kids might have called boring but she'd at the time thought was simply being responsible.

She could mention him now, of course. She considered it. But she knew she was likely to get hit with some question about, Are you sure you're really ready to date someone else yet? Have you really moved on from Colton? and the thought of getting upset about it in front of Henry was somehow embarrassing to her even though she'd already cried in front of him. Maybe she was more ashamed of her lackluster relationships with her parents than she'd realized. Maybe she was scared of him seeing yet another side of her that was fucked up, another thing she'd managed to fail at.

"Hi, sweetheart. Did the soup turn out okay?"

"Yeah, it did," Amelia said, her mouth dry.

She could still feel Henry's fingertips on her arm, each one of them setting her skin alight with a pleasant, fuzzy sensation. But she didn't know how long she'd be able to last on the phone pretending that she didn't have someone else with her.

"This, um, this isn't actually a great time for me, though," she explained. That technically wasn't a lie—she was on a date, after all, even if it was in her own home. "Can I call you back tomorrow?"

"Of course—I love you, Amelia. Go get some rest."

"I will. Love, you too."

She dropped her phone in her lap, her eyes floating back to Henry's. She watched as his eyebrows began to scrunch together; she must have been making a face.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"...Is it bad that I'm nervous to mention you to her?"

"No. I wasn't thinking that—did I do something wrong?"

"No," she echoed, lifting her hand to rub the back of her neck. "I just—I don't want you to think that I'm embarrassed by you or something."

His lips curved into a little crescent of a smile. "We've barely started seeing each other. I don't think there's much to tell yet."

It felt like there was already so much to tell. That she could fill up an entire book describing all the ways he'd been helping her feel alive, dedicate an entire page just to that singular smile he'd just given her. But in the purely objective sense, they were simply a couple of people who had gone on a couple of dates so far.

"I did tell Nat about us, though. I hope that's okay with you."

"She's your best friend—of course it's okay. How did she react?"

"She's happy for me. For us. She likes you so far."

His lips tilted up into a smirk. "I'll do my best to stop that from changing, then. I haven't told anyone outright that I'm seeing you, really. But I think Liam has his suspicions. My parents, too. I'm sort of not great at concealing my emotions if you haven't noticed."

"That's not a bad thing," Amelia laughed. "I'd like to meet your parents again sometime. They were sweet."

"I'm sure they'd be happy about that—they liked you, too. And I'm sure it won't hurt their feelings that they were right about me having a ridiculously massive crush on you even though I tried to act like I didn't."

A warm, bubbly feeling rose up in her chest, as if she could be drunk off of pure emotion. Without thinking, she started to ask, "But would you introduce me as..."

Henry tried to keep a straight face as he finished her question for her. "...As my girlfriend?"

Tentatively, she nodded.

"I can introduce you as my girlfriend. As long as that's what you want."

She felt his fingers carefully drift across the plane of her shoulder and up to the nape of her neck when she leaned in and kissed him, softly winding themselves into her hair like they could get lost there. She could certainly get lost in the way he kissed her, like nothing else she'd experienced before. So wanting yet so gentle, as if he was somehow aware that much more force would quickly make it unpleasant or maybe even frightening for her though she hadn't told him so.

Perhaps Henry Caruso was simply gentle with everything in this world because he was wise enough to know that it wasn't his to break.

"I didn't ask you very much about how your day went," Amelia realized aloud as she was walking him to his car, which she'd insisted on even though he told her she didn't have to venture into the cold with him.

"It was a pretty normal day."

"Tell me one good thing that happened," she nudged.

He leaned back against the car door and looked at her, a small smile plastered on his lips. "I spent all day thinking about the fact that I'd get to see you at the end of it."

She started to blush, which seemed to make him even more amused. He stepped forward and cupped her cheek in his hand, his palms cold in comparison to her hot skin.

"My Amelia Rose is starting to look a little bit rosy," he noticed.

"Your Amelia Rose?" she whispered, her breath quivering, as he slowly titled himself even closer to her to rest his forehead against hers. "Now you're just doing this to me on purpose."

His lips brushed against the tip of her nose. "Your turn. Tell me one good thing about your day."

"You should have to answer the question in a way that doesn't involve me first."

"Alright—my manager was making coffee first thing in the morning and it smelled amazing."

Amelia didn't know how she could possibly be expected to think straight when he'd just called her his Amelia Rose, but she managed to get something out. "I, um, I woke up earlier than my alarm went off, so I got to lay in bed for a long time and watch the sunrise. It was nice."

"It sounds nice."

She nodded. "It was. Will you hurry up and kiss me again?"

Henry obliged.