Once Amelia finally tumbled into her bed that night, she slept fitfully. She dreamed that she was walking down a dark, empty hallway and could hear Lily crying for help through the walls, but there was no way to get to her. She clawed and clawed at the paint until it started chipping off under her fingernails, then watched in agony as the wall seemed to heal itself like a scab forming over a wound, as if the whole house was alive. When she awoke, or so she thought, she didn't realize yet that she wasn't in her own bed. She curled onto her side and whispered something to Henry, but when the person next to her turned towards her, it wasn't Henry at all but Colton. She tried to scream, but he covered her mouth with his hand and suddenly her eyes flew open again—

Amelia bolted upright in her bed, gasping for air, and looked down to see the blankets tangled about her legs like she'd been flailing around in her sleep. She lifted her hands to cover her face and slowly exhaled. It was just a nightmare.

The pale rays of morning sun that snuck through the chinks in the blinds were faint; it must have been early still. The shirt that she had fallen asleep in, one of Henry's tees, was now sticky with sweat, so she pulled it over her head and discarded it onto the floor. She felt like she'd barely slept at all and yet wasn't sure how she was supposed to fall back asleep after that, so she rolled over to grab her phone from the nightstand.

To her surprise, Natasha had texted her just a couple of minutes ago.

Are you alive and if so do you happen to be awake?

Barely. To both questions.

Yikes. You good?

Yeah, just didn't sleep well.

Well if you need something to cheer you up I was gonna ask if you wanted to go Christmas tree shopping with me and Asher today. We're gonna grab one for his place

Sure but I don't think my apartment allows us to have the real trees :( I can see if Henry wants anything though?

Yes!!! We can live our best hallmark channel double date life

Lol I'll ask him

Amelia switched over to her messages with Henry, unsure if he'd already be awake or not. On one hand, he was a little more of an early bird than she was, but on the other, it really wasn't far out of the realm of possibility that he'd been kept up with even worse dreams than hers. The last she'd heard, he was still working on remedies to fight off his chronic nightmares.

She felt like she needed at least an hour-long cuddle to recover from the night she'd just had—she didn't know how he put up with it all the time.

Not that he had much of a choice.

Any plans for today?

While she waited for him to respond, she crawled out of bed to retrieve a scrunchie so that she could toss her hair up into a sloppy bun. By the time she returned to the comfort of her sheets, Henry had replied.

Nothing more important than you. Did you want to do something?

Nat wants to know if we wanna go Christmas tree shopping with her. I can't have a real tree at my place but I thought you might

Only if you'll help me decorate it

Deal

Her mood already significantly improved from where it'd been a minute ago, Amelia let Natasha know that Henry was on board with their Christmas tree excursion. Nat apparently hadn't even picked a Christmas tree farm for them to go to, however, so she was going to have to get on that while Amelia got dressed. Since they clearly weren't in any sort of major rush, Henry offered to come pick her up and once she'd pulled on a sweater and jeans, she saw that she had another text from him.

Want me to grab you some coffee?

It was tempting.

Only if you're already getting some for yourself

That would also buy her some more time to make herself look a little less like a sleep-deprived gremlin. She knew he couldn't mind less whether she looked put together or not, but it would be criminal for them to go to the Christmas tree farm and not get a picture together and her personal preference would be to not look like a clearance Halloween decoration in it.

In the spirit of Christmas, she veered somewhat from her normal makeup routine to reach for a barely-touched, questionably old pan of green eyeshadow and worked it in around the outer corners of her eyes. She thought this made her sufficiently festive for a whole twenty minutes until Henry arrived wearing a sweater with little evergreen trees on it.

"I didn't know you were such a tacky sweater fan," she smiled as he stepped inside, shutting out the cold behind him.

"What, this thing?" he teased, looking down at himself as if just noticing his own outfit. "These are just my normal clothes. I've gotta save the really fun ones for December."

She laughed softly. "I'm looking forward to it, then."

He passed over the coffee he'd brought for her; the outside of the paper cup was still hot enough that she kept the cardboard sleeve on it. Chocolatey flavors melted blissfully on her tongue when she lifted it to her lips for a taste.

"You're the best."

She set the cup aside on the table for a moment so that both of her arms were free to twine around his torso instead, fingertips trailing along the line of his spine. Closing her eyes, Amelia rested her cheek against the front of his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him and enjoying the downy texture of his shirt.

"I'm sorry about last night," he murmured against her hair.

"Mmmmmm, so this is apology coffee," she grinned.

"It's not apology coffee," he nearly laughed. "It just makes me happy to make you happy."

Smiling, she assured him, "You do a good job at it. And you don't need to be apologizing to me about last night when I'm the one who was least affected by all of it."

"I just—I want to do better than that," he admitted, his voice quieted to a gentle sigh. "I want to be a better person than that for you and for myself and for everyone, really."

"Hey," she whispered, tilting her chin up to look at him. "Wanting to be a better person doesn't mean that you're a bad one right now. I know who you are, Henry."

His lips curved into a small, self-deprecating sort of smile. "That's quite a trick, considering that I don't even know who I am. But I guess it's true that sometimes you just need another person to be a mirror of yourself. I at least like to think it's true."

"See," she mused. "You're very self-aware, Henry. And maybe you are a mess sometimes and I'm a mess most of the time, but it's a lot less scary to be a total trainwreck with someone else than do it alone."

"I love you, Amelia Rose."

She kissed him. "I love you, too."

It wasn't until they were five minutes away from the Christmas tree farm that Nat had (finally) picked for them that Amelia realized she hadn't told Henry that Asher would be there.

"I guess I should have mentioned that Nat's boyfriend is coming," she piped up from the passenger seat. "But I haven't actually met him yet, so I couldn't really tell you what we're getting ourselves into."

"Noted," Henry nodded. "Didn't you say they've been together for a little while? Hopefully that means he's not crazy."

Even though she supposed it wasn't asking that much of him, Amelia still felt gratified that Henry remembered all the little tidbits of information about her friends that had come up in conversation.

"A month or so longer than we have. So, no—I don't think he'll be a serial killer or a Republican or anything else deal-breaking like that."

Henry stifled a laugh.

When they pulled into the gravel parking lot, she spotted Natasha and Asher getting out of a truck that must have been his—clearly the more practical option for hauling around a literal tree than Nat's little Honda Civic.

She jogged over to Henry and Amelia as soon as she spotted them, Asher trailing behind her at a much more reasonable speed. He looked pretty much exactly like he did in pictures, cute in a slightly dorky kind of way, with black hair swept to the side in a fashion that gave Amelia vivid flashbacks to the major crush she'd had nearly ten years ago on that dude from The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Nat, who was wearing tiny snowflake earrings, gave a toothy grin when she saw Henry's festive sweater and lifted her hand to give him a high-five. Once they'd all been introduced to one another, Amelia thought they were ready to start looking at trees, but Nat clasped her hands together and wore a mildly conspiratorial look on her face.

"Since we're all here, I thought we could make a little game out of this."

"Oh no," Amelia said.

"Hear me out. Asher and I will go find our tree and you two will go find yours, and whichever team gets their tree loaded into their car first wins."

"...But what does the winner get?" Amelia questioned.

"The losers have to buy us all hot chocolate." Nat pointed to the checkout counter, where there was in fact a rather large sign advertising that they also sold cocoa. "See? It's not super high stakes. But you lose by default if your tree is lopsided or super ugly or something, so don't just grab whatever for the sake of winning."

"These rules seem very subjective," Henry noticed, trying not to smile at the absurdity of it all.

"I didn't know I was signing up to do competitive sports on my Saturday morning," Amelia added.

"Because I didn't decide this was a competition until, like, thirty seconds ago."

Amelia rolled her eyes in pretend annoyance, but now that Nat had challenged them, she was more determined than she probably should have been to prove that she and Henry were the more decisive couple unit. So she grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the first row of trees, shouting back at Natasha as she did.

"You can't rush perfection!"

"Watch me!" she called back.

And thus Amelia was now invested. She and Henry had to find a tree fast, but it had to be a good one, less because of Nat's extremely finicky rules and more so because Henry would be the one stuck staring at it every day for the next month even if it was ugly. She pulled him down the aisle of evergreens, twigs and pine needles crunching under their feet. She saw trees in pretty much every variety of shape and size, but she wasn't sure what they were going for. Short? Tall? Round?

"What do you like?" she asked Henry.

"You should choose," he told her. "I'm just along for the ride."

"It's going in your house, not mine."

"Tell me what you like and we'll go from here," he offered diplomatically. "If you actually want to win this game, the best way to do it is to not have conflicting opinions."

Ugh. Why did he have to have a point? Boys were always offering help when it wasn't needed only to not be of any use whatsoever once it was. Henry couldn't refrain from smiling a little bit at her unnecessary frustration.

She came to a halt in front of a tree that looked like a decent option—it was symmetrical enough and she didn't see any conspicuous dead spots. "What about this one?"

When his response was to let out a quiet laugh from behind her, she complained. "What?"

"Amelia," he began, placing his hands on the sides of her shoulders from behind. "If we get one that tall, you're not gonna be able to reach the top half and I'll have to lift you up there."

He was clever—she wasn't prepared for an ambush. Amelia squealed as his arms were suddenly firm around her waist, lifting her just high enough off the ground that her feet were dangling before he started tickling her sides.

She'd been louder than she meant to be. From somewhere off in the maze of trees, she heard Nat's voice call out, "You're also disqualified by default if you die!"

Henry was unrelenting. She was going to die, a death by tickling. She kicked him in the shin—mostly on accident—as she tried to squirm away from him.

"Point proved," she gasped through her fit of giggles, which probably sounded more like a screeching animal. He finally released her.

"I'm not even that short!" she insisted.

His only response was to kiss her on the cheek; she playfully nudged him away. She was not about to fall for his cuddly tactics again.

"Fine," she huffed. "We'll go find a tree that abides by your short people discrimination standards."

At the end of the same row of trees, she found one that was similar to the first one but a solid foot or so shorter. Henry didn't give any protest this time, so she ran off to find an employee who could drag it to the front for them.

That hadn't taken long, right? She was feeling good about their prospects of winning, but once their tree was hauled off to get trimmed and they were sent with its tag to go pay at the cash register, she saw Natasha watching in triumph as she and Asher's tree was sent through the netting machine.

She caught Amelia's eye and smirked. "No more canoodling intermissions next time and you might win."

"We were not canoodling," Amelia muttered. "Who even says that?"

She begrudgingly asked the cashier if they could add four hot chocolates to their order.

They were only a dollar each, but she also suspected that they were probably using a box of Swiss Miss packets. When Henry had to disappear to help get their tree secured on top of his car, Nat appeared at her side to help her carry the styrofoam cups.

They all reconvened in the parking lot, peacefully sipping on their drinks as if Nat hadn't just thrown them into the Hunger Games of Christmas tree shopping. Amelia still wanted a photo of her and Henry's first trip getting a Christmas tree together, hoping that there would be many more to come in the future, so she made Nat take one.

Henry didn't dare try to tickle her again as Amelia scooted over into the crook of his arm. And she suddenly felt emotional as they smiled for the camera, realizing how damn good it felt to share something—even if it was something insignificant—with the guy that she loved.