“Have you made a selection, sir?” a British sounding woman says coming up from behind us out of the blue, causing me to jump.
“It’s her choice, right…”
“Hannah,” I finally answer, realizing he’s done all this for me already and I haven’t even given him my name. I turn to Henry and mouth, “Are you sure?”
He crosses his arms across his chest and nods.
“I’ll take this one, please,” I ask, taking hold of the Rapunzel costume as it matches my long blonde hair.
“Very well then,” she says, eyeing me up and taking the costume. “I’ll be right back.”
“Is she going to—”
“Alter it to fit you perfectly. Absolutely,” Henry says.
“It’s really not that impor—” I begin and am quickly cut off again.
“It is impo
rtant, because you are important to me.”
I catch myself blushing as Henry moves in closer. “And if you don’t stop questioning my decisions, I’ll be forced to make you cease speaking.”
My eyes narrow, partly out of annoyance that he thinks he can do such a thing and partly out of curiosity for how in the world he thinks he can do that. I know he can hurt me, but I also know he won’t. My dad wouldn’t have sent me here if he was that type of guy.
“And how would you do that?” I challenge.
“Like this,” he says, closing the distance between us, his lips crashing down on mine.
5
Henry
“Little old for trick-or-treating, aren’t you?” a man says.
“I’m really sorry,” Hannah says as she steps away from the door, but I’m not about to let our very first attempt at this go in the opposite direction.
I move quickly from her side and slide my foot into his home, wedging it just as he goes to shut the door.
“What’s your problem, man?”
“I’m not the one with the problem,” I say, baring my teeth as my nostrils flare. “The problem here is you and your discrimination based on your preconceived notions of what you think is right or wrong.”
“Beat it weirdo,” he says, really laying into the door with all his weight but it doesn’t budge.
“What’s going on, babe?” a woman calls out from another room in the house.
“Some freak show and his—“
“That’s enough.”
My hand shoots inside his front door and grabs a packet of peanut M&M’s and I stuff the whole bag in his mouth so far down that he tumbles backward.
“It’s her first Halloween asshole, because her father was out there protecting this country for people like you and didn’t have time to take her trick-or-treating. Now he’s passed so you either leave those M&M’s in your mouth where they belong…stopping you from saying stupid things for at least the rest of the night, or you take them out and you apologize to her. Your choice.”
He pulls the bag from his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he says, a green stain on his front tooth from the force of one of the M&M’s I stuffed inside his soup cooler like a Thanksgiving turkey.
I take Hannah’s hand and lead her out onto the sidewalk and down the block. Her other hand comes to her face and she just shakes her head. “This isn’t a good idea. I knew it wasn’t,” she says.