DP: 31. Flowers

31. Flowers

It started with a flower. No, actually it started with a plant that wasn’t ready to bloom. A birthday gift from him to her, and almost an anniversary gift since he’d first asked her out four years ago the day after her birthday. He would have asked her on her birthday, but they’d fallen asleep watching movies with Tucker, and Danny had always found it kind of hard to ask a girl out when they were both asleep.

Not that he’d ever tried, of course, but still.

He said it was an African Violet, and that when he’d seen one it had made him think of her. So naturally he just had to get her one. Not that she didn’t already have dozens of flowers—some of them violets, at that—growing in her greenhouse already. But it was thoughtful, and he’d insisted that she keep this particular one in her room, on the nightstand next to her bed.

That request had confused Sam, because Danny was rarely that adamant about anything outside of the ghost hunts she and Tucker joined him in. she’d wanted to put it out in the greenhouse and coax the bloom along. And yet there it was, next to her bed, budding and beginning to turn more and more colorful every day as it began to mature.

More confusing was the way he asked her every morning if it had bloomed.

She’d already noticed that morning that it was looking unusually… alive. It was the best word that she could think of, especially since the petals had been unfurling since the night before. There were still a few that stubbornly held together, but she thought she could see the bright yellow of the stamen through the white and violet of them. Almost, but she wasn’t sure.

But she was sure when she finally got out of the shower. Still dripping wet and wrapped in her towel, she stood and stared down at the brightly colored violet. It couldn’t be helped that her face was wet with more than water, and Sam’s hand shook as she reached for the phone and dialed Danny’s number from memory.

“Morning,” he said on a yawn, and she almost smiled at that.

“Danny? What kind of African Violet is this?” she asked, wondering if he could hear the hope in her voice.

He was quiet for a long time, and then finally, “It bloomed?”

She nodded, and somehow never even thought about him not being able to see her response.

He chuckled a little, and she could hear the tension in it. “I guess it’s the ‘Will you marry me?’ kind,” he finally murmured.

There was no way Sam could help dropping the phone right then as she reached out to the flower and gently tugged the simple diamond ring that was wrapped around the slender stamen. She didn’t even want to stop the tears as she slid it on her finger and collapsed down to the floor, finding the phone and tugging it to her ear to hear Danny’s frantic and worried, “Sam’s” from the other end.

She gave a teary laugh and he was suddenly silent, waiting, she knew, for her answer.

“I think,” she said on a shaky breath, “That we need to find an ‘of course I’ll marry you’ violet.”