You hear, that adorable small voice of Evan’s making you just smile more as William lets Evan have his moment.
“Yeah Evan?” You answer to his call as you crouch down next to the small boy who has something behind his back? Slowly Evan hands this little paper to you, awwwww! It’s a little birthday note with everyone’s signature as well as some little drawings he did! The brightly colored drawing resembles you to some extent and it causes you to genuinely feel even happier than you already were, it feels like there’s more love in this restaurant than anything your parents gave you.
Evan twiddled his fingers slightly, silently reminding you that you haven’t commented yet and he seems to want your opinion on it by the looks of it.
“Evan, I love it! You’re so talented sweetheart, did you draw it all by yourself?” You ask with a gleaming big smile across your face like a ray of sunshine on your facial features.
“Well, Elizabeth helped a bit…” Evan mumbles as he looks at the ground with a small smile forming on his cute little face from your words. You really enjoy it when your words mean a lot to someone plus it’s Evan so how can you not smile even more at him.
“You both did wonderful jobs! I’m going to cherish it forever!” You chirp out as you hold the drawing close to your chest with genuine affection before looking at it again, your heart feels like it’s going to burst from today.
“Really?” Evan questions with a small glimmer of hope as if he finds these compliments and appreciation unbelievable, which only motivates you even more to make it know.
“Mhm!” You hum out as you fold it up and put it in one of your pockets before ruffling his head with adoration.
With a big smile of glee, Evan gives you a small hug and runs off to Elizabeth, slight rambling on how you loved it escaping him as he spoke to her. He’s just the sweetest little guy, you feel like you’d do anything to protect his innocence.
“I’m glad they like you.” William suddenly says, your attention turns back to the man who planned all this, there’s a slight tug at your heart when you remember that. The fact that William literally closed the place just for you, not like he needed to since it’s a place for birthday parties but it’s like he wanted it to be all about you. Which you are definitely not used to but admit that being the center of attention is nice, especially if that attention is William’s.
“Me too,” you respond with a small smile as your thoughts continue, you just didn’t understand why William was so nice to you. Sure there were moments that weren’t the best but nothing is perfect, other than William. That’s cheesy, what the fuck brain. You’re becoming a cheesy simp at this point…
“So going back to what we talked about earlier, would you be interested in going somewhere tomorrow? I’d like to celebrate your birthday even more with just the two of us, you deserve to be cherished, Y/N.” William softly yet firmly says, that last sentence feeling like velvet to your ears as you feel like you’re unable to register this.
You can’t help it as your mind instantly can’t think straight, you struggle to form coherent thoughts and you somehow forgot that William basically asked you to be…more than friends? He didn’t put a label on it. But regardless, is he actually asking you out? You cough slightly to clear your mind, “Um, that… that sounds nice!” You respond in a cheery tone as your face feels fairly warm as usual but it felt different, unlike normally where you just were assuming it was romantic, it feels more forward this time. Was William waiting for you to make a move back but you took so long that he just asked you himself?… Are you actually that oblivious?
William’s smile turns to a very confident smile and you can see some satisfaction in it, “Great, can’t wait. I’ll text you the details, alright?” He confirms with that same smile that really makes you feel so damn flustered in his gaze, his sexy voice can make anything sound so damn nice.
William doesn’t give you much time to respond as he walks away leaving you rather flustered from the idea of going out with him, though you collect yourself. Which you’ll need to really work on in the next few hours of today leading to tomorrow because it’ll be embarrassing to show up all flustered. You cringe at the thought, the lack of romantic experience is really going to kick in and you dread making a mistake. Do you wait for William to make another move or do you try? Well, considering you’ll probably just make a fool out of yourself… yeah, you’ll just let William guide you or something. Which he’s already done, hopefully it’s not annoying?
You twiddle your fingers a bit but calm down your nerves as you turn around to look at the group, it was a small group but you loved it. Your emotions pulled you back and forth in your head but all of it positive like a glimmer of light or a wish granted by a star. It was all just something you weren’t expecting to experience this year for your birthday, you expected to be lonely and hating yourself for months. I guess you can be happy with or without family, well, your sister is here but she’s more than just family. She’s a life long best friend who you feel like you can always count on. Someone you’re lucky to have in your life, along with probably everyone in this room. Hopefully? One can wish.
You feel a small flutter in your heart when you see William’s face come back in the corner of your eye, you turn to his direction and are met with the sight of a birthday cake. And it’s your favorite color… You cover your mouth with one of hands as you can’t help the uncontrollable smile on your face, this whole event has given you a comfort you haven’t felt in a while. You loved your family back at home but you just never were going to feel fully free to be yourself and now, with all of them. You feel different, a good different. William sets the cake down on the table next to you and you laugh softly in a somewhat awkward manner when he looks at you, your emotions making it so hard to express yourself. You feel like it’s all so much and while good, overwhelming. You never were too much of a party person, at least it’s just people you know because if it was full of people… You’d probably be a mess.
William gives you a gentle smile, which works to ease your nerves to a degree while he starts to get the candles out from his pocket. Everyone else, taking the cake as a sign starts to crowd around the table as you bashfully take your seat in front of the cake. Your eyes focus on the cake, the buttercream looks so very fluffy and it is lined with a white/black (whatever fits) ribbon-like frosting border. A couple of Oreos/cherries sit upon the small frosting mounds which you can already see Elizabeth and Evan eyeing from the corner of your vision. The cake feels like…home? Yet not how your home felt, it felt much better and practically magical.
The sight of the candles igniting stops your thoughts and you sit up straight with a little dumb grin on your face as your surrounded by people you choose. Which is something that really makes you happy. You perk up when everyone starts to sing the typical happy birthday song and you sit there embracing it all so hard as if it’ll all disappear if you don’t. Which scares you but you brush that thought aside, you don’t need no negativity right now. And not like anything’s going to happen, like what could go wrong?
Once the song finishes, you’re left with just one thing to do. Make a wish. It’s easier said than done, typically you don’t really wish for anything and back then, probably the biggest wish you made was to “fix” your queerness. But with all that said and done, with everything where it is now? You don’t know what you want, you don’t want to wish for anything unrealistic because well, you don’t want to be disappointed. All you can really wish for is for things to stay the way they are which you can only hope stays true. And you blow the candles out, snuffing out their little lives in hopes of your wish from within to stay true. Once those candles are out, you are met with a bunch of smiles in your direction and a couple hugs, those hugs being from your sister, Evan, and Elizabeth.
The rest of party is mostly a blur, tons of pizza and cake is eaten with a bunch of fountain drinks that are really going to flood your system. But it’s comforting. You spend a lot of time with your sister, Damien/Daryl, Evan and Elizabeth chatting about a bunch of random things. Elizabeth’s face was covered in pizza grease and cake frosting, everytime you wiped it, she always seems to come back with more. Are kids just naturally this messy with food? You don’t question it much more than that, the music in the background is probably just “Top 80’s music” which is a hit or miss half the time. Your coworkers have been doing their own thing, Fritz seems to be have been trying to make a new type of pizza before something came up and he left. Leaving the monstrosity he was making behind, the pizza had parts of the birthday cake on and whatever he could find in the kitchen cabinets. He called it Birthday Pizza and kept trying to get you to eat it, Elizabeth did take a bite out of it and said she liked it but she’s a kid. And you don’t trust a kids taste buds on what’s good…
Weird enough, you haven’t seen William too much since after the birthday cake which has made you rather disappointed but he’s a busy man. He must have more important things. Plus you’ll see him on that… date so you can’t really complain about not being able to see him, he’ll make it up to you. Right? It’s a rather flustering thought to be alone with William, you don’t get the chance to do so as much as you wish you could. Although, you almost always end up a literal mess when the two of you are alone which you can’t deny is both fun and embarrassing. Though, you have been getting some confidence around him lately which you can only hope leads to even better things…
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