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Hailey had a love-hate relationship with flowers ever since she was a child. She used to admire the pretty colors and all the wonderful smells each kind emitted, the way the petals felt like silk under her fingertips.
They lost their appeal as she got older, something meant to be beautiful had been tainted as she'd watch her father give her mother a bouquet of cheap flowers as a means to atone for throwing his fist to her face the night before.
It wasn't until Hailey left her childhood and family behind, got out of the house that was her own personal hell and was on her own that she started appreciating them, loving them again.
The array of colors made her stare in awe, the smells made her inhale deeply, and the petals still felt like silk. She'd bought herself some on the rare occasion, when she was in a particularly happy mood or when she needed a boost, but she had never been given any with intention, not by anyone who mattered.
Not until Jay.
The first time he gives her flowers doesn't count. They'd been doing surveillance for a case, and he'd pulled a ruse with their suspect and when he returned to the truck, he brought a bouquet of red roses with him that he'd gotten under false pretenses.
"What a guy," Hailey had said to him, eyes bright and a big grin on her face.
He didn't say a word about them after that, just gave her a tiny smile and back to work they went.
He doesn't know she kept them. Doesn't know she inhaled their scent every morning before she left for the district and every evening when she returned home. Doesn't know they sat in a vase on her kitchen counter for nearly a week before the petals started to wilt. Doesn't know how much she appreciated the gesture even if it wasn't one actually meant for her.
The second time he gives her flowers is the first time it means something.
They're the first thing she sees when she steps out of her bedroom and the sight makes her knees buckle and her throat run dry. A crystal vase sits on her kitchen counter, a white ribbon tied around the body, and inside are more than a dozen long stemmed roses with stunning red petals. The scent is overwhelming. The card is too that is tucked in with them.
She wore a smile all day because of those roses. Couldn't wipe it from her face if she tried, even when the team had teased her about it relentlessly and dug into her, asking too many questions about who the new someone was she had in her life.
"Must be a helluva guy if he's got our Upton smiling like that," Kevin had boasted from the end of the bullpen.
Hailey gave them nothing, but when she caught the green eyes of her partner stealing a glance at her from across their neighboring desks, a smirk tugging at his lips, her heart nearly lurched out of her chest.
Later that night after take-out on her couch and a few rounds in her bed, Hailey had curled into Jay with her head on his arm, fingertips dotting along the trail of freckles littering his skin. She looked at him with love in her eyes, a question burning in her mind all day long.
"What made you get me flowers?"
The answer he gave was immediate, no thought required, and with a dopey smile stretched out across his face.
"Remember that case we had last year? The DV one with Michelle and her husband?" He asked, and Hailey nodded against him because of course she remembered. He tightened his arm around her, fingers pressing into her lower back. "I saw your eyes light up when I came back to the truck with those roses. Figured it was a good piece of information to tuck away for the future."
Hailey's eyes had welled with tears, smitten by the gesture and the honesty behind his words, and at that moment Kevin's voice filtered into her head from earlier in the day about the new guy she had in her life.
She smiled, dimple in her cheek, and pressed a kiss to Jay's bicep before she rolled over on top of him, hands wandering, wanting to show her gratitude and love for the man lying beneath her because surely, she was in love with him. There was no denying it, even if she hadn't yet said the words aloud.
She sank down over him with his hands gripping her hips and guiding her movements, his eyes on her with a similar look reflecting in them as he stared up at her.
What a guy indeed, she thought to herself.
She gets flowers again on her birthday. It had always been a day much like Valentine's, one she didn't care to celebrate. She never had a reason until him, until he made it special for her. The little card attached to the yellow bouquet made her heart race at a gallop and had her cheeks flushing a beautiful shade of pink.
If she hadn't already been deeply in love with the guy, that would have done her in.
The next time she gets flowers is when she catches a nasty bug from Ruzek later that year at the start of flu season. She's put on forced furlough until she's no longer contagious and shooed out of the bullpen.
She's not sure how her husband does it or how he even had the time, but when she shuffled into their apartment an hour later, there was a bouquet of lavender and sunflowers waiting on the counter for her. Her eyes pooled with tears at the sweet gesture, and then she plucked a little card from the kraft paper wrapping and his handwritten words tugged at every single heartstring.
He'd come home later that night and found her passed out on the couch. A half-eaten bowl of chicken soup was on the coffee table next to the flowers he'd surprised her with, and the remote for the television was close to falling to the floor from her hand dangling over the couch.
He scooped her up easily and carried her to their bedroom, and she'd woken up in his arms as he laid her down on the bed.
"My flowers," she whined in a sleepy daze.
He held back a laugh as he tucked her in, but she didn't close her eyes until he set the bouquet on her nightstand within her line of sight for when she woke up again.
It ended up not being a bug, most certainly not the flu, and the next time he gives her flowers that mean something — mean everything — is eight and a half months later when she brings their child into the world.
Hailey wakes in her hospital bed to a dozen roses at her right, half pink and half white, and to her left is a bassinet that holds their daughter. Except the bassinet is empty. She sits up as quickly as she can and looks around in a worried daze until her eyes fall on Jay laid back in a recliner in the corner of the room. He has one hand on their daughter's back, the other on her head, and he looks up, flashing her a smile that makes her ache all over.
"Hey mama," Jay calls out softly. "You doing okay?"
Hailey nods, mouthing I love you.
"I love you too," he says.
She lets out a happy sigh as she eases back down into her bed and the pillows behind her back. Her heart races at the look he gives her and her new title and the little family they've created together.
She grins back at him with her dimpled cheek, a smile bigger than any she has ever worn, that no number of flowers could ever bring out of her, but still she reaches for the card tucked into the roses at her bedside. The tears are instant, and the swell of her heart is painfully good.
What a guy, she thinks not for the first time, only to realize how much more than that he had become to her.
Partner, friend, lover, husband. Now a father.
He wasn't just a guy anymore. He was the only, and he was hers, he was theirs, and he would be forever.