Holy shit, she thinks I’m cute. Cute is good. “Wow, thank you,” I croak. “Wow.”
Nikki laughs again. “Are you enjoying Pride?”
“Except for the heat, yes,” I answer, fanning myself again. “It’s…it’s really hot.”
“No kidding,” she agrees. “I guess that’s why Atlanta hosts Pride in October, huh?”
I nod. “Yeah, my buddy was just saying that.” I glance at Celeste and Max, who are watching eagerly from afar. “We’re probably going to head out soon, actually.”
“Good idea,” Nikki says. Her eyes fall on my exposed shoulders. “Ooh, you might want to reapply sunscreen, too.”
Sure enough, yep, they’re turning pink. “Oh, shit. Sorry, I mean, yeah, I should. Well, it was nice meeting you?—"
“Wait, before you go,” Nikki pulls a Sharpie out of her canvas bag. “Give me your arm.”
I frown but obey. Nikki takes my hand and writes what I assume is her phone number on the inside of my forearm. “Shoot me a text once you’ve gotten out of the sun. Maybe we can meet up somewhere that isn’t outside in the middle of June.” She winks at me.
My lips curl into a shocked smile. “Y-Yeah, I will.”
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Nikki’s brick-facade apartment complex looms over my gun-metallic Nissan Sentra. The historic building was once a massive factory, but it was later preserved and converted into loft-style apartments and condominiums. Nikki’s studio loft may be tiny, but it has so much character and history that it almost makes up for its ridiculously high rent. It also helps that she doesn’t have to share it with anyone else.
Jude
I’m here <3
Nikki
sorry, just finishing my makeup <3 I’ll be down in 2 mins
For tonight’s date, Nikki and I decided on a quiet dinner-and-a-movie night at her place. She cooks dinner, I prepare dessert, we cuddle on the couch and enjoy a romantic moviebefore we inevitably end up screwing our brains out in her bed until we pass out from exhaustion.
The only catch? We both need to purchase ingredients for the aforementioned dinner and dessert.
Grocery shopping is an inherently domestic activity that certainly does nothing to ease my anxieties about our relationship. Nikki and I giggle our way through the aisles, piling items into our cart with reckless abandon. Here in the middle of a progressive city, we are free to be our unapologetic selves—a sapphic couple composed of an ethereal, tattooed princess and a tiny, genderless goblin. We don’t receive dirty looks. We are hardly perceived at all. It’s all the normalcy and acceptance I’ve searched for my whole life.
It’s intoxicating and terrifying.
At checkout, we divide our items and pay separately—a necessary reminder that it’s still only a casual date. Nikki checks out first, making friendly small talk with the middle-aged cashier. The much younger male bagger appears caught off guard by Nikki’s beauty and tries in vain to flirt with her while scrambling to bag her groceries. She ignores him, choosing to wink at me instead. Heat rises in my cheeks as I’m once again perplexed by how this gorgeous person could be interested in someone like me.
“Sorry, ma’am?”
I’m pulled from my lovesick daze to realize that the “ma’am” the cashier is referring to is me. “Hm?”
“It looks like that card was declined. Do you have another form of payment?”
My mind goes completely blank. Fuck. “Uh, can I try it again?”
The cashier throws me a pitying expression. “Sure.”
I tap my debit card again, desperately willing it to work, but the machine emits the same angry noise. The words “INSUFFICIENT FUNDS” taunt me from the tiny green screen.
Panic floods my veins, paralyzing me.
“Sorry, it looks like it was declined again,” the cashier announces, arguably louder than necessary.
Shit, the textbooks. Mom probably forgot about the massive expense of buying all the wildly overpriced reading material for this semester. I typically don’t spend more than a few hundred bucks from my account per week on groceries, gas, and meals, but my textbooks set me back nearly $1,500. I should have reminded her. Shit, shit, shit?—
