Goldie sat back and waited, looking into Nina's face for a reaction.

Nina reached up with both hands, running her fingers over the silk. "All this for little ol' me?"

"Maybe I just wanted to make myself feel more confident," Goldie replied, shifting in Nina's lap. 

Nina pressed a kiss into the space above an embroidered iris flower. "And? Did it work?" 

"Guess we'll find out." Goldie undid the rest of the buttons on Nina's jumpsuit, and Nina shrugged herself out of it. Her own underwear suddenly felt cheap, uninspired. She was pretty sure she got the bra at a mall a few years ago. At least the bra and underwear were both black, so they bore some semblance to a matching set.

"God, you're so hot," Goldie whispered reverently. "And there's so much— never mind." She pushed the jumpsuit aside and undid Nina's bra with one hand, sliding the other into Nina's underwear. Nina had to suddenly switch focus from being the person doing to being the person getting done, and it was disorienting, but kind of nice. Dizzyingly pleasurable, but also. Kind of nice. 

Nina had no idea what Goldie saw when she looked at Nina. Part of her thought Goldie might be lying to be polite. At least about the hotness. Maybe she just hadn't gotten laid in a while, before Nina showed up.

She glanced at the clock, and then the stairs. "Should we take this to my room, perhaps?"

"Oh, I think we can at least finish you off here," Goldie said, and the lingerie really must have helped her confidence because this wasn't her usual frantic rambling, she sounded sure and in control. Her fingers moved faster and faster, and Nina could feel her breath get more and more ragged. "Yes," Nina had the presence of mind to gasp. "Yes."

She pressed into Nina at just the right angle, and Nina saw stars.

They did end up moving to the bedroom sometime later, Nina belatedly remembering her parents were supposed to come home eventually and taking their clothes up too. Goldie flopped down first, still in her expensive (now sticky and sweaty) lingerie.

Nina peeled the embroidered bralette off like she was unwrapping a candy.

Goldie grinned back at her, long legs splayed across the bed."Gonna ravish me now?" She sounded winded. Nina suspected it wouldn't take much to bring her to climax, after everything they'd done downstairs. 

She was right. 

Nina's alarm went off far earlier than she would've liked, but it couldn't be helped: she had work. From the sound of it, her parents either spent the night at their friends', or came in ridiculously late and were still asleep. Goldie was also still asleep, arm thrown across Nina's bare chest in a move that seemed more careless than possessive. Nina moved the arm off her as gently as possible and wondered if she could sneak in a shower before anyone else woke up.

Goldie turned out to be a light sleeper. "Where're you going?" she mumbled.

"Work. I can drop you off at the train station on the way. There's a cafe nearby if you want breakfast," Nina offered. "Sorry, I skipped last week so I have to make it on time this week or my manager will have my head."

"Fair enough," Goldie said around a yawn.

Nina pulled open her closet door and grabbed some jeans and a t-shirt at random. "It's either this or you get to meet my parents without me being there."

"Ah. Yeah." Goldie suddenly looked much more awake. She picked up her overnight bag— probably some kind of fancy brand thing, bulky brown leather to match her preppy look from the day before— and started rifling through it.

"We really don't have time to make breakfast here," Nina said as she brushed her hair in front of her mirror, thinking of the omelettes Goldie made a week ago. "But the cafe is pretty good. Sorry," she added again.

"Don't apologize." Goldie had swapped out the Oxford shirt with a short sleeved top and the lingerie set with a much simpler pair of undergarments, and tied the vintage sweater across her shoulders like a frat bro on the rowing team. She was now in the middle of tying her brown hair back into a long, swinging ponytail, gold highlights running through it in stripes. 

"Honestly thought it'd take you longer to get ready than this," Nina said.

"Well, I'm skipping my makeup, so." Goldie shrugged, but a note of irritation came through her voice. 

"You look fine without it," Nina said. She wondered if she should kiss Goldie to reassure her, or if that was just something married couples did in movies. She did look fine— so the skin on her face wasn't as flawless as usual, big deal. Nina almost never wore makeup herself. She wasn't wearing any now. She let her hair fall loosely around her face and grabbed whatever she might need at work.

Nina went downstairs first. Goldie followed shortly after, footsteps gentle to avoid possibly waking Nina's parents. Nina listened closely, but she couldn't be sure if they were home or not without checking their room itself, and that seemed a bit much.

"Your room is nice," Goldie said. "I don't think I told you earlier. But it's nice. It looks like you."

"Thanks," said Nina. "Lived there my whole life." She pulled out of the driveway and reversed to leave the bog-standard suburban neighborhood that surrounded them. There were small hints to the area's above-average ethnic diversity here and there— a garland of chrysanthemums over the door of that house, an elaborate red silk knot hanging in this window— but from a distance, it looked just like every other suburb in the country.

"God, I'm sick of this place," Nina said, and realized as she said it that she meant it.

"Move to New York with me!" Goldie said, clearly joking— at least partly.

So Nina huffed out a laugh and said, "with what money?" And Goldie went silent.

The cafe near the station was as cute and quaint as everything else in Middlewater, with a vaguely Parisian theme to its decor and mediocre quiche. The croissants were good, though, so Nina ordered two of those and handed one to Goldie.

"There's a different place in town closer to the art store that's like, famous for its croissants," she explained, "but it opens a little later and there's always an insane line around the block for half an hour before that happens. I think having a famous croissant place in town makes everyone else up their croissant game a little, though, so these are still pretty good."

Goldie took a bite of the raspberry filled pastry. "Not bad!" she said. "You know, the best croissant I ever had was actually in Florence. Not France. The ones in France were good but not as good as that random bakery on a side street in Florence."

"Do you travel a lot?"

Goldie shrugged modestly. "Studied abroad in Paris like a cliche, and did the Railpass-Ryanair thing on my breaks and weekends, also like a cliche. And then I've been to some places with my parents, but mostly limited to Western and Central Europe. The big cities with cultured art scenes, you know." She dipped the tip of her croissant into her paper coffee cup, nonchalant. Nina wondered if the cafes in Paris looked like this at all, with the black and white checkerboard tiles and Eiffel Tower-shaped flowerpots. Almost certainly not.

"Do you travel?" Goldie asked.

Nina shrugged. "I'd like to. We went back to Moscow a few times when I was a kid, but I don't remember much."

"I thought you said you were Ukrainian?"

"Ukrainian Jewish," Nina corrected her. "My parents met at university in Moscow, but it's not— ethnicity and nationality over there is different than here." It would take too long to explain. Nina suddenly felt exhausted by the very thought. She checked her watch. "I need to go to work, and you should catch the train." Nina collected their empty dishes and put them in the plastic dish return bin.

Goldie stuck out her lip in an exaggerated pout. "Don't you want to spend more time with me?"

"Wanting to spend more time with you is why I have to work today," Nina pointed out, the admission tumbling out of her mouth like off of a cliff. "Because I called in sick last week."

Goldie held the pout for a few more seconds before relenting and getting up from her chair. "Do you want to do this again next weekend? Will you have Sunday off then?"

"Maybe, yeah," Nina said. "Or maybe I could come up to the city."

It always felt like a massive imposition to ask a New Yorker to drag themselves out to the middle of nowhere Middlewater, but for her to come up to New York felt more like a matter of course. There was just more there— more things to do and places to see. "You could show me your sister's restaurant."

Goldie lit up then. "That would be really fun! Okay, yeah, we can totally do that." She nodded fervently. "And you—you want to meet my sister?"

Nina hesitated, then nodded. She'd made her decision: even if she was sure this wasn't going to last, she was going to ride it out for as long as it did. She was hungry. And she was curious.