Our first date had been on Friday night. I had planned everything for it. And because it went so well (I’m assuming due to the fact that Raven texted me early on Saturday morning about a possible second date) we did end up having a second date. And this time, she was orchestrating it.

To be honest, I was a bit scared. It wasn’t like I didn’t trust her, it was just that I was a bit hesitant regarding her taste and style and shit. But whatever it was, I was sure I would love it. At least, that was what I told myself as I pulled on a regular white shirt and black leggings.

She had told me to dress rather casually, and I wondered what we were doing as I put my arms through the sleeves of a thin cardigan. Maybe a walk somewhere with pretty scenery or a nice cafe for coffee and a chat.

I grabbed my bag and my phone, checking the time. It was four in the evening, and I nodded to myself. Right on time.

I left my room and made for the front door when I heard my sister call out from behind me.

“Hey, Lils,” she said from the table. I turned to see her setting her phone down. “Where’re you going?”

“I, uh…” I said, half debating whether or not to lie to her. I decided against lying. “Actually, I have a date.”

“Oh my gosh!” she practically screeched as she jumped up from her seat. “Is this that person you said you weren’t sure if you were dating?”

I laughed at her enthusiasm as I nodded. “Yeah, I’m going out with them now. It’s just our second date, though, so I'm not really sure how this is going to go.”

She smiled so brightly that I felt nearly blind, but she looked so fucking happy for me that I couldn’t look away.

“Oh my gosh!” she repeated as she came running up to me and embraced me in her arms so tightly that I very nearly lost my breath.

I laughed again, though a bit more out of breath than before, as I hugged her back. “Thanks,” I huffed amusedly.

“I'm just so happy for you,” she told me, and I was shocked to see the beginnings of actual tears in her eyes as we parted. But then she frowned at me and asked, “Wait, are you going out dressed like that?”

I frowned as well as I looked down at my clothes. “Yeah, what’s wrong with this?”

“Uhm,” she said as she turned to look at the window. “Lily… it’s raining.”

“What?” I said, my head whipping around to stare out the window with her. “Aw, shit!” I hissed under my breath.

I quickly pulled off my cardigan and ran back through the house to my room. I dashed straight to my closet and began to ransack it for my old raincoat. It was black and the only rain jacket I happened to own. It was lovely with a soft lining inside, and I checked the time on my phone as I pulled it on. It had taken nearly ten minutes to find it.

I was officially running late.

I bolted from my room again, nearly crashing into the wall as I turned the corner. I smashed my feet into my shoes, tripping as I ripped the door open and sprinted out. I nearly crashed into the lady who lived two doors down with how fast I was running, and I had to shout an apology over my shoulder.

I decided to use the stairs this time. I was only on the third floor and the stairs would be a whole fucking lot quicker. So I slammed past the door, my feet hitting the stone steps so fast I nearly slipped and fell down the rest of the stairs. But I made it out alive and mostly uninjured (I stubbed my entire fucking foot on the edge of the railing as I turned one of the corners) and continued my race out of the lobby and onto the sidewalk outside.

It was like magic, because right when I stepped into the rain outside of the apartment complex, my phone went off in my bag. I quickly stepped back under the overhang outside of the building doors and pulled my phone into my hand.

It was a text from Raven.

Meet me at the cafe beside Glass Glory, was all it said.

I smiled to myself as I read her text. It was short and sweet and concise, just like everything else about her. Except… Raven most definitely was not short. If anything, I was the short one.

Fuck, I wanted to see her so bad it felt like a knife in the stomach.

Be there soon! I replied as I pulled the hood of my rain jacket up to cover my head and stepped back out into the rain.

The rain itself wasn’t heavy or too cold or that much of a bother, and it actually felt nice. I felt like a child, again, out in the rain on my way somewhere. I guess I never really did things like this, but it felt so refreshing because of how fucking new I felt. Like I had been pulled apart, little by little as I first met Orchid. And once I found out that Orchid was actually Raven, I started to get put back together again.

I scrunched my nose up and glared at my feet. I was acting like a sappy, love-sick moron, and even I couldn’t take the thoughts piling up in my own mind.

“Blegh,” I coughed as I turned the corner of another block.

From the corner of my eye, I caught several people looking at me like I was being weird (which I was) but I ignored them because I didn’t give a shit about what they thought of me. I just continued on my way to the cafe beside Glass Glory.

I don’t think I’ve ever been there before, but I do remember seeing it two days ago on our first date. It had a yellow sign above the entrance and, if I remember correctly, the interior had a warm color scheme of browns, golds, and yellows. It sounded cozy, not something that I would choose as my first guess of where Raven chose, but I could also still see her there.

I mean, what the fuck, I could see her everywhere.

Either way, I looked up as I was just a few stores away from the cafe, and my eye caught on a figure in all black walking up to me from the other side of the street.

Raven, just like last time, coming from the opposite direction.

She met my gaze, and even though we were quite far from each other, I could make out her smile as we exchanged waves with each other.

I came up to the cafe just before she did, and I waited for her right underneath the fabric overhang that protected one of the two sets of tables from the rain. I shook my hood off my head to reveal my damp-ish hair to the cold, humid air.

“Ready for our second date?” Raven asked me, her hands in her coat pockets as she calmly walked up to me, her hood up and her black hair flopping over her eyes.

“Of course,” I breathed with a smile as I looked up at her.

This time, she took my hand in hers as her other came up to push her hood away from her head. Would there never be a moment when I would want to run my fingers through her short but silky and thick hair? No, I don’t think there would ever be that moment.

She led me into the cafe, straight to the cashier at the counter. Somehow, there was no line, and the man behind the counter looked at us expectantly. I smiled once at him before turning my focus to the menu above him.

As much of a coffee person I was, I knew that I probably shouldn’t have caffeine so late in the day. I guess I would go with a hot chocolate instead. It was the perfect drink for rainy weather, after all.

“Ready to order?” Raven asked beside me.

I turned to smile at her as I nodded. She smiled back as we stepped up to the cashier.

“I’ll have a small green tea for myself,” she said to the man, and he immediately looked down and started tapping the little screen in front of him. “And what would you like?” she asked, turning to me.

“I’ll have a small hot chocolate,” I said to the man, and he nodded and tapped more things on the screen.

But as I made to pull my wallet out to pay, Raven put her hand on mine and said, “It’s on me,” with a large smile. Then she turned back to the man and said, “So two small drinks, a green tea and a hot chocolate. For Raven.”

I blinked at her, the notion to object and pay for myself shouting in my head, but I was too stunned by her to say it aloud. And before I knew it, her wrist had snapped out and she had flashed her credit card at the scanner.

“Wait-” I began, but it was too late. She was already leading me towards one of the many unoccupied tables and sat us down. My tongue seemed somehow frozen as I tried to splutter a protest. “W-wait, I-I can-! I-I mean I sh-should-!”

But she just smiled devilishly at me as she leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. Her hands rested on her knee as she watched me stammer, so I stopped.

“You paid last time,” she said, shrugging. “I just returned the favor.”

I laughed and scoffed in a weird huff of breath as I mimicked her posture. I shook my head slightly as I looked at her smug face. She looked like an angel.

“Fine,” I finally agreed. “But that means that next time, I’m paying.”

She just chuckled at this, like she was talking to a petulant young child. “Sure, sure,” she told me.

I narrowed my eyes at her because for some reason, I didn’t believe that she’d let me pay. After all, she had brushed me off so nonchalantly, like I was spouting nonsense from my mouth.

But right then, the man called out her name, and she smirked as she leaned forward. Her legs uncrossed and she stood up, her eyes lingering on mine as she went to get our drinks. For fuck’s sake, she could convince me to dive off a cliff with just those eyes of hers… fuck…

She came back to the table with both drinks in her hand, and she handed me the one with the words “hot cocoa” scribbled on the side. I took it wordlessly and stood up with her. I could tell that we wouldn’t be staying from the fact that she had come to hand me my drink from beside me instead of sitting opposite me and passing it across the table.

I wonder what she had in store for us next…

We ended up walking through the rain, our hoods up as we cradled our paper cups filled with hot and steaming drinks to warm us up from the inside. We passed several stores that sold different things, and I was just sort of following where she led me without question.

At some point, I had only one hand holding up the cup while the other was in my pocket, hiding from the wind and rain. It was during a moment of silence between us, a break in our conversation, that I gave a slight shiver. My hand wasn’t warming whatsoever in my jacket pocket, and I was half tempted to pull it back out to hold the warm chocolate. But it wouldn’t be much better…

And that was when I felt thin, warm fingers tickle the back of my hand as it slipped into my pocket. It wrapped around my hand and gently pulled my hand from my pocket, and for one moment, it was like my brain ceased to work. I turned to look at our joined hands before I glanced up at her face. She was looking down at me with a smile as warm as her fingers, and then she was pulling both of our hands into her own pocket.

It was so warm.

I smiled to myself, and I was sure that I was blushing as I felt the wind and rain get colder against my face, but I honestly couldn’t fucking care. The only issue I had with our joined fingers was that my mind seemed completely occupied by it, and it took all of my power to even try to focus on where I was walking.

That is, until a particularly bright sign caught my eye.

“The Ink Palette?” I asked, looking up at her curiously. Through the rain, all I could see were the calligraphed words glowing brightly at the top of the store, so I had no idea what it actually was. “Is that an art place?”

She laughed lightly. “You could say that, I guess,” she told me as she led me closer.

And then I saw the place.

Pictures of naked bodies (with certain body parts censored and blocked, of course) with a fucking plethora of tattoos and piercings and all that shit. Black designs inked all over their legs, arms, backs, stomachs, necks, everywhere.

Nervously, I looked back at Raven. “A tattoo parlor?” I asked, my voice rising higher and higher with each word.

She smiled at me as we stood in front of the store, and my eyelashes fluttered as I looked up at her, bathed by the light from the store and surrounded by the quickly falling rain that glowed like a halo around her.

“Lily,” she said with that amazing, lopsided smile of hers. “Would you like to get a tattoo with me?”

How could I say no?

That was how I found myself inside of a tattoo parlor, the rain pounding outside as the sunset glimmered through the droplets of rain, beside Raven, who looked perfectly at home both in actual fucking looks as well as her composture.

And then this guy (I think it was a guy) walked up to us. He had two nose rings, another two on his left eyebrow, rings through the corners of his bottom lip along with a rod through the actual lip, and at least a hundred on each of his ears. His hair was long and bleached blonde, shaved at the sides of his head and pulled back into a ponytail. I could see the millions of tattoos all over his neck and chest and forearms from the slivers of skin I could see through his clothes.

To be completely honest, this guy scared me.

“Raven!” he practically shouted as he came up to us. “My girl, it’s been so long!”

“Yeah, man,” she said with a laugh. “What has it been, almost half a year?”

“Seven and a half months, to be exact, Raven,” he said as they embraced. “And who’s your pretty friend?”

“This is Lily,” Raven said as she held out a hand for me. I took it, and she helped me up. “We’re dating.”

“Oho!” the scary-looking guy said with a wide smile. “Nice to meet you! I’m Axe,” he told me.

When he opened his mouth, I noticed a tongue piercing, too.

I smiled shyly at him and felt the sudden urge to hide behind Raven like a scared child hiding behind their mother. I was so out of my comfort zone.

But the guy, Axe, only laughed and dropped his hand, which I then realized had been out in the offer of a handshake.

“Lily’s new to this,” Raven told him as she dropped my hand to wrap her arm around my waist.

He threw his head back and laughed. “Of course, let’s do this,” he said, turning and gesturing for us to follow him.

Raven gave me a comforting squeeze as she and I followed him to the counter.

There, Raven and I signed a shit ton of papers about our blood, insurance, age, and shit like that.

It was redundant, but finally, it was complete and Axe led us to the back. “Who’s going first?” he asked as he prepped the things he needed.

I had no idea what any of them were or how any of them worked, but then Raven spoke up, distracting me from him. “How about you go first?”

I turned to look at her with shock. “M-me?” I asked incredulously, and she nodded.

“Yeah, so you don’t get freaked out while watching me,” she said.

That made sense… I guess…

So I nodded and took a seat on the chair-bed-thing.

“So this tattoo here, right?” Axe asked.

I turned my head to see him holding up the sketch of the design I had decided on and at his blue pen as it waved around the general area that Raven and I had picked to get our matching tattoos at.

“Y-yeah,” I replied, suddenly out of breath and scared out of my shit.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s do this, then!”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could feel my palms sweating, all of me sweating as Axe shaved the area my tattoo would go.

But then I felt her warm, dry hand clamp around mine, and my eyes flew open. I turned my head to look at Raven.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’m here.”