Jealous Nile for the fic!!
ooh this is fun. i can't believe i've never written jealous nile before?? well:
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The little cafe they'd come to was almost a stereotype for how damn quaintly French it was, but it was nice. Real nice. And she was having a real nice lunch date with Booker, with croissants and everything.
Not like… Not a date like that. A friend date. It was nice.
Until he got up to get more coffee. She watched him as she sipped her coffee and nibbled on her pastry, and watched as a woman came up to stand behind him in line. When he turned, he said something to her, and she laughed and tilted her head. Booker smiled, then ducked around her.
But that wasn't the end of the interaction. A few steps away, she stopped him again with a hand on his arm and said something that made him smile and nod. She was smiling big time. Flirtatiously big time. Nile took another drink of coffee, feeling herself frown for no good reason. Well, it was rude, right, just stopping someone while they're trying to walk away. Even if Booker was tolerating her rudeness by talking to her, turning toward her even, engaging in conversation with this random woman.
Not like it mattered to her, it's just the principle of the whole thing bothered her.
Finally the woman let him go and Booker came back to the table.
"She a Mormon or something?" Nile asked, and Booker looked confused for a moment before he laughed. "Jehova's Witness or something."
"Neither, just making conversation," he said, smiling at her and then taking a bite of his croissant.
Nile hummed, ate a bite of her own food.
Outside after they finished, the sky was starting to get darker and she frowned up at it, started zipping her jacket up. "Rain?"
Booker looked up too, then back at her, but again, before he could answer, the not a missionary woman appeared out of nowhere, coming up to Booker kind of breathless. He looked surprised, and Nile felt annoyed.
"Sorry, I just couldn't let this go," the woman said to him, in French, and she lay her hand on his arm. Paused to bite her lip, then pulled out a piece of paper and pressed it into his hand. "Call me some time?"
He looked at his hand, then at her, but she was already hurrying away before he could respond. Nile scoffed, pulled the paper out of his hand.
"Elise," she read, looking over the woman's handwriting skeptically. "Alright, Elise, we've got dating apps now."
He laughed, but then he took the paper from Nile's fingers and pocketed it. "Ah, just an appreciator of old school courting."
Nile found herself scoffing again, on multiple levels. That he took the number back, that he called it courting. That he was entertaining the idea of calling up this random ass woman.
"Are you going to call her?" she asked as they started walking. It just felt… weird. What if she was planning to rob him and kill him? Or sell him to… organ harvesters. Alright, probably not either of those, but she could. It was possible.
"No," Booker said, but Nile had seen him put the number in his pocket. "Not really my type."
Nile hummed, frowning, hands deep in her jacket pockets. She felt a drop of water hit the shell of her ear, sinking her mood even further.
