Chapter Text
This dress keeps getting stuck on the strap of her bag, and she’s trying hard to just ignore it and not fixate on it too much, because she knows she looks hot as fuck in it. The dress is Prada, her little boots are just clunky enough to dress the outfit down a little and she pinned her hair up to show off her neck. The tight fit makes her legs look even longer than they are and cinches at the waist just right and it’s worth a little discomfort, even if showing up here is already turning out to be a mistake.
But Mari asked Lottie to come tonight, and Lottie knew saying no would’ve turned into a whole thing; Mari’s got a temper. There’s usually a direct correlation between going along with what Mari wants her to do and really good sex, so Lottie sucked it up, found a hot little black dress in her closet and made her way to this stupid art opening.
Her fault for getting involved with an art curator, maybe. It’s not serious — she doesn’t think it could ever be, what with Mari’s constant mood swings — but it’s been going on for a couple of weeks, and having someone to text on lonely nights hasn’t exactly been awful. Lottie’s never going to complain about having regular sex with someone as attractive as Mari.
She just should not have agreed to come to this. She’s been here twenty minutes, maybe, and Mari hasn’t looked her way once, which she thinks is kind of criminal considering how good she looks. And she gets that this is her job, though she isn’t exactly sure what part Mari had in all this, but that doesn’t mean she has to ignore Lottie completely, right? Why even ask her to come then?
Lottie’s no stranger to these types of events. That’s why she knows they all suck. She has attended her fair share by virtue of, you know, growing up rich, so she knows how to conduct herself; she just kind of assumed the person who asked her to come in the first place would maybe hang out with her a little, too.
Oh well. There’s an open bar, at least, so she orders a Shirley Temple in a vain attempt to not turn boredom into an excuse for drinking and lingers around a bit. Five more minutes on her own and she might just get a vodka soda anyway.
She makes eye contact with a guy around her age near the bar who looks lost. Poor thing; she immediately feels bad for him and shoots him a smile. He’s wearing a button-down shirt that looks a little too big on him, and his dark hair is gelled back in a way that makes him look like he never wears it this way. Then she sees he’s holding a pair of black heels by the straps, which is really just very sweet; Lottie takes pity on him and walks over.
“This is not the party I was promised.”
The guy laughs. “I’m not sure I fully get the vibe they’re going for, but I’m not usually one for art.”
“Neither. At least not when it’s commercialized like this.”
He smiles and holds out his hand. “I’m Travis.”
“Lottie.” She shakes his hand and glances down at the shoes he’s still holding knowingly. “So who are you here with?”
He gets this little smug grin on his face and motions towards the other side of the room where a couple of people are making conversation. “The gorgeous blonde with the roots that are growing out. She says it builds character.”
The girl is hot, so Lottie nods her props. He’s got good taste. She allows her eyes to linger a little, checks out the rather unconventional combination of black flared pants, a frilly blouse and pink Converse and wonders why someone this cool would choose to spend their Wednesday night at a stuck-up gallery opening like this.
“What about you?”
“Me?” It catches her off guard. Is she being that obvious? “Oh, well, I’m not even really dating her,” she says, rolling her eyes a little when he raises an eyebrow. “The brunette by the door in the pantsuit.” He follows her gaze and still doesn’t seem to get who she’s talking about, so she adds, “The tall one with her cleavage out.”
Travis laughs, and Lottie doesn’t know what compels her to tell this virtual stranger that it’s nothing serious, but she does.
“Me and Nat have been together for two years this March.”
Fuck, that seems like an eternity. It’s about two years longer than any relationship she’s ever been in, not that that’s saying much. Then again… She sneaks another look at his girlfriend, at her ass in those pants and the animated little smile that’s dimpling her cheeks as she talks and thinks she sort of gets why Travis might wanna keep her around.
“You look like you could use a drink,” Lottie says, and she can tell he wants one.
“I promised Nat I wouldn’t get too drunk at this.”
Lottie likes being a bad influence, for once. “Well, I promised myself I wouldn’t drink tonight but I’ll break my promise if you will.”
He gives in pretty easily. She sweet-talks one of the bartenders into storing his girlfriend’s heels behind the bar, and they share a couple of drinks over the next half hour or so. Mari comes over and passive-aggressively steals her away because she can’t stand not having Lottie’s full attention at all times, which Lottie would object to if she had any intention other than casual sex here.
She says goodbye to Travis, shoots him a smile, and he tells her he’ll see her around, which she doubts but doesn’t correct him on.
At the end of the night, she sees his girlfriend looking in her direction when she and Mari leave hand in hand and she isn’t sure if that’s jealousy she senses, but she smirks at her anyway.
***
There’s something about Midtown that Lottie kind of enjoys. It’s calming, the hustle and bustle of it all, and it makes her feel less alone with her thoughts, so she makes a point of taking yoga classes here every now and then.
It’s convenient that today’s class just so happens to line up with a meeting at a gallery Mari works with nearby. She hasn’t seen her in over a week, which defeats the point of the whole friends-with-benefits thing, if you ask her. She has friends; she’s here for the benefits.
She’s walking to the little coffee shop near the yoga studio where they’re supposed to be meeting, still dressed head to toe in earthy hues of lululemon, when a blonde woman runs into her phone first.
Nothing gets Lottie more riled up than people who refuse to look up from their phones and pay attention to the real world. She glares at her before she even realizes who it is and tells her to watch where she’s going.
“Whoa,” the blonde says, gripping Lottie’s arm to steady herself. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
Lottie blinks back at her and wonders why she looks so familiar. The angular cheekbones, the dimples, the dyed blonde hair, she—
“Wait, you’re Mari Ortega’s girlfriend, right?”
Lottie chokes out a laugh. Because honestly, what the fuck? She bites her tongue, but the urge to immediately deny the accusation is strong.
“Depends. Who’s asking?”
“Oh, uh, I work with Mari, kinda. I’m Natalie. I saw you two together at the opening the other day.”
Lottie tells her her name and wonders how she can get away from this conversation without sounding rude.
They’re kind of just awkwardly standing there and Lottie lets her push her out of the way so they’re not blocking the whole sidewalk.
The blonde motions to the coffee shop a few doors down. “Did you wanna go in and grab a coffee, or…”
Lottie looks at her again, at her bloodshot eyes and the lazy smile on her lips as she waits for an answer. Of course. She’d know that look in her eyes anywhere.
“Are you stoned?”
Natalie grins. “Depends. Who’s asking?”
She’s a little intrigued, honestly.
Mari is always late anyway, so Lottie reaches for Natalie’s wrist and pulls her towards the coffee shop, because she wouldn’t exactly mind some company, and the girl seems entertaining.
It helps that she’s really pretty.
They sit down at a table near the door so Lottie can keep an eye out for Mari, and then she doesn’t really know what to say to this virtual stranger.
“How’s Travis?”
“He’s good, yeah. Um, really busy with work and stuff, so.”
The awkwardness underneath Natalie’s cool girl exterior is kind of endearing. Lottie’s usually good at reading people, so she’s hoping her instincts are right.
“He teaches at a middle school, right?”
Natalie nods. “He’s the soccer coach.”
She finds out he’s in school alongside the job to get a promotion the school board has been holding over his head, and Lottie nods politely as Natalie rambles about it all. She gets it; she’s usually the stoned one in these conversations.
“That’s admirable. I work with schools sometimes and we could use more teachers like him.”
The blonde shoots her a weird smile, then glances at Lottie’s phone on the table. She must see Mari’s name pop up — a text telling her she’s running late — because the next thing she says is, “Why is a nice girl like you dating someone as terrible as Mari?”
Lottie laughs, caught off guard.
“Are you always this blunt, Natalie, or is it the weed?”
“It’s Nat,” she corrects. “And ‘m not blunt. Just curious. Mari’s kind of an asshole, no offense.”
“None taken.”
She’d be offended if they were actually dating, maybe.
When Mari walks in she does a whole weird possessive little circle around them where she talks down to Natalie the whole time, which… God, Lottie is honestly kind of embarrassed by it all. She shoots her an apologetic smile on the way out when Mari isn’t looking.
She breaks things off with her two hours later and drowns out the insults Mari hurls at her while she gets dressed again.
The sex isn’t worth all this negative energy in her life.
***
It’s rare for Lottie to ever get stressed out because of work.
She’s very candid about her privilege. The first step to using your privilege for good is to acknowledge it. Her parents are absolutely drowning in money, and it would be ridiculous to suggest she doesn’t benefit from it, too.
When she graduated from Brown, her dad asked her to join the board of his company and she spent a week having panic attacks so intense, Shauna had to sleep in her bed with her and hold her.
That was a pretty clear sign from the universe telling her not to get involved, and so she asked her dad to let her set up a charity instead. There’s no way the man would ever let a lucrative tax write-off like that slip through his fingers; he agreed pretty much right away, rented a little office space for her downtown and gave her enough of a budget to hire a small team.
(Did she mention her family is filthy rich? Yeah…)
They connect schools who struggle with art funding with local artists, put on little workshops and hold the occasional fundraiser where Lottie’s dad can parade her around to his rich CEO friends. It’s a good compromise that’s served her well for the past three years.
Anyway. The reason she very rarely gets stressed out is because she’s got a great set of people working with her. Lottie flexes her hours a lot, doesn’t really work full time to make sure she has ample time for her other interests and hobbies, and her team keeps things moving.
But now Misty is sick, and they’re supposed to host fifty middle schoolers for a painting class and their venue has pulled out and… Lottie isn’t sure how the fuck she’s gonna figure all this out in five days.
If she wasn’t the boss and trying to spread positivity at the office she thinks she’d cry right now.
They figure it out in the end; of course they do. The school ends up offering their gym as a venue, and Misty is back in time to rearrange the paint supply delivery to a different address, and Lottie doesn’t know why the past two days have felt like the stakes were incredibly high but they did.
She tells Shauna to keep her Sunday free and treats them both to a spa day and feels infinitely better after that.
***
She’s going upstate on a yoga retreat for the long Thanksgiving weekend because she’d rather spend the holiday practicing mindfulness than with her parents. She can’t remember the last time she spent a holiday with them, in their depressing soulless suburban mansion in Connecticut, and she’s pretty sure she’s repressed those memories for a reason.
She loves New York City, but it’s nice to get away sometimes, too. Shauna always goes home for the holidays which leaves Lottie without much of a social life, and the city kind of empties out. Lottie finds it a little depressing to witness, so she finds other places to go.
Anyway, she’s at Grand Central waiting to board her train when someone sits down right next to her. She’s been a city girl long enough for that to raise some alarm bells, and she’s about to glare at the stranger and maybe mention that there are other unoccupied seats across from her when she looks over and realizes it’s Travis. Natalie is standing in front of her with a grin on her face and it’s probably been at least a month since she last saw either of them.
“Oh my god, hey,” she says, trying not to be too enthusiastic because that would be weird, right? She barely knows these people and they’re not her friends, but she’s kind of excited to see them.
Natalie’s hair is a little longer; if they were friends, Lottie would tell her she likes how it looks now, with her dark roots grown out a bit more.
“Where are you going looking like that?” Travis asks, glancing at her matching set of sweats and a hoodie.
“I’m going to a meditation and yoga retreat upstate for the weekend.”
Lottie isn’t sure what they were expecting her to say, but Natalie bursts out laughing, then looks at her face again and says, “Wait, really?”
She nods and adds, “Might as well spend Thanksgiving tuning into mindfulness, right?”
She’s completely serious, and the two people she’s talking to are clearly trying not to laugh, which she’s used to. She’s aware her priorities are different from those of other people and that’s fine.
“What about you two?”
“Travis has family in Connecticut,” Nat says. “We’re gonna spend the weekend at his mom’s house.”
Lottie fights the urge to frown. It’s just that merging families with a significant other sounds like her literal version of hell; she would never want to subject anyone she likes enough to date to her parents, of all people. It’s bizarre to think there are others out there who don’t kind of hate their entire family.
But others have different priorities and that’s fine, so she forces a smile.
They talk for a while, and this really shouldn’t feel as comfortable as it does considering they barely know each other.
“I’m gonna go grab a coffee, do you want any anything?” Lottie asks.
Nat does, so they go off together while Travis watches their bags.
“Let me guess… Oat milk latte, no sugar,” Nat says when they get to Starbucks.
Which is a little freaky, because it means Natalie either actually remembered her order or somehow already knows Lottie well enough to guess. She doesn’t know what would be worse. They’ve met once.
She nods and lets Natalie order for her, and when Nat tries to pay she rolls her eyes and pushes her hand away from the card reader.
Nat shoots her this really pretty smile as a thanks, and Lottie wants to reach out and hold her hand, or something. Hold her hand, and pin her down, and take that skimpy band shirt off of her and… She bites her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood.
This is exactly why she needs a weekend away from civilization to practice mindfulness.
“We should hang out when we’re back,” Lottie says without really thinking it through. She just really wants to.
Natalie nods, says, “Okay,” and grabs Lottie’s phone so she can key in her number. “There.”
Lottie calls her, watches Nat’s phone flash with her digits, too, and smiles at her.
***
At the retreat, she catches the eye of this gorgeous blonde and decides she’ll let herself slip up this one time; sex and mindfulness don’t tend to go together, as far as Lottie is concerned.
Talking is discouraged on the premises, to really drive home the whole looking inwards thing, but Lottie doesn’t exactly need words to get her point across.
“You’re so fucking hot,” the blonde whines when Lottie corners her in the communal showers and pushes her against the cold tiles.
And Lottie doesn’t know what’s gotten into her, but she covers her mouth with her hand and says, “No more talking,” and sinks to her knees.
She’s always had a thing for blondes, alright? It’s not just because of Natalie.
***
She’s walking out of a meeting with her dad, feeling defeated and small and like a stupid child, when her phone vibrates in her pocket.
Lottie sees Natalie’s name and a picture in the message preview, but wills herself to wait until she’s in the back of a cab home to open it.
When she does, she actually laughs out loud. Nat is in workout gear, trying hard to do a yoga adjacent pose — Lottie can’t really decipher which one it’s supposed to be — and the text just says ‘am i doing this right?!’
They haven’t spoken since their encounter at Grand Central last week, even though Lottie can’t say she hasn’t wanted to text her. She just doesn’t want to be a pushover, and she’s not great at making new friends.
She wonders who took the picture and wills herself not to let these jealous thoughts cloud her judgment. Travis is nice. It’s not his fault Lottie has a little bit of a crush on his incredibly attractive girlfriend.
That’s how they start texting, and Lottie isn’t a good texter, but damn it if she doesn’t try, for Nat. She spends more time than she’d normally like on her phone replying to Natalie’s random messages, and she would absolutely hate this normally.
She smokes a little too much weed on a Thursday night and sort of stares at the handful of texts from Natalie she hasn’t replied to yet before she decides to just dial her number. The phone rings for maybe twenty seconds, and then Natalie picks up.
“Lottie? Everything okay?”
Lottie frowns. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know, because you, um, called me? Who calls people?”
She pouts. “I call people. I’m not good at the texting thing.”
“Yeah okay, but you go on yoga retreats, so. ‘s not like normal stuff applies to you.”
She smiles to herself, because Natalie made that sound endearing. “Normal is boring.”
“So why’d you call?”
Right, well. “My friend’s having a party on Saturday. You should come.”
It’s a white lie, because it’s technically Jackie who’s having the party, and while they’ve been part of the same group of friends for over a decade, Lottie wouldn’t really call her a friend. She’s more Shauna’s friend than hers.
“I would, but we have plans. Some friend of a friend’s birthday.”
We have plans. Lottie allows herself a little eye-roll.
She’s significantly less excited for this party than she otherwise would have been, she can’t lie. Jackie tends to be a lot, and if Jackie is around, it’s not like Shauna will spend much time with Lottie. At least Tai will be there, though she’s teased the appearance of her new girlfriend which… could either be really fun or really terrible.
Jackie has reminded them all — twice, in the stupid group text — that they should bring a date because it’s, “More fun that way!” and she considers hitting up Mari again but decides against it. She’s not that desperate. Not yet anyway.
Come Saturday, she wonders why she agreed to go in the first place. She ends up going alone, which is really not a big deal to her. She likes her own company.
Lottie always feels a little underdressed around Jackie. She opted for dark pants and a cute short-sleeved black top tonight, but Jackie is in a skimpy crimson dress, her lips painted a dark red. It’s not like she expected any less from Jackie, especially when it’s her own birthday party. She shoots Shauna a knowing look when she hugs Jackie hello; they both know Shauna is gonna spent most of the night staring at the way the red dress hugs Jackie’s curves perfectly.
See? She might have a silly crush, but at least she’s not Shauna levels of hung up on some girl with a boyfriend.
She looks around the apartment that Jackie shares with said on again, off again boyfriend and wonders where he is tonight. Notably absent, at least from the looks of it. Shauna will be happy about that.
She’s three drinks in, talking to Tai and her new girlfriend Van — cute, funny, ginger — when Van looks at someone over Lottie’s shoulder and waves enthusiastically. Lottie doesn’t know why but she’s got a feeling it’s someone she might know, and when she turns around, she’s a little gobsmacked to see Natalie and Travis walking towards them.
Small fucking world.
“Holy shit, Lottie?” Nat says before wrapping her up in a tight hug, and Lottie isn’t gonna lie; she definitely hugs her back just as tight and waits for her to let go first. Turns out Nat’s great at hugs.
(Or maybe she’s just a touch-starved mess.)
“Wait, you two know each other?”
She’s about to say something when Natalie says, “Yeah, we’re friends,” in the most matter-of-fact way. “Right, Lottie?”
Lottie just stands there and nods, too shell-shocked to say anything. She hugs Travis, too, and chats to both of them for a while, and when she goes to grab another drink and comes back to see Nat missing in action, she uses deductive reasoning to figure out she’s probably on the fire escape smoking and follows her there.
(She follows her in a notably normal, non-creepy way she should say. She just wants to get her alone. Sue her. She’s a little too tipsy to keep that stuff at bay.)
Nat grins at her when she sees her climb through the window, so clearly her company isn’t unwanted. She smells weed and laughs at how predictable Nat is, and maybe she shouldn’t mix after the drinks she’s had, but she knows she will anyway.
“I can’t believe we ended up at the same party tonight,” Nat says when they’re sitting side by side, their legs brushing. “You went to college with Van’s girlfriend?”
She’s a little tipsy, so it seems appropriate to grab Nat’s wrist and make her move her hand toward her so she can take a hit. Nat doesn’t seem to mind, just leans a little closer and watches her inhale.
“High school,” she corrects. “I went to Brown, Tai went to UPenn.”
Nat whistles like that’s impressive, or something, and Lottie just hides her face in her hair.
They talk about college for a while, and she finds out Nat went to a small liberal arts school on a full-ride scholarship to study photography. That kind of explains why she would work with Mari; the art scene is pretty small, even in a city as big as New York.
It's cold out, and she isn't dressed for the smoke break, and when Natalie just wordlessly drapes her jacket over Lottie's shoulders, Lottie kind of feels like her brain is on fire. It really isn't good for her sanity, how Nat is turning out to be nice and fun and interesting, on top of really fucking attractive.
When Nat takes the last hit, she motions for Lottie to shotgun it and Lottie very politely declines. The last thing she needs is Natalie’s lips on hers when she knows she can’t turn this into an opportunity to kiss her.
She’s aware she’s got a problem.
At the end of the night, Lottie hugs both Nat and Travis when they leave and says, “Thank you for coming.”
Natalie shoots her a stoned grin. “This isn’t even your party, you don’t have to thank us.”
She doesn’t know what possesses her to hug Natalie a second time and press a kiss to her cheek, but it happens, and then she whispers, “Thanks anyway,” like a total idiot and just kind of runs off.