Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want

49

"Kelly?", said Nina, "are you free?"

Nina hadn't talked to Kelly in a while, not in person. They would text each other sometimes, and Nina would send pictures of Vought events, and chit chat as they always did. After a while, Kelly noticed that Nina was probably too busy to answer her texts and stopped texting for a while. Nina would always apologize and Kelly understood it, but in a particular evening, Nina seemed too sad, even through text. The selfies and fun pics stopped coming, she was a bit short with the answers and Kelly sent her a message just to confirm if everything was okay and if Nina wanted to go out some time. Kelly was family, and she knew Nina had a bit of a conflicting relationship with her mom, because of the nature of her work. Her mom was extremely religious and saw working for Vought as worshipping false gods. Nina's mom would probably not be a good shoulder to cry on, so Kelly offered herself. Nina called her after a day or so.

"Today? What time?" Kelly looked at her watch. It was three in the afternoon.

"Early evening, like 8pm?" Nina's voice sounded a bit sad, as if she was in the verge of tears, "We can have burgers."

"Do you want me to call Angie or Sheila...?"

"No, no..." Nina sighed. If she was to talk about Homelander, she didn't want to disclose information to more people. Kelly was the closest of the three, and although she talked to the girls and they had a group chat, some stuff was only sent to Kelly in private. She loved them, but she wasn't in the mood to deal with them, as she would probably bring the mood down.

"Please... just the two of us," said Nina, after a brief pause.

"Great, honey," Kelly said, "I'll see you soon."

Nina had managed to avoid Homelander all day because Stan Edgar needed him for a press conference. She would usually accompany him and write speeches for him in these circumstances, but she decided not to. Homelander hated these things, but he needed to keep appearances and he needed to pretend everyone working at Vought loved each other. Nina knew about his feelings regarding some people, from Stan to the Supes that were in the Seven, but she also knew that he could be easily irritable and quick to judge, so she never took his venting seriously. She was friendly with all of them, and most seemed to respect her and be nice to her, except Ashley. Sometimes she was nice, sometimes she didn't even look at Nina in the face. They hadn't talked to each other for a while, maybe saying hi on passing. Nina didn't mind that, as long as they kept it somewhat cordial. Ashley was the least of Nina's problems. Most of her problems came from her lover.

Nina went to her room immediately after five, to get ready to go out. She refused to look at her Homelander posters, wanting to rip them off the walls, but trying to cool down at the same time. She knew she was extremely angry at him, and that kind of anger wore off after a while, and didn't want to do anything she would regret later. As she took a long and well deserved shower, she thought about the disappointment it was to organize something and having John destroy it. It wasn't really the first time. He threatened to break Starlight's neck once. It was an outburst of anger that Nina tried to rationalize because she liked him. Sometimes he acted a bit immature, and she imagined that it was because he was famous and the lives of the rich and famous were completely different from the working class. She had to deal with things that he never had to, as he was born to be a hero. But it was creating a wedge between them. He saw everything as a personal attack and it wasn't the right way to deal with things.

She got out of the shower, put some comfortable clothes on, a baby pink hooded jacket, a pair of jeans and sneakers. She sat on her bed blowdrying her hair when she heard a knock on the door. It was around 7pm, and she had promised she would be at the burger place at eight. She sighed and ignored it, as she had places to be and it was out of her business hours. She expected someone to say something, but instead, the person kept knocking on the door, gently. Nina couldn't even pretend that she wasn't there, as the blowdryer was really loud. She turned it off and walked to the door to see who it was, knowing damn well that it could be him. She wished that he would just give her some space. She wanted to be by herself just for a little bit. She opened the door and was pleasantly surprised with who she saw outside her room.

"Hi, Nina," said Annie.

"Hi, Annie," Nina replied, "what's up?"

"Nothing, really," she said, "I just came to see how you're doing."

"Hm... any particular reason?" Nina raised her eyebrows.

"Well..." Annie put her hands in her pockets. It appeared that she was going to stay in her room, as she was wearing a loose t-shirt and sweatpants, "I don't mean to pry, but I've seen that you don't... I've seen that you've been looking a bit sad. I know that this job can be stressful."

Nina let Annie in. She was a bit more relieved that Homelander was showing himself to be a very flawed person, but she couldn't demonstrate it in front of Nina. She also didn't want to go with the "I told you so" approach, because it could just turn Nina against her. She knew what it was to be in love, as she loved Hughie, so she didn't want to ruin everything for Nina. It appeared that she was going out somewhere when Annie came in, and it would be useful to know where she was going to alert Butcher about it. Nina walked to the mirror and started applying some lip gloss. She appeared to have really light makeup.

"Are you going out?"

"Yeah, I'm gonna meet my friend Kelly," Nina replied, "there's this burger place, you know?"

"Yeah, you told me about it," Annie smiled, "I'm not gonna hold you up."

"Oh no, it's okay," Nina looked away from the mirror and smiled at Annie, "I still have to finish blowdrying my hair."

"I can help you with that, if you want," Annie offered. Anything to get her out of that building. No one should work to death for Vought, and that included Nina.