TAKE IT EASY • TC ✔️

21: Salad Sandwiches

Lucia was on the way home when she got the call. She was on the bus, having found it the most efficient way of getting to and from the library (and also because Lilith was paying for the fare).

It was Monday afternoon, and maybe pink-tinted glasses were a thing, and maybe, next to Timmy's wine glasses, they were the best thing she'd received for her twenty-fourth birthday. Because she hadn't been angry or annoyed or even inconvenienced for the entirety of the day.

Unlike the week before, her internship was set to actually bear the fruits of her labour. Plentiful fruit, sun-ripened nectarines, plump and full and bursting with promise of fulfilment. No longer was she to sit in the corner of Kemi's office and stick to her heels like a lapdog. No, she would be spending the week in the foreign literature department alongside Nadia, who'd escorted her to her interview a few weeks ago.

Nadia herself was Spanish, born into a Palestinian Muslim family but raised in Spain. She'd moved to New York four years ago and had been working at the library for six months, she explained to Lucia as they went on a little tour of the department. Nadia was beautiful, almost striking in her beauty, with a long, perfectly straight nose (which Lucia didn't envy in the slightest), bushy eyebrows and the sort of smile which made you smile back, whether you wanted to or not.

Lu remembered her now, remembered that smile from when she'd first met Nadia. It was hard to forget.

They'd spent the morning sorting through volumes of Italian text (which Nadia had very kindly chosen to do today, seeing as it was Lu's area of expertise) and chattering about this and that. Nothing too taxing, but certainly more enjoyable than sorting through lots of documents about the trenches.

(In retrospect, Lu was certain the documents must have been fascinating. Usually she was not one to pass up the opportunity of extra knowledge, of jumping briefly into the past, however she had been so set on not enjoying the work that she'd neglected the part of her which would normally be invested in those types of things).

At lunch time, they sat together on the steps at the entrance. There was, Lu discovered, a staff room of sorts, where employees (or interns) could eat their lunch in the peaceful atmosphere of the library. However, when Lu told Nadia she'd been eating outside for the duration of last week, her face had lit up, and they'd taken their lunches with them to the steps.

It was then that they began to speak about non-work related topics. Or, at least, began with work related topics and quickly veered off into more interesting ones. Lu learnt that Nadia had been with her boyfriend for a year and a half, that she missed her parents like crazy and that she had a goldfish called caballo, which translated to horse in Spanish.

Nadia learnt that Lu was single in almost every sense of the word, that she was very bad at disguising her contempt for her mother, her father was dead and she had a cat called Julius. Nadia had snorted at that, repeating the name Julius in her rich, golden accent, softened by the time she'd spent in New York.

Lu hadn't meant to let it slip that she knew Timmy. Really, she hadn't, but when she realised she had nothing to say about relationships, he was the first thing that popped into her mind. Timothée, at least, would make it seem like she was not completely alone, and it had resulted in the conversation taking a slightly confusing turn.

("Timothée Chalamet? Isn't there that video online of him fucking a peach?" to which Lucia had almost choked on her sandwich, raising the back of her hand to her mouth and surreptitiously poking a salad leaf back between her lips.

"Doing what, sorry?"

That had resulted in, well, an explanation which was long overdue before the words had even left Nadia's mouth. Nadia had looked so quickly towards Lucia in surprise that her hijab had bunched up around her neck and she barely had time to finish her mouthful before she was rattling out an in-depth description of Timothée's role in-