3 Nicole
Nicole
Nicole is at work.
Nicole is always at work. She knows this.
It’s the price to pay for what she wants.
She’s a Black Lesbian Trying To Make It in Corporate America, and that is not easy.
She has to be the first one in the office, the last one to leave.
She has to do everything better than everyone else.
Sure, she whizzed through law school a year early—Penn, too, a good one—and was top of her class.
But that doesn’t mean she got any of the judicial clerkships she applied for.
Those go to people with real contacts, not the daughter of a sculptor and a senior engineer.
So she took a job at a law firm—that was hard enough to secure.
There are too many lawyers now, carpeting the streets the way bees cover honeycomb, dense buzzing layers of them.
Or at least they carpet the halls of this building.
There are seventy-seven other junior associates.
Everyone knows only around forty will make it to midlevel without being fired or burning out, and probably half that will make it to senior associate.
That’s seven years, if she’s good. Once she reaches that level, then she’ll be able to take some bigger cases, earn a reputation, and after four or five years, maybe she can find a job as in-house counsel for a big movie studio.
That’s the ultimate legal job; the agents and producers do most of the work, so you’re just there to put the official seal on everything.
Normal work hours, lots of money, and the chance to schmooze with Hollywood stars.
Maybe she’ll even achieve something akin to work-life balance. That’s her dream: queen bee.
But that’s a while off. So, for now, she lives on coffee.
She sleeps four hours a night, five if she’s lucky, and six on weekends.
She has a nice apartment in Midtown but since moving in has forgotten about it just as often as she remembers, her feet taking her on autopilot back to her parents’ place after work.
She’s stopped outside the door more than once and just turned around, not wanting to wake them.
She has no social life aside from brunch, the one thing her friends made her swear never to give up.
And they’re the only friends she has left. Three of them.
“That research done for the Jones case, Nikki?”
She hates the nickname but instinctively plasters on a smile and turns to Don, one of the senior associates who has stopped next to her desk in the junior associates’ bullpen.
She’s near the edge, which means it’s easier for her to escape, but also for the folks walking by to pop in.
Unfortunately it also meant learning to tune out the traffic of people walking by, which means every time one of them stops, it’s jarring.
She wonders if they know that. She wonders if they enjoy it.
“I already emailed it over to you,” she says to Don, smile still on. “You want a hard copy?”
He takes out his phone and checks it. “Huh, not sure how I missed that.”
Nicole shrugs, making a face she hopes conveys that she’s as shocked and confused as he is that he missed it in the two hours since she emailed it to him.
But she’s not. He was out to breakfast with one of the partners—his godmother.
They have one-on-ones every Friday, and they both come back smelling like expensive wine.
Today they found time for breakfast, too—they’ll practically spend the whole day together. How nice for him.
“Well, let me look this over, see what you missed.”
“Let me know,” Nicole says with a smile she hopes doesn’t appear as fake as it feels. She didn’t miss a fucking thing. She never does.
“Oh, and Barbara would like a coffee, if you don’t mind running down to the place,” he says, walking away, eyes still on his phone.
“Her assistant can’t manage it?” Nicole ventures.
“Making copies.”
“Sure,” Nicole says, standing. It’ll be good to stretch, get some fresh air, maybe make some eye contact with the partner, Barbara, so she knows Nicole’s face, at least. She stands up from her cubicle in the pen, then grabs her coat and purse.
“Can you get me one, too?” Don asks, eyes still on his phone. “The usual.”
“Of course,” she says.
“You’re the best.”
She is. But not for this. She heads to the elevator.
One of the partners, Ellen Kang, suddenly appears beside her, and they wait together in silence.
She’s in a beautifully fitted black suit with red trim, but from what Nicole knows about Ellen Kang, brownnosing right now would not help her career, so she stays silent, professional, as they get into the elevator.
She really wishes she were alone in the elevator though.
Her head itches, and she wants to scratch it, but not in front of a partner.
She braided her hair down too tight under a wig getting ready this morning—natural hair won’t get her ahead at work, she knows, so she wears a simple, flat black wig every day, in a bun or just hanging to her shoulders.
At least it’s Friday. Everyone leaves early on Friday, so she can be out of here by eleven, maybe even get a drink, scroll through Bumble looking at pretty girls she’ll never have the time to message.
When the elevator door opens, Ellen Kang walks out without even a look back. Nicole scratches her head.
Outside, the air hits nice. It feels like she hasn’t inhaled fresh air in days, although it’s only been three hours since she got in at 6:00 a.m. The bullpen of junior associates doesn’t have windows, just the light that comes through the glass-walled offices and conference rooms around it, so the air is recycled and stale, often smelling like sweat, coffee, books, mouthwash.
Outside though, in the financial district in Manhattan, it smells like…
well, like traffic, tourists, and distantly, the water. But it’s still an improvement.
There’s a park next to the building their office is in, a threadbare kind of thing, barely a block, mostly paved over in pretty brick but with at least a few dozen trees all lined up.
Once it starts to turn cold, they string white Christmas lights all over them, and at night it turns sort of beautiful, like a set for one of those interactive theater experiences.
Nicole went to one of those on the last date she had, years ago.
She loved looking around, admiring the design, even watching the actors play their scenes, but when one tried grabbing her hand, she pulled it back and noped right out of there, leaving her date behind.
That’s when she realized she wasn’t cut out for dating yet—the fun, the wonder, the adventure other women her age wanted.
Experiences. She’d have those when she was older and her world was comfortable.
For now, all she wanted was to enjoy an occasional nice dinner and to get laid.
But even that would require more time out of her days than she has.
She walks to the coffee place around the corner, not part of a chain, like the one in the office building; that’s for people who don’t know better.
This place is slightly out of the way, but not enough to prevent people from coming by—a lot of them today, making a line out the door.
She doesn’t mind waiting. She checks her phone, goes over what she has left to do today—research mostly, and her own projects, some ideas she wants to write down for the partners, make sure they know her name.
And her boys (Ian gave her the okay to refer to them as that when it’s collectively) are finally awake.
Must be nice, sleeping in. She texts them for a minute, smirking at everything—Brandon’s hookup, Ian’s stalking.
Ian isn’t wrong exactly, though she’d never describe herself as broken.
She’s…on hold. Success—then she’ll let go a little.
It’s like there are two clocks going, one for her job and one for everything else, and the everything-else one isn’t broken; she’s just unplugged it. For a little while.
OLLIE
I love a party!
NICOLE
Won’t a guy you just met think it’s weird if you throw him a party?
She doesn’t even look up until she’s at the counter, and it’s Sam.
She shouldn’t know Sam’s name. She shouldn’t have even looked at the name tag after her third time spotting her; it’s weird to know a barista’s name.
But she’s…well, cute. Mid-twenties, with long braids and onyx skin.
She’s got cheekbones that were made for modeling, high-end stuff, the cover of Italian Vogue .
“Hey,” Sam says, smiling. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” Nicole says, then swallows. “You?”
“Can’t complain. What can I get you?”
Nicole rattles off the orders instinctively.
Don, Barbara, hers, and one for Jim, who brought her one yesterday without asking.
Sam writes them down, nodding, the tip of her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth, and Nicole taps her company card to pay before moving aside to the pickup area, close to the counter.
She can see Sam begin making the coffees, moving from the stack of cups to the espresso machine. Her eyes flick to Nicole and stick.
“So, what do you do, anyway?” Sam asks. “You look too important to be getting coffee.”
Nicole smiles, a little taken aback by the compliment. Important. She’s not sure anyone has ever thought of her as that.
“Junior associate at a law firm,” she says. “Bottom of the rankings, so I get coffee for whoever asks.”
“That doesn’t seem like lawyering,” Sam says, pulling down one of the levers on the machine.
It makes a loud whooshing sound Nicole doesn’t try to speak over.
She just shrugs. Sam pushes the lever back up and pops a lid on the coffee cup.
“But I don’t mind it,” she adds, handing Nicole the cup with a smile.
Nicole takes it, staring at the cup, her brain trying to compute what Sam just said.
“You don’t mind what?” she asks as Sam starts on the next cup, adding a few pumps of flavoring. The syrup shimmers on the pump handle, and Nicole suddenly thinks about how Sam must smell—vanilla and sugar and coffee woven into her skin.
Sam pulls the lever down again, the noise loud. She keeps it down for a long time. Then she pushes it up, tops it with whipped cream (Don loves whipped cream), and brings it over to Nicole. Sam takes out a cardboard tray to hold this one.
“Don’t mind seeing you,” she says.
It feels like a hammer has come down on Nicole’s head.
“Oh,” she says. Her eyes feel too wide-open.
She has to remember to close her mouth. “Why?” It’s a stupid question.
She knows what’s happening here. It just pops out of her in surprise.
She wasn’t ready for flirting. She needs to be ready; if she’s ready, then she’s a good flirt. Or she was. Hasn’t done it in years.
Sam laughs. “You know, I’m part of this activist group; we could always use some legal help, if you can donate some time…
” She takes a folded-up flyer out of her back pocket and hands it across to Nicole: STOP WAR-FOR-PROFIT.
It looks like the sort of thing Nicole would have been handing out before law school.
In college, she was cochair of the Black Student Alliance and the LGBTQIA+ Student Committee, as well as a member of Queer Peers, Queers of Color for Change, and Students Stopping War.
But then she had class and studying, and changing the world fell by the wayside.
“Oh, I—” Nicole starts.
“I get it, you’re busy. But just in case.” Sam grabs one of the markers for writing names on cups and flips the flyer, writing a number on it. “Text me if you want to get together.”
“For activism,” Nicole says. She meant for it to be a question, but it sounds like a pronouncement.
“For activism,” Sam says with a laugh, then pulls the handle down for the last cup.
Nicole observes her for a moment and sees the hint of a tattoo peek from under the sleeve of her black T-shirt, notices her earrings—small silver skulls.
This would never work. Nicole leans back from the counter slightly, thinking about it, about someone from work seeing her, the rumor spreading— Nicole is dating the coffee girl, Nicole has a crush on the coffee girl .
She can’t be seen in the office that way.
She’s not sure how homophobic the partners are, but even if they aren’t, they place value on social standing.
If Nicole were to bring a girlfriend to a company event, she’d better be working at a Fortune 500.
She’d need to look impressive. Powerful.
Dating the coffee girl from around the corner will just mean teasing, the insidious kind that seems good-natured at first and then creeps into who she is, the way to distinguish her from the two other Black women junior associates: You know, the one dating the coffee girl.
Not you know, the one who found that ruling that helped us win the Henderson case. Not even the one who’s so on top of everything . You don’t promote the one dating the coffee girl.
Sam puts the last of the coffees in the tray and smiles at Nicole. “These are yours.”
“Yeah,” Nicole says, taking them. “Thanks. For the flyer, too.” She holds it up for a moment before folding it into her purse, then puts her hands on the tray of coffees.
They say nothing for a moment, both their fingertips resting on opposite sides of the tray. Sam is wearing tinted lip gloss, slightly purple.
“See you later,” Sam says, turning around to make the next order. Nicole puts a twenty in the tip jar, far too much, her hands shaking. She takes a deep breath and puts her coffee cup in the tray before taking it away. Outside, the air is cold, and she realizes she’s sweating.
There’s another Nicole who would date Sam.
The one who hadn’t been buried under the work, who would hand out flyers with her, working for a nonprofit, saving the world.
But the law became the world, and it self-replicates forever, never needing saving.
Her world, the one she’d protect, is down to just three people.
Five if she includes her parents. And she doesn’t need to hand out flyers for them.
But someone does need to cover the brunch bill.
She just needs to work. Become queen bee.
That’s enough to save the sliver of world she can still see through the slits between legal briefs.
Later, when she’s comfortable, working for Hollywood, making big money for a normal amount of work, then her world will get bigger again.
That Nicole could date Sam, too. Maybe she’ll still be around.
Nicole looks back briefly at the coffee shop window without thinking, her eyes pulled there for a moment, as though caught in a strong wind. She shakes her head before she picks out Sam. Nicole looks away. She has work. There’s no time for this nonsense now.