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Moving in with her girlfriend had been one of the things that Nic was the most scared of when she started the whole journey of dating Mina. She had an idea of what was going to happen with them rolling around in her head from the very moment that they confessed their feelings for each other while half asleep in an on-call room. She could picture them going on nice dates with each other to test out that it was really going to work, then telling some of their close friends and coworkers, and then they would make sure things were really going to last before they told their families due to the contentious nature of the relationships that they both had with them. She had seen sleepovers resulting in one of them moving to the other’s house or apartment after a long while, but that part had always made her feel tight with the worry of change.
Things with Mina had happened just as she had wanted them to. Their dates had been few and far between compared to what she had envisioned due to Mina’s surgical residency and Nic’s absolutely insane nursing hours. There had been less late night dinners that had stretched long into the evening and more quick bites at the cafe nearby to Mina’s apartment. Telling their coworkers had been less of an admission during catch up small talk and more of a discovery of them napping together. Nic had told her sister and father that she was together with Mina, but Mina had yet to let her mother know that she had another tie to the States instead of returning back to Nigeria like she had always promised she would.
Sleepovers had become more frequent and they had both simultaneously moved into each other’s homes. Mina liked Nic’s because it was further from the hospital and in a very quiet neighborhood where they could sleep and be with each other without worrying about what might be happening around them. Nic liked Mina’s apartment because it oozed the high fashion of her girlfriend, was close to the hospital, and felt easier to clean. The fact that they had filled that spot in each other’s homes at the exact same time had resulted in some arguments about where they were going to move.
Eventually they settled on moving into an entirely different place together. Nic had just refinanced her house and was able to sell it without being left with any debt from her mortgage while Mina sold her lease to Devon so that he could finally get away from the apartment that he had shared with Priya for so long. They had found a quaint little cottage house that had enough space for Mina to have a sewing room with plenty of light and a massive walk in closet, but not so cacophonous that Nic wasn’t able to make it feel like home.
She had already began to add the little elements of herself that she knew she was going to need for the place to feel like it was somewhere she actually lived. She kept the soft pastel palette that the house had already had when they purchased it and simply added in some jewel tones when she thought that they would work. She erred towards the more natural form of decoration, little songbirds and trees and butterflies. It was only when she purchased the last of her door pulls that she noticed something.
Mina’s style had always leaned towards the more natural and less deco when it came to designs. She sewed with practically everything and had the fashion sense to be able to pull quite literally anything off, but she certainly had some things that she preferred. It was true when it came to her style of houseware too. She had a set of fine china in a cabinet in the living room that had flower decals all over it. The rug in the bedroom was decorated with creeping vines that had tiny morning glory lookalikes. She kept flowering succulents in the windowsills of the northern rooms in their house, something that would add a bit of nature but wouldn’t require too much attention.
Upon that revelation, Nic had decided that she was going to do something to add to her lover’s collection of flower designs. She dug out some of the crystal vases that Jessie had left behind when she had raided their mother’s things during a bad binge. She washed it off and made sure that the bee painting on the side was just as precious as it always had been before she filled it with flowers of all different kinds.
It didn’t take that much out of her day to stop by the flower section of their local supermarket and pull out a bouquet that looked nice. She got roses, carnations, shasta daisies, even baby’s breath once. That had been an announcement, though, as she hated the flower. Mina seemed to love the flowering beauty that they had in the center of their dining room table, even when it got knocked by a lively dog and later a lively toddler.