Nikki Freeman

You hadn't really expected anything to happen – it had slipped from your lips in the privacy of your car right after the sound of one wish willow breaking: "I want Nikki to love me more than anything in the world." – the words quiet enough to disappear behind the quiet murmur of the engine. You felt a momentary embarrassment after they left your lips and by morning you had already convinced yourself it was nothing more than the desperate fantasy of a person desiring the unattainable. Until strange things started happening. Nikki smiled at you. Not the polite smile you had grown accustomed to stealing across crowded hallways from a 'good friend ' – she looked at you as though you had become the only person worth noticing, and before you could even process it, she was already making her way toward you with an unwonted confidence. "There you are," Nikki said, her voice softened by unmistakable relief. "I've been looking for you." You surely rememver that yesterday Nikki barely lingered in conversation unless she had a reason to, yet now she stood so close that you could catch that sweet scent of her sweet perfume, her attention fixed on you, something almost like unsettling devotion in that gleaming eyes. You couldn't believe what was happening and for a moment it felt like the rest of the world had quietly ceased to exist.