Nicole and Gummi Met in Charlotte, North Carolina just before Thanksgiving in 2019. Nicole was in the city to meet her future coworkers, and to catch a flight to Florida the following day for the Thanksgiving holiday. The group met for lunch around noon and finished up around 1:30pm, leaving Nicole with just over a full day to herself- assignments had all but wrapped up and it was time for break to begin. Against her better judgement, Nicole downloaded Tinder to meet a friend that knew the city better, so they might show her around the city she would someday call home… Gummi was new to the city- he had moved to Charlotte just 7 months prior as a Decathlete for the Queens University Track & Field team. That night, Gummi was suffering the doldrums of freshman dorm life (or maybe his roommate needed the room, the world may never know). Gummi downloaded Tinder with the hopes of embarking on a new adventure, preferably with a pretty girl. He was completely unprepared for the adventure he would find… The pair first met at the fountain outside the Hilton hotel in Uptown. They embraced each other in an awkward hug to break the ice. They struck up conversation, and Nicole recalls immediately feeling like Gummi was an old friend, or someone she knew in a past life. Gummi recalls being nervous and trying to get a plan together on the fly- he was supposed to be the tour guide, after all. Gummi finally formulated a plan- there was a dance club atop the Spectrum Center, a mall of sorts in Uptown, and they usually accepted fake ID’s! (neither character was 21 at the time…). This would be the perfect way to loosen up and have some fun. However, when they arrived, the club was closed! Bummer. The two spent several hours meandering aimlessly through the streets of what Gummi knew to be the safer part of Uptown, rarely straying more than a couple of blocks from Nicole’s hotel. At the end of the night, Gummi dropped Nicole off in the lobby of the hotel, where she told him that she would not invite him up to the room, but that she did hope to see him again. And the rest, is history.