Page 90 of Angel
If I didn’t make my own effort to fix things between us, family gatherings were only going to get more and more strained.
“I’ll take care of it,” I told Soph.
I cornered Lia after breakfast by following her to the basement game room, a place I hadn’t even known existed. She was following Tre and Franko down there for some air hockey when I caught her on the stairs.
“Hey Lia...”
She turned and coolly looked at me, her hair sweeping across her shoulder. Standing like that, one hip cocked and two eyes steely, she reminded me of the mean girls in high school.
For all I knew that stereotype could have actually been Lia, but I still didn’t remember high school too well so could only make guesses.
I gulped and took a couple steps towards her. My heart beat in my throat. There was no reason to be afraid of her, and yet I was.
Well, not really afraid of her… more like hurt by her. The fact that she thought I wasn’t good enough for Angelo stung horribly.
I wanted to show her I wasn’t who she thought I was, and I also hated that I so desperately felt a need to prove myself to her.
She turned her heart shaped face up at me in bored expectation.
I licked my lips and summoned the courage to go on. “I was thinking that you might like to go out for a bit… just the two of us.”
She kept staring at me, the only thing happening was the blinking of her eyes and the slipping away of my nerve.
Just when I was about to tell her to forget all about the offer, she responded. “Okay. Sure.”
“Oh… Uh, great.”
“I need to go pick something up for mom. At this coffee shop.” She stomped past me, not looking at me once. “Let’s go in my car.”
I followed after her, texting Angelo where I was headed on the way.
The garage contained spaces for at least six cars. Lia took us to a black Chevy Suburban at the end. My nervousness still getting the best of me, I buckled in and waited as she drove the car out into the freshly fallen snow.
“Is this for a present?” I asked after a while, making my question the first thing spoken since we stood on the stairs.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, nice. What are you getting there?”
“Coffee,” came her clipped response.
Coffee at a coffee shop.
The small talk on the rest of the ride was incredibly forced. Though I kept reassembling new ways of raising the topic between us, in the end whenever I opened my mouth it was either to talk about snow, how great the Christmas tree was, or how much I liked that it had finally snowed—that last one being a poorly veiled re-hashing of the first conversation.
By the time we pulled up to a coffee shop in a house, I was wondering why Lia even agreed to hang out with me. She didn’t seem interested in talkingorindirectly bashing me. It felt like she was mostly just putting up with me.
We unbuckled ourselves and stepped down into the still soft snow. The coffee shop, further away from the city than the Salvatore house, was nestled between a row of houses and a recreation center.
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and followed Lia up the wooden steps.
Once we entered the door into the shop it became obvious why Lia wanted to come to this particular place. Long bins of coffee beans lined on wall, dozens and dozens of different kinds boasting differing roast levels, countries of origin, and taste factors.
Lia went right up to the paper bags, grabbed one, and started scooping beans into its depths. I eyed the rest of the open-air shop. What had once been a house with many rooms was now a shop with walls knocked down, one full of families sipping hot chocolates on couches and baristas busily steaming milk.
After another moment, I hurried after Lia. One more try. After that I would give up.
“Lia...”
