Angel gestured to me. “This is my girlfriend, Tori. We met in class.”
“Originally, yes.” I pulled down the hem of my shirt as I stood to shake her hand. “Hello Misses—”
“I’m not a misses,” she said firmly.
Oh, scrubs. This was not a great first impression. “N-nice to meet you, then, Miss…”
She turned to Angel and crossed her arms, already done with me. “I tried calling you,” she said.
“I was working. Why didn’t you leave a message?”
“I didn’t expect to come home to this.” She gestured around the kitchen. “You said you were busy all week. Is this what you’ve been doing? Throwing parties and—”
“This isn’t a party, it’s a date,” he said sharply, opening his palm to me as if to remind her of my presence.
“Oh, excuse me.” She pointed to the container in his other hand. “Were you eating on the white couch?”
He shrugged. “I was taking the food on a tour of the house.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Angel, baby, we talked about this.”
I shifted uneasily.
Did he do a lot of sleepovers or was this more about house rules and his penchant for breaking them? Had he even told her I was staying over this week? Or was it such a non-event that he didn’t bother mentioning it to her?
“What did he do now?” a masculine voice sounded from the hall.
“Nothing,” Angel’s mom called.
A relatively fit middle-aged man walked in, rubbing and snuffling at his nose. There was something slightly off about his appearance. Maybe it was the sunglasses indoors—at night too—and I doubted he had eye surgery recently if they just got off a plane.
The guy scoffed at us. “Oh, he was busy, huh.”
“We were just cleaning up,” Angel said, his jaw clenched as he dunked the container into the kitchen trash.
I hurried over to start the dishes, but his mom shooed me away from the sink.
“No, sweetie. Don’t worry, Angel will take care of everything. Why don’t you head home for tonight, and he’ll call you when he’s free?”
“But we—”
“He’s busy,” her boyfriend, or whatever he was, said sharply, and crossed his arms. “And he’s gonnabebusy for the rest of the evening, so why don’t you leave, sweet cheeks?”
Angel stepped up to him. “Don’t talk to her like that.”
“Or what?”
“Or we’re going to have arealproblem,” he said in a way that implied he knew how to sterilize the kitchen after a bloodbath.
“Okay, let’s take a breath,” the mom said, putting herself between them.
“Punk kid,” the boyfriend spat.
Angel flexed his shoulders, much tighter than I’d ever seen them, and flicked the underside of his lip. “Tori, would you mind waiting upstairs for me? I’ll just be a minute.”
He so rarely used my real name. This must be serious.
I wrung my hands.
