“What was it someone wise once said to me about connections? If it gets you what you want, doesn’t hurt anyone?” Lia mused, tapping her chin like she was totally lost in thought. And, since she was already deep into this conversation, she held up her fist close to her cheek. “CoBOLT, fighting!”
Cal’s loud burst of laughter filled the cafe as they were served their coffees. And that was how Lia learned what an einspanner was. It was cold, it had some kind of foam, and it was really bitter.
“You’re a great friend, Lia,” Cal told her. “Things don’t feel so impossible when you say them.”
“Iama great friend.” She said without a hint of self-consciousness or irony, taking a sip of her coffee. “People don’t appreciate me enough.”
“They really don’t,” Cal agreed.
That was when the owner of Loser Records came up to them with an apologetic smile, an acoustic guitar and a felt-tip pen. Lia hadn’t understood what was happening in the moment, butwhen Cal had the guitar on his lap and a pen hovering, she pulled out another handy vocabulary word she’d kept close.
“Handphone?” she said, offering to take photos and videos for the store owner.
Because she was a great friend, duh.
post by@LoserRecords
Thanks for dropping by the store @CoboltCal ! The guitar needed breaking in :) [translated from Korean]
Posted one hour ago
17,000 views, 300 comments
Comments:
@Soobinx91(verified) Hyung why didn’t you invite me!
@Siwan (verified) *eye emoji* not jealous at all
@Minjiipers (verified) @Soobinx91 @siwan please tell Cal oppa to call me!
ELEVEN
HAPPY NOT KNOWING - CARLY RAE JEPSEN
“So you’re dating him.”
“Ha? I’m not.” Lia scoffed at her sister through her phone screen, where she’d left Frankie leaning against the cleansing balms. It was a couple of days later, when Cal was in between a show taping and heading back to the studio, and he found the time to go with Lia to go to the nearest Olive Young on their way to pick up acai smoothies for the boys—Soobin had been very particular. “I’m literally shopping for you at an Olive Young. How is this a date?”
“Did you eat lunch together?”
“Yeah, did you know Koreans eat sushi with gochujang? It was pretty good.”
“So you’re not on a first date, you skipped like three years’ worth of dates and went straight into domesticity.” Frankie sounded amused and very delighted, which only made Lia much more agitated and wave the sunblock angrily at the screen. Lia was flabbergasted at her sister, who only laughed. Laughed!
“It’s not a first date!” Lia argued. “If anything, it’s the third?”
“What?”
“Hoy Ate, are you really going to test me while I hold the fate of your skincare in my hands?”
“Oo na.” Frankie waved a hand at her phone, slightly distracted by whatever she was doing on her laptop. Thankfully, she knew when it was time to back off when Lia was getting annoyed. Well, she knew all the time, but actually did it only some of the time. “Where is your bias now?”
“In the cosmetics section,” Lia said, looking vaguely in the direction of where Cal and his bucket hat (“just Gen Z things,” he’d captioned on his story) had just sped off to. “Apparently, Siwan modeled for a makeup brand and Cal wanted to act like a proud uncle.” She laughed because it was so funny how Cal had described it, and?—
“Oh wow. You really like him, huh,” Frankie observed, making Lia glare at her sister again, which would have been more effective if Frankie was actually looking at her, which she was not. “Congrats.”
