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“I am in your corner. All I said was, what if she’s really trying to change?”
His sister turned and glared at him. They were in Venus Boutique, a Main Street shop with an eclectic mix of new and vintage clothes, jewelry, beauty stuff, and other extremely feminine items. It had been Zaxx’s idea to come in, but now that they were here, he didn’t think they’d find anything.
Zelda had gotten all the stitches in her face removed that morning, and the first thing she’d done thereafter, in the bathroom at the clinic, was a full face of makeup.
Currently, she looked pretty normal. But Pop was right that the cut across her nose would scar; the red line there was wider than the others and a little sunken; it still showed through the makeup. The hooked wound on her cheekbone would scar, too, but makeup hid it well.
The past week, she’d kept a very low profile, hanging out at home. First that had been because she was hurting, and then she’d been hiding. The story of what had gone down at Zaxx’s place was Page One News all week, and Zelda very much wanted to avoid anyone outside the club connecting the dots between her injuries and the chaos at her brother’s trailer. The Horde had a good handle on the story, keeping Danvers’ and Donohue’s names out of it, and making it about Gia coming upon a robbery in progress.
Luckily, the folks of Signal Bend were habitually inclined to believe the Horde. Otherwise somebody might have wondered what, exactly, Zaxx Bello had worth stealing.
“I. Do. Not. Care if she wants to change. She had her chance,” Zelda insisted. “You’re all the parent I need.”
Zaxx gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. The frustrated, weary sigh, he swallowed down unexpressed. He’d do anything for his little sister, including be her parent as long as she wanted him to, but he would have preferred to simply be a big brother.
“Do you even know what she likes?” Zelda huffed, changing the subject to the reason they were in this shop.
“If I did, I wouldn’t need you with me,” Zaxx shot back. “We’re just getting started, so no, I don’t know what she likes.”
“Can’t believe you stole Gia Lunden out from under me,” Zelda muttered, flipping desultorily through an earring display.
With a laugh, Zaxx reminded her, “She’s straight, Peach.”
“Huh. If you say so. I say her energy gives ... flexible. The wine, not the label. Like me.” She turned to face him and leaned back on the counter. “Okay. You’ve somehow won the jackpot, and Gia wants you. Her birthday is tomorrow, and you’re going to her family birthday cookout. Assuming her big, scary daddy doesn’t mean to make you the main course, you need a gift. So what do you know about her?”
Zelda had been invited to Gia’s birthday cookout as well, but she’d declined. As hard as she fought to pretend it wasn’t true, his irrepressible sister had been thoroughly subdued—temporarily, he hoped—by what had been done to her.
Catching a handhold before he fell into that psychic chasm, Zaxx focused on the moment’s most pressing question. He picked up a red silk scarf with a pattern of Siamese kittens cavorting over it. “She likes cats.”
Zelda snatched the scarf from his hand. “No. Even I know her well enough to know she isn’t red-scarf-with-cats. What else?”
“She’s crazy smart. Like, a literal genius.”
“A book, maybe?”
“Is that boring?”
“IMO, yes, very. But maybe not for Gia.”
“It’s not romantic, though, right?”
She laughed at him. It was such a normal sound, so full of snark and spice, Zaxx couldn’t help but hug her right then. She hugged him back, fiercely. There was a silent conversation in that moment, him telling her he loved her and was glad to see she was still in there, and her telling him of course she was still in there, and she’d be okay, and she loved him.
“This is not the right shop,” she said as their arms dropped away. “Let’s go across the street to Jubilee. The back room there has some outrageously cool shit.”
~oOo~
Zaxx was not a big shopper. He bought most things he needed at Walmart or online, and he had few reasons to shop for a gift—only his parents and Zelda, all of them easy to buy for. Pop always wanted the newest gaming thing, Mom wanted Wicca stuff or merch from whatever her biggest fandom of the moment was, and Zelda wanted derby gear, music, or a gift card somewhere—a gift she called ‘a shopping spree in a sock,’ because he always put the little card box in her stocking at Christmas. As for any other kind of gift-giving, that was a matter of throwing money in the club pool and letting one of the old ladies figure out what gift to buy with the cash they’d all thrown in for.
He hadn’t had a serious relationship since ... actually, he’d never been in a serious relationship long enough to hit a Christmas or birthday, so he’d never bought a gift for a woman beyond the occasional bunch of flowers.
As the owner of a birthday less than a week before Christmas, he’d always been ambivalent about expected gift-giving. His birthday had been swallowed up by the bigger holiday through his whole childhood, often passing by entirely unremarked. He’d developed a butthurt complex about how everybody else on the planet except maybe the other Sagittarius-on-the-cusp-of-Capricorn unfortunates got to celebrate their own special day with gifts, party, presents, cake, when he’d never had a birthday cake or gotten a present that wasn’t wrapped in Christmas paper.
That said, he was legitimately excited, and nervous, to have a chance to give Gia a birthday gift.
Signal Bend’s thriving Main Street Shops district was several blocks of small boutiques and eateries than ran the spectrum from quirky to classy, and all of them charming and quaint. Zaxx had heard stories about the long, bleak years in Signal Bend, when few people had work and most of the buildings were boarded up—every old fart in town had those stories preloaded—but in his knowing, Signal Bend was a picture-postcard town, with thriving businesses and rich community.
Among all that quaint charm, Jubilee Antiques & Curiosities was a showpiece. It was a real antiques shop, not a dressed-up junk shop. Though Nolan’s old lady, Iris, was co-owner, so the shop had a connection to the Horde, Zaxx had never been inside the place. The pieces in the window displays were always so expensive he was afraid to go in and maybe break something he’d need to pay off in installments.
