tea: substitute for therapy Who: Astra and Bea When: Late Saturday morning Where: Cuppa Joe Cafe What: Astra sitting around with tea she isn't drinking and a book she isn't reading. Warnings: TBD
Astra chewed uncertainly at the nail of her pinky finger while she pretended to read her book.
Her tea had gone cold. It tasted weak to her tongue. She wanted to drink something four times as strong, full of milk and sugar and spices, but she did not know how to ask for that, and even if she tried sometimes she felt baristas were just staring at her, right through her, because they didn’t want to serve that girl, the one with the impossible order who didn’t even know what she wanted.
Normally, a regular tea would suffice. But Astra had been starting to feel a bit off ever since she had devoured a piece of Brian Jefferies. She had wondered if maybe he had been poisoned, or that her body was unused to eating livers by now, before it occurred to her that morning that maybe she was just stressed out by the fact she was the culprit in a murder investigation. And it was connected to all those other Supernatural Civil Rights cases now. She shuddered. She would never do what had been done to that couple they had found.
Hence the tea, but that wasn’t really putting her at ease. Neither was her book, which had too many words she didn’t know. Astra spoke English, but that didn’t mean she could look at a picture of a striped cat and say whether it was a tiger or a lion. She knew more than enough vocabulary to get by; it was the finer details that escaped her. She looked at her book but her gaze just drifted away to watch the people on the street walking by. She wondered if she should be jealous of them.