Title: The Corner Market
Disclaimer: I don't own the show or characters.
Warnings/Notes: un-betaed
Cal usually sent Emily to the store on a regular schedule—Tuesdays he brought home most of the groceries, Saturdays he sent her out to fetch whatever he missed from the corner market. So when he suddenly started going himself on Tuesday and Saturday, she put it upon herself to find out why. The fourth Saturday and he'd been deflecting her questions, so she followed him. It wasn't that difficult: he wasn't paranoid, nor expecting her to be following (or that's how it seemed to her).
They entered the store and Emily stayed far enough away to not be seen, ducking behind shelves and using products to block her face from him. Nothing seemed out of place, nothing abnormal. Then the door jingled and her Dad's full attention was on it. So he was waiting for someone. Whoever he was waiting for, the person who entered wasn't them.
Emily had a run down of the people she figured he could be waiting for. She was quite surprised when someone tapped her shoulder.
"Emily?" Eli Loker was giving her a concerned look as she jumped and spun to face him, all while trying not to look guilty or out of place.
"Are you okay?" He seemed to be trying to furtively look around the store to see whatever she'd been looking at,
"What are you doing here?" Her words came out slightly hissed. His eyebrows raised. He didn't have time to answer because a hand came down on her shoulder, accompanied by her Dad's voice.
"Alright, Em?" But he wasn't looking at her, he was meeting Loker's eyes. The two men seemed to have a silent conversation which entailed each of them grabbing something off the shelf beside her—things they didn't look like they needed.
After they'd gotten home and she'd tried her best to give her Dad the runaround in answer to his questions, she still couldn't figure out who it was her Dad was waiting for. Only that Loker being there had crashed the party.