Addiction

--23--Anything for You--

 "Do we want to make our own pizza dough or just buy the premade kind?" Liam asked as we stood in the ethnic foods aisle of Country Market searching for something to make for dinner.

We'd discussed just getting Chinese takeout when we got there and smelled the food in the takeout place in the store, but then decided that making dinner would be much more entertaining and apparently they had a dishwasher at the house so we wouldn't have to do dishes. Grocery shopping with Liam was always entertaining, he got almost as distracted as the girls did and he always ended up talking me into a bunch of crap food I didn't need and he didn't need. We also ate way too much takeout the last few months and I happened to actually like cooking. Cleaning up the mess I made, however, was not my favorite. But that's what Liam was for, I knew he couldn't tell me no, especially when I would bring up the fact that I was the one that had done all of the cooking and he'd just stood there and tried everything before it was ready.

"Let's make our own," I said, "This one's the best," I remarked, picking up two boxes of the pizza kits that my Mom would always buy when I was little, "It has sauce and the dough mix."

"And we have cheese already," he said as I tossed the boxes into the cart, "Pepperoni?"

"Definitely," I replied as we moved through the aisle and over to the cold foods section, "And smokies."

"Smokies?" he asked with a perplexed look on his face.

"They're little sausages," I replied, "They're super good."

"Sounds good," he said.

"There's Italian sausage over here too," I remarked as I looked through the refrigerated section.

"Let's grab that too," he said as I threw it in the cart.

"What about drinks?" I asked.

"We've got a fridge full of beer and Coke, I think we'll be fine," he laughed, "What about that chip dip you made for lunch when we were at your house? What do you need for that?"

"Cream cheese, pickles, garlic salt, onion salt," I replied.

"Let's go find that stuff then, and some chips," he said, "Because that was really good."

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"Stop eating the chip dip!" I laughed as Liam stuck a chip into the chip dip bowl yet again as I mixed it in the bowl.

Shopping should've taken about ten minutes max but we were wandering the aisles for forty-five minutes and Liam kept picking out shit I knew he'd never eat or make while I actually tried to get food to make for dinner that night and the next two or three nights before the dining hall opened again.

I was okay with it though, it was one more thing to distract me from the cloud looming over my head that was the argument I'd had with my Mom before I ran back to school. I didn't now how to navigate the whole I didn't want to speak to my parents thing. I had sucked at communicating with them since coming to school in August but I had never not talked to them intentionally like I had done since taking off in the middle of the night.

"I'm just testing it out," he laughed.

"There isn't going to be any left when it's actually cold and ready," I laughed, playfully shoving him away from me.

"Fine," he grinned.

"Is the dough ready to put the sauce and stuff on?" I asked.

"Yeah," he replied, grabbing the sauce packet from the box and squirting it onto the pizza dough.

When I was in middle school, we'd make this kind of pizza every Saturday night, my mom and I would. It was our thing, cooking together. She taught me how to make all kinds of things from cookies and frosting to spaghetti sauce and meatballs. A lot of things changed in my life when the girls were born but cooking dinner with my mom was the one thing that didn't.