Page 31 of Sweet
“Daisy—”
“Don’t!” She felt her heart crack in half, and she raised her hand, putting whatever barrier she could between them. “Don’t lie to me.”
He swallowed hard, and the mask he’d been wearing slipped. “Will you sit down?” He pulled out a chair at the card table. “Daisy, please.”
“I don’t want to sit down,” she whispered.
Maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was all a dream. If she sat—if she touched anything and she didn’t wake up—then it would be real.
“Baby, please.” His eyes were shining. “Please sit down.”
Chapter 10
No one had toldSpider that it physically hurt to see someone you love crying. That was fucking important information if you asked him. School taught him fucking algebra, but they didn’t teach him that?
And that’s why school was bullshit.
Daisy was sitting across from him, one hand in both of his and the other clenched so tight on her lap that he could see her knuckles were white.
“Chino found me,” he said softly. “That’s my old boss. The guy who ran the crew I was in down south.”
Daisy’s eyes were wide. “Did he try to hurt you?”
“No.” Spider huffed out a breath and looked at the scarred table. “He wanted to… invest in me.”
“What?” She sounded confused.
“He wants me to move down south, open up a shop and all that. Give them a cut of the profits and do ink for his crew for cheap.” Spider couldn’t look at her, but he could imagine her face. She would be horrified. Repulsed. Disgusted probably.
“I guess that’s a pretty good offer.”
Spider’s head jerked up. She hadn’t sounded disgusted; she sounded sad.
“I’m not going!”
She looked at the duffel bag. “It looks like you are to me.”
Her face, which was normally so glowing, looked pale and tired. It was as if the bright, beautiful thing that made her Daisy had drained away; the sight made Spider even sicker.
“I’m not going with Chino,” he said. “I can’t lie; I thought about it. For a few minutes I considered it. I’d have my own shop. They said they’d get me my own house and everything.” One hand rubbed the back of her neck. “Not all their businesses are drugs, you know? There are some that are just kind of…”
“Criminally adjacent?” She looked at him. “Illegal-ish?”
“Yeah. But for the first time ever, I’d be my own boss.”
She stared at a spot on the wall. “Except you wouldn’t be. Not really.”
Yeah, she was a smart one. She caught on quick.
“Exactly.” Spider nodded. “I wouldn’t be dealing, but if they had a shipment of stuff they needed to hide? They wouldn’t think twice about leaving it at my house. I’d always be afraid of the cops; I’d always be worried they were looking at me for something.”
“No one would want to live that way.”
“But a lot of people do,” Spider said. “When I was thirteen, that was normal.”
Daisy finally looked at him. “Thirteen?”
If he was leaving, she deserved the truth. “I got jumped into Chino’s crew when I was young. When I was real little, my parents taught us to avoid those kids, you know? It wasn’t all gangs and shit. A lot of straight people lived in the neighborhood too. Regular people.”
