Page 33 of Sweet
“You can’t stay here tonight.” Spider stood and held his hand out. “Let me take you to Betsy’s. I know you had a fight with your folks and you don’t want to go home, but I don’t know if any of Chino’s guys are still around. It’s not safe here. Let me take you to the bookshop.”
She was silent, but she nodded and stood.
“Emmie’s mom, Yvonne, is gone for the next couple of weeks to Vegas, playing at this club with her band, so her room will be empty.” He grabbed her keys and ushered her toward the door.
She stopped before they walked out and turned toward him. “Are you going to leave once you drop me at Betsy’s place?”
He paused to think. Chino had said he could take a couple of weeks. Maybe it would be better to make sure Daisy was settled, make sure she was okay with her folks before he left. After all, with him out of Metlin, she’d probably want to go to college, right? And that was the best option. That’s what she should do.
“If you say you’re leaving,” she said quietly, “I’m not going to Betsy’s.”
Fuck, she could be stubborn when she put her mind to it. Pretty and happy and easygoing most of the time, but when the woman dug her heels in, she wasn’t going to move.
“I’ll stay for a week,” he said. “That’s all I can promise.”
Betsy didn’t askany questions when they showed up at her house at midnight. She took one look at Daisy and nearly shoved them inside before putting a kettle on for tea, making Daisy drink a cup of chamomile while she changed the sheets in her daughter’s room.
Spider tried to help, but Betsy forced him to sit at the kitchen table and keep an eye on Daisy, which was its own kind of torture.
She wouldn’t look at him, not that he could blame her. He hadn’t exactly made her promises, but he hadn’t interrupted her when she dreamed about his future. She’d talked about working at the café and seeing him more when she was finished with school. She talked about him opening his own place, and he didn’t tell her it could never happen.
For a little while, a few precious weeks, he’d started to think her vision for the future was possible. Maybe. Just a little bit.
She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow in Yvonne’s room.
Betsy closed the door and ushered him downstairs to talk on the old worn couch in a corner of the bookshop. “What’s going on?”
“She had a big fight with her parents.” He stared at a shelf full of biographies. “Told them she didn’t want to go away to school.” Martin Luther King.The Autobiography of Malcom X. Theodore Roosevelt. Catherine the Great. They probably had bigger problems than him, and they’d made it into the history books and all that shit.
Of course, they were all dead too.
Betsy wasn’t a fool. “A fight with her parents is not what put that look in Daisy’s eyes.”
Spider pressed his lips together.
“She’s in love with you,” Betsy said. “Did you two think Imelda and I didn’t know you were together? You think you’re very silent and mysterious, but I’ve known you for five years. You’re in—”
“Don’t.” He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. “They found me, Betsy.”
She sat up and leaned forward. “The gang?”
“Chino. I’m guessing he must have figured out my real name after I took off. Probably went through my mom’s place after the shooting. Then when I got my tattoo license—”
“You have to put your legal name and an address down for that,” Betsy said. “With the state board. That’s how they found you.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t know the exact details, but she’d guessed the same things Spider had. “I was getting ready to leave when Daisy came over.”
“Spider.” Her voice was soft and reproachful. “Were you going to leave without telling her?”
“I don’t know.” He groaned. “Betsy, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I thought three hundred miles would be enough to keep them away, you know? It’s been five years. I’m not doing any shit that would put me on their radar, but Chino tracked me down and wants to give me money to start my own place or something.”
“You’re not considering that, are you?” Betsy frowned. “Spider, you said you’d never go back. Your life would be controlled by them. I don’t care what they tell you, they are not going to allow you to—”
“I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I told you years ago: I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
Except Daisy. Daisy had been a mistake. Of course, there was only one Daisy, so how the hell was he supposed to have seen her coming?
“What do you want to do?” Betsy asked.
