Page 4 of Sweet
Tia Imelda reached over and patted Daisy’s hand. “My niece alreadyisa great gardener. You should be teaching them, not the other way.”
“Thanks, Tia.” She looked up. “I’m planning on taking some business classes in the spring. Maybe I’ll like those.”
“Oooh!” Roni’s eyes lit up again. “Can you imagine Daisy in, like, a superhot business suit? You’d look so bomb. You could, like, trade stocks and stuff on Wall Street and be so fu—”
A collective gasp cut her off. “Veronica Cristina Jimenez Orosco!”
“Freaking rich!” Roni’s face was red. “That’s all I was going to say, that Daisy could trade stocks and be sofreakingrich. That’s all.”
Or I could run a café on Main Street.
Her mother hit the back of her cousin’s head. “And why would she learn about business from some professors and not her aunties or her dad? You think those professors have ever done payroll or negotiated a contract? No, Daisy is going to study somethingimportant.” Her mom motioned to Roni. “And you’re next, so you better not be late with your Spanish homework again. Your mom told me you’ve been slacking off.”
“Why do I have to freaking take Spanish when I speak it, Tia? It’s sooooo stupid.”
“So you should be getting an A+ and not a C! What is that?” The volume of the debate in the kitchen slowly rose higher and higher as Daisy managed to shrink into the background, nearly finished peeling the charred chiles.
She pursed her lips, relieved that the attention of the room was on her high school cousins and not on her.
Daisy felt a nudge on her toe, and she looked up to see Imelda looking at her.
Her aunt smiled, her face creasing into soft, comforting seams. “They’ll figure it out,” she said softly.
“Figure what out?”
“You know.” Imelda winked and went back to scraping the sharp needles off the cactus leaves. “Remember,el corazón es lo que mueve el mundo.”
Daisy smiled. “I don’t think my heart is moving Mom and Dad’s plans, much less the world, Tia.”
“That’s because you haven’t found the thing that anchors it yet.” Imelda’s knife scraped along the cactus leaf, carefully shearing off the prickly spines. “But you will.”
Chapter 2
Spider’s alarmwent off at eight thirty every morning no matter how late he’d worked the night before. He was an early riser by habit, but that didn’t line up with tattoo-shop hours. Most days he worked until midnight, often until one or two in the morning if the piece was complicated or a last-minute walk-in had cash.
He was still the new guy; he didn’t get to pick his hours.
Rubbing his eyes, Spider tried to figure out why he was so sleepy. He’d gotten over six hours of sleep the night before—that should have been more than enough.
He closed his eyes and immediately remembered.
A cloud of curly brown hair, hazel-brown eyes, bright red lipstick leaving trails of red smudges over his chest. Her sweet pink tongue peeking out from between her lips as she—
Fuuuuuck him. He rubbed his eyes. He was not allowed to have sex dreams about sweet, innocent Daisy Rivera, pride of Metlin and his own personal fantasy wrapped up in a red polka-dot dress.
Spider rolled out of bed and immediately went to splash water on his face. He pulled on a pair of grey sweats, ignoring the semi in his boxer briefs. He grabbed the pull-up bar from under his bed and hung it over the closet door in the small studio apartment over his boss’s garage.
There was an old radio sitting in the windowsill that had been there when he moved in. He flipped it on and was immediately greeted by the sounds of the morning show on the oldies station.
“—starting the morning out with 98.9, the best of claaaaassic rock and doo-wop filling your morning drive. Let’s start the morning with that eternal question: Why do those fools fall in love, Harry?”
“I don’t know, JJ, but they’re driving their parents craaaaazy.”
The morning-show hosts bantered back and forth as a familiar song filled the empty apartment, taking Spider back to the happiest memories he had of his childhood, sitting in the corner of the automotive-upholstery shop where his dad worked, listening to the radio and drawing in his sketch pad.
He counted out fifty pull-ups, five sets of ten, alternating with fifty push-ups, also in sets of ten. Then he grabbed the exercise bands he’d bought at the swap meet and worked on leg presses and sit-ups.
Spider didn’t like spending money on gyms, and he didn’t like showing his skin to anyone who might know what his ink meant. His arms weren’t too bad, but his chest revealed the violence of his teenage years. Plus a lot of it was just jacked-up work from shitty artists who didn’t know what they were doing.
