Page 58 of Love Spells: And Other Non-Refundable Magic
Because I understand more than people assume.
Because I am tired of being brought in after something goes wrong and being expected to know how to fix it.
I can hear Rose and The Third Fairy already.
No explanations.
I lock my phone before I can ruin it.
Two down.
And for some reason, the second one feels significantly more dangerous than the first.
CHAPTER 17
FLORA
“I need you to make me a bracelet.”
I look up from the shipping label I’m trying to coax out of the printer and find my brother standing in the doorway to the dining room with the refrigerator left open behind him.
“What happened to hola, Flora, ¿cómo estás?”
“You sound like Ma.”
Fausto looks at the dining room table, where thirty-two small padded envelopes are arranged in uneven rows around trays of beads, tissue paper, thank-you cards, and the remains of the sandwich I forgot to finish at lunch.
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I want.”
“Didn’t you just say you wanted a bracelet, Fausto?”
“Yeah. Just make me one, please,” my brother says in his annoyingly nagging voice. He looks larger, taller, beefier than just a few weeks ago when I saw him last at dinner near his campus on the one day he had off from his fraternity duties. “You literally make bracelets.”
“I literally sell bracelets.”
“To strangers,” he says, turning back to the fridge and grabbing a container of leftovers I’m pretty sure our mom was planning to take to work tomorrow. “Dale.”
“Strangers who pay me, Fausto.”
He closes the appliance with his hip, then walks over and sits at the head of the table, clearing a tiny square to set the food down.
“Put that back.”
“What?”
“That’s Mom’s lunch for tomorrow.”
“She said I could have it.”
“She did not.”
“She did.”
Fausto pulls out his phone, and a thick tendril of dark brown hair falls onto his forehead. He blows it out of his eyes, then smiles that stupid smile that I’m sure lets him get away with so much shit.
He taps the screen a few times, then holds it up.
