Free Under Locke by Mariana Zapata

him as politely as I could. “When I have bad days, princess,” I whispered, opting at the last minute to leave out the Duke Dickface teasing my tongue , “I cry. I read. I clean. I eat crappy things. I swim or do the yard. I don’t make people feel like crap , your royal highness. ”
     
    Chapter Six
     
    “Are you sure this won’t get you into trouble?”
     
    Sonny’s upper body had disappeared beneath the car minutes ago with tools and a pan. I plopped down on top of a tire that was sitting off to the side of the bay at the body shop he worked at, watching him because I had no idea how to help. “It’s fine, Ris. Trust me.”
     
    Well, shit.
     
    The shop was closed on Saturdays; there was a very clear sign by the gate that we’d come through. Personally, I’d rather not get arrested for trespassing but Sonny didn’t look worried even a hundredth of a fraction. Plus, I’d spotted three bikes and two cars parked alongside the big adjacent building to the bays, so I figured we either weren’t alone or somebody was using the space as a parking lot.
     
    Only I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.
     
    “You trust me, don’t you?” he asked in a teasing voice when I didn’t respond.
     
    "No." I extended my leg out to nudge his knee with my toes. “Yes.”
     
    Because I did. A lot. Sonny had never let me down when he knew I needed him.
     
    Regardless, I still didn’t want to risk him losing his job all because I couldn’t change my own oil. “You're positive?”
     
    A dirty blue rag went airborne and smacked me in the face. “Quit asking.”
     
    "Sheesh," I muttered but made a face and picked the rag up with my index finger and thumb before tossing it back at him.
     
    He worked quietly for a few minutes, the sound of metal on metal and drip, drip, drip filling the silence before he spoke again. “Wasn’t your mom’s anniversary last month?” he asked in a muffled voice.
     
    I froze, sucked into the fact he remembered the date.
     
    But just as quickly as my appreciation for him flared, a distant but familiar feeling that was both pressing and heavy swam around in my stomach. It was awkward and irregular shaped, but after a second it went away like it always did in the past. I licked my lips and focused on answering him. “Yeah. It was.” Eight years had passed since my m om had died and it’d felt like something that happened two lifetimes ago instead. Which was a good thing, I thought. Will and yia-yia would agree, too.
     
    It’d taken me years to get over my dad leaving. Years of crying and suffering and feeling like the hole his absence left in my life would never go away. At ten, it's unfathomable that the father you love and adore would just... leave. By the time he showed up again when my Mom got sick, I'd gone from being upset to downright pissed.
     
    When I'd needed him before, he'd fallen off the face of the planet. Not even Sonny had seen or heard from him.
     
    I'd even blamed him for a while for what happened to Mom. Maybe if she wouldn't have loved him as much as she did, and then been left alone with two kids, juggling two jobs, she might have been fine.
     
    But she hadn't been. She died and left us with my crazy ass yia-yia that made the most amazing baklava ... for breakfast.
     
    Dad was alive but he'd become a long lost dream. A long lost dream that withered into smoke and ash right after Mom was buried.
     
    Will was there though. And without Will, who needed me to keep going, I wouldn’t have gotten through those floating, disaster months that ruined any chance of me making grades that were good enough to get scholarships. Scholarships that I should ha ve been shoo-ed into if I ’d played up The Arm Situation, but not even that could make up for my crap, quarter-hearted grades. 
     
    “The older you get, the more you start to look just like her,” Sonny noted, pulling me out of my thoughts.
     
    Yia-yia and Will had both said the same thing.