Chapter 32
Cinnamon Recap
Blah!
Blah!
Blah!
The damn alarm again. Why does reaching for it
feel so wrong? Like my body knows this isn’t how the morning is supposed to go.
Shouldn’t this thing just know I’m awake? Hell, we have smart everything these
days—why hasn’t someone invented an automatic alarm shut-off? Then again… maybe
I’m the only idiot still using a bedside analog clock.
I slap it off with more force than necessary.
That’s when it hits me—thick and syrupy, hanging in the air like a bad
decision. The smell alone makes my muscles scream betrayal.
"Fuck yoga..."
Of all the ways I could’ve spent last night,
waging war against my own body wasn’t exactly on the vision board. I’d rather
do equations and trajectory simulations, trying to figure out how to land on a
moving object traveling at billions of lightspeeds.
My blanket? A fortress. Its warmth? The last
bastion of my sanity. And I’m not surrendering without a fight. Because let’s
be real—my body feels like absolute shit.
I will say this about yoga… I thought I was fit.
Yeah. No. Turns out? I’m an idiot.
"Co?o."
“?Carlos! ?Levántate!”
Abuela’s voice slices through the fog like a
broadsword—unyielding, uncompromising.
“Son of a—”
“?Qué? ?Qué? Son of a QUé?”
I sigh. “Abuela…” I exhale the breath of a man
whose fate is sealed. “When I gave you a spare key… it was for emergencies.”
Another sigh. “I mean, come on. I could’ve been naked.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“?Entonces?”
I groan. She’s already moving, sweeping through
my closet like she’s raiding a crime scene. Clothes pushed aside. Empty spaces
inspected. Then she’s at my bed, crouching, peering under.
“?Qué haces?” I ask, voice still half-buried in
my pillow.
“?Dónde se está escondiendo ella?”
“She who?”
“?La yogui?”
I laugh. Hard. She gives me a look like I just
told her the sky isn’t blue.
“She had a boyfriend,” I manage.
“?Cómo que tiene novio?”
That tone? It could make a hurricane pack up and
leave.
I kiss my pillow goodbye and force myself up,
staggering like a newborn deer. I shuffle over, kiss Abuela on the forehead,
and croak out, “Oh yeah. Dude looked like a mix between Eduardo Yá?ez and Mario
Cimarro… but on steroids.”
"?De verdad?!"
“Sí.”
The door creaks open. Enter Marisol—majestic,
unstoppable, and wielding a plate of churros like an offering to the gods. Or a
bribe. No. A weapon. A sugar-dusted, golden-brown declaration of victory.
"?Y entonces, mi hermanito, qué bolá?"
Marisol grins.
I snatch a churro off the plate, scowling. “What
is this? Am I your entertainment? Better yet—what am I, a damn telenovela? The
Bachelor: Carlitos Edition?”
Marisol’s eyes twinkle. “We don’t. But she does.”
The churro melts in my mouth—almost, but not
quite, enough to dull the pain of impending social doom. I glare between bites,
but they’re already halfway out the door, mission accomplished.
From the kitchen, Margarita’s voice rings out.
"?Dale, mi vieja! El café ya está listo."
Abuela pats my cheek. “Come. Tell us everything.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Mornings are usually dull. Unremarkable. A
loading screen between sleep and whatever nonsense the day throws at me.
Not today.
Today, the kitchen hums with the kind of tension
you get before a final boss fight—if the raid team were half-asleep and nursing
hangovers. Cinnamon and lemon cleaner wage war for dominance, and the washer
thumps in the background like an overenthusiastic snare drum. The dryer chimes
in with a so ominous, I half expect a health bar to materialize
above it.
Abuela is mid-routine, moving with the precision
of a veteran raid leader.
I drag my half-conscious self to the fridge,
playing the part of a sandbagging DPS dodging mechanics. Yanking the door open,
I scan the contents like I’m hoping for loot: half a carton of eggs, spinach on
life support, and a cheese wheel one bad day away from fossilization. No orange
juice. Because of course there’s no orange juice.
Milk it is.
I grab the carton and shut the fridge a little
too hard.
Abuela
says without looking up.
I turn, carton in hand. “It’s my fridge.” More
statement than argument.
She stands there, arms crossed, all five feet of
her radiating the absolute authority of a dungeon master deciding my fate. Her
gaze locks onto me, calculating whether I’m worth the XP to level up into a
functioning human.
Before I can make an excuse, she presses a
steaming mug into my hands. The warmth seeps through the ceramic, carrying the
scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and masa—comfort incarnate.
she declares, voice
final as a system notification. “No coffee. No juice.”
I squint at her, then at the mug. “Abuela…”
A finger in my face.
Her brow lifts—a single devastating movement that could TPK a party. She takes
in my rumpled Akatsuki pajamas and mismatched socks—Pikachu on one foot,
Einstein on the other.
“No wonder it didn’t work out.”
I frown. “It’s called aesthetics.”
I sip the atole. Damn, it’s good. Like a warm hug
in liquid form.
Abuela doesn’t miss a beat, hands on her hips,
radiating the energy of a raid leader watching their DPS stand in the fire.
“You’ve been single too long,” she announces, slicing through my morning haze
with the precision of a debuff. “It’s not natural. You need balance. Una mujer.
Someone to argue with you over your crazy ideas and make sure you eat real
food.”
“Hot Pockets real food,” I mutter,
clutching the mug like a shield.
She snorts—a critical hit to my argument. “Real
food doesn’t come in a box and definitely won’t give me great-grandchildren.”
I nearly choke on my atole.
Across the room, my sisters—Marisol and
Margarita—lean against the counter, eating churros, sipping coffee, watching
the show. Marisol grins like she’s about to drop a fatal one-liner. Margarita
just sips her coffee.
Abuela steps closer, her sharp edges softening
into something that feels like a hug disguised as a lecture. “Mijo,” she says,
quieter now. “I want you to be happy. Not the kind of happy you find in your
music, locked away in your lab.” Her voice lowers, pulling at something deep in
my chest. “You can’t find that alone.”
The kitchen stills. The fridge hums, the leaky
faucet drips, and for a moment, silence stretches between us like the calm
before a raid wipe. Then, with a gentleness that somehow hits harder than any
lecture, Abuela reaches up and pats my cheek.
“?Así que la pinga tenía un tipo?” she muses.
“Bueno, pa'lante, pa' la otra.”
I sigh. The weight of her expectations settles
onto my shoulders like a main quest I can’t decline. Abuela never wins through
brute force—it’s the relentlessness of her love that gets you every time.
“Fine.” I set the mug down in surrender. “But if
she hates anime or music, I’m out.”
Marisol and Margarita exchange grins—the kind
that screams
“She loves anime,” Marisol says, pulling out a
laptop with the precision of a rogue revealing a hidden blade.
I narrow my eyes. “How much?”
Margarita smirks. “Enough to know
isn’t overrated.”
Damn it. They’re good.
The coffee table becomes my battlefield, and I’m
losing before the first turn. My atole steams smugly beside me, a
cinnamon-scented reminder that I’ve already been outplayed. With a dramatic
slump, I press my forehead to the polished wood, murmuring to whatever ancient
god of familial chaos oversees moments like this.
“This is absurd,” I groan into the table.
“What’s that, mijo?” Abuela’s voice cuts through
the room like a sharpened debuff.
“Nothing!” I bolt upright, nearly sloshing atole
down my Akatsuki pajamas. I clutch the mug like a lifeline. “Just admiring
your… unparalleled strategic brilliance, Abuela.”
She squints, the kind of look that could force an
NPC into skipping dialogue. “Uh-huh.”
I sip my drink slowly, as if cinnamon and masa
can drown the creeping sense of doom. My brain, ever the opportunist, leaps to
distraction.
Maybe I should make my students watch anime…
They’d get me. We could debate waifus and plot twists without judgment—
“?Qué?!” Margarita snaps, already suspicious.
“Nothing!” I yelp, voice cracking like a guilty
teenager.
Marisol shrugs, radiating the calm of someone who
knows she’s winning. “You need options, Hermanito. Balance. Someone to love
you, someone to ground you, someone to challenge you. Someone who knows when to
leave you alone with your beep-boop machines.”
“Bebop,” I mutter, brain still buffering. “And
it’s not a beep-boop machine, it’s a gramophone.”
Margarita waves a dismissive hand. “Whatever.
Let’s find someone who actually knows what that means.”
Marisol hums her agreement.
I gape at them, torn between indignation and
grudging admiration. “Whatever?”
Margarita claps her hands. “Abuela, what’s that
team thingy you and Carlos play?”
Abuela chuckles. “An adventuring party?”
“Yes!” Marisol says. “We need to build him a full team—healer, DPS, a
tank—”
“Okay, well, I’m the tank,” I cut in, offended on
principle.
Abuela shakes her head, the softest kind of
devastating. “No, mijo.” Her voice gentles, her expression turning
uncharacteristically tender. She reaches out, patting my cheek with the
finality of a warlord offering a tired soldier one last piece of wisdom.
“You’re a support class. Always helping, never letting anyone help you. That
has to change.”