A Brighter Spark (Xcite Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyway.’
    Suzy grinned. ‘They look like wonderful kids. Mine are both 12 – twins.’
    Daniel raised his eyebrows. ‘Wow. That must be a handful.’
    Suzy gave a laugh that was most than half made up of a sigh. ‘You aren’t wrong. And I had them at 18 too. I’m incredibly, incredibly lucky that I’d already snagged a scholarship for college, and it was lucrative enough to scrape by on. Their dad’s got his own business that he can do from home, which saved a fortune in day care. The four of us all shared a teeny-tiny basement apartment for five years, before Drew and I were each established enough in our careers and had enough savings to get our own places. I think Lily misses having all of us under one roof. I’m not sure how Steven feels about it; he’s a very quiet kid.’
    ‘It sounds like you’re on very good terms with your ex … Drew, you said his name was?’
    That made Suzy smile a bit as she shook her head. ‘He’s not really my ex, not … We were never a couple. We were best friends all through high school, and I guess we still are. But we were never boyfriend and girlfriend or anything like that.
    ‘But, well, we decided to do a whole ironic prom thing in our senior year … We weren’t the kind of kids who went to prom, you know? You were way more likely to find us out behind the Quonset huts smoking than you were to find us at a pep rally. We were OK students – like I said, I got a fantastic scholarship – just not into the whole school spirit thing.
    ‘But then we had the idea that it would be completely hilarious to go all-in for the prom. I got a gorgeous pink party dress with this big net skirt – I looked like I belonged in a plastic and cardboard box in the Barbie aisle at Toys R Us. Prom Princess Barbie. And Drew was all dolled up as the perfect Prom Prince to go along with it. It was a really, really fun night, but then in the car when he was driving me home we started to play a game of sex chicken –’
    ‘Sex chicken?’ Daniel interrupted, looking completely baffled by the term. It was so adorably clueless that Suzy couldn’t help but giggle.
    ‘You know,’ she explained. ‘Like how two cars driving at one another in old delinquent movies, that’s called chicken, right? The first one to get afraid and swerve away is the chicken. It was like that, but sex. The first one of us to say that things were going too far, that person was the chicken. It’s a dumb game kids play to try to gross each other out. We were doing stuff like licking each other on the ear or giving the other person huge hickeys. Trying to psych our opponent into backing down.
    ‘Of course, the trouble was that me and Drew, we’re both stubborn assholes. Neither of us was going to let the other win, and so the whole thing ended with the pair of us on the back seat of his mom’s station wagon in our stupid prom clothes, having the dumbest and giggliest and least erotic sex anybody has ever had. God, it was awful . Even by the standards of teenagers in cars on prom night, it was awful. I accidentally gave Drew a black eye with my elbow at one point, and the condom broke, and one of my shoes got jammed in the door handle and nearly ripped the upholstery when we tried to get it out.’
    Even more than a decade later, the memory made her laugh. Daniel was smiling too, but Suzy could tell his amusement was tinged with bafflement at the absolute stupidity of the whole escapade, and also with the knowledge that the adventure had turned out to carry with it serious consequences.
    ‘And then …’ Suzy shrugged. ‘Well. I realised I was pregnant in the summer before college. Drew was already doing his internet thing and making OK money, and so we talked about it a lot and decided that maybe we could do this. Drew had a really crummy childhood, so I think he liked the idea of being able to take care of someone else, to give them the things he hadn’t had. So we decided to keep the baby, which