A Brighter Spark (Xcite Romance) (3 page)

Chapter Three

Sunday afternoon’s outing turned out to be a new art gallery exhibit,
The Carnival through History
; paintings of revellers and excitement from every era since the Middle Ages.

‘A grown-up way for me to indulge my love of circuses,’ Daniel admitted, a sheepish note in his voice. Suzy felt thoroughly charmed.

‘When Lily was little – she’s 12 now – she used to love going to carnivals, because there was a possibility that there would be a magic act as one of the sideshow attractions,’ Suzy said. ‘Anything remotely associated with conjurors or wizards would have her captivated for hours. She taught herself to read when she was four, because she hated having to wait for bedtime when I would read her another Harry Potter chapter. She needed to know
now
what happened. As soon as possible.

‘Of course, she’d never admit to any of that in a million years. She declared recently that Harry Potter was for lame babies and dumb adults who have the IQ of lame babies. These days it’s nothing but Lovecraft and Milton in her hands.’

‘I know that it’s necessary for their development to go through phases like that, but it breaks the heart, doesn’t it?’ Daniel sighed. ‘My boy Henry’s that age too. They seem so very, very young and so incredibly adult, all at once. But if you think it’s bad now, wait until Lily’s 16, like my Hannah.’ He laughed at the thought of his own daughter. ‘Teenagers are a species all of their own, completely apart from children
and
from adults.’

Suzy shook her head, smiling. ‘I can’t imagine any child of yours being anything less than an absolute delight.’

That earned much louder laughter from Daniel, loud enough that a few of the other people in the gallery turned around to look at the two of them.

‘If only that were true!’ Daniel said. ‘I’d have far fewer grey hairs, that’s for sure. But for all her teenage absurdity, it’s true. She is a delight. I’m so proud of her. Of both my kids.’

‘I am of mine too,’ said Suzy. ‘Though I confess that I’m always a little relieved when they go to their father’s, even if I do end up missing them horribly by the time they come back. Is Hannah and Henry’s mother in the picture at all?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘Nope. It’s been just the three of us for many years now.’

‘You deserve a medal, then,’ Suzy declared, totally serious. ‘Holy
crap
.’

‘I’ve never had it put in quite those terms, but thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s hard work, but so very worth it. Oh wait, I can show you a picture.’ Daniel pulled his wallet out of the pocket of his slacks, opening it to show her the snapshot inside – a sunny suburban kitchen, inhabited by a pretty, plump girl with wavy dark hair and 1950s-style eyeglasses, who was using a hand-held electric beater to stir a bowl of cake ingredients while a younger boy looked on, smiling delightedly. ‘The picture’s a few years old but it gives you an idea, 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 turned out to be two babies, and, well …’ She shrugged. ‘Here we all are.’

‘I wish I had that kind of relationship with my ex-wife. You’re very lucky,’ Daniel said.

‘Yeah,’ Suzy agreed, smiling. ‘I guess I am.’

She was surprised by how much she genuinely enjoyed the experience of going a proper grown-up date to an art gallery, then out to dinner at a restaurant (she suspected, however, that actual grown-ups probably didn’t use the term “grown-up”; they probably said “sophisticated” or something like that). It was very different from standing at a bar or a nightclub table and having a quick drink with someone before an equally quick and mostly anonymous bout of sex, barely two dozen words exchanged between them through the entire proceedings.

They had proper honest-to-God champagne, not just the sparkling wine that Suzy had always thought was a near-exact substitute for the real stuff. The waiter brought the bottle out and poured a tiny amount for Daniel to test, to ensure it met his standards, and Daniel sampled the champagne and gave the waiter a decisive nod. Being trusted with a responsibility like that looked perfectly natural when he did it, as if there was nothing daunting or disheartening about assuming the mantle of adulthood.

The bubbles in the champagne made Suzy feel as if she was fizzing too. Happiness was like a golden froth inside her, welling up in her heart and making her smile a permanent fixture on her lips as they ate and chatted and told each other small, amusing stories from their lives.

‘When I was younger, I used to have an addiction to terrible fashion magazines,’ Suzy admitted. ‘Everyone always told me what trash they were and how I shouldn’t read them, and I always protested that they were harmless fun and nothing to worry about. I mean, of course they’re toxic and stupid and all those things, but I always figured, what’s the harm?

‘But when my kids were still toddlers, I found Lily looking at one of the issues one day. She couldn’t read yet, so it would have just been a pretty picture book as far as she was concerned, but I was shocked at how strongly I felt my reaction to seeing her with it.

‘I thought about all the awful messages those things are packed with, about plastic surgery and liposuction and Botox… Did you know “Botox” is short for “
botulism toxin
”? You’re literally giving your face food poisoning on purpose so it gets swollen up and you can’t see the wrinkles any more. What’s “beautiful” about deliberately poisoning your face until it’s paralysed?’ Suzy shook her head, still repulsed by the memory of the things she’d once brushed off so blithely as harmless. ‘And the less extreme stuff, the diets and the expensive fashions and the celebrity gossip, that’s just a different kind of poison, really, isn’t it? I didn’t … The thought of my little girl absorbing all that, of growing up believing that her worth was tied up with how expensive her dresses were or how thin her arms were or what shape her cheekbones were, that thought was
horrible
.

‘Have you ever noticed how every single celebrity fashion profile in those magazines always says that the celebrity looks “effortlessly beautiful”? What’s
effortless
about it? They use that word endlessly, constantly. They use it so much that it would lose any meaning it had to begin with, but that’s the thing, I don’t think it had any meaning at all even at the start. Because if any of those magazines believed even for a second that beauty is ever “effortless”, then they wouldn’t be able to push all these injections and surgeries and treatments and fads and fashions and diets and cosmetics, would they? They want you to expend every ounce of effort you’ve got on it. And yet “effortless” is their favourite word!’

Suzy paused in her rant, shaking her head as she laughed a little at herself. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise I still felt so passionately about it. It’s been years and years since I looked at one of those things.’

‘Don’t apologise. I think it’s admirable that you care so much about protecting your children from negative influences like that,’ Daniel assured her. ‘A lot of people think the “bad stuff” that needs to be kept away from children is things like bad language, or gay people, or rude cartoons on TV. It’s always been a puzzle to me how people can be so wrong-headed about what the real “bad stuff” in the world is – it’s things like sexism and racism and homophobia. It’s letting little girls think their worth is tied to how much the boys around think they’re worth as an object to possess.’

Suzy gave a self-deprecating snort. ‘I’m very lucky you don’t think swearing is one of the genuine bad things. We’d’ve been over the first time I opened my mouth.’

‘And more fool me if I’d been somebody that stupid,’ Daniel said with a grin, holding her hand across the table and giving her a look that made Suzy feel more beautiful than any magazine could ever hope to manage.

For dessert they had hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream, and Daniel collected a little of each on his fork and fed it directly into her mouth, leaning in to kiss away stray crumbs from her lips. His jaw was smooth against her skin and smelled of his aftershave, and Suzy had to shift in her seat as the closeness of him began to get to her, making her excited at the thought of getting him alone again.

The flirting escalated – the toe of her shoe brushing at the inside of his ankle, the touch of his fingertips against her palm as he gestured to explain a point. Suzy could see that Daniel’s eyes were blown wide and dark with want, and she felt certain that her own face was flushed, eyes hooded.

Finally, finally, they finished their meal and left the restaurant. They managed two blocks of walking before they had to stop so that he could pin her against the wall and kiss her and kiss her.

The wall was cold behind her back, heavy slabs of grey stone brick, solid and dark and sturdy on that spot for who knew how many years. Countless lovers might have stopped here before them, hot skin and panting breaths and desperate want there against the building’s shadow.

Suzy braced herself against the stone and hitched one leg around against the crook of Daniel’s knee, bringing him in close against her and forcing him momentarily off balance until he found a new centre of gravity. She rocked her hips up against him, the pressure of his hardness still obvious enough through his slacks that a frisson of pleasure shot through her and made her moan.

Daniel devoured the sound out of her mouth, his lips gentle but insistent against her own. He took his time, as if deaf to the choked whimpers he drew out of her with every rocking movement of his body against hers.

With any other partner, the whole thing would have felt to Suzy like something silly. Teenage make-outs between two people too eager to wait for home before touching one another. But with Daniel it wasn’t like that in the least. He was so calm, so deliberate, so completely in control of the situation and of her. It made Suzy feel as if she was hot enough to melt inside, intoxicated by his touch and his kisses in a way no amount of wine could ever manage.

Finally, finally, he slipped his tongue past her kiss-bruised lips, licking at her teeth before delving inside. Suzy moaned again, her whole body shaking in his grasp, her eyes rolling back in pleasure behind the flutter of her lashes.

With a rumbled growl in his throat, perfect control finally cracking, Daniel gripped the thin fabric of her blouse in both hands and wrenched it open. Pearl buttons popped free and landed with quiet clatters on the sidewalk.