A Brighter Spark (Xcite Romance) by Mary Borsellino Read Free Book Online Page B

see they missed me,’ Suzy joked dryly, handing Drew a can of soda. ‘Anything happen out of the ordinary?’
    ‘Nah.’ Drew shook his head. ‘Just the usual routine.’
    ‘Mmm,’ Suzy responded, distracted by her thoughts. ‘Are you busy tonight? Feel like hanging around?’
    ‘You know me, I set my own hours. I was gonna meet up with some friends and check out a new DJ, but I can text them no problem.’
    ‘I’m not derailing you on a date night, am I?’
    Drew snorted. ‘Joseph’s not quite the DJ type. Or the texting type, for that matter.’
    That made Suzy smile a little, because neither could she imagine Daniel being either of those “types”. It made her feel oddly content to have something so random and trivial in common with Drew. She liked the notion of their lives running on occasionally parallel tracks, of their lovers sharing similar traits.
    ‘I promise you’re not derailing a date night,’ Drew went on. ‘And can we stop saying “date night” now? It makes me feel like I’m half of a set of old marrieds or something. What’s up?’
    Suzy shook her head, her smile fading. ‘Nothing. Kind of. I’ll tell you all about it later, when the kids are asleep, OK?’
    ‘Ooh, grown-up problems.’ Drew grinned. ‘Sure, I’ll stick around.’
    His presence at dinner was enough to put Lily in a better mood than usual. She lit up when she talked to him, involved and enthusiastic, almost back to the bubbly little girl she’d been before the Mack truck of puberty had hit her full force with a shipment of hormones.
    Well, a bubbly little girl with a serious Lovecraft obsession, anyway.
    ‘The book is so awesome, Dad, you’d totally love it. Everything is really gnarly and horrible and scary. Like there’s this one story about a man whose friend has been doing all these paintings, and the paintings are of these dog-man creatures that are doing all kinds of violent, creepy stuff in the pictures. The first room of the artist’s house is all old-fashioned scenes, from pilgrim days and of witch hunters, but they’ve all got all these dog-people in them. And then the next room has paintings that are similar to the other ones, but these ones are all in modern settings of people doing regular stuff and then getting interrupted by the horrible dog-people. Or there’s one painting where the dog-people are teaching little babies how to be creepy like them, and that’s when the man who has gone to visit his friend realises that the dog-creatures are people as well, people who’ve gone wrong somehow. And then in the last room there’s a half-finished painting of the biggest, grossest, most frightening dog-person of all. This painting is, like, super-terrifying and the guy is just about ready to run away screaming anyway, but then he notices a little curled-up piece of card pinned to the corner of the painting and he unrolls it and it’s a photo , because the painting is a portrait being copied from a real subject , the dog-people are real. It’s such a scary story, Dad. It’s. So. Cool.’
    Steven told Suzy all about the new game he was playing, the plot of which was incomprehensible to her but which Steve was so earnestly invested in that she couldn’t help but get drawn into his attempts to explain it.
    ‘So it works kind of like the Invincibility Lollipop did in Kirby , or I guess it’s really more like the stars in Mario Kart , since it’s in a car in this game too, only the time-based stuff is weird in this one because the glitched players don’t have a clock in the same way, but that’s OK because I totally worked out the pattern they run on and I know how to exploit it …’ He chattered on cheerfully, clearly not bothered by the fact that if Suzy herself had been a video game character in that moment, she would have had a giant glowing question mark flashing above her head.
    After dinner they all watched a DVD of the most recent Batman movie until it was time for the kids to go to