The Spark (Carolina Connections Book 2) Read online

  “I know it’s not as simple as I’m making it sound and I don’t want to upset you, but I wouldn’t feel as if I were doing a good job as both your doctor and your friend if I didn’t at least bring it up. Please, Fiona, give it some more thought and, for God’s sake, pick up the phone and call me if you want to talk. I’m always here.” He stood. His glasses went back around his neck, settling over his crooked tie, and he opened his arms for another hug.

  Damn Pa! I went to him like Laura after someone pulled on her braids.

  Chapter Five

  I’ll Take Hell if Purgatory Is Anything Like This

  MARK

  “This is ridiculous!” I thought to myself. The woman sitting two seats over got up and switched to a seat across the room from me. So maybe I hadn’t said it to myself after all.

  I dropped my head down, elbows on my knees, as I waited for my mother to reappear from behind the closed double doors of the emergency room. My hand scrubbed at my short hair in a futile attempt to release some of my frustration.

  Why did they have to make these waiting room seats so uncomfortable? And what was with this reading material? The least they could do was give me Men’s Health or even Car and Driver, but all they had were chick magazines. And I already knew how to bring a girl to orgasm in less than five minutes, thank you very much. That thought brought the first smile to cross my face all day.

  It was the Friday after Nate’s momentous announcement, and the mental replay of Gavin falling off his barstool had kept me entertained all week.

  What? I’m easily amused.

  We’d been of absolutely no help in coming up with a good proposal plan, but Nate should have known better. He needed to talk to his sister, Bailey, if he wanted advice that didn’t include a reenactment of Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg’s famous “Dick in a Box” skit. Pretty sure the answer would be a right hook if he took guidance from us. Although come to think of it, Bailey would probably give even worse advice so he was pretty much screwed.

  I’d been behaving myself all week, not drinking and not even going out to the bars to scope out the talent. And what was my reward? A phone call from my mom at four this morning begging for a ride to the ER. Let me tell you, that is not a call any son wants to get, early morning or any damn time.

  Luckily, she was not the one who’d been injured.

  No, as if the Fates were punishing me for my bad behavior with the co-ed, it had been my dad who’d landed himself in the ER—my piece-of-shit dad whom I hadn’t seen in eight years and whom I’d hoped to never see again. Thus the reason I was going out of my mind in the waiting room while my mom was somewhere back in the ER with the dirty son-of-a-bitch.

  Why? I had no damn clue.

  When I’d picked up the phone this morning, I hadn’t been able to understand a word my mother was saying, but I did finally catch something about a hospital. Once I’d calmed her down a bit, she’d been able to explain.

  “It’s your father,” she’d said, sniffling.

  “What the hell do you mean?” I’d asked, still half asleep but relieved to hear she wasn’t hurt.

  “The hospital just called and said that your father was brought in late last night by ambulance and he was unconscious and b-b-beaten.” She started to cry again.

  What. The. Fuck?

  “Mom, calm down. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  This was bullshit. That asshole had ditched her thirteen years ago and now he was calling her from the hospital in the middle of the night?

  “Sweetie, I need you to drive me to the hospital. I’m too upset to drive. I’ll get in an accident.”

  “I don’t mean to be insensitive or anything, Mom, but why did he call you?”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “The hospital did. He’s unconscious and I guess I’m still his emergency contact.”

  Note to self: When he wakes up, knock him out again.

  So here I was at the hospital on a Friday morning—instead of working like I should be—wishing I were anywhere else for any other reason. Getting a prostate exam? Sure—lube up that glove and bring it on. Nothing could be worse than this. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my mom gave the tiniest shit about what happened to my dad.

  Had I been the emergency contact, the conversation with the nurse would have been a short one: “What’s that? My dad’s been beaten and he’s unconscious? Good. Tell him I hope it hurts.” Click.

  How could she still care about him? Let him make her cry? He’d caused enough tears when he’d been around, I would have thought she’d want nothing to do with him after all this time. I guess I was wrong.

  Growing up in my family had not been a picnic. While we didn’t live in a trailer park or starve, we didn’t have a whole lot. My dad had a hard time holding onto a job, mostly due to the fact that he was the laziest human being to ever walk the earth. His exceptional talent for shifting responsibility off himself and onto absolutely anyone else didn’t hurt either. He’d once blamed the family dog for losing a job because he claimed the dog “distracted” him and made him forget he was on shift.

  He would constantly do idiotic things like using his unsteady paychecks to buy dozens of scratch-off tickets instead of milk or peanut butter. Or he’d get fired from a job and then get the brilliant idea to come home with fifty dollars’ worth of takeout for dinner. My older brother, Jake, and I were luckily pretty good at making friends, so we spent a lot of time at other families’ dinner tables.

  Most nights, our father would come home after a day of work or hanging out with other deadbeats and proceed to tell my mom everything that was wrong with her. Or me. Or Jake. He had a brilliant knack for undermining and belittling and for finding just the right vulnerability to poke at.

  For Jake, it was his natural charisma and his less-than-stellar performance at school. For me, as paradoxical as it sounds, it was my better-than-average success at school—and also my scrawny-ness. I was only slightly less awkward than a drunk newborn giraffe. And for our mom, it was just about anything she did or sometimes simply the fact that she existed.

  I’d spent many sleepless nights conjuring up confrontations the adult Mark would someday have with my dad, meticulously outlining all his faults and putting him in his place, never comprehending that a man like him would never be swayed in his stubborn perception of his own superiority.

  Despite his general surliness and his miserable treatment of our family, he never got physical with any of us—apart from the occasional smack to the back of the head.

  “I don’t understand how any man could lay a hand on a woman,” had been a phrase I’d heard him utter many times.

  We were, after all, a God-fearing family, and hitting your wife would have been a grave sin. However, he didn’t find verbally and emotionally abusing his family or failing to provide for them to be frowned upon by God, so he went whole-hog and developed quite the talent for those pursuits.

  When we were little, my mom worked the night shift as a cashier at a convenience store so there would always be an adult around to care for us in the event my father found himself employed. On nights when my dad was too drunk or too busy being a deadbeat to feed us, the older lady on the other side of our duplex would usher Jake and me to her kitchen.

  Her name was Mrs. Finley and she was a widow whose husband had died in the Korean War. We knew this because every time we came over she told us the same story about how kind he’d been to her dying mother right before he’d left for the war and she only hoped someone had been as kind to him before he died. Being the young kid I was, the sadness of that didn’t register until much later.

  Mrs. Finley was a petite woman with short silver hair, and she wore a variety of housecoats that zipped up the front. Her house smelled like roses, despite there never being any fresh flowers in sight, and she made gingersnap cookies that were so spicy they burned our taste buds. For some reason, this made them even more appealing to Jake and me, so she baked them constantly.

 
The other thing I knew about Mrs. Finley, besides the fact that her husband was dead and she baked strange cookies, was that she did not like my father. Not one bit.

  With my mom working nights, there was always some money coming in, just never quite enough. Looking back, I’ll never understand how my mother managed to take care of us during the day and still get enough sleep to make it through her night shift, but she somehow did it. Mrs. Finley pitched in when she could, but it was mostly just my mom.

  As time passed, though, it became apparent that the home environment my dad created was taking its toll on our mother. There would be many times when I’d hear her crying through her bedroom door or days when we’d come home from school and find that she’d just been sitting on the couch and staring at the TV all day instead of eating and getting some much-needed sleep to make it through her night shifts.

  Although Jake and I had inklings that this wasn’t quite normal, it was all we knew so we didn’t think to question it much. Once we were a bit older I think we finally recognized our mom’s tendency toward depressive behavior, and as the years progressed she became more and more “delicate.” Not sure if that was the right word to capture the nature of it, but it seemed to fit.

  Then two things happened.

  First, Jake graduated from high school and signed up for the Marines the same day. I was fourteen and was suddenly alone with a depressed mother and a deadbeat father. By that point, my mom had moved to a better-paying job as a waitress, but there were a lot of times when she couldn’t get out of bed and I worried she’d get fired. I got a part-time job as a busser at a local pizza place—the owner knew I wasn’t sixteen when I lied about my age, but he hired me anyway and paid me under the table until I was legally allowed to work. We ate a lot of pizza at the Beckett household in those days.

  Needless to say, I was more than a little resentful toward my brother for ditching us.

  The second thing that happened was better than the first, although I may have been the only one to see it that way. About a week before my sixteenth birthday I awoke to the sound of my mother crying, which wasn’t unusual, I’m sad to say. I found her at the wobbly kitchen table holding a piece of paper. Tears streaked her cheeks and her eyes were puffy and red. I took the paper from her and read the words written in my dad’s messy scrawl.

  I can’t let you drag me down anymore—I deserve better.

  That was how my dad chose to leave our family. If his departure hadn’t wounded my mom so sharply I would have thrown a fucking party in celebration. I was certain Mrs. Finley would have pitched in with decorations and ginger snaps, but sadly she’d died the previous summer.

  It had happened peacefully in her sleep, and I remember thinking at the time that I hoped I’d been especially kind to her the last time I’d seen her. Although she wasn’t there to celebrate with me, I was sure Mrs. Finley was whooping it up in heaven that the bastard had finally flown the coop.

  That was thirteen years ago, and apart from a visit from him in my early twenties—where he asked me for money—I hadn’t laid eyes on the old man since.

  As far back as I can remember, I’ve thought of it as my job to worry about my mom and to this day I constantly wish to be a better son. I should have taken better care of her. Maybe if I had, she wouldn’t be in an ER crying over a guy who never deserved her tears.

  I rubbed my hands over my face as I mentally cursed him one more time. How much longer was this thing going to take? My ass was falling asleep and I needed a caffeine fix. I approached the main desk and asked the nurse if there was anywhere close by to get a coffee. She informed me that the hospital actually had its own Starbucks.

  Of course it did.

  I stumbled in the direction she pointed and sniffed the air for the scent of a caffeine trail. After a couple wrong turns, I finally approached the ubiquitous green and white sign and got in line.

  I was completely zoned out so it took me a moment to realize that someone was staring at me from a few feet over.

  Sitting at a small table in the corner was a tiny shift of a girl I’d encountered once before.

  The encounter had not gone well.

  I’d tried to hit on her and she’d not only rebuffed me, but she’d insulted me repeatedly and without reason. It was just my luck to run into Fiona Pierce on what happened to be one of the shittiest mornings I’d had in a long while (the cheerleading incident notwithstanding).

  Unable to cease being a member of the male species, I looked her over and, despite her diminutive size and overall insulting tone, I still found her to be physically appealing. What can I say? I own a penis.

  She has delicate features but huge green eyes and light blond hair that falls around her shoulders and sweeps over her forehead. It’s almost as if a breeze accompanies her wherever she goes, causing her hair to float around her face in constant motion. There was just…something about her, some hint of fire I’d noticed the very first time I’d spotted her across Laney’s backyard. It was the very thing that had propelled me toward the deck where she’d been standing, where I’d then proceeded to bomb in a most spectacular fashion. That had been the day after Thanksgiving and I hadn’t seen her in the months since.

  Until today of all days.

  She wore a light jacket and a knee-length skirt and sat with her legs crossed, one leg bouncing and showcasing some strappy heels. For a brief moment, my mind wandered and I imagined those heels biting into my back as her legs wrapped around my waist—and then I remembered what a harpy she was and forced my mind back to coffee.

  I’m sure I looked like shit, and that had to be the cause of the small smirk on her face. I didn’t think I was up to the challenge of sparring with the little spitfire, but the fact that she kept her eyes on me told me I wasn’t going to have much choice in the matter.

  It was all a little baffling to me. She was Laney’s best friend and—according to Nate—was really sweet, smiled a lot, and was funny as hell. He had mentioned that she had a bit of a temper, but that was no news flash to me. I simply couldn’t reconcile the two versions of this girl in my mind.

  It was my turn at the counter so I looked away from her to place my order. A moment later a voice came from my side.

  “Care to join me?”

  I turned to see Fiona standing next to me, coffee cup in hand, wide innocent-looking eyes peering up at me. Hmm.

  The top of her head barely reached my chin even with the heels. How short was this girl? I bent down in an overly exaggerated manner.

  “I’m sorry, can you say that again? I couldn’t quite hear you from way down there.” I was determined to fire the first shot over her bow. And it seemed my aim was impeccable.

  Her cheeks pinked immediately and her mouth got tight. “I was trying to be nice, but I’m obviously wasting my time,” she hissed and spun around to stalk back to her table, her hair swinging gloriously around her.

  Okay, so maybe I’d completely misread this situation.

  But she’d totally blindsided me with her bitchiness at our last encounter and I must have still been harboring a bit of resentment. After all, if memory served, she’d called me a “meat-head,” a “moron,” and had suggested I “go eat a bag of dicks,” all within the span of sixty seconds. If it hadn’t been aimed at me I might have found it impressive. And all I’d done was say hello—and I might have called her “Tinkerbell” and directed her to the kids’ table—that part was a little fuzzy.

  Since I couldn’t afford any more bad karma, I decided to go apologize once I got my coffee. I took my first sip to steel myself for what promised to be a delightful exchange.

  “Hello, Fiona.” I approached and she pretended not to hear me as her thumbs typed away on her phone—probably texting Laney about what an utter dick I was.

  I sagged into the seat across from her. “I’m sorry for what I said. It’s been a shitty morning and, based on our last meeting, I wasn’t prepared for civility.”

  She set her phone on the table and eyed
me speculatively for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, she spoke. “I suppose I can understand that.” She tossed her hair and sipped her coffee. “I accept your apology.”

  We were both silent.

  Her leg bounced.

  I spun my coffee cup around in circles.

  We both pretended to find the décor of this particular Starbucks to be fascinating.

  It was awkward as shit.

  I almost wished I were back in the waiting room.

  Or at the proctologist’s office—yes, it was almost that bad.

  Chapter Six

  Mystery Solved: Tony Soprano Is Alive and Living in North Carolina

  FIONA

  Shit, this was awkward. Why wasn’t he saying anything? I was the last one to speak, and according to the common rules of conversation, it was his turn, dammit!

  Fine.

  “So…” I said. I know—brilliant.

  “So…” Mark replied.

  Seriously?

  We were a match made in heaven—the dumb blonde and the dumber jock.

  Had his neck gotten thicker since the last time I’d seen him? I just didn’t understand the point to all these muscles—it was all a bit excessive.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love the solidity of a guy who works out and takes care of himself, and I wouldn’t turn my nose up at a nice set of abs and biceps—or a nice ass, of course—but this guy was like a walking ad for steroids. Okay, well, maybe that was a bit harsh, but he was just so…so…bulky. I mean, his boobs were ten times bigger than mine and there was something exceedingly wrong about that.

  Aside from his overly-muscled physique, though, I had to admit he’s kind of a babe. He has a great smile, not that I’d seen it yet today, but I remembered it from our last encounter. And I usually don’t care for the whole buzz-cut thing, but it so works on him. His eyes are also a rich deep brown and—holy eyelashes—how was that fair? All the mighty forces of Sephora couldn’t produce lashes that nice! Oh well, it wasn’t as if a nice smile and some eyelashes could make up for the fact that he is completely insufferable.