The Spark

“A day—two, tops.”

“What do I do until then?”

I held his eyes. “You sure you want my advice on that?”

He frowned, but nodded.

“Go home, Mr. Bentley. Call in a private chef to make your favorite meal and then fuck your hot fiancée. Because your assets will be frozen by morning, and once that happens? She’ll be hocking that rock on her finger to pay for a first-class ticket back to wherever she came from.”

***

“May I see your ID, please?”

I leaned back in my chair and smirked at my friend across the table.

“Fuck off,” Trent grumbled while pulling his license out of his wallet. He hadn’t even looked up to see my face, yet he knew I was enjoying the moment.

The waitress perused his ID and handed it back to him. This routine was a pretty frequent occurrence. Trent Fuller was thirty but didn’t look a day over eighteen. I’d never seen him with facial hair, and we’d gone to bachelor-party benders that lasted four days in New Orleans.

I smiled at our server. “He’s late hitting puberty. You want to see mine?”

“It’s okay. You look over twenty-one.”

“You sure? Not even to take a peek at my address, in case you’re in the neighborhood?”

The waitress blushed. I was teasing, though she was pretty, albeit a little young for me.

“I’ll be back with your drinks in a minute.”

Trent grabbed a breadstick from the middle of the table and crunched into it.

“Who was the hot blonde I saw you walk out to reception with her father this afternoon?”

“The old dude is her fiancé, not her father. But if you’re interested, I’m pretty sure she’s going to be in the market for another sucker pretty soon. My client is about to lose a bunch of the assets that make him so handsome.”

“Damn. We never get women who look like that in the intellectual property division.”

“You want to run with the big dogs, you gotta learn to pee in the tall grass.”

Trent’s face wrinkled. “What the hell does that even mean?”

I chuckled. “No idea. How’d things go with the woman you managed not to scare off a few weeks ago?”

My buddy and I went out for happy hour or di

Trent frowned. “I took her out to di

“Did you entertain her during the meal with your usual riveting conversation about copyrights and patents?”

“Fuck off.”

I laughed. I was kidding, of course. Trent was actually a pretty fu

“How about you?” he said. “How did things go with the brunette you met? She seemed really nice.”

“Gone. Failed test two.”

He shook his head. “You and your ridiculous tests. When was the last time someone made it past two?”

The waitress came and delivered Trent’s wine and my beer before disappearing again. I knew exactly the last time a woman had made it past my so-called ridiculous tests. Though I didn’t need to mention it had been a while, just to help prove my friend’s point.

He prodded. “Seriously, how long?”

“I don’t know…”

“You do too know. You remember shit you heard in the womb, Decker.” He shook his head. “It was the luggage woman, wasn’t it? The redhead you spent the weekend with who pulled the disappearing act on Monday morning. What was her name again? Summer?”

I took a long draw from my beer. “Autumn.”

It had been ten months since I walked into that coffee shop to swap luggage, and three days less than that since I’d last seen her. We’d met to exchange luggage and wound up sitting in Starbucks until it closed. After, we went out to di

We’d barely slept the entire weekend, even though we hadn’t had actual sex. Another first for me—spending three nights with a woman I wasn’t sleeping with. Yet I’d never been so wired about meeting someone in my life, and I’d thought the feeling was mutual. Which was why I’d been shocked as shit when I got out of the shower Monday morning and found an empty apartment. No note. No number. I’d never even gotten her last name. The only thing I had to go on was a folded-up piece of paper, an odd list I’d forgotten to stick back into her luggage when I’d rummaged through it. I still had it folded in my wallet at this very moment. Yet another thing I wouldn’t be mentioning to Trent.

“You do know why you couldn’t find anything wrong with that one, right?” Trent sipped his wine. “Because she blew you off. If she hadn’t, you would’ve found some test for her to fail. Maybe what you need to do is add not blowing me off to your list of tests. That way you aren’t pining after a woman who ghosted you. What happened with the one you met at McGuire’s last week, anyway?”

“We went out to di

“You know, you think it’s a problem that she stretched the truth a little. But I think her telling you she liked hockey was a good thing. It shows she’s willing to compromise and sit around while you watch a game just to spend some time with you. Does she have to love sports and watch every minute?”

“No, not at all. But when I asked her if she liked hockey, her response was, ‘I love it. Watch it all the time.’ That’s a consistency problem right there. If what she says and what she does are inconsistent off the bat, that’s a red flag.” I sucked back my beer. “Plus, the next day, she sent me a picture of her tits.”

Trent shook his head. “Only you would count that as a strike against a woman.”

No naked selfies for at least a month. Even if I ask for them. Now, I realize that asking for something and then holding that against a woman who gives it to me might make me an asshole, but it is what it is.

I shook my head. “I like naked selfies as much as the next guy. But if a woman is sending you one when you’ve known her less than a week—that’s a big red flag.”

“Whatever. I’ll take a naked selfie whenever a woman wants to send it.”

I smirked. “The problem with that is the only women you attract are ones who look your age, so it’s considered child pornography.”

“Dickhead.”

As usual, our conversation shifted from our pathetic social life to sports before it eventually landed back on the firm. We could talk shit about that place for days. But lately our focus had been on whether I’d make partner.

“So how’s the vote tally going?” Trent asked.

I was up against some stiff competition. Once every five years, our firm opened the partnership doors to two of its best-performing associates. The average time on the partnership track was ten to twelve years. I’d been with Kravitz, Polk and Hastings for just shy of seven when old man Kravitz told me I was up for consideration a few months ago. If I made the cut this year, I’d be the youngest person to make partner in the firm’s history—something I really wanted. Being the first to break that record meant more to me than the extra money I’d be pulling in. I already didn’t have enough time to spend all the cash I made.