Sparks Fly

Chapter Twelve: Confessions and Kicking Butt

I'm late again, what's new? But this chapter is long so that's cool. Right? No? Okay.

Anyway, thank you to @BixbixAeney for the lovely cover (up top). Check her out!

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--VIVKELLER23

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Teagan

"You're no one if you don't have one bed partner or another..."

There was a time when he'd believed he could be anyone at all, but his father laughed in his face. When you grew up with someone's disapproval constantly taunting you, it took a toll on the dreams you thought you could afford.

When you were the byproduct of a torrid affair that had inadvertently caused the death of a beloved parent, you realized dreams and fickle lies like love cost a hell of a lot more than they were worth. When the woman who raised you from birth to the age of fifteen suddenly gave up trying to hold onto a family that was not hers, you lost faith in your own sense of belonging.

If he was no one, it was because even his family had been a made up farce that fell apart under the fierce reality of life.

At fifteen, he watched his mother, the woman who raised him, the only woman worthy of the name, slowly fade to a shadow of who she once was with cancer claiming the fragile breath from her lungs. His father? The poor excuse of a man spent his nights drinking, mumbling about the woman he'd given up to stay married to someone who wasn't even going to live to see the next season.

He'd been fifteen. But even then, he had wanted to kill the bastard.

His father laughed, telling him that if he was good, he'd introduce him to his real mother someday. Seemed his father had another family he desperately wanted with a woman he addressed as Mary. The son she had, the one she didn't give up after ending her year long affair with a married man, wasn't a disappointment.

His half-brother was a Popstar.

And Teagan could only dream of becoming something other than the trash his father proved to be.

The day his mother died, his father was sleeping off the wild night he'd spent with his wife's sister. Teagan had called him, and when his father failed to answer, Teagan went home to find his father and aunt getting it on while his mother's body turned cold. He'd nearly killed his father in a blind rage then. The hurt his mother had endured because she'd loved a man who didn't deserve her made him care about nothing but giving some of that pain back.

When the red curtain of fury finally lifted, he found himself handcuffed and transported to a jail cell in the back of a patrol car. The incident had resulted in a warning, a hundred hours of community service, and a formal investigation into Teagan's home life by Child Protective Services.

The whole process was nothing more than an expensive cycle of crap the way he saw it. The system placed him in a foster home on the nicer part of Granite Woods, but the folks who took him in hadn't trusted him with their teenage girl around. They sent him right back and he bounced back and forth between "the slums" and the ritzy homes of the wealthier residents of Granite Woods for the better part of two years. The cycle continued until his father cleaned up his act and convinced the courts he was a fit father. By then, no one could be convinced to take in a boy who was closer to adulthood than boyhood, so they didn't really care.

But going home to his father proved to be hell. The old man went right back to his drinking, this time with a vengeance, and he didn't even pretend to care about how his son managed to survive. So Teagan learned to fend for himself because to rely on his father for anything would see both of them on the streets.