Authors: Helena Maeve
For once, Marten’s easy exoneration of her from every mistake remained absent. He could always be counted upon to take her side when it came to work disputes, but tonight, listening to Jackie, even that impulse stayed silent. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he said once they had reached the restaurant. “Maybe Tony didn’t see a future in being with us and the sense of novelty had lost its appeal, so…”
He trailed off, eyes suddenly gone wide.
“What’s wrong?” Jackie followed his gaze to a table for four not far from the entryway. Tony was already there, wearing black jeans and a black dress shirt under a knitted cardigan—and apparently he was waiting for them.
More importantly, he wasn’t alone.
“And that,” Marten muttered for his girlfriend’s ears only, “I take it, is Clara.”
Jackie could only nod. It was very much Clara and she was very much clutching Tony’s hand.
Chapter Nine
Walking up to the table was like climbing the scaffold to one’s execution—or so it felt to Jackie, whose thoughts were in far too much disarray to make room for sniggering at her own overdramatic nonsense. Marten guided her with a hand on her back, but a sixth sense told Jackie that he wasn’t faring any better.
“Jackie, hi!” beamed Clara, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle on her pencil skirt. “And this must be the boyfriend I’ve heard so much about. Lovely to meet you, Marten.” She pumped their hands with a lax grip, her fingers cold and bony like bird claws. “Please, have a seat. We already ordered the wine, I hope you don’t mind.”
Tony had risen to his feet when he saw them, but now he was being tugged down like a disobedient pup, his eyes downcast, his face turned away from them. His cheeks were stained pink. Jackie yearned to reach out and steal him away. Clara’s proprietary hold on his hand reminded her that it wasn’t her place. “I thought you were sick,” was all she found to say, forcing the words past the knot of confusion and embarrassment that seemed lodged in her throat.
Clara waved that aside. “So I played hooky for one day. Not like the office fell apart without me, is it?” She laughed. It wasn’t so far from the truth—one cog gone and a machine that had run perfectly on inertia before seemed suddenly to be teetering on the brink of collapse. In her short time there, Clara seemed to have created a semi-efficient system for dealing with planned and not-so-planned eventualities, a system that broke down completely if she wasn’t there to sustain it. In a couple of short months, she had made their entire department entirely dependent on her presence. She was more than a cog in the machine—she
was
the machine.
Their wine was brought out and poured, much to Jackie’s relief, and she took shelter behind the first glass. Frustratingly, Clara had picked a white Italian wine, something light and perfect for the season. It annoyed Jackie to find that she liked it from the first sip.
“What do you do, Marten?” Clara asked, smiling blithely while everyone else squirmed. “Jackie must have said, but my memory’s all—”
“Cut the crap.”
If the interruption had come from Jackie, the temperature around the table might have dropped a couple of degrees. Marten might have clamped his hand tight over her knee to prevent a public catfight. But he didn’t. It was Tony who’d spoken up, his voice barely above a whisper. He glanced at Clara even as he seemed to try to shuffle that much farther away from her without leaving his seat. “Tell them why you brought them here and let’s go.” He didn’t look at Jackie or Marten—it was as if he couldn’t see them.
Clara’s lips pursed tightly, her pale lipstick flaring her as she dug teeth into her bottom lip to scrape it off. The smile slipped like a mask. “Well…if you insist.” She was a different woman when she faced Jackie and Marten once more. “It’s simple, really. You don’t call or email or text. You don’t send carrier pigeons or smoke signals. You forget you and Tony ever knew each other. And we all get on with our lives.”
“Is that a threat?” Jackie asked, surprised to hear her voice so low and even.
“It’s a friendly warning. Tony is mine and you two were a distraction. Now that’s over—”
“It’s not,” Jackie interjected, glancing briefly towards Tony in search of support. There was a twitch in his jaw, but nothing more. He wasn’t going to speak out about this. She couldn’t understand why. “You don’t get to make decisions for him, Clara. And you certainly don’t get to threaten us.”
Her fists were coiling tight beneath the table. The last time she’d had to defend a loved one, it had been Christmas of 2011 and her parents had implied Marten wasn’t serious about her because he hadn’t proposed marriage yet. This was so much worse.
“Excellent advice,” Clara drawled. “You should follow it.” She gave Tony’s fingers a squeeze. “Well? Tell them, darling. Who do you love most?”
His teeth were gritted, his eyes downcast, but Tony still answered, “You.”
Every bone in Jackie’s body ached with the distress in his voice. But Clara wasn’t finished, “And who commands you, darling?”
“You do,” Tony said, the words heavy like the stroke of a gavel.
Clara turned to them, triumphant. “See?”
“See what?” Jackie shot back. “Other than you being super creepy, that is.”
“Proof that Tony is no longer your problem to deal with.”
Marten, who had been silent until then, shook his head. “He was never a problem.” To Tony, he added, “If you’d like to come home with us, we can…”
“He can’t,” Clara said, almost at the same time that Tony himself mouthed, ‘
I can’t’
. His shoulders lifted in a minute, barely-there shrug. Clara was driving this, not him, and she gave his fingers a tight squeeze, as if to recall Tony to order. “If that’s all, we should really be getting home. Babysitter is already claiming overtime.”
Jackie’s thoughts screeched to a halt.
Babysitter?
“It’s been fun,” Clara was saying. “Jackie, I’ll see you in the office tomorrow, won’t I? Marten.” The waiter looked confused as they filed out, leaving Jackie and Marten seated at the table. Jackie waved him off. She couldn’t think of food, couldn’t wrap her mind around what had just happened.
Marten fell back against his chair. “Did she say—?”
“Yeah,” Jackie echoed, equally bewildered. “She said…babysitter. They have a child together.”
“We don’t know that,” Marten countered. He tugged a hand through his hair, as if that was going to do anything to dispel the cloud of confusion left in Clara’s wake.
“We know it’s not a coincidence.” Clara and Tony
were
an item. Their Tony—to the extent that Jackie had any claim to a man who had more or less disavowed them—was involved with someone else. Bizarrely, it helped to think that he’d been miserable while doing it, as though the pain he was inflicting was somehow lessened by the thought of it being shared.
Jackie wondered how she was going to face Clara in the morning and in all the days to come. The things she had told the other woman were private and grossly intimate. They were all couched in the farcical buffer of hypothesis, but Clara was too clever by half not to have parsed out the truth. She had figured out that Tony was seeing them, somehow, and used it to her advantage. But Clara was just one woman—to assume she had the capacity to force Tony’s hand was to endow her with more power than her five foot nothing self seemed to possess.
“What do you think she has on him?” Marten asked, absently fingering the stem of his wine glass, so far untouched.
Jackie shrugged. The whole experience had been strange and uncomfortable, with Tony’s subdued presence at the table just one of many oddities Jackie couldn’t make sense of. She sighed. “Maybe it’s the kid.” She was just spit-balling, but the thought stuck. Tony had never mentioned a family, or shown much interest in discussing theirs. Jackie had always assumed that was because he didn’t care, but she knew full well guilt could take on the appearance of indifference. It was chameleonic like that.
Marten nodded. “Okay. Let’s say it’s the kid. Is it a custody battle?”
“She did say she doesn’t approve of Tony’s job,” Jackie recalled.
“When?” Marten’s brows were furrowed and she realised she hadn’t filled him in on all the details of that bizarre conversation. Much of it had hit her like a freight train, completely blindsiding her to Clara’s apropos until it was too late. By the time Jackie had caught up, she had been already pulling away from the kerb, launching one last poisonous volley over her shoulder.
Jackie shuddered at the memory. “Yesterday, when she dropped me off.”
“Before Tony ran off,” her boyfriend surmised.
“That’s right.”
“So… Do you think she knew you were going to see him?”
Hanging her head, Jackie nodded. “I may have intimated something along those lines.” Shame rose up in her throat. “I’m sorry! I thought she was just curious and I needed someone to talk to…” She couldn’t finish that sentence—she had no breath left to tell Marten she’d been wondering what it meant to love two men at the same time. She didn’t want to use that word now that Tony had essentially slammed the door in their faces. If she hadn’t said anything to Clara, they might never have gone through this. Tony could be home, in their bed.
No
, Jackie thought. Something else would have come up.
Marten clutched her hand over the white tablecloth. “This isn’t a Hollywood film. She can’t stop Tony seeing whoever he wants.”
“But he doesn’t
want
to see us,” Jackie insisted. It clawed at her to think it, even if it was true. “He was so upset when he saw me looking at his webpage. He’s not going to want to talk to us again.”
“Why not?”
“Because he thinks we’re using him.”
“We’re not…”
“Of course we’re not,” Jackie scoffed, loud enough that the waiter glanced their way. It took her a moment to notice that Marten was smiling wryly. She was only just now catching up with him. “Oh. You mean…”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Well, me too.”
Marten canted his head into a nod. “Yeah, I thought so. And that’s why I was going to tell you that we shouldn’t give up.”
“That’s the
conversation
you wanted to have?” Jackie asked, forging air quotes around the word for added emphasis. She’d been wondering if Marten was preparing a graceful exit, or some other kind of bombshell to outdo Tony. A small, guilty part of her had been worried he might propose marriage as a kind of balm. But Marten knew her too well to stoop to cheap tricks. The last time he had offered to put a ring on her finger, they had fought about it so badly that Jackie had ended up in voluntary exile on the living room couch.
“I don’t want to try this again,” Marten went on, “with someone else. We can, of course, but Tony was… Is—”
“Special.” Jackie didn’t have it in her to blush—strong emotions had been spent on seeing Clara and Tony together and realising they were
Clara and Tony
.
“Right.”
“We can’t just pursue someone if he’s not interested,” she pointed out, trying to inject reason into the relief she felt slithering through her bones.
“Are we sure Tony wouldn’t have come to see us anyway?” Marten insisted. “I don’t think it’s over. I don’t want it to be over. And until I hear it from his mouth, why should I believe it is?” He sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Clara is a perfect stranger, as far as I am concerned. At least you know her from work—”
“Don’t remind me,” Jackie groused. Tomorrow morning was bound to be an interesting experience. Her hand felt empty when Marten suddenly removed his and began patting his jacket. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for my phone.”
“Why?”
He had already found it and was thumb-tapping away. “I’m texting Tony. I know that’s what you normally do, but I’m giving you plausible deniability—and washing my hands of any workplace violence that might ensue.”
“I’ve created a monster.” Jackie sighed, only half meaning it. She thought about stopping Marten from finishing his message and sending it off—they weren’t exactly giving Tony a chance to make up his own mind. What if he really did want to be with Clara? But Marten was right. He could tell them himself. He wasn’t their submissive, he was their—friend. Their lover.
If he was through with them, which was possible, then he could say so. Whatever happened tomorrow at the office, Jackie was ready for it. She didn’t feel ashamed about what she’d done. She wasn’t going to pretend it had been meaningless fun. More importantly, she wasn’t going to give up just because some jumped-up little tart had told her to.
Jackie flagged down the waiter. “I think we’re ready to order now.”
Chapter Ten
She was early. The meeting hadn’t started and yet she could already feel the drumbeat in her ears, tribal and familiar, like something that had been with her a lot longer than spiked heels and nail polish. For the sixth time in eleven minutes, Jackie checked her phone. No new calls, no new messages—it was still early for London to be up, never mind New York and LA.
Jackie helped herself to another cup of coffee and made her way into the conference room. Even as a little girl, she’d always liked to be prompt in attending class. Better not to show up at all than to come in late, with everyone looking at her and the teacher making snide comments. Absolutes were a thing of the past—now she had a job she sometimes liked and a boyfriend she only sometimes understood and a rival she hadn’t known she’d acquired until battle had been waged and Jackie’d emerged the loser.
It was only one battle, though. Not the whole war.
Jackie sipped her coffee. Some ten minutes later, as her colleagues began to file into the room, she watched Clara arrive, looking as bubbly and excitable as she always did. Last night’s show of force was utterly absent.
“We missed you yesterday,” Jackie offered in lieu of greeting. “I do hope you’re feeling better.”
Something like puzzlement flashed across Clara’s features, a blink-and-you’d-miss-it kind of glare that Jackie recognised as the real Clara, the one that hid beneath the airy nonsense. “Oh, loads,” the other woman said, laying her accent on a little thick. “One of those twenty-four-hour bugs. You know how it is!” If she was worried that Jackie might give up the game, she didn’t show it. Her poker face was impeccable.