Insecure (24 page)

“I missed you, Mace.”

He'd missed her too. The pulse in her neck, the bone of her cheek, the stalled hitch in her breath when he teased her body. A different missing. Not like he missed Buster. That emotion was a tender sore in his heart, a soft spot in his head like a sinkhole where memories he was worried about losing got pulled together and sucked down, spewing up at him randomly when he least expected them, cutting off his breath.

Yesterday a memory of Buster teaching him to play poker using matchsticks for money made him forget where he was driving. He'd pulled up in front of the old house, now a construction site, before he realised what he was doing. He'd driven for forty minutes in a dream state like his brain was slow loading.

He'd missed Jacinta in an entirely different way. She was the memory he'd yet to make. She was the longing that had always made him feel different, apart from everyone around him. He didn't know what loving a person who wasn't Buster, who wasn't Dillon, was about, but he knew Jacinta was someone he craved, like a perfect, pristine line of code that'd function cross platform evermore.

She tugged at his hair. “I thought I'd lost you.”

“Not lost.” Not now, when for months that's how he'd felt. Never registering, drifting out beyond the most powerful search engine, empty and anxious.

“It was only a weekend. I didn't think there could be more.”

That word again—more. More was the smell of her, clean, aroused. It was the fine spider tickle of her hair dragging across his arms, the flick of her tongue on his lip and her thigh wedged against his. More was in her eyes when he broke away to lose the rest of his clothes to regret he hadn't come prepared for this, but to see she was. More was what she gave him when they came together on her bed and she took him deep, held him tight, her arms around his back, her knees hitched at his sides. He had her body and he had the trust in her eyes.

“I dreamed of you, Cinta. But it was never this. Never true. Only bad data. A false positive. Nothing is like you.”

He rocked his hips and her gasp was hot across his throat. Her fingers dug in to the back of his neck. This was how he made her happy, this was how he won her devotion; with slow, smooth thrusts and circling hips, with dragging kisses, with a rhythm that made her arch into him and toss her head.

She shouted his name and he lost control, no tempo other than speed, no tacit feeling other than friction so achingly sweet and tight. Eyes jammed shut because the dream and the reality were mashed together with the smell of her, of them, as their skin grew slick and their breaths stuck and sucked and stuck again. All the loss and insecurity he'd carried multiplied inside him till he couldn't contain the sensation shuddering out from his centre, sending his vision white.

She cried out again, going rigid, trembling and thrashing, and that place inside him that was sore and weary exploded in a burst of bright awareness so intense he cried out too, dragging her body down to lie against him, tucking her face against his neck and burying the hurt and the misery, his fear and loneliness in the yielding heat and softness of her and his own sobs.

“Mace?” She lifted her head, her eyes going wide, her hands coming to his wet cheeks. She tried to hold him but he pulled out, sat up and away from her.

She seemed to know he needed distance. She didn't try to touch him. “Tell me what happened to you.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and got his breathing back in order, stilled the dry ache in his lungs and blinked against the rawness under his eyelids.

“Did I do this, did I upset you?”

“No.” The answer barked out roughly. He needed to get out of here. “It's not you.”

“It feels like it is. I'm sorry about the sketch.”

“It's not that. I have to go.”

“I see.”

He heard the crank in her voice, but it couldn't be helped. They were a one night stand and neither of them had tried hard enough to find the other, neither of them had tried Jay.

“Go. Get out if you're going.”

Half of him was already on the street, walking to Dillon's, overwriting this with new code, another fake memory, one where he didn't crack up for no good reason. The other half of him was crawling back into bed with her, telling her everything he missed and feared and sleeping deep, dreamless with her close.

He went to her bathroom, disposed of the condom, washed his face. She was sitting in the bed with the sheet tucked up under her arms and her knees drawn up to her chin when he came out. “You bastard.”

He snagged his jeans from the floor and shoved them on.

“The only thing you liked about me was the money. You were fucking the company, getting off on who I was, and now I'm nothing you can't stand to be with me.”

That cut, and shit, he couldn't let her think that. He went back to the bed and sat, hooking one leg up, swivelling to face her. She was glorious, her hair tousled from the bed, from his hands, but fury slicked her skin. And he had nothing.

“I can't read your mind, Mace. If you want me to think differently you have to talk.”

“It's not you, it's me.”

Her eyes swelled to half the size of the universe.
Fuuck
. A line from every bad romance movie ever made, not even Buster's Antonio was that lame, and the sound of annoyance that came out of her was a new slash in his side.

“Jacinta, you have to know, what happened then, that wasn't you, it's my problem. It's got nothing to do with what we just did.”

“What we just did was intense.” Her voice softened. “I loved it. I was with you and then you went somewhere else and you're hurting. It's okay to tell me why. Is it the business? I know you missed out on getting capital from Jay.”

“No.” No funding and a competitor had surfaced, funding might not matter anymore. Dillon said they were one speeding car off roadkill. Ipseity might not ever be more than a toy he played with endlessly, like a kid so fascinated by dinosaurs they knew all there was to know to an obsessive level.

“Is it work? You quit, do you have another job?”

“No.” But it was time to think about getting one or Buster's legacy would go to waste. He looked at his hand, the one she'd drawn, balled in the sheet.

“Mace, talk to me or leave and forget where I live.”

“You painted me.”

“It's a charcoal sketch, but yes.”

He looked into her eyes. “Why?”

“You first.”

He looked away. She was a different version of the old Jacinta, in this tiny apartment, in this boho suburb, with her softer hair, and her brighter eyes, but it wasn't a complete upgrade, it was incremental change, the kind of upgrade no one but the most familiar users noticed. She still had the fire, the authority, that singular focus that made him wish he could fall into her attention and lie in its comfort. But he didn't know her that well. He'd spent more time with the virtual version of her than the real one.

“She died.”

“Who?”

“Buster. She shouldn't have died. She was getting better. I left her and she died alone.” He looked up, caught her shocked expression. “So it's not you. I just. I can't. It hits me that she's gone and I forget myself.”

Jacinta shifted down the bed, dragging the sheet with her, to put her hand on his arm. “Mace, I'm sorry.”

He waved her concern away and her hand fell to her side. Letting her see him like this made him stiff with embarrassment. “She was seventy-five. I don't know why I thought she'd live forever.”

He should be over this by now. There was something wrong with his latency, the time it was taking him to process this information, this emotion. It left him feeling broken, dysfunctional.

“You left work suddenly, is that why?”

This he could talk about. “I flamed out.”

She frowned. “Happens to the best of us.”

“What happened to you?”

“I didn't play the politics right. I flamed out too.”

“They pushed you out.”

She tossed her head. “I took the moral high ground. I quit.”

“And now?”

“Now I wait. There'll be another job, but at my level it'll take time.”

He reached for her hand and they clasped. “I don't think waiting is your thing.”

“I get a D for waiting.” A smile curved her cheek. “I called you too. From the office on the day I quit. I wanted to see you so badly. But I got your message bank and I was too chicken to leave one. Then I talked myself out of wanting you. I sketched you because that was a you I could have.” She squeezed his hand. “Do you hate it? I never thought you'd see it.”

He disentangled their hands. “I live two blocks the other way.”

She shook her head at the coincidence. “They only hung it because it's something they do for students. We all have a turn at having our work in the window for a week.”

“You're taking classes.”

She shrugged. “It's something to do while I wait.”

Which is what this would be if he didn't go now, and he wasn't up for being left again. “I should go.”

“It's okay to feel sad and to let me see it.”

He stood, looked for his shirt. “I don't need your permission for how I feel.” He didn't need her judgement, or her kindness either. He needed to be alone where he couldn't make anyone unhappy.

“No, but you seem to need your own.”

He tried not to slam her door like the kid who learns no one cares about dinosaurs as obsessively as he does, but it banged hard and echoed loud anyway.

He gripped the banister and took her stairs two at a time. Outside the cold night air hit him in the chest like the slap her words were. He plunged his hands in his pockets and walked back towards Dillon's.

He was hungry and frustrated. He ordered the pizza he'd intended to get when the gallery window distracted him and then waited outside the pizzeria for his name to be called. How long had she lived here? How had he never run into her before? Probably because he rarely left Dillon's place, preoccupied with avoiding the speeding car and cracking a new formula that would rip competitors' ambitions apart.

Crossing the road to the gallery was a deliberate choice, like not bothering to eat regularly. Standing in front of his portrait was another. The Mace in the simple frame looked relaxed, untroubled in sleep. The one standing on street didn't sleep like that anymore. Not easily, not deeply or for long; always waking too soon with a stiff neck or a headache. Or not able to get to sleep, staring at the ceiling for hours trying to empty his brain of useless backchat. Yet there he was on the paper, sleeping like he had no worries, in a stranger's bed, on a day the city was afraid. Sleeping deeply enough not to wake when she must've watched him so closely to be able to draw him like that.

He wanted to be that way again, but his life was different. He'd swapped places with the city. Now he was the insecure one. He was scared he was quietly going mad like his mother. There was a hereditary element, after all.

Buster had always said he wasn't like Mum. Never let him entertain the notion he might have her sickness. For now he'd put his lack of interest in the world down to grief, read up on it. It fitted, but he'd had enough. And what if it wasn't simply missing Buster and the fear he'd lost his dream to someone lucky enough to find the finance and the connections to make it reality?

His pizza would be ready, but he stood on, the hunger gone in the realisation he had another choice to make. He could huddle into his pain and hope it would eventually harden into resilience, or he could open up to it and let it show.

Dillon was worried about him, wanted him to talk to someone; badgered him about it. He simply wanted to feel good again, to sleep like there would be pleasure waking and to have that good banish the sorrow.

He'd felt good with Jacinta, so fucking good, even when she was drilling him; making him uncomfortable, making him talk, to own up to his feelings.

There was no security on her new apartment; nothing to stop him taking the stairs again two at a time, and pounding on her door till she opened it. When she did, relief grabbed him and squeezed the breath out of him.

She stood at the door in t-shirt that scraped her thighs and bare legs, hair still wild, eyes wary. She had nothing on underneath that shirt; he didn't need superhero powers to know it. He snapped his eyes up from her beaded nipples to her face. She was irritated. She turned her head to look away from him, back inside, looking for whatever he'd left behind. He knew what she'd say and cut her off.

“I forgot you.”

“What?”

“You were going to ask what I forgot.”

She held onto the door with both hands. She had goose pimples running up her arms. If he wanted inside that apartment, to be allowed to hold her again, he needed to be eloquent now. He needed the right words in a sensible order to persuade her to take a chance on him, no matter if the experiment was as short-term as the rest of the night or a cycle of continuous improvement that lasted a lifetime.

She wasn't going to help him out.

He had to say it. Mace stood on her doorstep breathing like he'd run a marathon. He'd dressed in a hurry, his jacket flapped open, his shirt was untucked, not enough buttons done up. His hair was longer and looked good on him, like the scruff from a few days of not shaving. But he'd lost weight and the dark patches under his eyes, the lines bisecting his cheeks, were new. He was hurting, but Jacinta could only help him if he wanted help.

He put his hand on the outside of the door to stop her closing it. “I left like this once before. But I went back for you. Then life got in the way for both of us. What we had was bigger than a weekend and it still is. I'm not walking away again. I'm not letting you walk either, without a fight. I've come back for you.”