Insecure (38 page)

“Are you fucking Alfie?” The words came as sharp as the thought, as an arrow of torn pain.

She sighed. “No, but in the interest of full disclosure, I went to dinner with him tonight and he kissed me.”

“Did you kiss him back?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck! Why?” As if he deserved an answer.

“You have a demanding mistress, Mace, and she's a dream you don't want to give up. I was angry and lonely. I just wanted a kiss to feel good for a moment on a night that was spoiled because you weren't there with me.”

Christ
, that was a fatal knife slash to his jugular, but bleeding out was too good for him.

She left him standing there, went to the bedroom and turned off the lights. She knew he wasn't going to come to her easily there. Holding her at night had taken all his confusion and irritation and smoothed them away. He wasn't fit to hold her and everything he faced now, he'd set in motion. There was no surprise, no place for anger, just the wretchedness of having reached an inevitable conclusion of his making.

He needed air. What was in his chest was foul and suffocating. He went to the balcony and wrenched open the doors. Cold night and open sky, the smell of soft rain on the sleeping city. He breathed deep and let the spray sprinkle him. When the front of his shirt was stuck to him he took it off.

He'd hit the hanging punching bag enough times to have split one knuckle before he realised he was doing it. You didn't get to change what other people did because it hurt you. Otherwise there would be no accident taking his mother away, or the illness that got to her first. Now he couldn't breathe for another reason. He could hit that bag till his hands broke. It didn't bring Buster back and it wouldn't bring Cinta back either. The bag swung at him and he stopped it, hugging it, he held on and leant his head against it. His face was damp, rain, sweat, tears like acid on his cheeks.

“Enough, Mace.”

She was a silhouette in the doorway, huddled in her silk robe.

“Go back to bed.” He turned towards the city. He didn't want her to see his face. “I won't bother you. I'll sleep in the office.”

He flinched when her hand came down on his shoulder. “Come inside, please. I don't want to be apart from you any more tonight.”

He stared out at the city. It was resting, easy and quiet, but it could be a terrifying place. It had been that weekend they'd met. It had thrown them together and now it was a silent witness to them coming apart. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed against his back. He shifted, his hands coming to her forearms. “I'm wet. It's cold. You should go inside.” He'd intended to unclasp her but she kissed his shoulder so he gripped her arms to stay upright. “Cinta.”

There was only one decision he could make if he wanted to quell the rampant terror in his heart and have her back securely in his arms, in his life. “I'll give it up.”

She laid the side of her face on his back, her whole body now pressed to him. “You can't do that. You can't hold me responsible for taking your dreams away. You'll only grow to hate me.”

He was vain and arrogant and ignorant. Ipseity was the foundation his adult life was built on; giving it up would undermine him, fill him with resentment and change who he was. He could no sooner give it up than he could stand to lose Cinta. This was a deal-breaker he had no experience negotiating.

He turned and pulled her to him, and she came, pliant and accepting despite everything. “Tell me what to do.”

She lifted her face, damp now, tears on her cheeks too. He forgot himself and kissed her, and when her lips accommodated his, he sank into the kiss, settling her closer, shielding her from the rain. Would that he'd shielded her from his ambition when he'd had the chance, like she'd tried to do for him, explaining why second best was all she could offer, until she'd made room for him to come first. He couldn't give her anything less. But anything less was the death of Ipseity.

She had no instructions but she had willing lips and roving hands. She gave him everything her body had. Her sighs and murmurs, her soft caresses and her biting fingernails. She was wet clinging silk and slippery silken, fragrant skin. She was unending arousal and pleasure that pressed the pain down, levelled it out and hid it in waves of mindless release.

He took her standing braced against the balcony rail, and they were loud, demanding of each other, hurting one another good in the drive to be one, to wipe out separateness. He took her again on the hard floor of the studio where they tumbled when his legs gave out and it was slower, kinder, but still coloured hot by madness and loss.

He would've slept then alone on the hard floor, but she offered her hand and led him to the bedroom, saying, “Stay with me.”

The words made the walls of his chest tear because it was already morning and day would bring its tidy personality and force them to face the muddle. He slid into bed beside her and she rolled to face him. She ran her finger over his eyebrow, the one that ruined his poker face and gave him away so often. She traced his lips. He could see her measuring, evaluating what came next.

“Maybe it's best if we take a break for a while.”

He let the weight of that sit. “We're opening an office in Silicon Valley.” He didn't say he'd have to go, he didn't have to. He didn't have the right to make her dump her own life and go with him.

She smiled, her palm against his cheek. “I'm so proud of you. You're going to make it.”

He shook his head. He knew exactly how slim their chances were. They were a long way from payday and anything could happen between here and there. He'd done nothing to be proud of, and that she could still think it, say it, after tonight, made his throat close up.

She kissed him, the softest brush of pretty lips and he strained to get the words out. “It's me who's proud of you, though why you'd want my opinion now, I don't know. You were magnificent when I met you, so strong and focused, but you had that severity, that sadness from too many parts of you denied. You're not severe anymore, you're whole, you're stronger and lighter and more and more brilliant to me.”

He'd made her cry again. He pulled her to his chest and she gave him a watery smile. “When you get around to it you can say the nicest things.”

But he'd wrecked his chance to learn to do that more often. He stroked her hair, damp from the rain, and he held her like he used to when he didn't know this end was written for them.

He lay awake for hours, feeling her breathe, and when she stirred he let her roll away. And she took part of his heart and all of his hope with her.

Jacinta knew he'd gone before she woke. She dreamed it in a palette of bruised colours and hard-edged shapes with no proper form that dripped and splattered cold, and rose up as menacing black shadows before they sealed tight on her arms and legs, making them heavy and impossible to move.

She woke up sobbing.

She loved Mace, but she wasn't strong enough to hold their relationship together when he'd wandered so far from the idea of permanence. She had to make a choice. She could stay with him and wait until he had time for them, hope that when he did, they'd both still want to be together, or she could move ahead with her own life. She couldn't do both. And her own life was about to restart.

It took her a long time to get out of bed and she had no desire to leave the loft. Mace had left a note. He'd be home as soon as he could get away. They should talk. He loved her more than he'd ever have the words to say. He was sorry he'd ever given her cause to doubt it. He would find a way to make it up to her.

That only made it worse, because she knew what was coming and he didn't. The regular trickle of apologies, the broken promises, the separation, wretched loneliness and anxiety. Then resentment, anger, blame and ultimate disinterest.

Oh, he was wiser after last night, but she'd seen this from a long way off, when the possibility of her return to work was a distant hope. And she'd watched the marriage breakdowns of dozen of career track colleagues, men and women like Aaron, who failed to juggle work and partners, whose relationships went sideways into affairs or ended bitterly in division and divorce.

When Mace got home, he insisted on cooking, acting as thought they'd find their way again, but he was uncertain with her, craved her closeness. He didn't understand how much his life was about to change, how little say in it he'd have if he wanted to succeed. And he did want that, you could see it thrumming in him, the hunger, the determination to build his dream. She could never make him choose. She'd eat the broken promises for dinner, stomach the resentment, and carry the weight of the blame first.

They passed the week in a haze of hesitancy and tenderness. Mace came home, came to bed, and lay next to her, but when he thought she was sleeping he'd get up and work again. He knew he wasn't fooling her. She let it go.

It was the beginning of letting him go.

She did her research for the new job and had lunch with Constance, reluctantly put her business suit back on and attended the first interview. The job was interesting. She'd feared it might only seem so because of the long absence with no real prospects. The headhunter laughed when she said that was a concern. He told her about four other roles in the pipeline she could write her own job description for. He had every intention of making a fat commission out of placing her in a job that would make her famous.

She'd settle for productive, stimulated, engaged, motivated. She'd settle for less money and more control, a smaller playground and a bigger scope. By the time the fourth and final interview rolled around, Mace was ready to fly out to San Francisco and she was close to throwing off her concerns about the job.

She'd be working hard again. This time starting as an unknown quantity without the support of the family name, diving into corporate politics she had no way of understanding clearly, running agendas she was yet to formalise with staff whose skills and attitudes she was unfamiliar with. It'd be a wild ride, an intense first hundred days, and as long as the final meeting with the board ticked all the right boxes, she'd be starting within the month.

And yet for all it made her brain fizz, woke her competitive spirit, she was aware of what it would cost. There'd be little time for leisure, little energy to paint; the idea of taking commissions was a laugh. She'd lose contact with the art crowd, and she'd be alone, so very alone, because the cost of holding on to Mace was to repress the ambitious parts of them both. The only choice she had to make was how she let him go.

She watched him finish packing his suitcase. The date of his departure for San Francisco had moved dramatically forward, like all things with a start-up, subject to radical change. His cab would be here soon.

This time he'd be away longer, an unspecified amount of time. He said it was fluid, that nothing was fixed, that he'd come home immediately if she needed him, but he packed almost every piece of clothing in his functional wardrobe, and he must've known in his heart she wouldn't call him back.

When the taxi drove away, the only remaining trace of him would be the furniture he'd set them up with, the photographs changing in the digital frame, his old car in the garage and the painting of him he'd never seen on her covered easel.

He was agitated, unsettled; anxious about the trip, setting up the office and leaving her, but excited about going and apprehensive about showing it.

“You're going to be fine.”

He sat on the bed, looking at his shoes. “I have no idea what I'm doing. We should've let Anderson hire a new CEO when he wanted to. We could lose all this so easily.”

She stayed by the wardrobe. She'd steeled herself these last few weeks to limit her proximity to him, because the need to be in his arms was so compelling and he was so willing to have her there, but too hesitant to force the contact.

He looked over, his expression torn between excitement and longing. “Come with me. Throw stuff in a bag now and come with me.” He stood. “Fuck, just come as you are and we'll buy what you need.”

Stunned, she shook her head. He'd suggested this when the trip date firmed, but vaguely, as if he was more afraid of her saying yes than no, but maybe she'd misunderstood him, because there was no ambiguity in him now. Her breathing stalled. She folded her arms across her ribs. He was offering her another choice. What if she took it?

“Cinta, come with me.”

“No.” It was too late. Mace was trying to hold on to something that had already slipped away.

He stepped in front of her, put his hand to her face. “If not now, tomorrow, this week, next week, whenever you're ready.”

Cat with a mouse, she felt cornered. She'd be torn apart whichever way she ran. “No.”

“Why not?” His voice got sharp. He looked at his watch. “What's stopping you?”

Her choices had narrowed suddenly, shockingly. The option of letting their relationship continue to drift, to shake loose slowly, and inevitably end softly with the fondness they deserved to have for each other was closing out.

She couldn't afford to be the mouse anymore. She had to roar. “It would be the same thing in a different city.”

He stroked his thumb across her cheek. “We'd be together.”

She looked into his eyes and wondered if this would be the last time. “No, you'd be working, and I'd be waiting for you to have time for me.”

He dropped his hand in frustration, smacking it on his thigh. “That's the whole problem isn't it? You say you love me, but you won't wait for me.”

“As I would never have asked you to wait for me.” Oh God, this was hard, much harder than she was ready for. “And if you were thinking clearly you wouldn't ask me to do it for you either.”

“I'm thinking clearly and I'm asking.” He frowned. “Again. I'm asking again. We love each other. We're stronger than this. Come with me.”