by Helena Maeve
A vicious clutch tightened in Jackie’s chest. “Please, don’t go,” she pleaded. “I know it looks bad, but I wasn’t checking your work. I was just—” She couldn’t think how to finish off that lie, because she had been looking to see if he was still in the business—and if not that, she had been thinking about it, at least. It was the way she had found him in the first place. Without that website they never would’ve met and Tony wouldn’t be inching towards the front door now while Jackie tried desperately to cling to her pride and not follow him out into the corridor still dripping shower water. “Tony—”
“I’m sorry, I just remembered I have this…thing. Um…say hi to Marten for me.” He couldn’t seem to look her in the eye.
It would have been better if the door had slammed behind him, but Tony was too much of a fucking gentleman to let that happen. Jackie shivered. It was too cold to be wandering around the apartment wearing only a towel. “Damn it,” she swore, the sound of her voice echoing lamely in the empty room.
She couldn’t explain the kicked-in-the-gut sensation of being left behind like this. Her misgivings aside, she’d never imagined Tony actually walking out on them. And for what?
* * * *
“It’s not like I did anything I haven’t done before,” she insisted to Marten when he made it home later that evening. “He knows we’ve seen his videos. We’ve talked about it.”
Her boyfriend canted his head against the pillow. Sleep wasn’t on the cards until Jackie had got to the bottom of this. She had tried, but the expression on Tony’s face as he’d slipped out kept replaying itself again and again behind her closed eyelids, her mind stuck on that awful goodbye like a broken record. “He looked like I kicked his dog or something.”
“Does he have a dog?” Marten mused sleepily.
Jackie jostled him as she threw up her hands towards the ceiling. “That’s my point! He knows everything about us and we don’t know anything about him and that’s supposed to be normal? He could be married and have sixteen kids for all we know. He could be a serial killer.”
Marten cracked an eye open.
“Okay, maybe not so much with the serial killer,” Jackie agreed, sighing. She didn’t want to argue in favour of invading Tony’s privacy and told herself she wasn’t, but the reality of it was that their bed felt empty without Tony to burrow against her back or fit himself as best he could into the crook of Marten’s arm. She wasn’t so blind that she couldn’t tell she had driven him out, however inadvertently.
Sensing her frustration, Marten rolled up on one elbow. “He doesn’t owe us an explanation. His life is his. We don’t answer to him and he doesn’t answer to us.”
“I know that.” The petulant edge in Jackie’s voice gave the lie to that answer.
“So maybe we should have a conversation about that.” Marten held her gaze, shrugging. “I’m serious. We’ve been seeing a lot of him and I’d like to know what we’re doing, too. Is this just sex or…sex and friendship or—”
“Sex and love?” Jackie finished for him. She pursed her lips into a thin line, not entirely dissenting. She had been wondering that herself, but it seemed silly to assume, like mistaking fast-burning infatuation for the steady, fortifying flame of a real, long-term partnership. And besides, they barely knew each other. “What if,” she ventured timidly, “he’s been hiding something important from us?”
Marten’s eyebrows knitted into a frown. “Like what?”
“Like…someone else.” Repeating Clara’s comments in the car proved an easy task. They were etched into her memory and she needed to speak them aloud before they obliterated every other thought inside her head. “I know I’m probably making a big deal out of nothing,” she hastened to add before Marten could, “but if I’m right, not only is Tony seeing someone, I also work with her. This whole thing could get extremely awkward.”
“It’s probably a coincidence,” Marten said, repeating the same tired mantra Jackie had been peddling all evening.
“Yeah.”
Beside her, Marten dropped down to the pillow, sighing. “We should probably have a conversation.”
Jackie stared up at the ceiling, into the same cracked paint she’d watched a thousand times before falling asleep, or when Marten had her on her back—or when Tony did. “A conversation about seeing other people?”
Her boyfriend offered a small, acquiescing hum.
“Are we okay with that?”
“No,” Marten said. “Not really.” She could hear the unspoken but we’ll have to put up with it anyway if it’s the case that he held back. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but it was the truth. They had no claim to Tony. At best, they were the people who sometimes shared his bed, all because Jackie liked to watch his pornographic videos online. They weren’t friends—friends knew things about each other. They shared interests. So far, all Jackie had been able to find out was that Tony was an adventurous eater, great in bed and typically laddish, as he liked to say, about things like soccer—football—and rugby.
She rolled onto her side and pressed her lips to Marten’s shoulder. She couldn’t shake the sense that some vital part of them was missing.
Chapter Eight
Work the next day was a drain on the nerves. Not only was there too much to do to make room for trips to the coffee maker, but Clara had also called in sick, which meant calls were getting diverted to Jackie’s office instead, interrupting her every fifteen minutes. She wasn’t built for multi-tasking, whatever nonsense her magazine peddled about women being naturally predisposed, and she was seriously thinking of quitting when just around noon her smartphone came alive with the shrilling jingle of a call. She didn’t have time to answer, but a quick glance at the name flashing on the display told her she really should.
“Tony, hi,” were the first breathless words out of her mouth. “How are you?” Forced levity was going to show, but she tried it anyway.
“Hey,” he said, his voice hushed and slightly echo-y. Wherever he was calling from, it wasn’t very populous. “I got your message. You don’t have to apologise.”
“I really should,” Jackie contended. She glanced around her. There were too many people still in the office, so she had to keep her voice low and details scarce. “I can explain. It wasn’t what you think. I haven’t been keeping tabs on you or anything like that. A-and I don’t assume that just because we’re… You know, that you’ve stopped working or… You know, having a life.” She scrubbed at her forehead, but it did nothing to improve her eloquence. “Will you have dinner with us tonight? I know this great Italian place close to the apartment, it’s—”
“I can’t,” Tony interrupted. “That’s partly why I called.”
Something icy and unpleasant seemed to sink into her socks. It made her feel glad she was sitting down.
“It is?”
“Yes. Look, I don’t want you to have the wrong idea,” Tony was saying. “You and Marten have been nothing but kind to me and I’ve enjoyed our time together… Well, frankly more than I expected I would. But this isn’t going to work out. I have some commitments I need to keep in mind and with my job—”
“I don’t mind your job,” Jackie hurried to interject. “I really don’t. And I haven’t even checked the page since Marten’s birthday.” He would know what it meant. He couldn’t dismiss that evening like some kind of accident.
He couldn’t just break up with them.
“You’re sweet.”
“I’m really not,” Jackie insisted. “Tony, please—”
“Hear me out. You’re sweet and Marten’s a lucky guy to have you. I’ve enjoyed our evenings, but… You two don’t need me. Eventually you’d have gotten bored of the whole thing anyway.”
Jackie cleared her throat, something wet and uncomfortable lodged there like a goddamn hairball. “You don’t know that.” She couldn’t admit having thought the same thing last night. “The address of the restaurant is—”
“Jackie, you’re not hearing me.”
“It’s—”
“Jackie…”
She parroted the address anyway, despite his protests and his sighs and the tension she could hear in his voice. If he wanted to end the call, he was welcome to, but Jackie couldn’t just give up. She didn’t have it in her. “We’ll be there at eight,” she finished by saying. Silence greeted her on the other end. “Tony?”
“Yeah. I’m here.” He let out a long-suffering exhale. “Sounds busy over there.”
Phones were ringing off the hook and sixteen more emails had assaulted her inbox since she’d picked up. He wasn’t wrong. Jackie chuckled mirthlessly. “A day in the life of your average copy-editor… For what it’s worth, I just want you to know I’m really sorry about last night.”
“I know.”
“You’re still not coming tonight.”
Tony kept silent on the subject. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Jackie turned away from the office floor to face the wall. Her voice dipped low. “And if… And if I ordered you to come?” In different circumstances, Tony’s breath would have caught because he was excited. Jackie recognised the sound, but they weren’t in bed together and here, now, she couldn’t mistake it for arousal.
“I can’t believe you brought that up.” He sounded hoarse, his throat rough and used as if he’d been shouting for a very long time without anyone listening. He sounded shocked, disappointed. Hurt.
Guilt swarmed. Jackie bit it back. “I didn’t mean it like that—” He was the one who sometimes called her ma’am, who talked about D/s like it was nothing. How was she supposed to know what he needed to hear from them?
In the end, it didn’t matter.
“Goodbye, Jackie.” The call dropped with a click. It used to be that the dial tone would follow, but those days were gone. Modernity meant there was nothing between Jackie and complete, unforgiving silence.
She swallowed back a sob. She’d never cried at work before and she wasn’t about to start now.
Marten picked up on the second ring. “You sound awful,” he noted without pussyfooting around the point. “What’s wrong?”
“I talked to Tony.”
“Yeah? How did it go?”
Jackie sniffed. “I think we should cancel tonight.”
“That good, huh?” Marten sighed. “I’ll take the afternoon off. Let’s go for a walk.”
“Are you breaking up with me, too?” It wasn’t the same and she knew she was an awful person for even drawing the comparison, but there was no helping that it felt the same. Loving Marten and being with Tony were two sides of the same coin.
“Never,” Marten said, infusing the words with certainty. She believed him. She wanted to believe him. “I just think we need to have a talk about what we’re doing here. With or without Tony. Jackie, I can’t… I’m in love with you, I want a family with you—”
“Me too!” Heads turned around the office, but Jackie ignored them.
“But then Tony comes along and I find that… Well, I want what we have with him, too. And I don’t really know how to handle that.”
At least they were in the same mess together, Jackie mused sardonically. “I can’t leave early,” was what she said. “We’re understaffed today. Clara called in sick.” Probably, she couldn’t help think, to be with Tony in his hour of need.
Marten wasn’t so easily deterred. “Then I’ll hang around the office with you until you’re finished. I can staple things. I make a great cup of coffee.”
“How do I know you won’t leak information about our next issue to the competition?”
“You don’t,” Marten answered, a smile in his voice. “You’ll just have to trust me.”
* * * *
It wasn’t hard to do. She’d already put her faith in him so many times without being disappointed that once more couldn’t hurt. That he had stopped for doughnuts and store-bought coffee before coming to visit also helped. The work piling up around her didn’t necessarily get done any faster with Marten sitting in a corner and tapping lazily at his phone, but the occasional smile they shared did help smooth the jagged, frayed edges of her nerves. She was still a little off her game, but by seven p.m., she felt more like herself than she had when they’d talked on the phone.
“This isn’t the way home,” Jackie noted as Marten drove them away from the office, in the opposite direction. “Are we still going to the restaurant?”
Marten nodded. “Even if it’s just the two of us.”
She tried to tell herself it would be romantic anyway. It had been a while since the two of them had taken the time to go out together tête-à-tête. There was nothing to be done about the sense that something was missing—Tony had made his choice.
“I said something to him on the phone today,” Jackie confessed once the silence had stretched for too long and the radio DJ wasn’t doing a very good job of filling it. “I, uh, offered to order him to meet us tonight.”
Marten’s profile gave little away. “You did that?”
Jackie hummed her agreement. She had and she knew it had been unkind. She knew enough about Dominance and submission role-play from what she’d seen and read to understand that what a man liked in the bedroom didn’t necessarily have an impact on the rest of his life. Tony had never offered to rub her feet after work and he wasn’t ostensibly submissive in everything he did—except in bed, where he seemed to like nothing more than to be at their beck and call. Timing mattered. So did consent. Jackie hung her head. “I’ve really messed things up, haven’t I? Even if there was a chance we could convince him, I basically called him spineless, so…”
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.”
