Insecure

by Ainslie Paton

  She was so close, trembling, panting, eyelashes fluttering. “You are so much more,” he said.

  She thrashed her head side to side, he stopped her with a hand and her eyes opened on a gasp. “Don’t stop.”

  “Breaking me up, Cinta. Breaking me down.”

  “Oh!”

  “You know how I feel about you.”

  Her nails dug into his flank. “No. Don’t.”

  Don’t stop, don’t tell? He was incapable of either. “This is how I feel. This is what you mean.” He used his fingers to push her into release and he exploded behind her, taking her shudders and sharp cries and making them part of him, like the new scar under his foot, sudden, surprising, tender and healing.

  They held still a long time, their bodies cooling, their kisses gentling with their heartbeats. He needed to move or he’d crush her. There was a faint cry of sirens outside. They brought the world back with all its terrors.

  She scrubbed her knuckles over his head. “Before we know if it’s over, tell me you’ll stay one more night.”

  He put his face to her breast and licked lazily. “What does it mean if I stay?”

  “We could have another bath. I could fall asleep in your arms and be okay about it, happy about it. If you stay I can reheat nachos for dinner. If you stay we could do this again or...” she turned her head away.

  “Or?”

  “We could make love like last night.”

  It was anatomically challenging; he couldn’t kiss her and smile at the same time. “You won’t run away?”

  “I’m not running away now.”

  But he could worship her, this severe, unexpected woman who let him see her vulnerability.

  “Can we do that, Mace? Be this for one more night?”

  It was impossible. One more night wasn’t long enough, dark enough, filled with enough stars or the touch of her, but if he could keep adding the nights, one by one, a linear progression, followed by days, a tentative code—it would be the best thing he’d ever written.

  11: Turn Back

  Mace made her head spin, as though he stole her wits with her oxygen when he kissed her. If she didn’t stop kissing him back she’d be late and it was destined to be a horror morning, a nightmare week, particularly as she’d ignored both her phone messages and her inbox all of Sunday. She’d never done that. People were going to assume she was on her deathbed, and she’d pay for it in long hours and anxious deliberations.

  She needed to shove him out the door. She needed to step back into her life. But he was a kind of fever she suffered. Prolonged exposure had her catching the disease of him. Now his smell, his taste, the energy of him swam in her limbs and burned in her veins. Bad for her: drugging, hooking deep, and inescapable. The lockdown was over, but the siege of her heart was in full force. The remedy was amputation: clean, fast, surgically brutal, but lifesaving.

  And she held the scalpel. But she couldn’t bring herself to make the cut.

  “You’re going to be late.” He had to get home before getting to work. She didn’t know where he lived or how long he needed to get there and still get to the office on time. She didn’t know anything about him except he had a difficult childhood, was raised by his grandmother, and turned himself into a tech wizard. They’d not taken much time to talk, letting their bodies carry the conversation, and he wasn’t much of a talker anyway.

  Which made it hard to understand how he’d managed to learn so much about her. And harder still to understand why that didn’t make her feel apprehensive.

  She trusted him. With her body and with the elements of her life that weren’t part of her public identity. It was probably a huge mistake, a risk she didn’t need. Not because she thought he’d betray her secrets, but because she didn’t trust herself not to want him in her bed again. And that was a complication she didn’t need.

  It was intolerably unfair to have to suit up for battle after a weekend of such rare indulgence. But the morning’s newscast reminded her their time together had come at an enormous cost. Lives taken, damaged forever; the security of the city jeopardised and its confidence shaken.

  Mace took her earlobe between his teeth and pulled gently. “Can feel you thinking.” His hands were inside her silk robe. He’d been touching her all morning and she’d done nothing to reject his advances, she craved them, but now she needed to exorcise them. She had no place in her day, in her week, in her life for this, for him. They were more than she’d expected, so much more it was disquieting, but they’d hit the natural boundary of her tolerance for the disruption of her life. She had responsibilities. People depended on her. She was going to turn around Friday’s disaster and she was itching to get into it.

  “I have so much to do.” She’d given him a razor and a toothbrush and his cheek was smooth against her neck, his breath coffee and peppermint.

  “And I’m stopping you.”

  “Yes. It’s time.”

  “It’ll make me sound pathetic, but it was the best time for me.”

  She smiled, attempted to dislodge his hands, but with no success and no regret. “You’re not pathetic.”

  “I fall for my hook up. Definition of pathetic. And man enough to admit it.”

  She was CEO-in-waiting of one of the country’s largest banks. She had wealth and position. She had personal influence and power. People clamoured for her attention and fawned on her favour. She felt like crying because this gorgeous complex man was playing at loving her.

  She knew it was play; a hybrid variety of Stockholm syndrome where the circumstance had kidnapped them both and held them hostage to each other’s nearness. Outside of her apartment there was no reason for them to be. And even if she was game enough to try to fit a relationship in her life and deal with the scrutiny that would bring, he was hopelessly unsuitable. He was a junior employee. He didn’t come from her world of education and privilege, not that it made him a lesser person, but it made him an outsider. It made him a challenge. And she had enough of those to fill thirty-hour workdays.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself over to him, to the contented growl he made, to the arms that bore her weight and the lips that calmed her at the same time as they hitched her pulse.

  She’d lain in the comfort of him long after they’d settled to sleep, restlessly awake. She’d eased out of his arms without waking him, went to the kitchen and drank her fill of chilled water, then took the pad and pencil Jay had borrowed back to bed.

  The only thing she sketched these days were business plans. And for those she needed words and numbers, not fine and shaded lines. She barely held a pen, let alone a pencil anymore; everything was keyboard and touchscreen. There was a moon, enough light through the glass ceiling to see him clearly. She sat on the floor and filled the pad with sketches until her wrist ached and her fingers cramped.

  She filled the pages with aborted efforts to capture the way his hand lay curled on the sheet, the way his shoulder fitted solid and functional to his neck and chest. She drew the leg he’d thrown outside the sheet: the rounded knob of his knee, the elegant length of his shin, his surprisingly bony ankle, shapely foot with the bandage tape around it and squared off toes. The pencil had a mind of its own and wasn’t keen to follow her lead. She couldn’t get his proportions right, capture the latent strength, the resting spark of him.

  She attempted his face and almost woke him, groaning in disgust at what she produced. She got pins and needles in her foot. She made error after error of line and placement and instead of wanting to garbage mulch the pad, she wanted a better pencil, a bigger pad, a piece of charcoal, more time. Not that any of those things would help her get the look of him, the unconscious masculine strength and grace of him on paper, but because it made her happy to try.

  Last night she’d have drawn him forever. This morning, he was the one who made the cut. He pulled away gently. He retied the bow of her robe. He tucked her hair behind her ears, pinching their edge with a smile when it didn’t sting.


  “You’re going to be busy. Jay will make you crawl over glass.”

  He nodded. “I won’t louse it up.”

  “I’d like to hear how you go from time to time.”

  He shook his head. “No.” He kissed her forehead. “I knew what this was.”

  “We—”

  “No, we won’t. You work in your tower. I work in mine. That was the design of this.”

  He had it right. She’d chosen him because they had no need to be in each other’s space again, because she had no personal future need of his particular professional skills.

  He turned away, zipped his duffle and shouldered the strap of his laptop bag. She couldn’t read his eyes; so steely blue they were closer to grey, a washed out watercolour that didn’t fit with his solid acrylic vitality.

  It should be easy to watch him back away, a relief he was handling it so reasonably, so unemotionally. They were the two states she’d built her career on: rationality and logic, but this morning they tasted like chaff on her tongue; flaky, insubstantial and utterly lacking in the nutrients she needed. She missed him and he was still standing in front of her. She was ill equipped to deal with these emotions, they didn’t have a place in her life and they weren’t welcome.

  He picked up his duffle.

  “You have everything?” Not that he’d unpacked and scattered his stuff everywhere, but it was something to say that didn’t give away the strange emptiness she felt. Once she was dressed and in the office she’d stop feeling this way. She’d have no time to think about anything that wasn’t Wentworth business and she’d be caught in the rush that came with her job.

  “Everything I came with.”

  She moved around him to the front door, opened it and held it ajar with her back. He was still standing in the other room. If he asked to see her again, she’d say no. If he tried to kiss her again, she’d move away. She had everything she needed and he took nothing away by leaving.

  He gave her a slow nod as he stepped into the corridor. He wasn’t limping this morning. She watched him walk to the end and call the lift. He kept his eyes on the floor monitor. Rationally that was the best thing. Logically it was what she wanted. She should be in the shower, dressing, but she couldn’t make herself look away from him.

  If he turned his head and smiled, she’d call his name. If he glanced around, she’d beckon him. If he came back, she’d let him touch her and tell him they could see each other again. If he looked back, she’d find a way to fit him in her life.

  It was neither rational nor logical.

  Please look back. Please look back.

  The lift arrived and he got in, the doors closing behind him, leaving her looking at an empty corridor. She stepped away from her front door and it clicked closed behind her. She almost laughed aloud at her ego. Why did she think he’d want to be with her? She was world’s worst girlfriend material with no desire to change, and she’d made that perfectly clear to him.

  She was in the bedroom when she heard the pounding. She went back to the door. It had to be him, and he had to have gotten out of the lift before it went anywhere because he didn’t have the code to make it ride back to her floor.

  She opened the door. “What did you forget?” That had to be it, a split-second recognition he’d forgotten his wallet, or house keys. He stood outside frowning. He must be annoyed, his nice clean, unemotional exit buggered up by a forgotten USB stick or a sock.

  “You.” He pushed past her and dragged her into the room with him, dumping his bags. The door swung shut behind him. “I have everything I came with except you.”

  12: Responsibility

  Mel’s darting eyes told Jacinta what she needed to know about how wild and out of control her morning was going to be. But it couldn’t be any more out of kilter than the last hour. She’d almost let Mace lift her onto the kitchen counter and turn her into a writhing heap of jelly again. He’d made do with a promise she’d call him when she had a handle on her various work crises. She’d warned him that might be days, a week even, not to expect her to call anytime soon and not to call her. That’s the way it would need to be.

  There’d been a suspended moment where she’d watched him consider; weigh her conditions with his expectations, her requirement for control against his obvious desire to take this thing they had and see if it had wings that flapped.

  It was only then, when he’d drawn away, she noticed the tension in him, straining the muscles at his neck and along his jaw and knew it was for her. It made it worth the logic crunch, the irrational leap to see him again, even if what was between them never became anything more than the heat and the crackle of their bodies in motion.

  He’d looked away, rubbed his hand over his face, then given her that raised eyebrow, and said, “I can deal.”

  Mel handed her a printed summary of the morning’s media. “Malcolm’s been in here twice already. Are you sick or something?”

  Yes, that had to be it, but not sick in any way a doctor could fix. “Give me fifteen minutes and a short black then ring Alison and tell her I’m coming to see Malcolm.”

  Fifteen minutes was only enough time to glance at the contents of her inbox. It was 8.30am, an hour and a half after the time she usually started work. She sipped the coffee, scanned the printout, then her email subject lines. A dozen of the list Mel had culled for her attention positively glowed with menace, but the ones she needed to see first were those from Malcolm and Henry.

  Her intercom buzzed, Mel said, “Do you want Henry?”

  Yes. Deal with the chairman before the CEO. If Henry was calm it had the effect of putting a plug in Malcolm’s volcano. “Put him through.”

  “Henry, good morning.”

  “What happened to you? Mel says you’re not ill. Were you away this weekend? You should’ve said, or maybe cancelled, given Friday. You do know they went with the other bid.”

  She unclenched her teeth. “I want us to immediately move on Plan B.”

  “I’m not sure I remember what Plan B was, Jacinta. The rest of the board certainly won’t and might not be in any mood to consider it.”

  The door opened, banging against the wall where there was already a well excavated divot in the plaster. Malcolm strode in. Mel stood behind him, shaking her head, rolling her eyes in a sorry gesture.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Jacinta pressed the speakerphone button. “Henry, Malcolm is here.”

  Malcolm ignored the phone and leaned over the front of her desk. “Have you seen this morning’s press? Share price is down ten points. Executive meeting in an hour.”

  “Malcolm, the board will want a full report ASAP this morning,” said Henry.

  “Of course,” he said.

  In the open doorway, her corporate affairs director, Emelia Gianopolis, mouthed the name of a finance commentator Jacinta had no desire to talk to and no way to say no to. She nodded to Em, gave her a five minute signal and refocused on Malcolm. Mel came in and refilled her coffee. Henry was talking about the reaction of industry analysts.

  She covered a smile with her hand. Malcolm wouldn’t have cared if she’d been hooked up to a respirator all weekend and was trailing an IV drip tree. She was hopelessly behind on the information she needed, in a deep hole with the board, and would need to cancel a speaking engagement that’d already been rescheduled twice to accommodate her calendar. There’d be a hundred people in a ballroom who’d paid to eat roast chicken and hear her talk about the future of electronic banking. The chicken would be rubbery and they’d have to make do with Tom. Tom would be flexible and furious with her.

  Malcolm spied Em and chewed her out over headlines he didn’t like. Jacinta sent a text to Tom about filling for her and promised Henry his report. Mel put a pitcher of iced tea on her desk. She looked at her watch. She’d been in the office exactly twenty minutes. Not long enough to take control. Not long enough to forget the feel of Mace’s lips on her neck, but long enough to know she was exactly where she wanted to be
.

  It was after four when Tom strolled in. She couldn’t very well put him off, though she had another media interview in fifteen minutes. “Sorry.”

  “Good Lord. You owe me. You know how much I hate doing those things.”

  “Was it terribly embarrassing?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, with one being that deep suspicion you get if Dad says something complimentary, and ten being how migraine-inducing having to socialise with him is, I’d call this a thirty-two.”

  “Oh Tom.”

  “They paid to see you, the chief operating officer, not me, the mailroom boy.”

  “I thought we’d promoted you out of the mailroom.”

  “I didn’t get that memo.”

  Tom sat, he crossed his legs and settled in. “Where the hell were you yesterday? I thought you were probably dead.”

  She didn’t want to encourage him so she kept her eyes on her screen. “Thanks for checking I wasn’t. I had a day off if that’s all right with you.”

  “I don’t care if you went nude skydiving, but Dad was... Christ, if it weren’t for your apartment being in the lockdown zone he’d have sent the army in to get you out of bed.”

  “I wasn’t in bed.” All of the time.

  “Good a place as any. Hang about, you’re blushing. What were you doing?”

  She sighed and looked over the top of her screen at him. “People died outside the apartment, Tom.”

  “Right. I didn’t think about that. Awful, wasn’t it. Shocking bit of business. What a horror show that man, Kincaid, was. Mental case. Are you trying to tell me you were incapacitated by fear?”

  “Tom.”

  “No, I didn’t think so. So what were you doing?”

  “Reflecting, taking five, letting the dust settle.”

  He straightened the cuffs of his shirtsleeve. “You were having a big sulk, weren’t you?”

  Em appeared in the doorway. Jacinta waved her in. “Tom was just going. I have an interview to do.”

  Tom stood. He smiled at Em, but the smile was fixed on her chest.