She should’ve backed away from the rawness in him, grabbed her keys and opened the door, but to her disgust she was so turned on by his edgy frustration, so melted by his words, his voice and hands. “You don’t get to come in here, act like a pig and make demands like that.”
“I can’t be nice. I don’t care if all you do is scream at me. I need to hear your voice. I don’t care if all you do is slap me, I need your touch.”
He’d moved closer so her body was grazed by his and she swayed towards him. “You were so rude.”
“I’m coming apart, Cinta.”
“I hate you so much right now.”
He moved the hand on her cheek to her ear, rubbed the helix between his thumb and finger. He’d been so stiff and unyielding, but his touch was smooth. “So long as you still feel something for me.”
She angled her face away, a last ditch effort to pretend escape. “You are so sacked as my boyfriend.”
He gave a soft laugh and his fingers pushed through her hair. “You owe me a bunch of warnings before you sack me from that job.”
He turned her head back around and she let him. “Consider that the first one.” He groaned and brought his face close, nose in her hair, breathing her. “What’s wrong, Mace?”
His arms came around her and pulled her close. “I’m terrified.”
She touched his chest, his face. “Of what?”
“Losing us.”
Her heart double tapped. “That’s not going to happen.” She wound her arms around his neck.
“No?” His shoulders slumped. He was exhausted. “Why do I feel it?”
She shook her head, because she felt it too, the absence, the slow drift apart. She’d expected it, but it went down hard, and it tore her up it was affecting him so much. She kissed his jaw, his lips, pressing her fingers into his skull. “Let me make you feel something else.”
He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom and she undressed him, unpeeling him slowly from his clothes. He’d not regained the weight he lost in India, but he’d retained his exercise regime so his body was a miracle of hard planes and angles, ropey muscles and firm tendons.
“I want to paint you like this, so strong, so vulnerable.” She dragged her open mouth over his chest and down to his abdomen. His hands tangled in her hair and he pulled her shirt off over her head as she went to her knees.
“No.” He came down to his knees in front of her. “I need your eyes on mine.” He pushed her till she sat with her back against the bed and he knelt, legs either side of her shins, and took her face in his hands. His kisses were so slow and thorough, she was delirious when he lifted her again and placed her on the bed.
“I miss you. Your skin, your smell, your taste.” He tugged open the tie on her pants, sliding his hand into her underwear. “Going mad not having you.”
It was her turn to be sensuously stripped. He did it as though they had all the time in the world, as though nothing else mattered except the exact craft of worshipping her body in exquisite, painstaking detail. It took a long time before he wanted to enter her, and she was liquid need. Once he was seated deep, he settled on his elbows and she fell into his eyes, not tired anymore but full of everything he felt for her and everything he worried about. She tried to kiss his tension away, but it built in her with his slow steady pumps until she was clawing at him, bucking beneath him and fighting to find her release, calling his name, over and over.
He took her up and brought her down again, before he took his own end, trembling against her in storm of emotion that made him shutter his eyes then tuck his face to her neck. He was asleep almost as soon as he rolled and pulled her into the spoon of him and they slept the evening away, forgiving everything but resolving nothing.
When she woke in the morning he was gone. But he’d pinned a piece of her sketchpad paper to the door. He’d drawn a huge winged love heart with an arrow piercing it and their initials. She left it there to remind them both of what they had.
34: Brutality
In another group, there would’ve been a drinking game. Not this crowd. Everyone here was too exhausted to drink, too competitive to risk losing. The month end Summers-Denby come to Jesus, meeting of the incubator survivors, was as brief as it was brutal as it was revealing.
Anderson simply gathered them together and they could tell by who wasn’t in the room who’d already been asked to leave. It was better than public humiliation, but not much. Then he told them why the crashed out company had burned up and put the fear of a flash fire in all of them. The end of someone’s dream made for poor entertainment and nervous expressions all around.
There were four companies left now. Ten founders. Not one of them was eating properly, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, or winning friends and family. Not one of them was giving up.
The three founders from the betting software platform were at each other’s throats, could hardly make eye contact, but they pulled it together enough to meet their milestones. Janelle had an abscessed tooth, but instead of taking time out to see a dentist she was walking around with a bag of frozen peas held to her jaw. You knew where she’d been by the drips of water on the floor. Ramesh had moved into his office so he didn’t waste time travelling to and from home. The guy seriously needed to shower more. Carl went to pick up his kid at kindy for the first time all year and didn’t recognise him amongst all the other blond blue-eyed three-year-old terrors tearing about the playground, and Antony’s wife had moved out.
It wasn’t the first relationship to break up. Ramesh’s girlfriend left him months ago. Janelle said she hadn’t been laid in over two years. Dillon said he didn’t even think about hooking up anymore.
Jay was single and so was Anderson. Maybe this was a single person’s game. Being alone meant you didn’t have to consider anyone else’s feelings. Mace hadn’t spent more than half an hour with Cinta not fraught with the fear he was wasting time for weeks. This start-up business was like gladiator school; there was no space to think, no sympathy for error, no second too precious, and the lions were hungry for more failure.
Immediately after the meeting, he ran into Monica in the kitchen. She was so deathly pale he asked if she was all right. She told him dispassionately how she found out her husband was having an affair with their nanny by watching a nanny-cam feed, and how she didn’t have the headspace to work through whether to chuck him or the nanny out.
“The nanny at least looks after the kids. All Selwyn does is complain about me never being there.”
“Is it...can you...? God.”
Monica laughed. “It’s okay, Mace, you don’t have to say anything. There’s nothing to say.” She slid a frozen meal in the microwave. “I guess I should’ve seen this coming. Our marriage worked when Selwyn got what Selwyn needed: a stable home life, an available wife, well behaved kids. Now I’m never there and he has to do the washing, make beds, empty the dishwasher and help with homework. I thought our marriage was strong enough to take this, but it’s not, and better that I learn it now than if we get final funding, because it’s only going to get worse.”
“And if...” He didn’t have to finish.
“If we don’t, well, I learned something about my husband that maybe I don’t want to live with for the rest of my life.”
That was so pragmatic it took Mace’s appetite away. He quit the kitchen thinking about Cinta and how the fuck he’d managed to end up one of the only players with a stable relationship. He didn’t have the track record for it and it made his mouth desert dry to think about how easily he could blow it.
He rarely rang Cinta in the middle of the day, he rarely thought about her when he was here; there were thousands of deadlines and critical decisions pushing on his head, eating his brain like gladiator zombies with their own zombie lions.
He dialled her phone. He had no idea how her show prep was coming, if her job search showed any promise. He had no idea if he’d worn out what they had.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she
answered.
That said it all. They almost had no conversation that wasn’t about Ipseity. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Want me to sing?”
She sounded amused. She sounded like home and relaxation, tea and hot buttered toast someone else had made and brought to you by a warm fire. “Can you sing?” Why didn’t he already know that?
She laughed. “Not a note. Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing.” Other than the feeling of unease cramping the back of his neck. “What are you doing?”
“I’m very, very busy.” He could hear traffic, other noises that weren’t the soundscape of the loft. “I’m sitting in the sun. I’ve got coffee, a sandwich and a book.”
“What book?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. What book?”
“It’s called The Sheik’s Secret Wife’s Lover’s Baby.”
He laughed. There was no way. But a few of Buster’s books with just as implausible titles had made it into the loft, piggybacking on the day bed, tucked in between the mattress and the springs, and Cinta had given him a caning for it, calling him a closet romance reader. God, he loved her. “Yeah, what’s the baby’s name?”
“You’re worrying me. It’s end of month, tell me you and Dillon are okay, you made it through.”
“We made it through. Everything’s all right.” Except for whatever this was twisting his gut, a kind of panic attack he didn’t have time for. At least he was managing it better this time, he hadn’t raced home and thrown her friends out, demanded sex with her. What a fuckwit he’d been.
“I’m reading Disruption: Jobs that will power the future. Sheik’s Secret whatever would be more fun. Mace, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m tired. I’m just... We’re all right aren’t we? You and me, we’re okay?” He pinched the bridge of his nose, there was a headache lurking. What the fuck was he going to do if she said no? He didn’t have Ramesh’s fatalism or Monica’s practicality. He was relying on Cinta to get them through this as a couple, because he didn’t know the first thing about surviving in a relationship that was stressed.
“I love you. We’re fine. I miss you, but I know this is what you have to do.”
“I, how? Fuck.” he groaned. “How did I get so lucky to have you hit on me?”
“I liked your swagger.”
She wanted him to laugh but he didn’t have it in him.
“Mace, we’re okay. We can do this. Whatever upset you we can talk it through. When will you be home tonight?”
He swiped the screen on his tablet, checked his to do list. “I’ll be late, baby.”
“How late?”
“Don’t wait for me. You should go to bed.” He’d said that a lot lately. This time he felt the heft of it, a solid block of egotistical ambition forming a barrier between them.
“Shall I bring you dinner?” She’d done that a lot lately. Bringing Chinese, Indian or Thai for him and Dillon. He’d rather heat one of the frozen meals provided for them than deal with the guilt of dragging her out on that selfless mission.
“No. I’ll get something here and try not to be too late.” They both knew that last bit was an empty promise, but Cinta let him make it without complaint and he did nothing to kick the dishonesty.
He rang off. He got back to work. He meant to send her flowers, chocolates, anything so she knew how much she meant to him. He meant to open an account with some delivery mob so he could do that easily, often. It was an insurance policy, like Carl taking pictures of his kid with his phone, like Monica consulting a lawyer, but Dillon needed new budget inputs and there was a meeting about locations and he forgot, and when he got home she was asleep and rather than wake her he slept on the couch in his office.
They’d be all right. They’d be fine. Cinta understood. He had to trust that.
35: Fantasy
“You have twelve,” Mace said, while Jacinta was tidying up after a rare meal together. He sat at the kitchen table and it made her happy, just that simple act of him being there. If he was home, he was usually extra silent and withdrawn, working some problem in his head while she tried to make conversation and draw him out. He’d eat like a hungry cannibal and then disappear into his office and she’d go to bed alone. But tonight he was with her, and he’d been in the studio. He’d counted.
“Close enough.” Her final selection was still a work in progress.
“It’s a theme. But I’m not sure if I get it. Something about the colours and the way you use the canvas, like everything is in half or mirrored.”
He’d done more than counted. He didn’t come home with flowers and groceries; he didn’t get all gruff and alpha demanding. He gave her his most precious commodity—time.
She dumped the tea towel and leant on the table opposite him. “How long were you in there?”
“Long enough to see how hard you’ve worked.”
He might’ve whispered sex in her ear, naughty, joyous crudities; the words that made her lose her breath, curled her toes to rigid points on legs that hugged his hips. “It’s about wholeness.”
He reached forward and circled a finger around her ear. “Ah-huh.”
He was often abrupt and offhand with her and she got it. He was deadly tired and couldn’t afford to slow down. He was inconsiderate and insensitive because he was tense and anxious, and it spilled over in dozens of unexpected little ways: a burst of temper because they were out of milk, a phone call that never came, a commitment forgotten. They stabbed her like pricks from a sharp spike. But not tonight.
“Sometimes that’s a straight equation, two identical halves. Sometimes it’s more complex and the pieces don’t necessarily reflect the whole.” Did that make sense to him? Would it make sense to anyone who came to the show? She gave him the edited version, tense about this moment being spoiled if he lost interest.
“Your life. My life. Our life. Our whole is a lot lopsided right now, baby. I’m sorry about that.” He leaned forward and kissed her gently. “Don’t sack me yet, okay.”
She was an industrial spill, a trip hazard of bone gunge and sinew sludge, muscle mucus and organ mud. He got it.
All the wrappings were off her heart where it came to Mace. So when he hurt her, no matter how incidental, no matter how she understood it wasn’t deliberate, she bled hard. She’d made use of that hurt with a brush and a canvas and he wasn’t hurting her now.
The quickest way to him was over the table. She came up on her knees and launched herself at him. He caught her under the arms, pushed his chair back and hauled her into his lap. It’d been so long since they’d fooled around, since he’d done more than given her an absent-minded kiss, or touched her with the same intention as he pocketed his phone, for the efficient habit of it.
“You get it. I’m so scared people won’t, or they’ll think it’s too basic, too simplistic to be worthwhile.” She was so eager to talk about this, and so impatient to be closer to him.
He rubbed his nose along her cheek to her temple, but his hands lay still on her thighs. He didn’t reject her kiss, but he didn’t fall into it either. He made an ambiguous murmur, more complaint than compliance and she knew her rationing of time was over. He was mentally already at his desk, even while she tried to convince him there were other ways to spend the evening. He left her in the kitchen with the rest of the after-dinner clean-up and went back to work.
She threw cutlery in the sink. She chipped a cup. She slammed the fridge door. She knew emotional turmoil, she knew loneliness, but she’d never experienced them from so close up, with such a soft belly. And yet she’d been ready for this. But it was harder, more hurtful than she’d imagined.
She took that complex war between love and patience, resentment and tolerance, to the studio day after day, night after night, and used it to complete her paintings for the show. It was good fuel, it burned clean, so the work felt solid, but it also left her aching.
When she’d first started to
paint without hating it, sometimes the mood would strike in the middle of the night. She’d slip out of Mace’s arms and leave their bed. He always woke and came looking for her. She’d feel his hands, his chest, his hot breath on the back of her neck and the scratch of his stubble when he nuzzled close. He didn’t speak, he didn’t interrupt. He’d shuffle back to bed, but he’d let her know he was aware she’d gone missing.
Would he know she was missing now? Not misplaced like house keys, not put away somewhere safe but forgotten, but missing from his life, as he was from hers. She lay in bed and knew he wouldn’t come in until she slept, if at all. She’d have to show him. She’d have to bring him to bed. She went to the office. He had two screens in front of him and a notepad on the desk. He had his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands.
“Mace.” He jerked upright with a grunt.
She stood behind his chair. “You’re done in. Come to bed.”
“In a minute.”
In a minute meant in an hour, in a day. It meant when the problem was solved or brain function ceased to produce more than sitting upright, breathing and blinking. She’d been there a thousand times and there’d been no one to suggest a better way.
She put her hands to his neck, so tight. She didn’t have his skill at massage but she pressed her fingers in to the unyielding muscle and stroked up towards his hairline. “Whatever it is, it will be easier to fix if you sleep.”
He groaned and pushed into the chair, tipping his head back and looking at her over the top of it. “Please. I have to get this done.”
She was being dismissed. Again. Well, not this time. “Why don’t we see if I can help?”
“Cinta, it’s late, go to bed.”
“I want to help.”
He sat forward and thumped his hand on the pad. “Can you rejig this program so it doesn’t produce dross?” He twisted his head to glare at her. “I don’t think so. Go to bed.”
“You’re wrong. I can help.”
He swung the chair around and she had to step back out of the way of his knees. “Go the fuck to bed.”
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