by Elle Pierson
Kenji caught the ball in one hand, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Yeah,” he said. “There was a dude a while ago. Big box.”
“Did you see who it was? What did he look like?”
“Nah, I didn’t really notice.” Kenji looked totally uninterested. “Just saw the back of his head over the hedge, then I made this wicked shot.”
“Did you catch what colour hair he had? Anything like that?” Sophy asked, not holding out much hope. She recognised a severe case of teenage boy when she saw it.
“Blond, maybe? Or black.”
Right.
“You didn’t notice anything at all?” she pressed.
“He was really tall, man. Like, yeah. Tall.”
Sophy sighed.
She didn’t understand unobservant people at all.
“Okay. Thanks.”
A tall man with a hair colour between blond and black.
That ought to narrow it down.
Chapter Nine
Mick’s features blinked in and out of Hades’s face like a form shimmering beneath the surface of water, recognisable one moment, slightly distorted and elusive the next.
Sophy sat back on her haunches, letting the narrow precision-size chisel and mallet in her hands rest against the wooden floor. She let go of the chisel and reached to brush the fine dust from the head. The shape was still trapped within the stone block, a creature struggling to emerge from its chrysalis, but the spirit was flickering awake. This one would soar into being like a butterfly, she hoped. She had never carved so quickly or so accurately in all her years of sculpting.
She had come into the workroom first thing this morning, not even waiting for Melissa to haul her derby-drained limbs out of bed, eager to be back on her home ground, in her familiar environment. This was the safe routine of her life, where she was on solid footing. From here, she could go out and observe other people’s drama and heartbreak, and then retreat to the happy, creative serenity of her own domain.
It was the prospect of never being able to…to turn off, to recharge, that she thought bothered her the most in the concept of an ongoing, full-time relationship.
Only this wasn’t a theoretical idea.
It was Mick.
And it wasn’t a question of whether she wanted to pursue a relationship with him. She had been in a relationship with him for several weeks now. It seemed to have happened without waiting for permission from either one of them. They just sort of…were. And the loss of control was playing hell with her peace of mind.
She was a messy, disorganised person with a casual attitude toward timing and scheduling. She had never pegged herself as a control freak.
It was very disconcerting, these new insights into her personality.
She was afraid of being hurt, yes, but it was the potential for causing hurt in return that was suffocating. He had been treated so poorly, so often. She felt a – probably stupid – responsibility to be only light and smiles for him.
They got one another. It was something she had never looked for, or expected to find. She seemed to have been programmed with the interpretation manual to the majority of Mick’s silences and reserve. She had a good idea of what he felt for her.
A relationship of half measures would never be enough for him. Probably not enough for her, either. When she committed to something, she committed.
But how did you reconcile opening up completely, sharing your life completely with another human being, while still being whole within yourself? She had never lost herself within a relationship, but she had never fully invested in one either.
She was in love with Mick, but she didn’t want to identify solely as one half of a couple. She was Sophy, and she wanted to remain an individual.
It sounded awful, selfish, even as an unspoken thought.
She was unhappy and confused. Right at this moment, the interior of her head, where she’d always thankfully withdrawn to be alone, was starting to feel like the playpen of a repetitive, sulky, spoiled brat. Seriously, could she be any more pretentious? The temperamental artiste, not wanting to sacrifice her time and her art.
For once, she welcomed the interruption of her cell phone, which bleeped twice in short succession with incoming texts. Scrabbling about in her bag, she hauled it out and thumbed through her inbox.
The first message was from Melissa, informing her that Jeeves had been sick on the living room carpet, and what should she do about it? “Clean it up” seemed like the obvious answer, but probably not the one her cousin was after.
She sent back a quick reply, promising to come home after lunch and deal with the mess. Her dog, her puke, she supposed. Even if it was probably Melissa’s fault for giving him scraps from her breakfast croissant. She always seemed to think that sharing negated calories.
Her stomach fluttered when she saw Mick’s name on the second alert. It was a characteristically brief note, asking her if she wanted to have lunch with him, and signed with the usual impersonal “M”.
Not that she wanted him to start composing sonnets or signing off with effusive love hearts and emoticons. The very thought made her reluctantly smile.
She texted back, saying that she’d walk down and meet him at the hotel. After a pause, she deleted her instinctive “x” and followed his lead with a simple “S”.
Suddenly she was worrying what he might read into the most ubiquitous, banal chat speak. She thought she’d successfully avoided this sort of behaviour in high school.
At least she wasn’t such a coward or so masochistic that she was going to avoid his company. She also needed to mention the incident with the paints. That whole situation was starting to get a little unnerving. It would be one thing if someone was openly flirtatious or giving off the most remotely interested vibe, but she hadn’t noticed a thing. And she didn’t walk around with her eyes closed to people’s behavioural patterns; she was usually far too self-conscious about the way others reacted and interacted with her.
A gentle knock sounded at the door, and Don stuck his curly head in with a smile. His hair was wafting about in all directions. There was always something sweetly lethargic about it, as if the strands had made a sleepy attempt to drift their separate ways and lost the energy to continue.
“May I invade the realms of creativity?” he asked, and invited himself in without waiting for an answer. Coming straight over to observe the birth pangs of Hades, he tilted his head and circled the sculpture, bending to examine the more minute emerging details.
Sophy waited for the initial verdict, her hands clasped in front of her, nerves knotting her gut. She trusted Don’s opinion over any of the other tutors. He had always been able to pinpoint her successes and resounding failures from an early stage. He was a great believer in first instincts.
“It’s very good,” he said slowly after a long stretch of silence, and she released a tense breath. Coming from Don, that was a ringing endorsement. “Very good,” he said again, dropping to a crouch to look up into the lowered, pensive face of the god.
He glanced over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow in a slightly mischievous quirk that made him look like a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “And you’re going great guns with it. You only started cutting last week, didn’t you? Must be an…inspiring subject.”
She felt a tide of violent red surge up her cheeks, and her eyes snapped away from the gentle teasing in his.
“Hmm,” she managed. She reached out her forefinger and touched the tip of her nail to the cold, chiselled lower lip. “Something like that.”
Hades’s flesh and blood prototype was nowhere in sight when she arrived at the hotel at lunchtime, but Sean was coming out of the exhibition hall.
He grinned when he saw her and immediately turned in her direction. “If it isn’t our damsel,” he said, looking genuinely pleased to see her. “How’s it going, Sophy?”
She answered him easily enough. For some reason, knowing that Sean squeaked like a seven-year-old girl at th
e first scurry of a spider eased her shyness of him. Arachnophobia seemed a lot more humanising than the old idiom about imagining people in their underwear, which she’d always found ineffectual at best and potentially traumatising, depending on who was flashing their knickers at her mind’s eye.
Sean hooked his thumbs in his pockets. He was dressed in a sharp navy suit with a lighter blue shirt that exactly matched his eyes. Objectively, he was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen in real life. He was one of those people who were so physically beautiful that they seemed incongruous in person, like someone had puffed air into a magazine cut-out.
She thought it would be awful, to have people literally turn their heads in the street wherever you went. And with all due respect to Sean’s intelligence and personality strengths, which appeared to grow on a person, Sophy found herself watching him in the same way that she might admire a Monet. Nice to look at, but she was happy to do it from a distance and not for too long. He wasn’t…touchable the way that Mick was.
“Sophy,” said Sean suddenly, with such unusual seriousness that she returned her full attention to him. “Listen… Thanks. For going to the wedding with Mick.”
Consuming, intense heat started in Sophy’s neck, and began to creep past her ears toward her face. The day was turning into one continuous blush. “Um. Did he…tell you about it?”
And how much had he told him about it? Men didn’t talk about stuff like that, did they? Unless they were bedpost-notching jerks, which Mick absolutely was not.
Sean seemed momentarily diverted by her high colour, but he refrained from pursuing that sideline, in what must have been a Herculean effort for him. “He mentioned this morning that you voluntarily went to dinner with Darth and Cruella,” he said frankly. “I hope he offered you at least three of those medals he hides in his sock drawer. How bad was it?”
“It was…” Sophy considered. She despised gossip, and with anyone else she would be loath to discuss Mick’s personal life at all, but she knew Sean was next door to a brother to him. And he was a significant improvement on the blood brother. It wasn’t even comparable. Oranges and really bad apples. “I just – I don’t understand how they can treat him like that.”
“And I wish I had an explanation for you. They’re just extremely unpleasant people,” said Sean bluntly. “I used to try to reason it out when we were kids, but there really is very little else to say. The majority of the Hollisters are not good people. Mick is one of the best.”
He was watching her carefully as he spoke, a hint of steel in his voice. Usually that sort of unspoken warning, the subtle ice, would resonate straight to her plentiful stores of insecurity, but in this case she felt a contrasting surge of warmth. This was someone who had Mick’s back, who would go to the wire for him – someone else who loved him.
“I know it,” she said quietly, and his face softened. He held out a hand and she took it. It wasn’t a handshake; it was more as if they sealed a silent vow of sorts. Brother and sister in arms, bonded by a common loyalty.
The young consultant, the one who’d first tried to scrape her off the floor during her asthma attack, and who still looked like a teenager doing work experience, came up then and claimed Sean’s attention. Sophy still couldn’t see Mick, and she didn’t want to go in search of him if he was working, so she ducked into the ladies’ room. For more practical purposes than escape this time.
She was drying her hands under a Space Age contraption, covered in fancy buttons and levers yet expelling less air than a bored asthmatic blowing out their birthday candles, when the door opened and history repeated itself. Sophy stiffened, immediately removing her gaze and wondering if she was just destined to encounter Jennifer Nolan every time she entered this bathroom. Like a really not-fun twist on the wardrobe in Narnia. The direct portal to Mick’s horrendous ex-lovers.
She shook her hands in an attempt to scatter the remaining water, and turned to leave. There were few people she would less rather speak to. And, unfortunately, she wasn’t a violent person, which ruled out drop-kicking the other woman into the lake.
Jennifer was smoothing her long blonde ponytail with one hand, while the other fussed at a pretty silver locket. She wore slim black pants, a silk blouse, and leopard print heels that Sophy would give quite a lot to possess. She would probably have to give quite a lot. At least four months’ rent money, if she had correctly identified the designer. Security consultancy obviously came with some financial perks.
It was amazing how efficiently a good dress allowance could disguise the horns and forked tongue.
Out of sheer habit, she stood politely aside and waited for the other to pass. Instead, the heels came to a stop, and she looked up to meet a pair of calculating hazel eyes.
“You’re the student who collapsed during the incident with the smoke grenade,” Jennifer said, studying her from her topknot to her pink flats. The condescending tone on the word “student” seemed to imply that Sophy had been at the exhibition accompanied by a packed lunch and a parent helper. She had adopted a “just us girls” tone, which effectively made Sophy feel a decade younger and at least a foot shorter than she actually was. “I noticed you in the foyer with Sean.”
Sophy said nothing. She wasn’t even sure if she could speak, and she didn’t know why she wasn’t walking straight out. As early as the school corridors, some women seemed to possess a certain type of compulsion, like those giant spiders in Lord of the Rings that paralysed their victims first so they couldn’t escape. There was usually at least one lurking at every cocktail party and academic function.
“As someone who knows the boys very well,” Jennifer went on, and Sophy was unable to subdue the flicker of her left eyebrow at anybody referring to either Mick or Sean as a “boy”, “do you mind if I give you some advice?”
She continued without waiting for a resounding rebuff. “I wouldn’t try to play one off against the other if I were you. I know you wouldn’t think it to look at him, but Mick does eventually catch on to these things, and he can have quite a temper.”
Sophy stared at her in disbelief.
“And it’s just a wee bit juvenile to play games.” Jennifer somehow managed to utter those words without being instantly smited by the god of hypocrisy.
Sophy had never been able to stand up to a bully in her life.
Apparently she had only needed the right incentive.
“Thank you. I’ll take that on board. Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
The hazel eyes narrowed slightly.
“How much did you bet, out of interest? What exactly is the price tag on integrity these days?” Sophy’s hands were fisted behind her back, but her voice was miraculously cool, steady, and audible. “Ripping your claws into someone who’s too honourable and too decent even to verbally slap back. That must be really satisfying. You complete and utter bitch.”
Jennifer’s expression had chilled, but she looked at Sophy scornfully. “Big words from such a very little person.”
“It’s not just empty words.”
“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Jennifer asked contemptuously. “Because no offense,” she went on, dripping sarcasm, “but I think I could take you.”
Sophy was absolutely certain she could. In comparative physique, the other woman was a nylon catsuit away from an alternative career as a superhero. Fortunately, she had a more productive use for her hands than throwing a punch.
She smiled back breezily. “Oh, don’t worry,” she assured the scowling blonde. “I can do much better than physical retaliation.”
“I somehow doubt I have much to worry about.”
Sophy looked at her once more, just for a moment, her head tilted to one side. “Want to bet?” she asked.
And she turned and left the bathroom before her knees gave out and completely ruined her exit.
Her hands were still shaking in her lap when Mick drove her home after their lunch at a waterfront cafe. The distance was approximately forty-five sec
onds by car on a good traffic day, but he was going on to an afternoon appointment in Wanaka, over the Crown Range, and he wanted to have a look at the box of paints. Her half-hearted joke that they were unlikely to be concealing plastic explosives or laced with asbestos had fallen flat. The whole meal had been awkward, with barely a word spoken and eyes skittering off in all directions if they accidentally made contact.
Seeing each other naked seemed to have thrown them straight back to the public shells of their first meeting: stammering shyness on her part and impenetrable reserve on his. When she did sneak a peek at him, he was usually watching her with a conflicted concern that slid back into aloofness under observation.
She was reaching out to open the front door when he stopped her with a hand on her elbow. “Sophy,” he said, and then hesitated, seeming to consider and discard various options for speech.
She waited, her knuckles locked around the door handle. Butterfly wings were beating a fast tattoo in her stomach.
His dark grey eyes were intent on her face, his wide shoulders tense. He reached out and cupped her cheek with one enormous, comforting palm, his blunt nails gentle against her skin.
Compelled by both the desire to put off a conversation that seemed to be gathering in speed and importance at the rate of an incoming tidal wave, and by desire in general, she slid her own hands up his sides, curving under his arms to clutch his shoulders and tug him down. Her mouth met his, hard and rough, and he returned the kiss without restraint, his forearms falling to form a familiar supportive cross at the base of her spine as he urged her up on her tiptoes.
He tasted good, he smelled amazing, and he felt frighteningly safe, but she was not so decimated by the embrace that she didn’t hear the door opening. She didn’t really believe that outside of fiction people could be so overcome by lust that they genuinely didn’t notice when their boss walked in, or the stage curtain went up, or the elevator doors opened, revealing them in flagrante.
