Insecure (33 page)

Carmen held her glass up. “Do you miss it?”

Jacinta refilled it. Yes, no, maybe. Of course she did. This was fun, like being on the sabbatical she'd never had, long service leave from all her stress, but it wasn't permanent. Mace was permanent; this was simply an adventure holiday. “The good days.”

“But you've painted before now?” said Agnes. She was the youngest to Ingrid's elder statesman and the good girl to Carmen's tattooed, dreadlocked extravagance.

“My mum taught me. I took art at school and dabbled from time to time, but it's been a while and I've got a lot to learn.”

“Is humble a line in your bio, like a core skill?” said Alfie.

Carmen laughed. Ingrid said, “That's not nice.”

“Yes. It comes after taking the trash out,” she said, aiming a pretend kick at Alfie's ribs.

They were all laughing when Mace came in. It was the middle of the afternoon and a weekday. She was hard pressed to remember when she'd last seen him in daylight. He left before the sun came up and was rarely home to eat with her anymore.

She went to him as he was dumping bags. He'd been to the supermarket and had flowers as well. She was instantly worried he was unwell or something bad had happened at work.

“Are you all right?”

He handed her the flowers, a huge colourful bunch, but he was frowning. He went into the lounge room, ignored the hello, how are you's, and pulled the plug on the entertainment unit stopping their music. “Everyone out.”

She dumped the flowers on the kitchen table. “Mace. That's incredibly rude.” She half laughed, half chastised, trying to make this less embarrassing. “We've got a class at four. We'll all be out of here in an hour. We were talking about—”

Mace looked at Ingrid, maybe hoping for an ally. ”I'm sure it was riveting.” Ingrid laughed at him. Alfie and Carmen were on their feet. Agnes had never met Mace. She stared at him.

“Mace.”

He turned to her. “You're skipping class.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“We'll be going then,” said Carmen. “Close your mouth, Aggie.” She tried to hustle everyone.

“I dunno, this looks entertaining. I'd like to stick around,” said Alfie.

Mace turned cold, determined eyes on Alfie. “Out, all of you. Now.” He went to the front door and opened it. There was obviously nothing wrong with him that an injection of decent manners and a thump in the head wouldn't cure.

She trailed behind her guests. “I'm so sorry. I'll come with you.” She wasn't staying in the loft with Mace for one more second.

Ingrid hesitated in the doorway. She ignored Mace. “Would you like me to stay?”

He answered. “I need her, Ingrid.”

Ingrid lifted her chin and stared him down, her expression fierce. She was approximately half Mace's size, but she wasn't the least bit intimidated by his Doberman to her Toy Poodle. She must've seen something she liked. She patted his chest, pushed Agnes ahead of her, glanced back at Jacinta and stepped into the stairwell.

It didn't matter what Ingrid thought she saw. Jacinta was having none of it.
Who did he think he was?
She stepped around him to leave and he blocked her exit with his outstretched arm.

“Let me go, please.”

He closed the door. “So civil.”

When he'd been so obnoxiously offensive.

He moved in on her, his eyes measuring, bouncing all over her face and body, his expression locked down, severe as a winter's night. She stood her ground. Let him pull that menacing stunt. She'd faced down menacing men before. He shifted quickly, his hand coming up to cup her cheek, the tenderness of the move at odds with everything else about him. She jolted from the shock and heat flooded through her as his other hand slid over her hip to grasp her butt.

“I haven't seen you awake for days. I need to be with you right now.”

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.

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.