by Susie Tate
I just couldn’t seem to get her wide-set, chocolate eyes out of my head. On the rare occasions I could actually get to sleep, I dreamt of her. Weird dreams where she was cold again but this time I engulfed her in my arms, warming her against my body until her shaking subsided. Why on earth would I dream of her? She was so far from my usual type it was almost laughable. Rebecca had been five-foot eleven, ball-breaking, curvaceous and blonde – not skinny, small, make-up-free (other than badly applied eyeliner) and nervous. I needed to get a grip.
I just couldn’t stand the thought of Mia keeping things from me – not my bloody company, me.
Which was ridiculous.
Chapter 7
Can we just forget that this happened?
Max
“V!” I shouted as I slammed out of my office. Everyone’s eyes swung to me apart from the chocolate ones that were haunting my every thought at the moment. Mia just sank further down into her chair and stared at her monitor.
“Max, what on earth?” V said as she emerged into the communal space.
I threw my hands up in the air and let them slap down on my sides. “I’ve bollocksed it up.”
“What precisely have you bollocksed up, darling?” Her cool, calm collected question only escalated my frustration. Why was V always so goddamn in control? It was nauseating.
“Everything,” I told her as I paced up and down between the junior architects’ desk.
V put her hands on her hips over her perfectly fitted, brown leather pencil skirt and her toe of one of her sky-high stilettos started to tap.
I huffed and threw myself down into one of the free office chairs, which creaked under the sudden impact. “It’s all gone to shite. We’ll have to cancel the bid. I’ve fucked it.”
“Well, before I ring the client and tell them you’ve ‘fucked it’, might you want to explain the problem to me and maybe we can try to fix it.”
I scowled at her with her uncreased clothes (my shirt looked like I’d worn it for weeks) and her sound bloody logic.
“Fine, whatever,” I grumbled, pushing up from the chair and glaring at the new hire next to me who quickly looked away.
“Don’t mind Max,” V said to the new guy as she swept past him. “He’s basically on the same level drama-wise as a thirteen year old girl.”
I snorted but my bloody lips twitched, damn them. V had always been able to make me laugh at myself – it was one of her unique talents.
Mia
I watched Max and Verity disappear into his office and let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. Max was just so … much. He had a presence that filled the space and sucked all the energy out of it. Tall, muscular in a bulky way, dark – like some sort of highly strung thoroughbred, especially when he was being teenage-girl-level dramatic, as Verity put it. How she had the ladyballs to say that to his face was beyond me. I’d expected him to explode after she’d teased him again just now. But ,if anything, it seemed to actually take the wind out of his sails. I’d snuck a look at his face after her comment and it even seemed like he was suppressing a smile. As if he enjoyed being the butt of her joke. Like he accepted he was being an idiot.
Nate would have never created a scene like that in public. He was always in complete control. No drama. When he was angry he didn’t bluster about, he went ice cold – and the angrier he was, the more precise, more devoid of emotion his voice became. And nobody teased Nate. I tried to imagine his reaction if I’d compared him to a thirteen-year-old girl and shivered in my chair.
Suddenly I was transported back in my mind to a year ago, sitting in the low-slung sports car with him, trying not to crease the dress I was wearing for my cousin’s wedding, and feeling the acute claustrophobia of being trapped in a confined space with Nate for two hours. But he was in a good mood. He’d told me I looked pretty. He’d even held my hand some of the way.
“The service better not be that long and there better be booze,” he said, his earlier smile giving way to the beginnings of a scowl – I should have taken that as a warning sign but I’d been lulled into a false sense of security. The service was going to be Catholic and Greek Orthodox with both a priest and an orthodox clergyman.
It was not going to be short.
“Nate, you numpty, it’ll take hours. You know that Tom’s Cath – ”
Wham.
My head snapped to the side with the impact to my face. I saw stars for a moment and blinked through the passenger window to stay conscious. As my vision demisted I looked down at my light blue dress. It was splattered with blood. I brought my hand to my mouth, pulling it away and looked at the blood on my fingers. Nate’s hand returned to the steering wheel. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. At the next roundabout he went all the way around and headed back in the direction we’d come from. I swallowed as the metallic taste filled my mouth.
“Don’t speak to me like that.” His voice was devoid of emotion. He handed me a handkerchief and I pressed it against my mouth. Neither of us said a word on the way home. Nate phoned Tom’s parents and sent his apologies. He told them I was throwing up something I ate. (“I told her not to order mussels if she’s not on the coast with a direct view of the sea.”)
I binned the blue dress and I missed my cousin’s wedding. My sister phoned me later that day, furious with me not for coming.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” she’d asked – at that stage my mouth had swollen so much it was distorting my words.
“Must be all the vomiting,” I’d muttered.
Marnie hadn’t believed me. She knew Nate stopped me going to the wedding and she didn’t understand why I didn’t stand up for myself. Why I let him separate me from my family. We got into a huge row. By the end of it my face was aching and tears were streaming down my face. That was the last time I spoke to her.
“Mia? Mia can you hear me?” I blinked and came back to myself with a jerk. My mind always felt sluggish after a flashback – as if I was hearing everything underwater and seeing everything through a thick haze. I shook my head to clear it and then noticed Verity standing by my desk.
“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered. “Er … did you need something?’
Verity paused for a moment. Her head tilted a little to the side and her eyes narrowed. “You okay?” she asked, her tone a little softer than her normal cool efficiency.
“I’m fine.” I forced a small smile, blinking to clear the haze and rubbing my hands together. Fear seemed to make me cold. I was so tired of feeling so cold. “Did you need me?’
“Max hasn’t bollocksed everything up entirely, but he does need your help with the 3D modelling again.”
Bugger.
I was still managing to avoid Max quite successfully. I suspected the pickle he was in with the computer was in large part down to that avoidance and I felt a twinge of guilt. Navigating all the updates wasn’t easy. Even though I knew he deserved to be ignored after insulting me again, my conscience wasn’t going to allow me to make up any more excuses. I knew they hadn’t won the last bid that day I’d turned up to the office half frozen, and I felt responsible for that – like maybe I’d thrown Max off his game.
“Sure, of course,” I said, pushing up from my chair.
*****
“How did you do that?” Max asked as he leaned in closer to the screen. We were both sitting at his desk side by side. My breath caught as his large arm brushed against mine. His scent – clean, male, hint of expensive aftershave – was just detectable in the air around me, his presence, as always, vibrating the atmosphere with tension and energy. He was just too much for me to handle in close proximity. I cleared my throat.
“It’s … um, I mean. It’s not …’
He laughed. “You can tell me it’s easy and I’m a complete pillock if you like. I’d agree with you.”
He was looking at me and smiling. When he smiled his whole face opened up. He went from just average broody-type handsome to sincerely gorgeous. He had a dimple for God’s sake. I de
cided that was too much as well.
And now I had lost the power of speech.
“Hello? Number Five. You in there, lass? Had a malfunction?”
I dragged my eyes away from his green ones and took in a deep breath. It only served to push my arm up against his again as my chest expanded. A low twisting feeling of awareness uncoiled in my stomach, along with the familiar anxiety I had been conditioned to associate with it. As I exhaled my breath caught and I started coughing. It was the third coughing fit I’d had that day and it exacerbated the rib pain that had never quite gone away.
“Shit, Mia,” Max said. “If you’re ill I shouldn’t have kept you late. You should’ve said. I feel like a reight bastad now.”
“I’m not ill,” I told him once I’d recovered my breath. “I never get ill.”
“Of course you don’t,” he replied. “You’re Number Five. Human frailty be damned.”
I smiled. It felt weird – like the muscles involved had atrophied from disuse.
Then I elbowed him right in his muscled bicep.
“Christ, watch it, Five,” he said and I froze. Cold fear stole through me until I registered that he still had that teasing note in his voice and that he was still smiling. Had I really felt comfortable enough with him to elbow him in the arm? How had that happened?
We’d been working on the presentation for hours now. All the others had long since left the office. At first I’d been skittish. It had taken a while before I would even sit on the chair next to his. I’d spent the first hour hovering on my feet to the side of the desk and explaining things to him from afar. When I needed to type on his keyboard I’d wait until he moved well away and dart in to do it, still hovering on my feet.
Still able to run if I needed to.
In my rational mind, I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me. Even if he was unstable, at that time the office had been rammed. There was no way he would do anything with all those people around. But it was difficult to quieten my instincts – the instincts that had been honed to detect threats for so many years.
But after an hour, Max’s anger with himself had cooled, and his body was no longer strung tight with tension as he realised I could help him out of the pickle he’d created. He stopped grumbling under his breath and had started to relax. Eventually he’d looked up at me and rolled his eyes.
“I can’t do this with you hovering there like a hummingbird on steroids,” he told me. “You’re making me nervous, Number Five.”
Me make him nervous? The idea was so ridiculous that I let out a small laugh despite my discomfort.
“Number Five?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know, Short Circuit? Jonny Number Five? ‘Input. Input.’ The way you flash from screen to screen and take in all the information reminds me of him.”
I didn’t think that being compared to a robot from an eighties movie was a particularly great compliment, but his voice was so warm that it almost sounded like one. I’d smiled and finally sank into the free chair next to him. From then on I seemed to slowly get used to being near him, slowly settle into the small ways he teased me, even managing some smart remarks back, and now I’d actually elbowed him.
He cradled his arm, mock-grimacing. “Those bony things are vicious weapons. I’ll have a teeny tiny bruise from that tomorrow. May have to report you to HR. Er … Number Five? You okay in there?” Max waved a hand in front of my face and I flinched in my seat. “Mia?”
The tone of his voice was now edging towards concern. God, I had to stop behaving like such a weirdo. It was obvious he wasn’t angry. There was no need for me to tense up so much.
“Fine!” I said, forcing a smile that I hoped would convince him I was a normal human and not a freaked-out mess. I cleared my throat. “Do you even have an HR?”
I could feel him staring at me from the side, but continued to focus on the screen.
“Ha! No. Maybe I’ll give that title to Yaz?”
“Yaz?”
“It’s not like she’s got owt better to do. Although she kicked me in’t balls a couple of months ago so I don’t think she’s exactly anti-violence where I’m concerned.”
“She what?”
“Yeah. That’s her idea of non-contact touch rugby. The little shit needs banning.”
“You play rugby?”
I couldn’t imagine Max doing anything outside of the business. He was so ambitious and focused I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.
He laughed. “Got to keep this old carcass semi-fit somehow. And it i’nt rugby it’s beach, touch rugby.”
I snuck a glance at his ‘carcass’. His long sleeve t-shirt was fitted enough to see the outline of his musculature. Semi-fit, my arse. I cleared my throat and looked away.
“Beach, touch rugby. That’s sounds … niche.”
He chuckled. “You’d be surprised. It’s actually pretty popular. There’s an annual tournament in London. They bring sand into Earl’s Court and make a massive pitch there for it. We got in’t semi-finals last year.” I’d noticed that as it got later in the day Max’s northern accent tended to get a little stronger.
“You play?” he asked.
“What?”
“Do you play team sports? It’s a mixed team and it doesn’t matter if you’re small. It’s not like normal rugby – speed’s more important than strength.”
If there was one thing I was it was fast. My speed and agility had rescued me from a fair few sticky situations over the years. But I shook my head. Lack of sleep and food meant I barely had the energy for work, let alone running around on a beach. He leaned back in his chair a stretched his arms up above his head.
“Gah! We’ve been sitting here for three hours. You sure you don’t mind staying like this? I’ll make sure you get paid the overtime.”
“I don’t mind, honestly.” I’d deal with the consequences of finding a place to sleep later – after all I needed to make sure I was useful in a crisis. I needed to keep this job.
“Want some Chinese? I’m starving.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I said, but my traitorous stomach had other ideas and it took the opportunity to grumble loudly. The sound seemed to vibrate around the silent office.
“Mia … I haven’t seen you eat today,” Max said carefully.
“Oh I ate lunch out,” I lied. The only thing I’d managed to eat today was the Weetabix I stole from the kitchen this morning. I would have loved some Chinese food, but I could not afford to waste the money. Max frowned at me as he pulled out his phone. The order he put in was massive. No wonder he had to exercise regularly if that was the amount of food he ate.
When it arrived and he slid two containers and some prawn crackers in my direction I realised why he’d ordered so much.
“I told you I was fine,” I snapped as I grudgingly took a seat at the other end of the sofa from him. He’d taken the food and laid it out on the coffee table.
“Mia, you’ve saved my arse by Number Fiveing the fuck out of this presentation. Just eat the damn food. Please.”
I shot him an angry glare, but relented when the smell of the Chinese hit my nostrils. There was only so much will power a girl could exert when confronted by a healthy dose of MSG.
Once I started the food I inhaled it. If I’d been alone I would have groaned in ecstasy. Max kept some beers in his office fridge and brought out one for each of us. I blamed the food and the alcohol – both of which I was unaccustomed to, and both of which relaxed me to a level I hadn’t been in months – for allowing me to let my guard down.
We’d finished everything and were talking more about beach touch rugby. Max’d managed to get out of me that I’d played netball for years (until Nate – of course I didn’t actually mention Nate). Max insisted touch rugby was better than ‘girlie basketball’.
“Uh, I’m sorry but netball is way harder than your pathetic game. It’s about precision and skill. We work off the ball to create space, we don’t just charge about like buffalo. As for it being girlie �
� your beach touch mama’s boys’ game might be non-contact, but if you watched any real netball matches you’d realise it is very much not.” Under the influence of the first bit of alcohol I’d had for a while my old attitude from years ago was starting to peek out. It was a shock to me that I could feel comfortable enough around Max to allow it, even if I was a little tipsy.
He burst out laughing and then seemed to get distracted by my hand around the beer bottle.
“Your thumbs are ridiculous,” Max commented.
I blinked.
“Er … way to deflect my direct hit at your pathetic sport with a random statement.” I looked at my hand around the glass bottle and then raised an eyebrow at Max. “I fail to see how my thumbs are ridiculous.’
“Look,” Max said, pulling the bottle out of my hand with one of his, then turning my hand so my palm was facing him. He then took his other hand and placed it palm-to-palm with mine. My thumb and fingers barely came halfway up his huge paws. My breath caught in my throat at the feel of his warm, rough palm against my hand. Since I’d lost weight and hadn’t been able to look after myself I’d felt perpetually cold. The heat from his hand seemed to seep through into mine and down my arm.
“I mean, look at these little guys. How do you even hold stuff with them?”
He moved further into my personal space from across the sofa. For some reason, either tiredness, unaccustomed alcohol, or having a full stomach for the first time in months, I didn’t pull away. In fact, as his scent reached me I found myself drifting towards him as well. His eyes went from our hands to my face and his pupils dilated.
“Mia,” he whispered and I felt his breath against my mouth. His face was so beautiful this close, it felt almost overwhelming. The warmth from his palm was still seeping through me and I felt a sense of wellbeing that I hadn’t experienced in years. I forgot to be scared. I forgot who he was. I forgot everything. It was like he was the sun and I was under his gravitational pull. I closed the small gap between our mouths and I kissed him. The first touch of his lips to mine sent a bolt of awareness through me so strong I was surprised that I didn’t pass out. My hands moved of their own accord to his solid chest. Just as my mouth opened slightly under his, his hand slid up my arm, over my neck and into my hair.