by Helena Maeve
Her fists were coiling tight beneath the table. The last time she’d had to defend a loved one, it had been Christmas of 2011 and her parents had implied Marten wasn’t serious about her because he hadn’t proposed marriage yet. This was so much worse.
“Excellent advice,” Clara drawled. “You should follow it.” She gave Tony’s fingers a squeeze. “Well? Tell them, darling. Who do you love most?”
His teeth were gritted, his eyes downcast, but Tony still answered, “You.”
Every bone in Jackie’s body ached with the distress in his voice. But Clara wasn’t finished, “And who commands you, darling?”
“You do,” Tony said, the words heavy like the stroke of a gavel.
Clara turned to them, triumphant. “See?”
“See what?” Jackie shot back. “Other than you being super creepy, that is.”
“Proof that Tony is no longer your problem to deal with.”
Marten, who had been silent until then, shook his head. “He was never a problem.” To Tony, he added, “If you’d like to come home with us, we can…”
“He can’t,” Clara said, almost at the same time that Tony himself mouthed, ‘I can’t’. His shoulders lifted in a minute, barely-there shrug. Clara was driving this, not him, and she gave his fingers a tight squeeze, as if to recall Tony to order. “If that’s all, we should really be getting home. Babysitter is already claiming overtime.”
Jackie’s thoughts screeched to a halt. Babysitter?
“It’s been fun,” Clara was saying. “Jackie, I’ll see you in the office tomorrow, won’t I? Marten.” The waiter looked confused as they filed out, leaving Jackie and Marten seated at the table. Jackie waved him off. She couldn’t think of food, couldn’t wrap her mind around what had just happened.
Marten fell back against his chair. “Did she say—?”
“Yeah,” Jackie echoed, equally bewildered. “She said…babysitter. They have a child together.”
“We don’t know that,” Marten countered. He tugged a hand through his hair, as if that was going to do anything to dispel the cloud of confusion left in Clara’s wake.
“We know it’s not a coincidence.” Clara and Tony were an item. Their Tony—to the extent that Jackie had any claim to a man who had more or less disavowed them—was involved with someone else. Bizarrely, it helped to think that he’d been miserable while doing it, as though the pain he was inflicting was somehow lessened by the thought of it being shared.
Jackie wondered how she was going to face Clara in the morning and in all the days to come. The things she had told the other woman were private and grossly intimate. They were all couched in the farcical buffer of hypothesis, but Clara was too clever by half not to have parsed out the truth. She had figured out that Tony was seeing them, somehow, and used it to her advantage. But Clara was just one woman—to assume she had the capacity to force Tony’s hand was to endow her with more power than her five foot nothing self seemed to possess.
“What do you think she has on him?” Marten asked, absently fingering the stem of his wine glass, so far untouched.
Jackie shrugged. The whole experience had been strange and uncomfortable, with Tony’s subdued presence at the table just one of many oddities Jackie couldn’t make sense of. She sighed. “Maybe it’s the kid.” She was just spit-balling, but the thought stuck. Tony had never mentioned a family, or shown much interest in discussing theirs. Jackie had always assumed that was because he didn’t care, but she knew full well guilt could take on the appearance of indifference. It was chameleonic like that.
Marten nodded. “Okay. Let’s say it’s the kid. Is it a custody battle?”
“She did say she doesn’t approve of Tony’s job,” Jackie recalled.
“When?” Marten’s brows were furrowed and she realised she hadn’t filled him in on all the details of that bizarre conversation. Much of it had hit her like a freight train, completely blindsiding her to Clara’s apropos until it was too late. By the time Jackie had caught up, she had been already pulling away from the kerb, launching one last poisonous volley over her shoulder.
Jackie shuddered at the memory. “Yesterday, when she dropped me off.”
“Before Tony ran off,” her boyfriend surmised.
“That’s right.”
“So… Do you think she knew you were going to see him?”
Hanging her head, Jackie nodded. “I may have intimated something along those lines.” Shame rose up in her throat. “I’m sorry! I thought she was just curious and I needed someone to talk to…” She couldn’t finish that sentence—she had no breath left to tell Marten she’d been wondering what it meant to love two men at the same time. She didn’t want to use that word now that Tony had essentially slammed the door in their faces. If she hadn’t said anything to Clara, they might never have gone through this. Tony could be home, in their bed.
No, Jackie thought. Something else would have come up.
Marten clutched her hand over the white tablecloth. “This isn’t a Hollywood film. She can’t stop Tony seeing whoever he wants.”
“But he doesn’t want to see us,” Jackie insisted. It clawed at her to think it, even if it was true. “He was so upset when he saw me looking at his webpage. He’s not going to want to talk to us again.”
“Why not?”
“Because he thinks we’re using him.”
“We’re not…”
“Of course we’re not,” Jackie scoffed, loud enough that the waiter glanced their way. It took her a moment to notice that Marten was smiling wryly. She was only just now catching up with him. “Oh. You mean…”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Well, me too.”
Marten canted his head into a nod. “Yeah, I thought so. And that’s why I was going to tell you that we shouldn’t give up.”
“That’s the conversation you wanted to have?” Jackie asked, forging air quotes around the word for added emphasis. She’d been wondering if Marten was preparing a graceful exit, or some other kind of bombshell to outdo Tony. A small, guilty part of her had been worried he might propose marriage as a kind of balm. But Marten knew her too well to stoop to cheap tricks. The last time he had offered to put a ring on her finger, they had fought about it so badly that Jackie had ended up in voluntary exile on the living room couch.
“I don’t want to try this again,” Marten went on, “with someone else. We can, of course, but Tony was… Is—”
“Special.” Jackie didn’t have it in her to blush—strong emotions had been spent on seeing Clara and Tony together and realising they were Clara and Tony.
“Right.”
“We can’t just pursue someone if he’s not interested,” she pointed out, trying to inject reason into the relief she felt slithering through her bones.
“Are we sure Tony wouldn’t have come to see us anyway?” Marten insisted. “I don’t think it’s over. I don’t want it to be over. And until I hear it from his mouth, why should I believe it is?” He sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Clara is a perfect stranger, as far as I am concerned. At least you know her from work—”
“Don’t remind me,” Jackie groused. Tomorrow morning was bound to be an interesting experience. Her hand felt empty when Marten suddenly removed his and began patting his jacket. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for my phone.”
“Why?”
He had already found it and was thumb-tapping away. “I’m texting Tony. I know that’s what you normally do, but I’m giving you plausible deniability—and washing my hands of any workplace violence that might ensue.”
“I’ve created a monster.” Jackie sighed, only half meaning it. She thought about stopping Marten from finishing his message and sending it off—they weren’t exactly giving Tony a chance to make up his own mind. What if he really did want to be with Clara? But Marten was right. He could tell them himself. He wasn’t their submissive, he was their—friend. Their lover.
If he was through with them, wh
ich was possible, then he could say so. Whatever happened tomorrow at the office, Jackie was ready for it. She didn’t feel ashamed about what she’d done. She wasn’t going to pretend it had been meaningless fun. More importantly, she wasn’t going to give up just because some jumped-up little tart had told her to.
Jackie flagged down the waiter. “I think we’re ready to order now.”
Chapter Ten
She was early. The meeting hadn’t started and yet she could already feel the drumbeat in her ears, tribal and familiar, like something that had been with her a lot longer than spiked heels and nail polish. For the sixth time in eleven minutes, Jackie checked her phone. No new calls, no new messages—it was still early for London to be up, never mind New York and LA.
Jackie helped herself to another cup of coffee and made her way into the conference room. Even as a little girl, she’d always liked to be prompt in attending class. Better not to show up at all than to come in late, with everyone looking at her and the teacher making snide comments. Absolutes were a thing of the past—now she had a job she sometimes liked and a boyfriend she only sometimes understood and a rival she hadn’t known she’d acquired until battle had been waged and Jackie’d emerged the loser.
It was only one battle, though. Not the whole war.
Jackie sipped her coffee. Some ten minutes later, as her colleagues began to file into the room, she watched Clara arrive, looking as bubbly and excitable as she always did. Last night’s show of force was utterly absent.
“We missed you yesterday,” Jackie offered in lieu of greeting. “I do hope you’re feeling better.”
Something like puzzlement flashed across Clara’s features, a blink-and-you’d-miss-it kind of glare that Jackie recognised as the real Clara, the one that hid beneath the airy nonsense. “Oh, loads,” the other woman said, laying her accent on a little thick. “One of those twenty-four-hour bugs. You know how it is!” If she was worried that Jackie might give up the game, she didn’t show it. Her poker face was impeccable.
Jackie thought about life at the all girls’ boarding school and the petty wars that had been waged over the most inconsequential things. Back then, she’d been an outsider—the colour of her skin and her fascination with everything goth had cost her points on the social ladder. But the other girls hadn’t bothered her much. There was something about Jackie that inspired unease and her peers had known not to stir her pot unless they wanted retribution. She wasn’t sure what game Clara thought she was playing here, but she had chosen the wrong opponent.
* * * *
She didn’t have to wait long for hostilities to resume.
“I thought we had an understanding,” Clara said, her shadow drawing itself long over Jackie’s desk. Everyone else had jetted off to lunch, leaving Jackie alone behind her computer to surf the Internet in peace.
The other woman’s remark ricocheted without success. Jackie barely looked up. “There was no understanding,” she pointed out. “You gave us an ultimatum and we decided to ignore it.”
Clara snorted. “You must be joking. You’re still texting him even though he said he’s not interested? What kind of pathetic loser does that?” Jackie glanced up to find her waving a smartphone—Marten’s text message was clearly visible on the screen.
That explained how she’d figured out Tony was seeing other people. She would have recognised Jackie’s number early on and known the hypothetical man of their conversations wasn’t so hypothetical after all. With every attempt she’d made to dissuade Jackie, she had only been looking out for her own best interest. It stung, but Jackie couldn’t deny she had put the bullets in Clara’s gun herself.
“You confiscated his phone?” It stretched imagination, but not, perhaps, if dealing with someone so desperate. Jackie rolled her chair back to face Clara head-on. “I think you may have answered your own question there, princess… What I think you fail to understand is that last night you made a fool of yourself. Marten and I weren’t impressed.” The lie came easy to Jackie, it just rolled off the tongue. “And no, we’re not going to back off your man because you thought to tell us. This isn’t middle school and Tony is not property. He gets to make his own choices.”
“He chose me,” Clara shot back, defiant. “You heard him.”
“Yes, the emotionless delivery was particularly persuasive.” The chair creaked as Jackie stood up. Now they were at eye level and Clara was the one to take a step back to keep her high ground. “What are you holding over him, hmm? A kid? Money? What kind of woman would force a man to stay with her and quit his job—”
“Quit?” Clara barked a laugh. “I found him his job. He had nothing before me. You should have seen the mess he’d made of his life!”
“Be that as it may—”
“No, I got him on his feet again. Me! And that’s after he up and abandoned me in Minsk.” Clara folded her arms across her chest. “I’d only just turned eighteen and he left me in a foreign country!”
Jackie rolled her shoulders into a shrug. “He said you dumped him.” It didn’t make abandoning her any less callous, but it was an explanation. Every story had two sides, including this one. “Did you really expect him to hang around after that? Be—what, your lackey?” They had been kids. Just kids. Jackie couldn’t imagine making a commitment to anyone at thirty, never mind being twelve years younger and in a foreign country. Relationships required maturity, patience—all traits she’d lacked in her teens.
“Don’t talk to me like you know me,” Clara shot back. “You don’t know what I had to do to survive. To get home…” She sneered. “To pay his debts. Oh, you didn’t know about that, did you? No, Tony likes to pretend he’s some teetotaller hippie. Well, he’s not. He got me in a bad way with some people in Minsk and the son of a bitch took off. Just like that… I had to tread on my pride to survive.”
“You were a British citizen in a foreign country—”
That didn’t fly with Clara, who tossed her hair with a snigger. “Yes, my parents could have put James Bond on the case.”
“He wronged you,” Jackie was prepared to recognise, though it didn’t go a long way towards pacifying Clara. “Fine, I’ll agree with that. He was a stupid adolescent boy who should’ve known better… Still doesn’t give you the right to play gaoler five years on.”
Clara smiled, but there was an edge to it. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What?”
“That he’s twenty-three and you’re thirty…”
“If you’re going to try and insinuate I could have been his mom, you should double-check your math.” She wasn’t going to give Clara the satisfaction of an honest answer. Two could play this game of half-truths and thinly veiled insults.
“I’m just thinking of how this is going to work out for you. How will you introduce him to your parents, hmm? Or your friends? Will you tell them he’s a friend of Marten?” Clara perched on Jackie’s desk, careless of the keyboard and the papers strewn about. She didn’t seem to notice that her hand narrowly missed the sharp end of a paperclip. “Or is he going to remain your hypothetical man? The person who doesn’t really exist in your lives except when it’s convenient for you?”
“Now who’s talking like they know me,” Jackie bit out. “I liked you better when you were all ditsy and didn’t know how to work the phones.”
“Ouch. Don’t change the subject. How can you possibly think you can offer him what he needs?”
They were veering into dangerous territory. Jackie eyed the clock on her computer screen. Lunch break would be over soon and people would be filing back into the office. She didn’t want to make this more public than it already was. “The nature of my relationship with Tony doesn’t concern you.”
“Very diplomatic,” Clara mused. “Also complete bullshit.”
Jackie rolled her eyes. “You got him doing porn.”
“He had to help support his daughter somehow.”
There had been one too many surprises. Jackie didn’t even flinch at the n
ews. “Frankly, I don’t even know if I believe she actually exists at this point. But for the sake of argument, let’s say I do. How does that justify what you’re doing to Tony?”
“The porn? I had no idea you were such a prude, Jackie…”
The urge to rearrange Clara’s face burnt hot in Jackie’s veins, but she bit it back. “You know I’m not. I thought he got into pornography because he liked the work. Now that I know it’s got your dirty hands all over it, I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Do you honestly think I could force a man like Tony into doing sex work?” Clara asked, arching both brows. For a moment, she looked like her old self again, bewildered and slightly wary.
“Until last night,” Jackie answered, “I would’ve said no. But you’ve got some sort of hold on him…”
“Oh, please.”
“You do,” she insisted. “You think it’s a game, but for him it’s real. He thinks he’s committed himself to you and you’re playing him like a two-dollar banjo.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you care?” Clara rolled her eyes. “If Tony hasn’t figured it out, you’re not going to help him. He’s weak—”
“See, I don’t think that’s true.” Jackie vividly recalled watching him take all that Marten had to give and coming back for seconds. She had an image of him licking his wet lips as he waited on his knees until Jackie or Marten gave him permission to touch himself. He was all willpower, that man. He hadn’t dropped Clara’s hand last night, though it visibly pained him to be put in that position. Jackie narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “I don’t think you believe he’s weak, either. You’re just looking for a way to justify what you’re doing.”
“I do what I need to do to survive,” Clara protested, her gaze flinty.
Voices filtered in from the hall—their co-workers were starting to return from lunch. So much for privacy.