“He said he used to work for Wentworth.”
“He doesn’t still?”
“Told me he quit.”
Interesting. Not speaking with Jay meant she hadn’t caught up on how Mace and Dillon went getting funding, but if he’d quit maybe he’d gotten his first round. She frowned. Or he hadn’t and that’s why he’d made contact.
Mel was giving her big eyes and her eyebrows had disappeared into her fringe.
“He worked in IT,” she said to collect her thinking, as that wave of good feeling went sour.
“That’s right. He tried to pass himself off as an old friend.”
“Did he?”
“For a moment there you didn’t look unhappy about that.” Mel studied her with eight years experience of expression reading at call. “Oh my God, did you have a thing with him? You did, you did have a thing. Oh my God. That’s so exciting.”
“Pipe down. Okay, we had a thing, but it was one night that—”
“Oh my God.”
“It was months ago and really it was—”
“You liked him.”
“It was a one night stand.”
“Oh, so you don’t want his phone number?”
What was she going to do with Mace’s phone number? It was too late to use it now, and if he was only calling because his financing had fallen through and he wanted to get to Jay, it was better to let it go. “No.”
“Really. Wow, I was all excited there. I looked him up on the employee records system. His details were still there. He’s hot! Kind of broody, with those light eyes, the cropped hair, all cheekbone and that—”
“Okay, okay.” Jacinta smiled. Mace was hot enough to have burned through a part of her memory, the part that told her skin cells to goose-bump at the thought of his hands on her. “You don’t think it was wrong of me, a work colleague?”
“Oh my God—you hit on him.”
She forked lemon curd into her mouth and laughed around the tartness.
“Hell, girl. He had an attitude on him, if he didn’t want to be hit on again, he wouldn’t have called.”
“I told him not to.”
“Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. You are my hero.”
“No, it was just...not me. Not...” She shook her head. She had no idea how to talk about Mace and that weekend she replayed in her mind till it was so familiar and cosy it made her ache to acknowledge it wasn’t real.
“So it’s okay to throw this out?” Mel waved the bit of scrap paper.
She could take his number and never use it, keep it as a lucky charm. What was the harm in that? No harm at all but it was silly sentimental thing to do, another version of running from this enforced process of finding out who she was without a job. Like the haircut and the holiday, thinking about Mace was another stalling tactic when she had work to do.
She nodded and Mel grimaced, but rolled the paper and tucked it into the handle of her cup. Mel made her dash back to the office and Jacinta sat on, she had nowhere to hurry to. When the waitress came to clear the table she thought about snatching Mel’s cup and taking the paper. But she let the waitress stack the crockery without making a move. She was fossicking for the keys to the hire car and thinking about checking for a place to rent in this neighbourhood when the waitress called.
“Excuse me, did you need this?” She held out the paper.
She stood and picked up her bag. What she needed was to build a life while she waited for the right job. What she needed was to look forward, not back.
“No, thank you.”
When she phoned Jay and he’d finished rousing on her for dodging him, he said the same things: cut loose, have fun, because soon enough the right job would be there and she’d regret it if she didn’t make use of this gift of time, this unique circumstance of being able to support herself and not work.
“You could learn to cook,” he said.
She’d learned about the ready meal section in the supermarket, learning to cook sounded like a chore.
“You could learn an instrument, write poetry.”
“That makes cooking sound more interesting.”
“You could paint.”
The canvases spent weeks stacked in Bryan’s garage. Now they were stacked in her new rented apartment, taking up more room than was sensible.
“I might paint.” It had always been a thing she could lose herself in, and why had she trucked the stupid canvases around if somewhere in the back of her head she didn’t have a desire to pick up a brush again?
“I’ll commission something to get you started.”
She laughed. She missed Jay. Not living next door to him was another painful consequence of losing the job. “I’ll give you a canvas and you can pretend it’s good enough to hang while having an unfortunate accident with it where it gets crushed beyond all recognition.”
“Then it will be modern art and probably worth a fortune. Get cracking.”
“Speaking of commissions. What happened with Mace and Dillon?”
“Oh yes. I thought you’d already know. The investment committee knocked them back. I meant to step in and override that decision, I have a feeling about those two, but then this nightmare in Shanghai came up. I must phone Dillon when I get back.”
“You thought I’d already know?”
“There was something going on there.”
“Just a little fling.”
“It looked like more than that.”
“It wasn’t. When are you back?”
“Another month, maybe longer. I’ll expect a masterpiece from you by then.”
Jacinta hung up with promises to stay in closer touch and less regret she hadn’t saved Mace’s number from restaurant waste.
Later that week she set herself a target. She figured if she treated her time off like a job, with to do lists and deadlines that put structure back in her day, she’d feel less uncertain, less anxious and unanchored from the real world.
She cooked her first pasta meal from scratch and it was edible, but only because it was drowned in parmesan cheese. She started a morning yoga routine. She put a canvas on the easel and didn’t hate the idea of standing in front of it, and she enrolled in art classes at the local gallery and didn’t chicken out the day of the first class.
And she called Mel. Called in a favour, had her raid the HR files for detail on Mace. She couldn’t forget him. And she didn’t have to. Seeing him again was an event she could control. She could add it to her to do list and if it didn’t work out, scratch if off as not worth doing again, like the beef she’d cooked that tasted like wet leather.
All that was current in Mace’s file was an address, but when she took her new demonstrator model Honda there, it wasn’t current any longer. The cottage was empty, a sold sticker on the real estate agency sign in the yard.
She sat in the car and laughed. She could ask Jay for Dillon’s number and track Mace that way or she could let it go, like the job she’d loved, the apartment, the coffee machine, the life she’d had, that now, three months on, felt more and more like it belonged to someone else.
She drove home. She went to art class where no one expected anything of her, and lost herself in paint and canvas where she could have any life she wanted.
23: Damage
Mace studied the painting, if that’s what it was. It was the only thing in the window of the gallery, all lit up. It wasn’t there last time he passed. He was sure about that because he’d forgotten his keys and Dillon was late so he’d spent half an hour loitering around the street waiting for him to get home. There’d been an abstract in the window then, all yellows and oranges, colour rather than shape.
This was a sketch or a drawing, he had no idea, but the more he looked at it the more it spooked him out. The figure was a man, asleep, half covered by a rumpled sheet. It was incredibly lifelike, down to the raised veins on the man’s forearms and the calloused knuckles of his hands.
It could’ve been him. It looked like him. But that had to be som
e kind of trojan horse virus masking a truth that needed de-bugging. He traced the line of the sheet to the hashed strokes of the shinbone, to the foot, with its blunt toes.
And the squared off edge of the sticking plaster under the instep.
Fuck. He took a step back from the window as if he’d seen his own ghost lying there, and then he heard his name being called and turned to the sound.
Jacinta was bundled up in a bulky coat and scarf, her hair was different, loose around her face, but it was her. He looked back at the painting. She’d done this, stolen his image like she’d stolen his reason that weekend then disappeared before he could steal it back.
“Mace.”
She was standing closer now. Her expression a mix of fear and something else he couldn’t read that looked like hope. He gestured to the window.
She nodded, her cheeks flushing pink. She stepped right into his space and they stood almost touching, while the traffic moved and people walked past and the cafes and restaurants served their dinner menu. He floundered, not able to move away; not willing to speak in case she did.
She looked younger, no dark circles under her eyes, no strain around her pretty mouth. He’d fantasised about seeing her again, at night when his brain buzzed from a day of failing to solve problems and he couldn’t quieten it.
The scene was always exploded erotica. Better than porn because it was his own script. Jacinta in her black suits and heels, but the suits were shiny leather, a second skin showing every curve, the skirt so short it grazed her arse, no shirt beneath the jacket, a single button stopping him seeing her breasts. And the heels were nail thin, and designed to shift her balance, arch her back and make her legs endless, or thigh high boots, making her wide-legged stance more dominant.
In those imagined scenes that got him off, she’d taunt him with her power and her lack of regard for him and he’d strip her of her remoteness and make her his devotee, one slow, raging wet kiss at a time.
But this was better. This was real. Soft fabrics and flat shoes made her smaller and more precious than his sleepless dreams. He could smell her perfume, sense excitement in her quickened breaths. She wasn’t remote and she wasn’t taunting him.
He gestured to the window again. “Why?”
“I still want you.”
Jesus. Her words came out a strangled thing, like she’d had trouble admitting it, like she’d had fantasies too. She’d painted him, naked in her bed. What did that mean?
He lifted a hand and touched her cheek. She sighed and leaned her face into his palm. He brushed her hair back, circled her ear gently, making her smile, then cupped her skull, feeling her warmth, stopping her from running before he did something to make her.
She grabbed the front of his jacket and closed it in her fist. So he had done something to keep her here, but he didn’t know what, other than being in the right place at the right time again.
If he kissed her he was taking her to bed. But he didn’t need Dillon as witness to it.
Her fist pushed against his ribs. “I live close.”
He kissed her hard; all out of finesse, if he’d ever had any. He dared her to be a new fantasy: an ethereal presence, a brain phantom allergic to sunlight, an Etch A Sketch image shaken to a blank screen. She groaned into his mouth and that was a sound straight out of his memory, out of his private porn show and he was all the way gone, walking her backwards into the window, getting his hands inside her coat, pressing his lips to the pounding pulse in her neck.
Her thready, “Please,” pulled him up.
He stepped back but took her hand. Her apartment was two blocks the other way from Dillon’s. They were neighbours. He had a thousand questions but they couldn’t compete with the need to get to her, to touch her tulip petal silk skin and hold her body; take the real her and wipe the plastic porn substitute out.
He checked himself when they tumbled inside her place, nearly tripping over a stack of boxes. She was living like he was, half unpacked, indoor camping. Her easel stood in the room by the only window, a canvas on it.
She watched him like he was made of explosives.
“You want this, Cinta?”
She flung her coat off. Jeans and a long-sleeved tee that fitted close underneath. If she only wanted to talk he needed to get out of here now. She stared at him as though she wasn’t sure she had the power to defuse him.
“You were on fire when I met you,” he said
“I still am.”
Holy fuck. He got rid of his coat. She’d taken off her shoes, started on her top. He stopped her. This would be too quick, and if it was only one night he wanted it slow and easy; a faked-out forever. He wrapped around her and lifted her so they fitted together. He kissed her till he was weaving on his feet. She’d gotten his shirt undone and her mouth was hot on his chest. He wanted inside her body, but he wanted her words too.
“I left you a message.”
She pressed her face to his neck. “I was scared of this, scared of you. But I went to your house, when I knew I wanted more.”
Buster’s house, sold to a developer three months ago. He moved her away from him so he could see her face. It was one weekend five months ago, but it’d done some damage to both of them.
“I’m not scared now. I want more.”
He didn’t need the leather; he needed his hands on her soft, warm skin. He didn’t need the raunch of boots and single buttons or the tease of too much but not enough flesh; he needed Jacinta in his arms, whispering her need in his ear.
She could taunt him all she liked, with her hips, with her tongue stroking his, he’d take it—he’d want more. He didn’t need to teach her respect, he only needed to see trust in her eyes and feel desire from her touch.
He undressed her slowly, making her gasp, making her laugh—a gorgeous sound—when he had trouble with the hooks of her bra. He got it off her and slingshotted it across the room and she laughed again.
She hadn’t laughed enough the last time they were together. He wasn’t a guy who knew how to make her laugh except by accident, but if he could find a way he’d make her happy, at least tonight.
She’d said more, but more could mean anything, and there was no room in his head to explore it, he was too busy relearning the secrets of her body. The way her waist scooted in from the hollow under her ribs and swelled gently to her hips. He traced that symmetry with his tongue, with his open mouth. Her arse was made to fit in his hands, her hands were made to make his blood surge and speed through him, make him forget slow and fight to get it back.
“I missed you, Mace.”
He’d missed her too. The pulse in her neck, the bone of her cheek, the stalled hitch in her breath when he teased her body. A different missing. Not like he missed Buster. That emotion was a tender sore in his heart, a soft spot in his head like a sinkhole where memories he was worried about losing got pulled together and sucked down, spewing up at him randomly when he least expected them, cutting off his breath.
Yesterday a memory of Buster teaching him to play poker using matchsticks for money made him forget where he was driving. He’d pulled up in front of the old house, now a construction site, before he realised what he was doing. He’d driven for forty minutes in a dream state like his brain was slow loading.
He’d missed Jacinta in an entirely different way. She was the memory he’d yet to make. She was the longing that had always made him feel different, apart from everyone around him. He didn’t know what loving a person who wasn’t Buster, who wasn’t Dillon, was about, but he knew Jacinta was someone he craved, like a perfect, pristine line of code that’d function cross platform evermore.
She tugged at his hair. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Not lost.” Not now, when for months that’s how he’d felt. Never registering, drifting out beyond the most powerful search engine, empty and anxious.
“It was only a weekend. I didn’t think there could be more.”
That word again—more. More was the smell of her, cle
an, aroused. It was the fine spider tickle of her hair dragging across his arms, the flick of her tongue on his lip and her thigh wedged against his. More was in her eyes when he broke away to lose the rest of his clothes to regret he hadn’t come prepared for this, but to see she was. More was what she gave him when they came together on her bed and she took him deep, held him tight, her arms around his back, her knees hitched at his sides. He had her body and he had the trust in her eyes.
“I dreamed of you, Cinta. But it was never this. Never true. Only bad data. A false positive. Nothing is like you.”
He rocked his hips and her gasp was hot across his throat. Her fingers dug in to the back of his neck. This was how he made her happy, this was how he won her devotion; with slow, smooth thrusts and circling hips, with dragging kisses, with a rhythm that made her arch into him and toss her head.
She shouted his name and he lost control, no tempo other than speed, no tacit feeling other than friction so achingly sweet and tight. Eyes jammed shut because the dream and the reality were mashed together with the smell of her, of them, as their skin grew slick and their breaths stuck and sucked and stuck again. All the loss and insecurity he’d carried multiplied inside him till he couldn’t contain the sensation shuddering out from his centre, sending his vision white.
She cried out again, going rigid, trembling and thrashing, and that place inside him that was sore and weary exploded in a burst of bright awareness so intense he cried out too, dragging her body down to lie against him, tucking her face against his neck and burying the hurt and the misery, his fear and loneliness in the yielding heat and softness of her and his own sobs.
“Mace?” She lifted her head, her eyes going wide, her hands coming to his wet cheeks. She tried to hold him but he pulled out, sat up and away from her.
She seemed to know he needed distance. She didn’t try to touch him. “Tell me what happened to you.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and got his breathing back in order, stilled the dry ache in his lungs and blinked against the rawness under his eyelids.
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