Grip watched two of his best friends in the world reunite as if they’d been apart months not minutes, as if they were sun and earth, rain and fire, their own universe.
The only thing he felt in his chest was grief.
TWENTY-ONE
Mena buttoned her jacket, popped a mint in her mouth and collected her laptop, business-card holder, a pen and the Paradiso file. She was meeting with Mr. Lostal Paradiso. Another of the firm’s problem clients.
She’d been back at work a week and every day with her new client portfolio had been like a visit to one of Seven Gates’ hellish experiences. Confusing, frustrating, and full of hidden traps. The only thing missing was the threat of spiders.
And Grip to hold her hand and promise to chase them away for her. It was no fun at all and it was still better than she deserved.
She’d thought being back in the office, being drowned in complex work and the attempt to repair her reputation would stop her thoughts wandering to Grip so often.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
Yesterday Rebecca Greenling had dropped a data stick in the boardroom and Mena had flushed hot at the memory of crawling under that table, meeting Grip’s eyes, then their hands touching briefly as he passed over her phone.
When she looked out the window, she could still imagine his ridiculous monster truck with its humorous number plates, parked illegally in the street.
Eat pasta. Forget it.
She couldn’t listen to music either, without hearing piano, without closing her eyes and seeing Grip tear up the stage at the charity concert, a guest appearance nobody expected and everyone in the music scene had been talking about since.
He’d played with a kind of divine intensity, his brilliance unmasked. He was fearless and unforgettable and for the rest of her life she’d regret the wrongheadedness that had caused her to lose him.
The event had been her one chance to see him again, but after experiencing his performance, she’d known her mission would fail and almost turned back. Grip had conquered his old fear. She’d watched him remake himself on stage. If he’d ever needed a muse, he didn’t need one now. He didn’t need her apology either. Dressing up like her old self was as much about showing him she wasn’t ashamed of the tattoo on her hip as it was about reclaiming her own life. One where she didn’t dress so stiffly, changed her hair color from time to time, and pursued interests outside of work. One where she was more realistic about what she’d achieved already and not so frightened of being able to manage in the future if she lived a little in the now.
She’d rocked that updated goth look, flirted her way backstage to prove she still could and because if she didn’t try she’d never hear the end of it from Vera, and then Grip’s stone face and harsh words had made her lose the last of her confidence, had shut her down.
A bad groupie didn’t take no for an answer. Didn’t let rejection stop them. Mena had been a good groupie, respectful, worshipful even, but never to the point of not reading the room and Grip had made it perfectly clear that there’d be no encore opportunity.
All things considered; she didn’t blame him.
But she did fantasize about him, and this time around she had the new memory of his hands and his mouth and his touch to inspire her.
Shame that Lostal Paradiso would be more likely to inspire very late nights at her desk untangling balance and loss statements instead of bent over it unraveling in a perfectly messy orgasm.
At the door to the boardroom, Mena took a breath to center herself. Mr. Paradiso needed to see her as competent, professional, the answer to his problems. He did not care that she felt weighed down by sadness and slept badly.
He was younger than she expected, standing by the window with his back to her when she pulled the big wooden door open and stepped into the room, an unaccountable nervous trill running up her spine. When he turned, she nearly fell through the floor.
“You kept your hair dark,” he said, voice velvet low.
The part of her still-functioning brain thought regrowth will be a bitch, but she said nothing. Stared at Grip. The breadth of his chest in a Violent Femmes T-shirt, his hair longer, spikey with product. Those talented hands hanging loose at his sides. His green eyes dulled with caution, hooded by his lowered brows.
She was in the wrong room.
“I’m sorry for interrupting. I didn’t know you were coming in today. I’ve got the wrong room. I thought I had a meeting in here.” She took a step back, her ankle wobbling.
“With Lostal Paradiso.”
They knew each other?
“I didn’t know if you’d want to see me, Mena.”
Her pen rolled off her laptop and bounced on the floor. A gear inside her shocked brain clunked. “You’re Lostal Paradiso?”
“It’s a name I use when Mark Grippen will be a nuisance. Good old Lostal can book a table at a restaurant or a seat on a plane and no one pays any attention to him. People have been paying a bit too much attention to Grip since he trashed a piano.”