Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

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.