Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

“She died.”

“Who?”

“Buster. She shouldn’t have died. She was getting better. I left her and she died alone.” He looked up, caught her shocked expression. “So it’s not you. I just. I can’t. It hits me that she’s gone and I forget myself.”

Jacinta shifted down the bed, dragging the sheet with her, to put her hand on his arm. “Mace, I’m sorry.”

He waved her concern away and her hand fell to her side. Letting her see him like this made him stiff with embarrassment. “She was seventy-five. I don’t know why I thought she’d live forever.”

He should be over this by now. There was something wrong with his latency, the time it was taking him to process this information, this emotion. It left him feeling broken, dysfunctional.

“You left work suddenly, is that why?”

This he could talk about. “I flamed out.”

She frowned. “Happens to the best of us.”

“What happened to you?”

“I didn’t play the politics right. I flamed out too.”

“They pushed you out.”

She tossed her head. “I took the moral high ground. I quit.”

“And now?”

“Now I wait. There’ll be another job, but at my level it’ll take time.”

He reached for her hand and they clasped. “I don’t think waiting is your thing.”

“I get a D for waiting.” A smile curved her cheek. “I called you too. From the office on the day I quit. I wanted to see you so badly. But I got your message bank and I was too chicken to leave one. Then I talked myself out of wanting you. I sketched you because that was a you I could have.” She squeezed his hand. “Do you hate it? I never thought you’d see it.”

He disentangled their hands. “I live two blocks the other way.”

She shook her head at the coincidence. “They only hung it because it’s something they do for students. We all have a turn at having our work in the window for a week.”

“You’re taking classes.”

She shrugged. “It’s something to do while I wait.”

Which is what this would be if he didn’t go now, and he wasn’t up for being left again. “I should go.”

“It’s okay to feel sad and to let me see it.”

He stood, looked for his shirt. “I don’t need your permission for how I feel.” He didn’t need her judgement, or her kindness either. He needed to be alone where he couldn’t make anyone unhappy.

“No, but you seem to need your own.”

He tried not to slam her door like the kid who learns no one cares about dinosaurs as obsessively as he does, but it banged hard and echoed loud anyway.

He gripped the banister and took her stairs two at a time. Outside the cold night air hit him in the chest like the slap her words were. He plunged his hands in his pockets and walked back towards Dillon’s.

He was hungry and frustrated. He ordered the pizza he’d intended to get when the gallery window distracted him and then waited outside the pizzeria for his name to be called. How long had she lived here? How had he never run into her before? Probably because he rarely left Dillon’s place, preoccupied with avoiding the speeding car and cracking a new formula that would rip competitors’ ambitions apart.

Crossing the road to the gallery was a deliberate choice, like not bothering to eat regularly. Standing in front of his portrait was another. The Mace in the simple frame looked relaxed, untroubled in sleep. The one standing on street didn’t sleep like that anymore. Not easily, not deeply or for long; always waking too soon with a stiff neck or a headache. Or not able to get to sleep, staring at the ceiling for hours trying to empty his brain of useless backchat. Yet there he was on the paper, sleeping like he had no worries, in a stranger’s bed, on a day the city was afraid. Sleeping deeply enough not to wake when she must’ve watched him so closely to be able to draw him like that.

He wanted to be that way again, but his life was different. He’d swapped places with the city. Now he was the insecure one. He was scared he was quietly going mad like his mother. There was a hereditary element, after all.