Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

“He saw you slug me.”

“Yeah.”

“I think you ruptured my spleen.”

He laughed. Dillon sounded like Dillon, not like someone he’d just slugged in frustration. “If you can tell me why you need it I’ll buy you a new one.”

“Bastard.”

Dillon laughed too. And Mace stood in the street and held the phone away from his ear. When the cackle stopped he said, “What?”

“Get your arse back in here. I might need you to take out Anderson because Jay just overruled him and he is not a happy monk.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither, but apparently Jay likes our style. He’s going to find us a mentor and you and I are going to work harder in the zero amount of time we have left when we’ve finished chasing women, getting tatts and snorting coke. And one more thing.”

Mace had begun the walk back to the loft. “Listening.”

“They decided on the location for opening the first office.”

He stopped dead and a woman with a stroller gave him a dirty look as she swung around him. There were five cities on the list, aligned with customer markets, access to finance and a bunch of other indicators Mace was mystified by. The decision mattered, it wasn’t just a milestone ticked off, it was a shift from one set of objectives to another. Opening an international office was a Summers-Denby second round funding activity. He kicked into a run as Dillon said, “Silicon Valley, here we come.”

37: Open and Shut

Of course it would happen like this. She should’ve bet on it. Not a wisp of interest from a headhunter in over a year, and today, on the day of her gallery show, Jacinta got the call. She was the lead candidate for a CEO role. She’d come highly recommended by Constance Graves.

There’d be a series of interviews, but the recruiter indicated that barring an asteroid, or alien invasion, the job was hers if she wanted it. The last time she’d balanced the likelihood of catastrophe over a real life decision she’d taken Mace home and her whole life had changed.

She’d had to sit down, her legs suddenly disinterested in supporting her frame, her mind suddenly wiped of her day’s to do list. A list that looked pathetically thin, pedestrian and lacking in substance when she found it again, scrawled in her sketchpad. On top was pick up the dry-cleaning, followed by get Blu Tack and red stickers, pay the household insurance. It ended with find gold heeled sandals.

The wait was likely over. She sat on the floor with the phone in her lap and looked around the loft, at the furniture Mace had brought. She’d been happy here, but the day bed needed recovering and the kitchen table was heavily scratched, more space would be good, and a stove that didn’t have a mind of its own would make burning things more predictable.

But then, she wouldn’t need to worry about cooking again unless she wanted to. There’d be a new apartment, with better views, a nicer car, someone else to go buy Blu Tack. A to do list with interesting, challenging items on it, not domestic drudgery. She needed to research the company, a large mortgage lender, not as diverse a business as Wentworth, but she could take it in different directions, make it her own. But not today.

Today she had to hang paintings and get the show ready. She’d been so nervous about that when she woke this morning, now it seemed inconsequential. It no longer mattered if nobody came to Cinta Worth’s show or if any of the paintings sold. Not that it ever truly had mattered; it’d been great as a filler; fun, a chance to explore her creative side and kill off her old demons.

She should call Mace, but she hesitated. It was hard enough to get his attention face to face, on the phone he was terrible: vague, offhand, you knew he was doing something else and only half attending to the conversation. It could wait.

She got to her feet. Alfie would be here any minute to help carry the paintings down the road to the gallery. She did love the loft, it was full of good memories: the night Mace brought her here, so nervous about asking her to live with him, the nights he’d taught her to cook, interspersing food preparation instructions with sexual favours, the long, layered nights of lovemaking and gentle conversation, the laughter, the tears, and soaks in the too small bath. And her time in the studio, working out her halves, making things whole. But it’d served its purpose now.

When Alfie arrived she put him to work. She almost told him her news, but he only knew she’d left a job with a payout and hadn’t needed to work for a while. He had a peripatetic work existence himself, swinging from broke to flush depending on whether his band had gigs or not. What she did outside of class and art and afternoons of arguing for the fun of it was of little interest to him. And when she was working again it would be difficult to find the time to keep up with him. That felt like the defeat of something good she’d made of her life, but it was also real.

“Hey, you all right, Cinta?”

She was unexpectedly terrified and not about the showing. She was right where Mace had been the afternoon he’d thrown everyone out of the loft. She missed him like a supernumerary sense had suddenly been anesthetised, like she was reduced by half. How was it going to work wh

en they both had serious career jobs? It wasn’t a working relationship now. They were virtually flatmates who rarely spoke and occasionally slept together. Very occasionally. If she’d known it would be like this... She’d thought she was ready... God, this was just panic about the show.

“Babe, you’ve gone white. What’s up?”

She shook her head, let a breath go. There wasn’t time for this now. She blinked and her eyes were wet. “I’m nervous.”

“Me too,” he grinned. “I think you’re going to sell out.”

“Hah. I’ll be lucky if anyone other than my friend, Jay, buys one.”

“Ah come on. Mace will. He’s loaded now, isn’t he?”