“Half of you is doing new and exciting things, the other half is all limpy and shrivelled and lacking in competence.”
“Limpy? You’re jet-lagged. Remind me not to come to you when I need my ego stroked.”
“You know what I mean.”
She sighed. “I still miss him terribly, if that’s what you’re waiting to hear. But life isn’t designed by Disney. Romantic happy endings are a storybook thing. And I’m not a stroke victim. I’m on my feet and I’m excited about what I’ve got the chance to achieve for myself. Excited and appropriately freaked out.”
“Limpy. It’s not good enough.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Dr Summers-Denby?
He inclined his head and held his glass out for more juice. “Yes, professional, therapeutic, and medicinal.”
She looked at the glass. “What did your last slave die from?”
He tapped the glass on the benchtop. “It wasn’t too much Disney and it wasn’t a broken heart.”
“I don’t—”
“Cin, my darling, if you don’t have a broken heart then I’m not the man you’d have broken it over if I swung that way, and Mace is not the man using work to make his heart pump.”
She snatched the glass from his hand and blushed like a sixteen year old. He was right on all counts, but there was nothing she could do about it.
42: Speechless
After the swearing, after the room emptied of freaked out employees, Dillon didn’t say a word. He sat at the meeting room table and stared at Mace. His silence was full of disbelief. He exhaled panic, snorted doubt.
Mace had made two mistakes. He’d fucked up big and small. The small fuck up, an error in the software platform he’d had to cop to, was something he could fix, was fixing—the crisis would be averted.
It should never have happened, a rookie mistake, but the roar in his head was a constant now, a loud discordant jangle of thoughts and images that stopped him processing clearly, and the more he’d tried to ignore it the worse it got.
His focus was off, his attention wandered; he’d stopped listening to his team, and while every analyst in the sector was watching, waiting for them to blow it, he’d almost screwed them, set them back a year, maybe longer.
He could hardly hear anything around that roar now, nothing soothed it, but he could hear Dillon’s distress like a siren, before he finally spoke. “What’s going on with you, dude? You need to get your head in the game.”
The problem was he was playing by the wrong rules in the wrong game, in an arena that had seduced him so thoroughly he’d lost the whole point.
“Is this just the pressure or—”
It wasn’t the pressure. He couldn’t give a shit about the pressure. It was something else entirely that kept him from seeing straight, kept him too busy to get above the detail and see the pattern.
“You’re so distracted I could be tugging one out and you wouldn’t notice. God, man, go get laid for fuck’s sake. Hit a bar somewhere and pull a one-nighter. Do what you have to do to get your head on straight and do it quick. We can’t afford for you to mess up now.”
It wasn’t that simple. The one-nighter solution failed to get traction, never developed beyond the notion. “There’s something I have to do.”
Dillon palmed his face. He was strung out too, but he’d managed to keep it together like he always did. “Good. Get it done. We’ve got four days before the investor presentation.
“I won’t be here.”
Dillon laughed through his fingers.
This was the big fuck up, the mistake of a lifetime, and Mace wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to fix it. “Listen to me. I won’t be here.”
“Yeah, funny.”
“The platform is stable again. Everything will be ready for the investor pres, and you don’t need me anymore.”
Dillon pushed back from the table. “What are you talking about?”