“That’s funny, because I keep thinking tonight you’re too trusting. You give up too much of yourself without making anyone work for it.”
It was like we were squabbling again, but the energy between us was much more gentle. “If you seem to be giving up a lot already, people don’t dig any deeper.”
Axel nodded, and leaned his forearms on the railing of the balcony, which was a quite ugly little corner that had seen at least one person sneak out for a smoke that night already, if my nose was correct. Probably Ms. Miller. “You’re a different kind of secretive to what I’m used to, at least. You do it to protect yourself or people you care about, not to gain an advantage over anyone else. I find that quite interesting.”
I shrugged. “I think I was getting an advantage with you. I think I was using you to explore things about myself I find a bit embarrassing, to convince myself I didn’t have any choice so I didn’t need to think about the choice I was making.”
“And I still abused that trust. So what’s the trick here?”
I was trying not to take his gruffness personally. He was clearly finding this rapid turnaround disconcerting.
But I’d watched him while I ate, my head down or tilted away but my eyes constantly on the move so nobody could say for sure. That was another thing I was good at: watching people I didn’t want to know I had that much interest in them. I used to watch Marcia putting on her makeup before leaving the house, always on the edge of asking her if she could help me with a few things… but it wasn’t essential, I told myself, I shouldn’t bother her to do things I could probably figure out myself by watching enough tutorials on YouTube.
The fact that I’d gone almost makeup-free that evening spoke to how I hadn’t figured it out. And now it was too late.
“I keep thinking about how good it was to work with you on that deal,” I said. “A team in this thing rather than fighting over stupid things like unenforceable patents.” Axel raised an eyebrow in my direction. “I think I was too caught up in the whole thing initially, so I didn’t think too much about it. But there’s nothing you could logically have expected Dad and I to do with that patent. Like, fighting over patents legally takes a lot of money, and Dad couldn’t even afford to fight for proper custody of his sons. And you’re just not a big enough deal for anyone good to want to take it on as a matter of principle or whatever.”
“You’re right,” said Axel. “Little brat. It was never about the patent, and I think you’re smart enough that we never need to say out loud what it was somewhat about.”
His mother. I was happy not to talk about that if he didn’t want to.
I took a surprised step back when Axel turned on me, and found my back up against a brick wall. Axel advanced on me enough to box me in a little, the railing on one side and his arm leaning against that wall on another.
“I’m never going to go back,” he said. “We were always one or two pay periods away from everything disintegrating, being too far behind on our rent to catch up, getting this or that cut off. All those favours I can call in on now, the list of contacts Dad and I share… none of them wanted to know us until we made that money back. Not fucking one. I don’t know how you live like that all the time, Aileen, with someone you know can never get you out of it. Especially when it’s not for any good reason. I could never do it.”
“I’ve got no choice,” I said… but that wasn’t quite right, and his stare challenged me to do better. “I didn’t realise I had a choice. At least you knew what it was like to have that kind of life. You had an idea of what you were supposed to be getting back to. For me… I didn’t know anything. I’d always lived that way.”
Axel’s next question startled me. “What about your dad, then? How was he brought up, what were his parents like?”
“I only know my grandma, she’s been in a home for years now, mentally she’s… in her own world, these days. Dad doesn’t talk about his childhood much, he says it was happy but… he always rolls his eyes a bit when I tell him about some of the funny things Grandma’s been saying and doing when I visit her. Like he doesn’t see her as being terribly funny to him. He doesn’t really bother visiting her himself.”
I had never thought about it that way, just as I suspected Axel had never thought about what it would be like to have never had the things he’d had to fight to regain. Maybe Dad’s life would have been a bit closer to Axel’s, if he’d had an upbringing that raised it into him.
And maybe Axel still had a lot to learn.
“You need to have more confidence in yourself,” I told him. “Stop feeling like you have to go on the attack with everyone when your own abilities are just fine to get you through.”
He bumped foreheads with me. “You, too. The confidence thing.”
I was aware that I had somehow ended up in a tender moment with the same guy I’d just insisted I was going to have nothing further to do with, and I knew a lot of people were going to look at me like I was an idiot. They would see me as the final act in a very weird trilogy of compromises made for money, for status and power.
But it wasn’t my fault they felt that way, was it? I had to start really believing what I claimed I believed, that I was a unique situation worthy of being considered on its own merits. And that meant I had to accept the same probably applied for Tamara… and especially for Callie.
And none of it was anyone else’s business unless we needed it to be, was it?
It was a struggle to meet his eyes for the next part, because it still scared me that I was going to take this step. But I was determined to do it
now, and I needed to project the kind of confidence I wanted to feel. “I’m going to accept that you made a really bad call when you started that recording on impulse. That maybe it’s not actually representative of the best of who you can be.”
He put his cheek down against my forehead, pinning me in a weird but somehow comforting embrace. I could smell him: not that awful fragrance he’d been adopting to psych me out, either. Something subtle, fresher.
“Are you sniffing me?” Axel asked.
“A little,” I admitted.
His chuckle vibrated through my skull. “I’ve succeeded.”
“In conditioning me? If you wanted me to notice you’re using something different, sure.”