“No?” His shoulders slumped. He was exhausted. “Why do I feel it?”
She shook her head, because she felt it too, the absence, the slow drift apart. She’d expected it, but it went down hard, and it tore her up it was affecting him so much. She kissed his jaw, his lips, pressing her fingers into his skull. “Let me make you feel something else.”
He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom and she undressed him, unpeeling him slowly from his clothes. He’d not regained the weight he lost in India, but he’d retained his exercise regime so his body was a miracle of hard planes and angles, ropey muscles and firm tendons.
“I want to paint you like this, so strong, so vulnerable.” She dragged her open mouth over his chest and down to his abdomen. His hands tangled in her hair and he pulled her shirt off over her head as she went to her knees.
“No.” He came down to his knees in front of her. “I need your eyes on mine.” He pushed her till she sat with her back against the bed and he knelt, legs either side of her shins, and took her face in his hands. His kisses were so slow and thorough, she was delirious when he lifted her again and placed her on the bed.
“I miss you. Your skin, your smell, your taste.” He tugged open the tie on her pants, sliding his hand into her underwear. “Going mad not having you.”
It was her turn to be sensuously stripped. He did it as though they had all the time in the world, as though nothing else mattered except the exact craft of worshipping her body in exquisite, painstaking detail. It took a long time before he wanted to enter her, and she was liquid need. Once he was seated deep, he settled on his elbows and she fell into his eyes, not tired anymore but full of everything he felt for her and everything he worried about. She tried to kiss his tension away, but it built in her with his slow steady pumps until she was clawing at him, bucking beneath him and fighting to find her release, calling his name, over and over.
He took her up and brought her down again, before he took his own end, trembling against her in storm of emotion that made him shutter his eyes then tuck his face to her neck. He was asleep almost as soon as he rolled and pulled her into the spoon of him and they slept the evening away, forgiving everything but resolving nothing.
When she woke in the morning he was gone. But he’d pinned a piece of her sketchpad paper to the door. He’d drawn a huge winged love heart with an arrow piercing it and their initials. She left it there to remind them both of what they had.
34: Brutality
In another group, there would’ve been a drinking game. Not this crowd. Everyone here was too exhausted to drink, too competitive to risk losing. The month end Summers-Denby come to Jesus, meeting of the incubator survivors, was as brief as it was brutal as it was revealing.
Anderson simply gathered them together and they could tell by who wasn’t in the room who’d already been asked to leave. It was better than public humiliation, but not much. Then he told them why the crashed out company had burned up and put the fear of a flash fire in all of them. The end of someone’s dream made for poor entertainment and nervous expressions all around.
There were four companies left now. Ten founders. Not one of them was eating properly, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, or winning friends and family. Not one of them was giving up.
The three founders from the betting software platform were at each other’s throats, could hardly make eye contact, but they pulled it together enough to meet their milestones. Janelle had an abscessed tooth, but instead of taking time out to see a dentist she was walking around with a bag of frozen peas held to her jaw. You knew where she’d been by the drips of water on the floor. Ramesh had moved into his office so he didn’t waste time travelling to and from home. The guy seriously needed to shower more. Carl went to pick up his kid at kindy for the first time all year and didn’t recognise him amongst all the other blond blue-eyed three-year-old terrors tearing about the playground, and Antony’s wife had moved out.
It wasn’t the first relationship to break up. Ramesh’s girlfriend left him months ago. Janelle said she hadn’t been laid in over two years. Dillon said he didn’t even think about hooking up anymore.
Jay was single and so was Anderson. Maybe this was a single person’s game. Being alone meant you didn’t have to consider anyone else’s feelings. Mace hadn’t spent more than half an hour with Cinta not fraught with the fear he was wasting time for weeks. This start-up business was like gladiator school; there was no space to think, no sympathy for error, no second too precious, and the lions were hungry for more failure.
Immediately after the meeting, he ran into Monica in the kitchen. She was so deathly pale he asked if she was all right. She told him dispassionately how she found out her husband was having an affair with their nanny by watching a nanny-cam feed, and how she didn’t have the headspace to work through whether to chuck him or the nanny out.
“The nanny at least looks after the kids. All Selwyn does is complain about me never being there.”
“Is it...can you...? God.”
Monica laughed. “It’s okay, Mace, you don’t have to say anything. There’s nothing to say.” She slid a frozen meal in the microwave. “I guess I should’ve seen this coming. Our marriage worked when Selwyn got what Selwyn needed: a stable home life, an available wife, well behaved kids. Now I’m never there and he has to do the washing, make beds, empty the dishwasher and help with homework. I thought our marriage was strong enough to take this, but it’s not, and better that I learn it now than if we get final funding, because it’s only going to get worse.”
“And if...” He didn’t have to finish.
“If we don’t, well, I learned something about my husband that maybe I don’t want to live with for the rest of my life.”
That was so pragmatic it took Mace’s appetite away. He quit the kitchen thinking about Cinta and how the fuck he’d managed to end up one of the only players with a stable relationship. He didn’t have the track record for it and it made his mouth desert dry to think about how easily he could blow it.
He rarely rang Cinta in the middle of the day, he rarely thought about her when he was here; there were thousands of deadlines and critical decisions pushing on his head, eating his brain like gladiator zombies with their own zombie lions.
He dialled her phone. He had no idea how her show prep was coming, if her job search showed any promise. He had no idea if he’d worn out what they had.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she
answered.
That said it all. They almost had no conversation that wasn’t about Ipseity. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Want me to sing?”
She sounded amused. She sounded like home and relaxation, tea and hot buttered toast someone else had made and brought to you by a warm fire. “Can you sing?” Why didn’t he already know that?