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“Please don’t. This is my mess. I need to clean it up. I don’t deserve your help.”
He removed her hands and bent to pick up broken glass. “You didn’t deserve to be hit. Nothing you could do is an excuse for that. You didn’t deserve to lose your mum, have Malcolm as a father, have him teach you to hate and fear a part of yourself. You didn’t deserve to lose out to politics when you were right.”
He picked up a tube of paint and tightened the top on it, then flung it at the wall. “Those fuckers.” His anger and confusion lived in the taut tendons in his neck and the hard lines his face had settled in.
She hardly understood her own behaviour but she owed it to him to explain as best she could.
“I forgot about shopping, like I forget everything when I’m working in here. But I had the radio on and I heard the newsbreak. I came out to see what time it was. I was going to dash out before you got home. And I heard it, Henry being interviewed. I was so angry with all of them I didn’t know what to do. I was painting, playing at being an artist, while they were re-engineering Wentworth using my plans without me. I wanted to tear this room and everything in it to pieces.”
He looked around at everything but her. “You did a good job.”
“I frightened you.
He leaned on the workbench, his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were shifting, wary.
“I’ve done it twice tonight and I didn’t mean it either time.”
Now he focused on her. “Tell me about the second time. ‘Cause God help me, Cinta, that’s got me knotted tight.”
She reached her hand out to him, but the look on his face, so closed up, so distrustful stopped her. “Five years ago I lived with a man. His name was Brent. He was a global tax specialist for a mining company.” She took steady breaths to make sure she could keep her voice level, calm. Mace’s breathing was short, his shoulders up.
“It was something like what just happened to us, but we weren’t arguing. I got in his way, he tried to get around me, he bumped me, I tripped and fell. We laughed about it. I didn’t think anything of it.” Not at the time. Her eyes went to her bare feet, later she’d recognised that accidental bump for the deliberate push it was. “I was wrong.”
Mace expelled a grunt of loathing, and she looked over at him. His whole body was poised, assessing an invisible opponent, looking for the weakness.
“A week later he shoved me into a wall and there was no excuse for it. He apologised and I forgave him.” She breathed deeply, Mace wasn’t breathing at all. She had to get the worst said. “That was my mistake. A month later he smacked me so hard he knocked me off my feet and gave me a black eye. He said he thought that’s what I wanted, what I needed from a man.”
Mace’s hands went to the edge of the table behind him, his scarred knuckles white as he gripped it, his head dropped forward. He was going to need her words to find his.
“I threw him out. I had him charged with assault. He lost his job and he moved overseas. I never saw him again after the night he hit me and I thought I was well past it.”
His head snapped up. “But I brought it all back.”
She couldn’t deny it. He’d brought that moment of crippling fear roaring back. And now it was a vast chasm of misinterpretation opening up between them.
“I know to my last breath you would never hurt me. I thought I’d lost you. I thought you were going to leave me. I got in your way, it was so like...when I fell, I stopped thinking and I panicked.”
Mace held his temper but anxiety vibrated out of his skin and floated in the room like noxious fumes. There were two strides and a blast zone between them and Jacinta could see no way to knit enough reason to pack the crater. He was going to leave her now for an entirely new reason, one she’d already made her peace with, one he had no fault in.
“I’m not frightened of you, Mace. I’m terrified I’ve proven myself not worth going through all this for.”
She gestured to her self-portrait. “I painted that after Brent left me. I wanted it as a reminder not to look over my shoulder in fear. But I’ve been doing that for a long time. I was frightened of being like my mother, frightened of not measuring up to Malcolm, frightened of committing to another relationship.”
She’d never wanted to hear Mace’s voice so badly, but in his fear of what he’d done to her he was mute to her need. Her eyes stung, her limbs felt heavy, she might fall again and this time it would be into the black emptiness of being without him.
“I’m so tired of all that. I don’t want to be ashamed or frightened of any part of myself anymore. I love you. I hurt you. I screwed up.”
It was difficult to hold her head up, impossible to look at the cool wall of apprehension in him. “I need very much, just for now, for you to at least pretend to give us another chance.”
“Can’t pretend.”
She heard him move, but she’d closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch him walk away. She would lay down in the mess and sleep till the end of time, never have to deal with being without him.
His hand was warm on the back of her neck. “Can’t deny this cuts me up.”
She gulped and he must’ve felt it. She opened her eyes and looked up at him.
