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“We’d have one night.”
“But it wouldn’t be enough. Not nearly.” One night had been the end of everything before it. “I want to love you for a long, long time, Cinta. First, second, always, any way you’ll let me.”
She stood in front of him, so close he could see the fine movement of the breeze through her hair. So close he could see the tremble in her eyelashes. But too far away to claim without permission.
“Is there room for a man who still loves you, above all else, in this new life of yours?”
She opened her eyes and the memory of the two of them on fire for each other shone there. “It’s a monumentally stupid idea. You have a business to run.”
He remembered Don and his unending love for Buster. “The most wretched thing a man can do is be without the woman he loves. I can live without Ipseity, but I can’t live without you.”
She shook her head, but her eyes glistened. “You have no sense of self-preservation.”
He dipped his head so it was closer to hers. “Apparently not.” In the space between them he could feel her tension, smell her indecision until it broke like the weather.
“Oh God, Mace, I was afraid of needing you, of taking you away from your dream. Of compromising on my own life. I never stopped wanting you.”
“You have me.” He let his hand stray towards her and she lifted hers so their flat palms met.
“You can’t quit. It’s the only way I’ll let you love me.”
He shook his head, watched their hands. If she tried to pull away now he would grip her tight and hold her captive. “You’d be agreeing to come second and you deserve better. Because you were right about me having a mistress so I had to give her up.”
She separated her fingers to let him fold his over her hand. “There would need to be rules.” She lifted her other hand palm flat. “I’ll wait for you and you won’t make me wait too long.” He raised his hand to hers and they clasped. “I can work anywhere in the world and you’ll run the damn air-conditioning too high in summer and you’ll come to bed no matter how late every single night and hold me.”
“That’s not—”
She shook their joined hands. “Do you really think Dillon will let you walk away? Do you really think I will?”
He gripped her hands and pulled and she stepped towards his body, taking the spin from his head, finally easing the roar. He wasn’t going to risk her again, it was already done. “I chose you over Ipseity, over Dillon.”
“And I choose you, the same as I chose a life I was once too conditioned against, too scared to risk security on. But I want my business and my art and I want you to have Ipseity.” She took another step, broke their hands apart. “So you’d better get it back.”
He stared at her, while the gears in his head ground too slowly. She wanted him back, but with the circumstances she’d once rejected. “I don’t understand.”
Her hand on the side of his face was a gesture that might have pushed him over. She brushed her finger over his eyebrow and he held still for fear any movement might shake her off.
“I want to capture you like this, Mace. Paint how beautiful you are, straining with your own greatness, honourable, awkward and shy, but so intense and unsure. I want to show you what that looks like to me, to the world.”
“I don’t—”
She pressed her hand over his mouth. “But I do. You’re so much more capable than you think. And so am I. It took losing everything I thought was important to teach me that. I have a life I like now, not one I thought I should have to prove a point. I have the chance to be an artist and if I fail, I’ll have risked and learned and grown because of that. But though I tried, oh Mace, I tried so hard, I can’t fill the space that is you and I can’t have you without what makes you great, what makes you, you.”
She stepped away suddenly. He chased her with an outstretched arm. She took another step back. “Call him.”
“Now?” His head was thick with the sense of her, the depth of what she’d said.
“If there’s an asteroid coming, and we only have one night, and you want to get lucky...” She flashed a sudden grin that fried his resistance. “Your decision.”
He was all out of understanding this, but he was good for following a prompt. He turned his phone on and dialled Dillon, waiting for him to answer with a bad taste in his mouth. He’d fucked Dillon over and he deserved whatever came next.
Dillon answered with a yawn. “You’d better have straightened your head out.” There was no fury in his tone, only the gravel of weariness.
He said, “Working on it,” while he marvelled at Dillon’s equanimity, and watched Cinta, holding herself out of reach, holding out the promise of more happiness then he thought possible.
“There’s a hole in the wall in the conference room.”
“Yeah.”
