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She cried out again, going rigid, trembling and thrashing, and that place inside him that was sore and weary exploded in a burst of bright awareness so intense he cried out too, dragging her body down to lie against him, tucking her face against his neck and burying the hurt and the misery, his fear and loneliness in the yielding heat and softness of her and his own sobs.
“Mace?” She lifted her head, her eyes going wide, her hands coming to his wet cheeks. She tried to hold him but he pulled out, sat up and away from her.
She seemed to know he needed distance. She didn’t try to touch him. “Tell me what happened to you.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and got his breathing back in order, stilled the dry ache in his lungs and blinked against the rawness under his eyelids.
“Did I do this, did I upset you?”
“No.” The answer barked out roughly. He needed to get out of here. “It’s not you.”
“It feels like it is. I’m sorry about the sketch.”
“It’s not that. I have to go.”
“I see.”
He heard the crank in her voice, but it couldn’t be helped. They were a one night stand and neither of them had tried hard enough to find the other, neither of them had tried Jay.
“Go. Get out if you’re going.”
Half of him was already on the street, walking to Dillon’s, overwriting this with new code, another fake memory, one where he didn’t crack up for no good reason. The other half of him was crawling back into bed with her, telling her everything he missed and feared and sleeping deep, dreamless with her close.
He went to her bathroom, disposed of the condom, washed his face. She was sitting in the bed with the sheet tucked up under her arms and her knees drawn up to her chin when he came out. “You bastard.”
He snagged his jeans from the floor and shoved them on.
“The only thing you liked about me was the money. You were fucking the company, getting off on who I was, and now I’m nothing you can’t stand to be with me.”
That cut, and shit, he couldn’t let her think that. He went back to the bed and sat, hooking one leg up, swivelling to face her. She was glorious, her hair tousled from the bed, from his hands, but fury slicked her skin. And he had nothing.
“I can’t read your mind, Mace. If you want me to think differently you have to talk.”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
Her eyes swelled to half the size of the universe. Fuuck. A line from every bad romance movie ever made, not even Buster’s Antonio was that lame, and the sound of annoyance that came out of her was a new slash in his side.
“Jacinta, you have to know, what happened then, that wasn’t you, it’s my problem. It’s got nothing to do with what we just did.”
“What we just did was intense.” Her voice softened. “I loved it. I was with you and then you went somewhere else and you’re hurting. It’s okay to tell me why. Is it the business? I know you missed out on getting capital from Jay.”
“No.” No funding and a competitor had surfaced, funding might not matter anymore. Dillon said they were one speeding car off roadkill. Ipseity might not ever be more than a toy he played with endlessly, like a kid so fascinated by dinosaurs they knew all there was to know to an obsessive level.
“Is it work? You quit, do you have another job?”
“No.” But it was time to think about getting one or Buster’s legacy would go to waste. He looked at his hand, the one she’d drawn, balled in the sheet.
“Mace, talk to me or leave and forget where I live.”
“You painted me.”
“It’s a charcoal sketch, but yes.”
He looked into her eyes. “Why?”
“You first.”
He looked away. She was a different version of the old Jacinta, in this tiny apartment, in this boho suburb, with her softer hair, and her brighter eyes, but it wasn’t a complete upgrade, it was incremental change, the kind of upgrade no one but the most familiar users noticed. She still had the fire, the authority, that singular focus that made him wish he could fall into her attention and lie in its comfort. But he didn’t know her that well. He’d spent more time with the virtual version of her than the real one.
