Read Online Insecure by Ainslie Paton - Free Book Online Page A

demonstrating trajectories and blast impacts. They’d reduced the severity of the event to a macabre video game in an effort to have something new to broadcast. It was sickening.
    â€œI can’t watch this, Mace.”
    He picked up the remote and switched the channel, flicking impatiently past more of the same on the other networks, sport and home shopping. He landed on a movie, sea monsters invading land. He grunted and switched to Hugh Jackman showing his Wolverine claws, then Brad Pitt running from zombies. He skipped over the Linda Lovelace 70s porn movie and Iron Man doing his thing. He stopped on The Great Gatsby .
    â€œViolence, destruction, end of the world, sex or excess.” He looked across at her. “Preference?”
    If he wasn’t going to take her to bed then he had to talk. “How did Buster get her name?”
    He muted Gatsby flinging shirts at Daisy Buchanan. He squared his shoulders off on the arm of the lounge and faced her. She did the same and brought her legs up, stretched in front of her, toes pointed towards him.
    â€œShe used to call me that when I was a baby. One day she came into the room, I looked her in the eye and called her Buster. It was the first real word I said.”
    She smiled and Mace did too, a crooked half embarrassed smile. “That’s a cute story. How did she come to be your Malcolm?”
    He turned his head to look at the TV. There was room for a Sumo wrestler and his two size zero girlfriends between them. If they touched it would be no accident. If he went back to one phrase sentences she’d be bereft.
    â€œWhat happened to your parents?” he said.
    She inclined her head. Her turn, that was fair. “My father died when I was five. He had a brain tumour. I only have the vaguest memories of him.” Mace watched her, but his expression gave nothing away. “My mother didn’t cope well without male affection. She had a series of boyfriends who I do remember, then suddenly there was new daddy, Malcolm. He left his wife for her. He was always ambitious, a social climber, and she was very beautiful. She was a better fit with his plans than his first wife. I was eight when they married. I was twelve when she died.”
    â€œHow’d she die?”
    â€œAn accident.” He took that and gave nothing back. He made her want to tell him more, simply because he felt no need to push for it. “She broke her neck skiing.” She shook her head remembering her fractured childhood, where she’d wanted for nothing but was starved for affection. “I had a stepfather who found me a nuisance because he already had two boys who lived with their mother. He remarried almost immediately. He didn’t know what to do with me. There were lots of babysitters, tutors and activity camps, then boarding school.”
    â€œDo you look like her?”
    â€œLike my mother? No. Why do you ask?”
    He shifted, closing some of the distance between them. “You said she was beautiful.”
    â€œI don’t look like her.” Not beautiful, decorative. Not the kind of woman men lost their heads over. Not the kind of woman who needed them to. She had a figure that was fashionable and wore clothes easily. She had a face that was pleasant to look at but was too strong to be called beautiful. It was his turn. “What happened to your parents?”
    He looked away, then reluctantly back. “My father shot through before I was born. My mother was...Buster used to say, delicate. Now I know she was bipolar.”
    He looked back to the TV again. He had a way of making a full stop physical.
    â€œWhat happened to your mother, Mace?”
    â€œWant to go to the bedroom?”
    And then starting a new, altogether disconnected sentence.
    She did, even if he only wanted her to avoid talking, but she wanted this first. “Tell me.”
    His eyes came back to hers. “She stepped in front of a bus.”
    Her toes curled.