Chapter 6
6
JESSE
Now
Jesse walked into the corner office of the grand shared workspace building on Gray’s Inn Road, through a glass Crittall door with a sign saying Lightning Designs on it in an abstract font. No thunderbolt on his logo. Too obvious. The ground floor office had just two desks, one looking out onto the hustle of the buses and people walking up the road to King’s Cross or down the road to Chancery Lane; the other desk facing an exposed brick wall with a screen on it. There was a tiny round meeting table behind both desks, by the door. It was small but light and airy, made more so by the cascades of plants tumbling from rope hanging pots Jesse had attached to hooks in the ceiling.
He nudged the door with his shoulder as he carried two coffees in glass cups that were kept behind the bar marked ‘Jesse’ and ‘Max’ in black marker on cream masking tape, nodding a thank you to the barista as he opened the door.
‘I got us both one,’ Jesse said as he placed Max’s regular flat white in front of her.
‘Ah, thank you,’ she said, gratefully hugging it with her hands. ‘I was desperate but no one was in when I arrived.’
‘Wow, you were early.’
Max looked a little flustered. Her face was usually a picture of serenity, her movements always slow and thoughtful.
‘I wanted to get ahead on the GrowPots packaging this week,’ she said, then took a grateful sip. This was only a half-truth. The whole truth was that she’d wanted to get out of the flat before her husband Liam woke up. He’d been at his worst all weekend.
Seeing Jesse, his kindness and his extra-hot coffee, was a cruel reminder for Max that it didn’t have to be like that. Why was she putting up with it?
‘Good weekend?’ she asked, shifting the focus. ‘How was the zoo?’
Jesse hadn’t told Max that he was meeting a stranger at London Zoo because he thought it would sound weird and inadvisable in his situation. That was his half-truth. They knew each other well enough to know when and when not to bother with all of it. When Max said Liam had had a heavy night, Jesse knew the subtext and would gently ask if she was OK. Max would usually say yes, even though she knew something had to give.
Jesse and Max had met at college in Reading, on the same Graphic Communication and Design course, when Max had been getting a grilling from a particularly harsh lecturer about her work for a fabric softener brand they were inventing. Jesse had put his hand up, disagreed with the lecturer, and said he thought Max’s design was great. It hadn’t gone down well, neither with the lecturer nor Max, whose usually serene and smiley face was thunderous.
Max had scowled at him as they’d filed out of the tech room. ‘I don’t need rescuing,’ she’d said, with a quiet shake of her head.
‘No, but I could have done with some help,’ Jesse had replied. His designs were being critiqued after Max’s, and boy had the lecturer torn his work apart. Max hadn’t stood up for Jesse, and then felt terrible about it. She had thought his work was exceptional, so she bought him a Coke and a panini in the canteen by way of a thank you and an apology. Six years later, Jesse started Lightning Designs, specialising in sports typography, and two years after that he employed his best girl friend Max to take on more of the packaging and product side of things. Max had been at Jesse and Hannah’s wedding in Richmond Park; Jesse had been at Max and Liam’s more recent wedding at Hackney Town Hall, but he’d taken Ida instead of Hannah because she was on a work trip.
‘The zoo was good thanks. I didn’t get as much sketching done as I should have.’
‘Too weird without Ida?’
‘Yeah,’ Jesse said noncommittally, as he went to his desk with three big computer monitors on it, with photos of Ida dotted around the screens’ edges, slumped into his seat and sighed. ‘Everything is too weird without Ida,’ he said sadly. Max’s eyes almost filled up.
‘Want to talk about it?’ she asked, taking another sip of syrupy coffee.
‘No.’ Jesse smiled gratefully. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ It wasn’t often he raised the elephant in the room. How Max’s honeymoon period had been anything but. How she seemed to want to spend more time in the office than she did at home. She shook her head gently and swivelled her chair back to the drawings in front of her.
Jesse put the radio on and awoke his screens to remind him what he had been working on before the weekend. Before he’d thrown himself into Remy , the zoo, and the crazy lady from the coffee shop.
A football kit. A brand story. A mission statement. A club that had just been promoted to the Premier League. His comfort zone. His happy place.
He looked at one photo of his daughter, pinned to the screen in the middle. Golden brown curls, blue eyes, cheeky face.
Deep breath.