We headed back to his home together in the car, mostly talking about nothing important. It would have been a perfect moment, if I didn’t have a million things to say to him that I just didn’t feel like I could. A minefield of things remained unsaid, and if I swayed at all in the wrong direction, I might explode the ease we pretended to have with one another. Well, an ease that included really hot sex that kept popping up here and there.
Like on the kitchen table that morning.
Or maybe it was just me pretending. Maybe Max really was content in our current setup. In this…pattern of whatever it was we were doing, because friends really didn’t behave like this. Not really.
I was afraid I’d already plummeted into a problem because I was pretty sure I was in love with him. Pathetically in love with a man who said he wasn’t interested in love. Was this a thing with my family? Layla had done the same thing, the only difference was Zeke already really loved Layla. He’d made a terrible mistake when he’d hurt her, but he’d fixed it, in a big way, and spent a lot of time proving his feelings to my sister. I just couldn’t see Max doing that.
Zeke had been so used to feeling lonely, he’d thought he had to stay that way forever. Or at least that was how Layla described it. I wasn’t sure why Max continued to give me so much attention if he didn’t love me, but it was clear he wasn’t lonely.
He had friends and family to fill his life anytime he wanted and the ability to scuttle off to be by himself, if he preferred solitude.
When we took another walk together to look at the leaves that afternoon, I let myself pretend for just a bit that we were happy and we could do this kind of thing together forever. Pretending was only going to make my heart hurt more later, yet I couldn’t bring myself to break out of the bubble of illusions. Not yet.
Right then, I could breathe. I had no need to lock and unlock his doors over and over at night. It had never been a problem for me in other people’s houses, only my own space, and that meant that I didn’t really feel at home there yet.
When that changed, I’d have to acknowledge it was time for me to speak up.
I made deals like that with myself all the time.
How many times I locked the door was how I judged if I needed help or not.
How many times I cried…how many calories I ate…how many times I went to the gym. Did other people live like this, or was this just my own brand of cray-cray that I hid from the world?
It didn’t really matter, because I fell asleep that night pressed against him as we watched a movie together. I might have stayed like that all night if he hadn’t gotten hit with another nightmare.
He woke easily when I said his name. He jolted to awareness, then placed his head in his hands for a good thirty seconds before he would speak to me. Eventually, he did. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” I sat up so that we’d be more face-to-face, and the blanket slipped down a little bit. I had to pull it back because it was cold in the room. In the week we’d been there, it was getting significantly colder in Maine.
He nodded. “Yep. The nightmares are back, and I really hoped they were gone. If it keeps up, I’ll call the doctor and do something about them again. Sorry I keep waking you up.”
I touched his arm. “Don’t worry about me, I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Yep.” He got out of bed. “Go back to sleep. I’m going to do some stuff for a while, and I might sleep in the guestroom if I sleep at all so I don’t keep you up.”
The idea filled me with coldness that had nothing to do with the room. “Don’t do that. I mean, get up if you want to, but come back here. I’ll sleep in the guest room before you will. This is your house.”
He rubbed his eyes. “You sure? You need more rest than me. You’re healing.”
I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one healing, but his wounds were more internal at the moment. Not that I had any intention of saying that right then. “I’m sure.”
“Okay.” He walked from the room, his shirt off, like he didn’t know the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Maybe he just didn’t care.
Max never came back to bed.
His mother’s party was everything I’d imagined it was going to be. We walked through the door, and everyone in the house seemed to yell hello all at once. I smiled, and Max didn’t. In fact, he’d been tense all day.
I’d wondered if he was going to make an effort to be pleasant with his family, and the answer turned out to be sort of no. He was nice to his parents, but that was about it. His siblings got grunts as answers when they pulled him into hugs, but they pretended not to notice he was being rude. They did that for me too. Big hugs. Everyone in the whole house—and there were so many of them, I lost count—hugged me.
Except for his sister Trina. She barely said hello and then turned her back on me like I wasn’t even there.
It hurt, since I’d decided to pretend for the afternoon that I belonged there, and then I remembered that she had been the one living with Max when it had all gone sour with Hayley’s. Yep. I was never going to be her favorite person. Her husband, whose name I was pretty sure was Hal, was very friendly, and I liked her daughters, who were three and one.
In fact, I spent a lot of the time before dinner with a tiara on my head, playing with the children who had decided I was new, sparkly, and exactly who they should be spending all their time with. Their parents would come in and out, sit with us, and make small talk. Max looked the most like his brother David, but the whole family had a familial look that really worked for all of them.
Eventually, the kids ran off to play outside in the snow that had started coming down. A dusting, they were calling it. I didn’t know what that meant to Mainers, as they called themselves. I followed noise toward the large living room.
But I stopped outside his father’s office when I heard Max’s voice.
“What is it that you want?” He sounded annoyed. I was glad he wasn’t talking to me like that.
“I just don’t know what you’re trying to prove by bringing that bitch to our mother’s house.” I recognized Trina’s voice, and I winced. Ouch.
Max sighed. “Don’t talk about her like that. You don’t know her.”
“Oh, but I do know her. I was there, remember? I lived through all of it with you. She destroyed your life. Why are you bringing her here, Max?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I appreciate that you were there for me when it all fell apart, but it’s so much more complicated than you understand. She’s my friend. That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to understand more than that.”
I should really have walked away or announced I was there. I did neither thing. I just stood there like a high schooler eavesdropping on gossip that happened to be about me. I couldn’t even blame Trina for how she felt. I had hurt him, and if someone did that to one of my sisters, I wouldn’t want to have them in my house either.
Well…this was technically her parents’ home, but same difference in the end.
“Does she know what she cost you? What it is still costing you? How you had to sign up with investors who are eating you alive? How you aren’t even earning on your own fucking restaurant yet?”
This time he sounded tired. “Enough. Thank you for caring, but Hope knows what she needs to know. I don’t want her to know I’m struggling. She’ll try to fix it, and like I said, it’s complicated. She has enough on her plate already.”
I scurried away, my heart beating fast. He wasn’t making money? Damnit. Why hadn’t he told me? I shook my head. Well, I knew why. He didn’t want me to know.
“Hope,” his mother called to me when I wound up in the living room. “Come sit. I was just looking at old pictures. Look at this one of Max.”
I wasn’t sure I could smile and fake it right that second. I had to think about what Trina had said. I had to figure out what to do. Max was never going to be honest about his situation, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t help. Of course, I
’d promised him when we started sleeping together that it would stop.
Damnit.
“Here.” Hayley patted the seat next to her and Cameron’s wife—whose name I now couldn’t remember—popped up to let me sit there.
There wasn’t anything I could do if he didn’t want me to. I had to…butt out.
With that thought, I forced myself to look at Hayley’s family photos. Max had been a very cute kid. Big, bright eyes and happy smiles. He always seemed to be holding a fishing pole or lying in a hammock in these sets of photos.
Hayley pointed to one where he held a cat. “That was his third cat he brought home that summer.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Oh, Max was always bringing home strays. Whatever animal he thought needed him, he took it home. Third cat. Five dogs. A rat. A chicken. Sometimes they were other people’s pets and he just didn’t know. It was cute.”
“Ugh.” Max walked into the room. “Are you seriously showing Hope family photos?”
I smiled. “That’s okay. This is lovely. No one has photos of me from when I was young. I think there are maybe three photos from my whole childhood.”
“Maybe that’s why you love to be photographed so much now,” Trina sort of sneered. “Trying to make up for the attention you didn’t get?”
Their mother gasped, but I forced myself to smile. “Maybe. I know you teach drama, but maybe you should have majored in psychology. Seems like you might be on to something.”
Everybody laughed, even though I hadn’t really meant to be funny. Still, it was better because it set Hayley at ease. It was finally time for dinner. Amazingly enough, in a room of people being kind and nice, the only person I could focus on was the one who didn’t like me. Like she took all the air from the room and only she remained in it.
Max bent over. “Sorry about that. Trina is snarky.”
“No big deal.” I was good at faking happy. I’d lost my appetite, but I’d fake eating too.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out for being around big families.
The snow got worse, and we all left quickly after dinner. Max drove through it like it was no problem, and we were back at his place before I knew it.
“My family is a lot.” He told me after we’d settled inside. “You were great with them. Particularly when my father started grilling you at dinner about why you had never been out on a fishing boat. Handled that like a champ, although you should expect him to insist you go fishing with him this summer.”
I doubted I would be there by then. Certainly, Max couldn’t still be there. He had to get back to his restaurant. “Your family is amazing.” I meant that. Completely. “And they adore you.”
“Even in my bad moods. They’re used to them, I’m afraid. Everyone knows I’m just a little fucked up.” I stared out the window at the snow. Amazing how it felt like I was going up as I stared at it. I hadn’t noticed the optical illusion since I was a kid. Then again, I hadn’t really been focused on the snow. It was more like something that stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do and kept me stuck inside.
Max came up behind me. “Trina was intense tonight. She was there with me when—”
“I fucked things up,” I said, interrupting him. “Yes, I remembered that, and if I hadn’t, I would’ve figured it out fast. Don’t worry about it. Not everyone has to like me.” Even if I wished they did. Maybe she’d been right about my need for attention.
He put his arms around me. “You did well with it.”
“I’m not sure if I should say thank you. I didn’t know I was being judged.”
Max laughed. “Fair enough.”
“Why do you call yourself fucked up?” Maybe it was the snow making me brave enough to ask questions I should have kept to myself, but he said we were friends— currently my least favorite F word—and friends talked to each other.
He put his chin on my shoulder. “Lots of reasons. The nightmares. The bad moods. The fact that I absolutely hate the thought of the things that other people want.”
Well, that last one was a new piece of information. “Like what?”
“Like I don’t think I could get through a week if I had to do the marriage thing.” He stepped back and went into the kitchen.
I took a beat before I asked the obvious. “The marriage thing?”
“The whole what do you want for dinner tonight, honey? How would that even work? I’m cooking for hundreds of people. Or the where should we go on vacation? thing. Or the you’re working too many hours thing. Or the you left the bathroom a mess thing. Why does anyone want to go through their lives having to be accountable to someone else’s needs and wants? Whatever it is that makes someone want to do that, I don’t have it. Like us, for example. This is fine. It’s been actually fun being together. But if you wanted to go, you could go. You don’t have to check with me. I’m not in charge of you. If I took off tomorrow, there isn’t anything you’d say about it.”
Well…that wasn’t true. If he left me in the woods without him, I’d have something to say about it. That wasn’t, however, what I wanted to focus on right then. “Look I don’t have a lot of experience myself. My parents were unhappy, and I was a baby and don’t remember. Your parents seem happy. Your siblings seem like they’re in love. My sister has never been better than she is right now.”
“Right, I get it. That’s why I’m saying I’m fucked up. I don’t date or do relationships outside of friendship for this reason. There is something inherently missing inside of me. I don’t want that…whatever it is that makes people get married.”
I was pretty sure that Max was astute enough to know that the things he said hurt me, particularly because I wasn’t putting on my best fake happy right then. But if he was going to pretend this was fine, then I would too.
“I think that people get married for lots of reasons. Sometimes they get married for the wrong reasons.”
He poured himself a drink of whisky. “What are the right reasons?”
“I guess it would have to be that the very idea of living without that person day in and day out is so abhorrent that it creates such a void in your existence, you have to declare to the world that you are in it together forever. Because if you don’t, you’re not sure you can get through another day.”
He held up his hands and actually grinned at me. “It’s like you’re speaking a foreign language.”
His point was taken. Direct hit to my heart. We were friends. We were never going to be like his siblings and their significant others or his parents. Or Layla.
“I’m going to bed.”
Max frowned. “Don’t you want to watch a movie?”
“Not tonight. I have PT tomorrow. I need to be rested. That’s what I’m here to do, after all. Physical therapy and hiding from the Russian mob.”
Not to start daydreaming about things that were not going to be mine. At least not with Max. The second part of that thought was the one that hurt me because I didn’t want to do any of those marriage things, as he’d put it, with anyone else. He’d woken me up inside. So what did it mean that he didn’t want me that way?
Still, that night when he climbed into bed, as I pretended to sleep in the way only insomniacs could, he tugged me against him, making me the small spoon in his embrace, I almost cried because it was so fucking unfair.
“Why do you feel like you have to fix everything?” he whispered in my ear, negating my belief that I’d fooled him. He smelled like whisky, cinnamon, and sandalwood. Somehow, it was a heady combination.
I opened my eyes. “I have to be worthy.”
“Of what?” He snuggled closer.
“Of having lived. When I’m gone, I have to know that I did something worthy of having been here. If I’ve made a mess, I have to fix it myself. That’s how I’m built.”
He was quiet. “Of having lived? So that when you’re dead, some faceless people can lay judgment on your life? Or is this a religious thing?”
I shook my head. “Not a religious thing.
I don’t know if there is or isn’t an afterlife. I wasn’t raised with any particular faith. I guess it’s the nameless, faceless people. Sure. But maybe they won’t be nameless or faceless. Maybe they’ll be my family.”
“Still worrying that you’ll care what people think after you’re dead?”
I pulled out of his embrace. “There is nothing wrong with wanting to do better. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a better version of myself. Of saying sorry. Of making amends. Of wanting the people you leave behind to say, hey, she was here and thank goodness she was. I grew up with a ghost in my house. All my houses. She walked behind us all the time. Her red hair, gorgeous eyes, and talent cast a shadow over everything I did. People remembered her. They pay thousands of dollars still for her work. It mattered that she was here, even if her time was brief. I can’t do what she did, I don’t have an inch of talent, but there isn’t anything wrong with wanting to do what I can while I’m here. Maybe someday, Tim will remember me. They’re going to remember you, by the way. Your food. What you did. I’m sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you, like the marriage thing doesn’t, but it’s just a truth to me. If you live with a constant ghost, you learn to believe that someday, you will be one too. Maybe because of it, you also want to have made a difference while you were here.”
He rolled onto his back. “Just another thing I’m never going to understand.”
Chapter 19
After the birthday party, his family started coming over every day. Different members visited at different times. I was always glad to see them because it was a distraction from the fact that Max and I weren’t talking about what we’d discussed that night after the party. Susan declared me fit to stop PT by the end of that week, which was surprising for how fast it went, but I really was moving around better.
Redheaded Redemption (Redheads Book 2) Page 21