by Megan Mulry
They settled into a free table out on the sidewalk and Bronte put her elbows up, resting her chin in her hands. She was so happy just to gape at him. Max trailed his fingers along the back of her hand and down her neck, then across her shoulder, then put his hand down on the table and looked out to the street. Bronte almost felt bereft when his hand moved away.
“I think—”
“I think—”
They both started and stopped simultaneously. Max turned back to look into her eyes again, his lids intensifying. “You first.”
Bronte swallowed. “Well. It’s been a grand day so far, and I was just starting to think about later and—”
“Yes.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said yes. Whatever you want to do, wherever you want to do it, however many times you want to do it. My answer is yes.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“You don’t want to know more about me? Or where I grew up? Or my favorite movies? Or how many brothers and sisters I have…”
“No. I mean, yes, of course, eventually, that would all be splendid information, but for now, no. I am not particularly interested in any of that. All of you is sitting right here. I know what you like to read, after all. And that other information is just, well, as Martin Amis would say, the information.”
“Nicely put. I could not agree more. I mean, gentle rains and all that sound delightful m’lord, but why bother?”
Max winced for a split second, then grabbed Bronte’s hand and leaned across the narrow table for a kiss. The first kiss he had been anticipating for the past four hours, the past six weeks. The kiss he could no longer delay. His tongue trailed tentatively across the seam of her inviting lips, then ventured into the warm welcome of her luscious mouth.
Bronte simply gave in. Her eyelids became unaccountably heavy and she emitted an unconscious mewl of pleasure. He tenderly withdrew a few inches, his eyes clouded over with desire, barely able to focus.
Bronte whispered his name, “Max.” An invitation. A new statement of fact.
The moment hung there: weightless, timeless. Bronte brought her tongue to the corner of her mouth, to relive the feel of his in that same spot only seconds before. Max leaned back into his seat and put the palms of both of his strong, beautiful hands flat onto the table.
“We should probably go, Bron.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere with a bed?”
“Okay.”
Max smiled and pressed on. “I was just kidding about the bed part. Well, sort of; I mean, maybe we should start on a couch and work our way up. I think you might live in this neighborhood…”
Bronte replied dreamily, “You’re right. I think I might.”
“Shall we go there? Or would you rather hop in a cab and go to my place in Hyde Park?”
The tiny, piercing voice of the savvy single woman in her balked at the idea of having some guy she’d never really met into her apartment, let alone diving into bed with him after a few hours hanging out on the near west side of Chicago. She tried to rationalize that she’d kind of known him for six weeks, or six Saturdays, as it were. Maybe it wasn’t so slutty and tawdry after all.
The other, visceral, gut-knowing part of her accepted the fact that she was going to attack him one way or the other, and it might as well be at her place right around the corner rather than his grad-student studio apartment twenty minutes away.
What was the best way to run a three-minute security check on a guy to make sure he was not an axe murderer?
“You’re worried I’m an axe murderer?”
Bronte looked at him askance. “That’s a worry.”
“What? That I might be an axe murderer?”
“No. That you can answer my unasked questions… I’ll have to work on cloaking my pedestrian thoughts a little more thoroughly.”
“Not at all. I will tease them out of you one way or another. Might as well stick to Plan A: Brutal Honesty.”
“Okay, then yes, it did just, for a split second, cross my mind that all of your sexy, British wonderfulness might be a fabulous ruse and you are really a homeless vagrant, come to seduce me.”
“Let’s see. That very last part is true by the way.” Max ruminated, theatrical index finger tapping one cheek. “References? A dance card? Letters of credit? I’ve got it: a mutual friend! Isn’t there some damn thing about six degrees of separation? Surely, between the two of us, we know someone in common—someone who can vouch for us to one another. Do you know anyone in the economics department at the University of Chicago?”
“Alas, Milton Friedman and I have lost touch. Chicago is probably going to be a dead end, since I know about seven people here—six of whom I work with and one of whom I never wish to lay eyes on again. What about New York City advertising agencies?”
“Sorry, no. Not that I can think of. Where did you go to college?”
“UC Berkeley. What about you?”
“Oxford.”
“Of course you did.”
“Very funny.”
“It’s just that, does every highfalutin Brit go to Oxford or Cambridge?”
“Who said I was highfalutin?” Max asked with more force than he had intended.
“No one, Mr. Sensitive. But wouldn’t you agree that British PhD candidates at the University of Chicago are not that thick on the ground, if you get my meaning. A self-hating intellectual, perhaps?”
“Something like that,” Max conceded.
“All right then. I was not a total slacker at Cal—there has to be some highfalutin Brit who has crossed my path. Let me put my thinking cap on and—” Bronte snapped her fingers and smiled with enough wattage to disrupt the grid. Max could not have been more pleased.
“Who?”
“David Osborne? He was at Oxford, then I met him through one of my cousins who was in the same training program at Morgan Stanley and now he’s back in London—”
Max was whipping out his cell phone and scrolling through his saved numbers, then he looked up and punched the green “talk” button with a victorious jab.
“David? Then step out of the pub if you can’t hear me, you stupid toff… No, I’m not back in London yet… stop your yammering and listen… no, I won’t be back in time for that party. Tell me what you know about Bronte Talbott… mm-hmm… mm-hmm…”—broad smile—“… yes, nice bit of crumpet that, eh?”
“Give me that phone, you pig!” Bronte said, laughing as she wrenched the phone out of Max’s hand and continuing to laugh into David’s ear. “So what do I need to know about this Max Heyworth character, David? Mm-hmm… originally from Yorkshire, mm-hmm… well, that’s not a lot to go on, but I was really just trying to rule out axe murderer, so I guess your drunken acknowledgment that he’s a stand-up guy will have to do…” Bronte could no longer concentrate on the rest of what a very inebriated David was yelling into the crackling transatlantic connection (something about Anne Boleyn winning the Nobel Prize), what with Max’s index finger tracing the edge of her other ear and her trying weakly to swat him away. “Right, right, David; that’s all for now. Send my love to Willa.”
Max was grinning stupidly as Bronte handed him back his phone. “Any other flammable hoops for me to jump through?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
“Of all the bad omens…” Bronte murmured, her laughter fading.
“Are you kidding? What could be a better omen than the jolliest person we know being our mutual acquaintance? And if you know anyone jollier, I demand an introduction.”
“I won’t dwell on it, but I met my ex at David and Willa’s, at a huge party after some big concert a little over a year ago.”
“I was there!” Max said.
“No. You were not. I would remember.”
“Seriously, I was. Maybe that’s why I thought you looked familiar when I saw you that first time in the bookshop. That was a crazy scene—David’s apartment was thronged, right?”
Bronte nodd
ed.
“My flight from London was delayed, so I didn’t get there until after two in the morning, but I swear I was there. I stopped in New York on my way here actually, after my spring holiday. Oh my God, I bet you’re the one Willa wanted to introduce me to. Too bad you went home with the wrong guy.”
Bronte covered her face with her hands. “You have no idea.”
He pulled her hands away so he could really look at her. “On the other hand, you wouldn’t be sitting here now, in possession of your Brutal Honesty Manifesto no less, so maybe I should be thanking that scoundrel for luring you to this dark world of wind and heartbreak, eh?”
“Don’t even think about it. I am not one of those people who stays friends with ex-lovers—a sad fate, I fear, that you will one day share… or maybe you will be the exception, since you do seem particularly… amiable.”
“Well, thank you, kind lady.”
“I am starting to adore when you go all royal on me.” Bronte was distracted by the loud siren of a passing ambulance and missed Max’s momentary grimace.
As they lingered at the café table, Bronte pressed her thumbnail against her lower lip and contemplated the reality that Max had been at Willa and David’s party. She wondered if this was a second chance of sorts. She wondered if, this time around, it was possible to be totally up-front from this very first day, to be honest to the point of crass, to avoid all of that crazy devolution into crushing hope that had ensured the failure of her previous relationship.
“Look, Max. Here’s the deal. I want to be all casual and modern and all that, but the reality is that I am not all that sure I can do it, unless we have a pretty ironclad understanding. I love the philosophical idea of entering into a sexy friends arrangement”—she smiled at him—“but the truth is that I will probably become cloying and desperate and… you’ll find me wanting. So I think if we deal with all of that from the very beginning, then we can, you know, make do.”
He looked at her as if she had two heads.
Then he smiled some wonderful ancient smile that could have soothed medieval kings and seduced daughters of foreign enemies. Bronte wavered in her conviction and thought, for a tiny moment, that she might dive into his arms and betroth herself to him right there on Division Street, intellectualized parameters be damned.
No! her wiser inner-self screamed. She had sworn off gut instincts. Gut instincts had moved her into a shitty studio apartment in Chicago. Gut instincts sucked.
But this Max—he seemed to be well-versed in the language of blatant honesty. Bronte thought it may have been his sheer command of the King’s English. Something about the very primacy, the way he made use of each word of the language, made her feel that he had a clearer understanding of… well, everything.
“So let me get this straight.” Max smiled across the café table into Bronte’s sparkling eyes. “You think if we set out, from the very beginning, to be… I’m sorry, Bronte, but I cannot bring myself to use that tawdry phrase that is constantly bandied about… I shan’t ever be anyone’s fuck buddy…”
He said the last two words as if they had been scraped off his tongue. He would never utter them again in his life.
Bronte laughed and reached one hand across the small distance to grab one of his hands in hers. “Of course, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I hate the friends-with-benefits bullshit. I’m just saying, let’s try to be honest, realistic, and not try to pretend that there’s some grand future, some wonderful tomorrow that involves me… and your gentle British rains. It’s just so much easier for me—not that that is your job, you know, to make my life so much easier.” He smiled at her forthright enthusiasm, then she continued apace, “I mean, let’s just call it what it is. You are in town for, what? Eight more weeks? We are obviously—I mean, I suppose I should say I am obviously taken with you and look forward to spending as much of your free time with you as possible.” She smiled again and reached out her other hand to enclose his hand firmly in both of hers, as if they were making a pact. “But, I mean, really, what’s the point? Let’s just have so much fun! Don’t you think?”
Max looked at this incredibly beautiful woman and wondered what had happened to make her so skittish, so totally unwilling to just move forward at a normal pace with a (relatively) normal guy in a normal romantic relationship. But, as it was, he supposed it was worth it to play by her strange rules of engagement: no mention of lasting tenderness, no long-term plans, no future. And certainly no mention of his title. If an eight-week affair with a run-of-the-mill graduate student made her jumpy, he could only imagine what a potential future with the nineteenth Duke of Northrop would do to her precarious equilibrium.
“All right, Bronte. I accept your terms.”
He said it in a way that had Bronte worried he was going to add, “And I raise you!”
Instead, Max reached across the table and held Bronte’s cool cheek in the palm of his hand. “Let me head home for a little bit, then. Can I pick you up around seven thirty and we’ll go to dinner and a movie? Some people might call it a date, but we don’t have to call it anything.”
Bronte looked at him strangely. In the romance-novel part of her brain, she had simply assumed that she and Max would end up (that day, damn it!) in bed together in a tangle of false promises and condoms.
“Oh. Okay. Yeah. That sounds… great,” she said, recovering. “I’ll be ready at seven thirty. Will you pick me up at my place or shall I just meet you at the theater?”
“I’d rather pick you up, if it’s not too old-fashioned of me?”
“Too old-fashioned sounds ideal.”
***
Two hours later, Bronte was spending way too much time wondering what to do with her hair. If she put it up again, that would be the fourth attempt in as many minutes. She growled at her reflection and brushed it straight.
“No false promises,” she chided the overly optimistic alter ego who stared back at her—especially promises to herself. But he’s British, her hopeful self protested. He’s charming and dashing and gallant and… everything!
She turned away from her foolish self and switched the light off in the small bathroom.
She had showered and changed into her favorite pair of jeans and a long-sleeved French boat-neck shirt. She was wearing a new pair of huge gold hoop earrings that she had treated herself to a few weeks ago. Something about them made her feel all Foxy Brown. Even though her appearance was about as un–Pam Grier as possible—skinny, tall, and pale—good jewelry could work miracles. And every woman deserves a little Foxy Brown, she’d argued with herself the moment before she’d slapped down her credit card and splurged.
The doorbell rang and she grabbed a lightweight khaki jacket from the front hall closet and opened the front door.
Max looked a little too big for the entrance, which was really the bottom of a stairwell. And then he smiled, a big, glorious smile that had Bronte repressing the briefest thought that he might not only be too big for her little apartment, but maybe too big for her entire world. She’d already burned through her lifetime supply of larger-than-life men. But her palpitating heart hadn’t gotten that memo, so on it hammered its happy beat.
“Let me see you,” he said, gesturing in a small circular motion as if he were choreographing Swan Lake.
“You want me to spin?” Bronte laughed.
“Yes. Please.” He looked a little sheepish, maybe worried that he had already trespassed into forbidden, unnamed regions of the sexy friends road map.
Bronte let her arms come away from her sides and turned slowly, keeping her eyes on his over her shoulder. “Okay?”
“Very.” He leaned in and kissed her turned cheek, no hug or embrace, just a lovely, tender kiss that made Bronte want to fall into a puddle right there in the cramped entryway.
“Let’s be off then,” he said, then took her hand and spun her lightly back around.
After that night, and for four consecutive nights after, he picked her up at seven thirty. On the dot,
as her mother would say. Not that she was telling her mother or anyone else that she was seeing someone… because she wasn’t. He was merely an interlude. And he was fantastically prompt.
Then, Thursday he called her at work.
“Hey, lovely.”
Bronte did not want to begin to contemplate what that little “lovely” did to her pulse—very accelerated—but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him to quit it.
“Hey, you,” she answered. “What’s up?”
“I was thinking tomorrow night we might go out for a proper meal.”
“What does ‘proper’ mean?” Bronte joked. She was sitting at her desk overlooking a small park. The tiny pink buds on the trees were joyful and life-affirming, making their annual triumph over grim winter, but she found her mind—already!—in a constant state of relating everything back to the weeks until Max’s departure.
Buds led to full-blown blooms, which in turn led to the thick, leafy trees of high summer. When he would be gone.
“You know, a nice bottle of wine… snooty waiters… you in a small dress.”
“Aaah, that kind of proper. I love that kind of proper! Do you want me to make a reservation somewhere? Should we try to be mindful of the cost or just live a little?”
“I’ll make the reservation, and I think we should just live a little. And I don’t want to go if we are going to argue about the bill. It was my suggestion; I want to pay.”
“I told you—”
“Fine,” he interrupted, “then we won’t go.”
Bronte had made financial parity one of the nonnegotiable demands of her sexy friends doctrine. All of that fiscally irresponsible jet setting with Mr. Texas—initially with her pretending she could keep up on her own comparatively small salary, sometimes with him paying exorbitant sums with openhanded generosity and love, and finally with Bronte feeling like a ridiculous circus clown pulling out her empty pockets and tilting her head with that exaggerated, freaky, grease-makeup frown—had made her vehemently opposed to any of that grand gesture crap.