Chapter 20 #2
"A what?"
"The NeverEnding Story. You have Netflix, right?"
"Yes, but I've never seen it."
"Good. Then this will be new for you."
I stepped past him into the foyer without waiting for an invitation, because waiting for invitations had never been my style and because if I hesitated now I might lose my nerve entirely.
I navigated his home like I belonged there, my cane tapping against imported marble as I made my way toward what looked like a living room. The space was exactly as I'd imagined: expensive, tasteful, and utterly devoid of personality. A mausoleum decorated by committee.
But he was here, and that changed everything.
I shrugged off my coat, draping it over a custom leather chair without ceremony, then placed the paper bag on his coffee table. The Burger King logo looked obscene against the expensive glass.
His eyes widened at the sight of greasy fast food threatening his hand-polished Italian marble. "Wait, you can't just..."
But I was already unwrapping the food, the paper crinkling against the pristine surface. Let him panic about his coffee table. Let him fuss over the presentation. That was Maxime, always trying to impose order on chaos, always trying to control the uncontrollable.
He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with porcelain plates, sterling silver cutlery, and pressed linen napkins. I watched him slide a plate beneath my half-unwrapped burger, watched him place a coaster under the drink I hadn't even ordered.
"Of course you'd eat a Whopper with a fork and knife," I said, shaking my head.
I found his remote and navigated to Netflix, searching for the film while he continued his elaborate place-setting ritual. The familiar title card appeared on screen, and something loosened in my chest at the sight of it.
"What are you doing?" he finally asked.
I settled onto his couch, noting with satisfaction that it was more comfortable than it looked. "Having dinner with you. Watching a movie."
"But... Burger King?"
I patted the space beside me. "Sit. The fries are getting cold."
He sat, still uncertain, still off-balance in a way I rarely saw from him. I pulled the food from the bag and placed his burger on the plate he'd positioned, the paper wrapper crinkling as I set it aside.
"You remember the office we had when we first started?" I asked, unwrapping my own burger. "That converted storage space on Vine Street?"
"Above the copy shop." He nodded slowly. "We could hear the machines running all day."
"And across the street was..."
"Burger King." The memory surfaced in his eyes. "You used to get a Whopper every Thursday."
"The one day we let ourselves spend money on lunch." I took a bite and closed my eyes briefly, letting the salt and grease transport me back three decades. "Three ninety-nine for the value meal back then."
"You'd always get extra pickles."
"And you'd pick them off yours and give them to me." I nodded at his burger. "Go on. It won't kill you."
He took a tentative bite, and I watched his expression shift from skepticism to something approaching recognition. The same transformation I'd experienced standing in that fluorescent-lit restaurant.
"Why are we doing this?" he asked.
I finished chewing before answering. "Because sometimes you need to remember where you came from to understand where you're going."
I turned my attention to the television and started the movie. The screen filled with a young boy reading a book while hiding from bullies.
I placed the paper crown on the coffee table, within reach but not forcing it on him.
We ate in silence for several minutes, the film playing. I noticed him picking the pickles off his burger without thinking, placing them on the edge of my wrapper. I claimed them immediately, adding them to my own burger with a small nod of thanks.
The gesture had survived thirty years. Some things, it seemed, remained constant.
"I've never seen this movie," he said finally.
"I know." I gathered our empty wrappers, tucking them back into the bag. "I have. Every time it played on the local station."
He looked at me more carefully. "When was that?"
"Oklahoma. When I was nine." I kept my eyes on the screen where the boy was entering a mysterious bookshop. "Shane would pass out drunk on the couch. I'd turn the volume down low so it wouldn't wake him up."
Shane. The name I never spoke aloud. The stepfather whose skull I'd crushed with a Louisville Slugger when I was seventeen. Maxime knew the story, or enough of it, but I'd never told him about the small moments that had made survival possible.
"It was like finding a door," I continued, dropping into a quieter register. "For two hours, I could be somewhere else, somewhere where kids actually won and monsters could be beaten."
I could feel his gaze on my profile, the weight of his attention more intimate than any touch.
"It's not a great film," I added with a small shrug. "The effects are dated. The dialogue is cheesy. But..."
"But it was yours," he finished for me.
I nodded, finally looking at him. "I wanted to share it with you."
The words hung between us, simple but weighted with everything I couldn't say directly. That I saw him as more than useful. That I wanted him to see me as more than powerful. Somewhere between Singapore, Zurich and this improbable moment on his couch, I'd stopped pretending I didn't need him.
On screen, Fantasia was being devoured by The Nothing. Atreyu rode through swamps and faced his reflection in a magic mirror. Falkor the luck dragon soared through the clouds with a laugh that had once made a broken boy in Oklahoma believe that good things were possible.
"You know why I really liked it?" I asked. "The idea that stories could save the world. That imagination mattered."
I reached for the paper crown, turning it in my hands. The cardboard felt flimsy, almost pathetic, a cheap promotional item that shouldn't have meant anything at all.
"Burger King cost two ninety-nine for a meal back then," I said, eyes still on the crown.
"Shane always said it was too expensive, that I didn't deserve it.
But some days, if I'd done enough odd jobs around the neighborhood, I could get one anyway.
" I looked up, meeting his eyes. "One time," I continued, "the cashier gave me a crown.
I wore it all the way home, feeling like I'd gotten away with something enormous.
Shane saw it when I walked through the door.
He knocked me to the ground, tore it up, and made me watch while he threw the pieces in the trash.
Then he gave me a split lip for 'wasting money on garbage. '"
Maxime reached out without hesitation, taking the paper crown from my hands. Our fingers brushed in the exchange.
He placed the crown on his own head, adjusting it carefully.
"How do I look?" he asked.
"Like royalty," I said softly.
We turned back to the movie, sitting closer now, the space between us somehow less defined. On screen, Bastian was riding Falkor through clouds, his laughter echoing as they soared toward adventures I'd once dreamed of sharing with someone who understood.
My hand found his in the space between us. His fingers intertwined with mine.
"You're the only one who would understand," I said.
He'd been there at the beginning. He'd seen the man emerge from the broken boy. He'd helped build the empire that had set me free.
We watched the rest of the movie in comfortable silence, hands joined, the paper crown still perched on his head. It was ridiculous and childish.
And yet, sitting there with Burger King wrappers on his coffee table and a paper crown on his head, a quiet warmth spread through my chest. It wasn't power or control or the cold satisfaction of dominance, but something softer and more dangerous.
When the credits rolled, neither of us moved to turn off the television. The dim light from the screen cast soft shadows across his face, catching the edge of the crown, illuminating the bruises that Xander had left.
"Stay tonight," he said suddenly. "Here. With me."
My eyes met his, searching for the catch, the ulterior motive, the strategic calculation I'd come to expect from everyone in my orbit. I found none of that, just a man in a paper crown asking for something he'd never allowed himself to want.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes." The certainty in his voice caught me off guard. "I want you to."
I reached up and adjusted the paper crown that had slipped slightly askew on his head. "Then I'll stay."
Maxime rose from the couch and stood there for a moment, hands empty, looking lost in his own home. I'd seen Maxime navigate hostile boardrooms, defuse international incidents, manage my empire through eighteen months of my absence. I'd never seen him not know what to do next.
"The bedroom is upstairs," he said finally. "I should... there are things I need to prepare. Fresh towels. I'm not sure what's in the guest room, but I can—"
"Maxime."
He stopped.
"I'm not sleeping in the guest room."
His throat worked, and a slight tremor moved through his shoulders. "Of course. I'll show you to the master suite, then."
He led me through his house, and I followed with my cane marking time against the hardwood. At the service elevator tucked behind the main staircase, he pressed the button without comment. Of course he had one. And of course he knew better than to make me climb stairs at the end of a day like this.
The master bedroom was impersonal, just like the rest of the house. High ceilings, neutral colors, furniture that looked like it had been selected from a catalog. The king-size bed dominated the space.
"Which side do you prefer?" Maxime asked.
"Which side do you sleep on?"
The question seemed to confuse him. "I... the left. Usually. But I can—"
"Then I'll take the right."
He nodded, but he didn't move. His hands hung at his sides, opening and closing on nothing. I recognized the pattern from years of watching him work: Maxime needed a task. Without one, he was adrift.
"I should get you something to sleep in," he said. "I have—"
"Maxime."
He stopped again, and this time I crossed the room to stand in front of him. I was close enough to see his pulse jumping at his throat, close enough to smell the lingering scent of his shampoo beneath the day's accumulation of sweat and stress.
"Stop."
His eyes met mine, and I saw it clearly: the fear, yes, but something else beneath it. Want that he didn't know how to express without a command to follow, need that had no outlet when there was nothing to do.
I reached up and removed the paper crown from his head, setting it on the nightstand. His hair was mussed where the cardboard had pressed against it, silver strands catching the low light.
"Get ready for bed," I said. "Whatever you normally do. I'll use the bathroom after you."
Structure. Something he could follow. The relief that flickered across his face was almost painful to witness.
He disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard water running. I removed my jacket and draped it over a chair. Then my shoes and my belt.
When Maxime emerged, he wore loose cotton pants and nothing else. The bruises from Xander's beating had darkened further, spreading across his ribs in watercolor purples and greens. His chest was pale, sparse dark hair scattered across skin I'd touched in other contexts, for other purposes.
He stood in the doorway, waiting.
"Which drawer?" I asked.
"For?"
"Something I can sleep in."
"Oh." He moved to the dresser, pulled open a drawer, and retrieved a pair of gray sweatpants and a white undershirt. He held them out to me without meeting my eyes.
I took them. My fingers brushed his, and he flinched like I'd burned him.
The bathroom was clean, organized, every product aligned at right angles. I changed quickly, folding my clothes out of habit, and when I returned to the bedroom, Maxime was already in bed. On the left side. Lying rigid, staring at the ceiling.
I turned off the overhead light, leaving only the lamp on my side. The mattress dipped as I lowered myself onto it, my hip protesting the movement. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
"You can breathe," I said.
He let out a shaky exhale.
The space between us was perhaps eighteen inches, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his body and hear each controlled breath he took, but not close enough to touch without intention.
I turned onto my side, facing him. He lay frozen, his profile sharp in the dim light, and I studied the architecture of his face: the blade of his nose, the set of his jaw, the dark sweep of his lashes against his cheek.
"Look at me."
He turned his head. His eyes were wide, almost frightened, and something in my chest clenched at the sight.
"You don't have to do anything," I said. "There's nothing to manage here. Nothing to anticipate. Just sleep."
"I don't know how to do this." The confession came out barely above a whisper. "Without... I don't know what you want from me."
"Nothing. That's the point."
His brow furrowed.
"Close your eyes," I said, giving him something to hold on to.
He obeyed. His breathing remained uneven, his body still taut with tension, but the simple act of following an instruction seemed to settle something in him.
The lamplight caught the bruises on his face, the lines that age had carved around his eyes and mouth, the gray at his temples that hadn't been there when we'd started this, when we'd been young and hungry and building something neither of us fully understood.
He'd spent decades sleeping alone in this mausoleum of a house. I'd spent decades surrounded by security details and locked doors and the ever-present awareness that someone might be coming to kill me. Neither of us had learned how to share a bed without purpose.
His breathing began to slow. The tension in his shoulders softened incrementally, and then sleep finally claimed him: the subtle release in his jaw, the way his lips parted slightly, the small unconscious sound he made as he surrendered to it.
I reached over and turned off the lamp. Darkness settled over the room, and I lay there listening to him breathe across the small distance that separated us.
The boy who'd learned to sleep with one eye open in an Oklahoma trailer, listening for Shane's footsteps, should not have been able to relax. The man who'd built an empire on paranoia and control should not have been able to close his eyes in an unfamiliar bed.
And yet.
I let my own eyes drift shut. The last thing I registered before sleep took me was the sound of Maxime's breathing, steady and slow, and the knowledge that for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't alone in the dark.