Chapter Sixteen #2
“Everything was fine, everything was normal, and then when I woke I realized I was cold, and the room was too quiet,” Max carried on.
“Far too quiet. All I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. My mother’s breathing had stopped.
She’d died, and I’d been asleep next to her. If I’d only been awake . . .”
“If you’d been awake, what?” Bo couldn’t help herself from asking. “You were six. You were a child. What could you have done?”
Max shrugged. “Something. Anything other than nothing.”
“You were six,” Bo argued again. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“I could’ve called an ambulance,” Max replied. “I didn’t even do that, you know. Not even once I understood what happened.”
Bo paused. “You didn’t call an ambulance? You mean you didn’t know how?”
“No, I knew how.” Max made that ugly sound again, bitter and awful. “I still didn’t do it though. I lied to myself that she would wake up. Told myself that she would get up and bring me a bowl of cereal like always. She didn’t though.”
Bo felt a wave of sorrow for Max, and instinctively her hand reached for his. “I’m so sorry.”
“I remember tucking her in.” His voice went quieter, almost flat. “Like she was sleeping. I pulled the blankets up to her chin, just like she did for me every night. I thought she was just cold. That she’d wake up if she warmed up. I must’ve sat there for hours, just waiting for her to wake up.”
“Oh, Max.”
He shook his head, the movement sharp, nearly embarrassed. “Anyway, that’s why I don’t like it. Sleep, I mean. Since that night, I’ve always been . . . not scared of it. Not exactly. Just wary of it. I have to be bone-deep with exhaustion before I can do it.”
“What happened? Afterwards?” Bo asked gently, and Max made a noise.
“Oh, Geoffrey turned up, of course, once our neighbours realized something was amiss. They called the police, who then called him. He was still my mother’s emergency contact, can you believe that?
That was the biggest joke of all. Geoffrey wouldn’t marry my mother, wouldn’t leave the wife he hated for her, but he was still down as her emergency contact.
He even identified her body at the morgue.
Arranged the goddam funeral. Oh, quietly, of course,” Max clarified, his words dark, “he couldn’t have the press getting wind of anything.
Couldn’t have anyone find out about his dirty little secret. ”
Bo opened her mouth to speak, went to defend Geoffrey, before realizing she couldn’t. Not this time. Max however saw her face, and he exhaled sharply.
“I told you once before, I know he was kind to you. I know you loved him. That wasn’t my experience though.
Some of the things he did . . . pretending I wasn’t his son, dumping me in boarding school after boarding school, not even inviting me home for Christmas .
. . he wasn’t a good man, Bo. Not always. ”
Bo chewed on her lip. “He made some bad decisions, I know that. He told me about some of them.”
“He didn’t tell you about me,” Max stated flatly.
“No,” Bo admitted. “But he told me about—” abruptly, she stopped. Geoffrey might have been dead, but the secrets he told her weren’t, not while she still held them.
Max gave her a look. “What did he tell you about?”
Bo swallowed. “Something he did. Something he wasn’t proud of. Something he spent the rest of his life regretting.”
“What?” Max looked curiously at her. Still, she paused, uncertain of what to say.
She could still recall the look in Geoffrey’s eyes when he’d spoken about his past; could still recall the pain in his face as he’d confessed the thing that haunted him most. Was it a betrayal to share it now with his estranged son?
Or would it help Max understand more about the man his father had been?
“You know, your loyalty to Geoffrey is admirable,” Max suddenly remarked, looking at her keenly.
“I’ll never know just what he did to inspire such absolute trust in you.
Oh, aside from leaving you a gift in his will worth millions.
” There was a snap to his voice Bo didn’t like, his sharp words a reminder of their enmity of old, and she pushed at him, pulling her legs towards her chest to shift him away.
He was too quick for her though, grabbing one of her ankles and holding her in place.
“Settle down,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No. You damn well shouldn’t have.”
“You know Geoffrey is a touchy subject for me,” Max said, and his eyes softened as he looked at her. “But I shouldn’t take that out on you.”
Bo said nothing, still annoyed, and Max stroked her ankle. “I shouldn’t have said it,” he said again. “I don’t want to be like this whenever I hear Geoffrey’s name.”
“If it’s any consolation to you, Geoffrey wasn’t a happy man,” Bo replied, and Max seemed to think about her words, sitting up, still stroking her ankle thoughtfully.
“I think I knew that already. Happy men don’t stay with wives who make them miserable. Happy men don’t stay in careers they don’t want. Happy men don’t latch onto young and vibrant women in their old age to liven their retirements.”
“Vibrant?” Bo nearly scoffed. “I’m not vibrant.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I know I look a certain way, and I understand those looks could be . . . well, mistaken for something like vibrancy.” Bo chewed on her lip again.
She’d never admitted to anyone — other than Willa, that was — just how uncomfortable she was in her own skin.
How much the blonde hair, long legs and figure of which her mother had been so proud discomfited her.
How sometimes she felt like a stranger in her own body.
“I know I look like something I’m not,” she added. “I know all this.”
Max inhaled deeply. “I’m not talking about how you look, Bo.
That’s nothing to do with what I meant. Your vibrancy .
. . it doesn’t come from your hair, or your face, or your breasts — as nice as they are,” he clarified with a smile.
“No. Your vibrancy comes from within you, Bo. It comes from your kindness and capacity for thought and consideration for others. It comes from the care you take of your garden and the love you have for your friends and your willingness to look for the best in others. I said that I didn’t understand how Geoffrey was able to inspire loyalty in you, but I get how you were able to inspire loyalty in him. Completely and utterly.”
Bo was floored. No man had ever complimented her so beautifully before.
All the other men in her life, the dates, the boyfriends, the erstwhile lovers .
. . they’d all fixated on her looks. She’d been told before that she was beautiful.
She’d been told she was attractive. She could even recall Oliver, in a fit of jealous anger one day, telling her she was the kind of woman who gave men thoughts they were better off without.
No man before had ever told she was good. No man had ever used so wonderful a word as vibrant to describe her before.
“Max,” she uttered, still stunned, “thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me for telling the truth,” he replied fiercely. “You don’t need to thank me for honesty.”
She nodded. Suddenly feeling brave, she crossed her legs, sitting up and looking Max directly in the eye. “What was Raphaella like?”
Max looked surprised. “My ex-girlfriend? Why?”
Bo shrugged. “I’m curious.”
Max lay back on her bed, crossing his arms under his head. “Clever. Educated. Well-spoken.”
“Beautiful?”
He opened his eyes to look at her. “What made you ask that?”
Bo shrugged again, desperately trying not to blush. “I told you: I’m curious.” She couldn’t tell Max her suspicions that he had a type, a type she was firmly not.
Max looked at her for a long moment, before he nodded. “I thought she was beautiful. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been with her.”
“How long were you together?”
“Three years.”
“Oh.” Bo felt strangely deflated. That was longer than any of her relationships had ever lasted.
“I met Raphaella at one of my concerts,” Max told her. “She played violin. She wanted to talk about music with me.”
Now Bo felt even more deflated. Raphaella was clever, well-educated and she played an instrument.
What could she offer by comparison? Her looks, and what did they matter?
Max had all but said looks weren’t important to him.
He did say you were vibrant, her mind offered, but it was a weak argument, given that Max had made that compliment within a Geoffrey context.
Face it, Bo told herself, men like Max don’t get serious with women like you.
Max will end up with someone like Raphaella again.
“Did you love her?” she asked quietly, and Max blinked.
“Who? Raphaella?”
She nodded, and Max seemed to think for a moment. “I guess I couldn’t have,” he eventually decided. “If I did, we’d still be together.”
She must have sighed, because Max squeezed the ankle he was still holding. “What about you?” he asked, and she looked down at him.
“What about me?”
“You must have an ex-boyfriend or two,” Max replied easily. “Tell me about them.”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.” Max grinned as he repeated her words back to her.
“Oh, well.” Bo shifted uncomfortably. She hated talking about Oliver. Talking about Oliver meant talking about Phoebe, and Oliver’s affair with her.
“Oh, well, what?”
She shrugged. “I, umm, dated someone named Oliver.”
“Okay.” Max nodded. “What was he like?”
“Oh, he was handsome. I think the word people use is ‘jacked’?”
Max’s face went still, and Bo shifted again.
“He was an actor too, well, an actor slash model. He worked out a lot.”
“How long were you with him?” Max asked, a strange tone to his voice.
“Just under a year. He, umm, left in the end.”
“He left? Where did he go?”
“Oh, nowhere. He left me, not London.” She swallowed nervously. “There was another woman.”
It hurt still to say the words. Hurt still to be reminded of the pain Oliver had inflicted on her fledgling heart. She looked down, abruptly lost in the pain of the past.
“What a fucking idiot,” Max murmured, and Bo looked up again.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Max said smoothly, before sitting up and hauling Bo into his lap. “You’re better off without him, you know that, right?”
She nodded. Willa said that. Lisa said that. Ida said that. Even Geoffrey said it. It still didn’t make it hurt any less.
“Did you love him?” Max asked, and there was something new in his voice. A tone she hadn’t heard before.
“What?”
“Did you love him?” Max asked again, and his gaze was intent upon her face, which he stroked with a feather-light touch.
“I must have loved him, or it wouldn’t have hurt so much,” Bo reasoned, but Max shook his head.
“No. Rejection stings, Bo. You don’t have to have been in love with . . . Oliver, wasn’t it? You don’t have to have loved Oliver to have been hurt by him.”
“I really liked him though,” she said, and Max gave a soft smile.
“Liking someone isn’t the same as loving someone, trust me. Loving someone is beautiful, even if they never love you back.”
Bo didn’t understand that. How was love beautiful if it hurt? How was love ever beautiful if it wasn’t shared? She frowned, but Max smiled again, leaning towards her.
“When you fall in love, you’ll know it. You’ll feel it, right in here.” He laid a hand over her heart. “You’ll feel it.”
“Like a concerto,” Bo offered, and Max laughed.
“What makes you say that?”
“When you play, that’s where I feel it,” Bo replied. “In here.” She put her own hand over Max’s chest, and the rhythm of his breathing suddenly changed in a way that was familiar to her. Lightning quick, he flipped her onto her back, caging her beneath him in the way she loved.
“Muscle memory,” he whispered, bending to press a kiss on her collarbone.
“That’s all my playing is: muscle memory.
I know all the notes, how and when to play them.
” Softly, he trailed a finger down her body, so that she squirmed delightedly.
“I know how hard to press them too,” Max carried on, and now his finger reached the juncture between her legs.
She inhaled sharply as he lightly pressed against her most sensitive part, rubbing softly so that she had to chew on her lip to stop from crying out.
“I know how hard to press them, so that they make the best, most wonderful noise.”
“Play me harder,” she managed to utter, lost now entirely to the feelings coursing through her body.
“I will,” Max promised, though his finger still moved in a frustratingly soft way.
“I want to commit you to my muscle memory. I want to know all the ways to play you so that you make those gorgeous noises you do . . . sounds I feel, right in here.” He gestured to his chest once more, and Bo felt something a little like happiness flood through her.
A happiness which mixed with her lust to make the most perfect of cocktails.
“Please,” she now begged, opening her legs wider for him, and Max nodded, lowering himself against her. Abruptly, he stopped, looking deep into her eyes.
“You might just be the best thing I’ve ever had the privilege of playing,” he whispered. “Have I ever told you that? Being with you is a privilege, and don’t ever let anyone make you feel differently. Not ever again.”