Chapter Seventeen
She started to feel it at the oddest of times and in the most inconvenient of ways.
It, that thing Max had talked of, a feeling he said she would know in her heart.
She began to feel it, began to recognize it, though she didn’t dare put a name to it.
Wouldn’t dare put a name to it. Putting a name to it acknowledged it, gave it shape and a reality she wasn’t quite ready to face.
It was almost as if she didn’t name it, it wasn’t really happening.
If she didn’t name it, she didn’t feel it.
Except, of course, that she did.
She felt it when she went to Max’s one evening to use the shower and heard him playing.
It was a piece she was beginning to know well, and once she was clean, she snuck into his study to listen, tiptoeing into the room before sinking into her usual corner silently.
Max gave no indication he knew she was there until half an hour later, when his fingers stilled, and his shoulders went lax.
“Come here,” he ordered, without even turning around, a little out of breath. She went up to him, resting a hand on his shoulder, and he hauled her in front of him, lifting her onto the piano keys and dropping to his knees.
He ate her out on his eighty-five-thousand-pound Yamaha, and she couldn’t find it within herself to care.
Also, for someone with aspirations to be a florist, she could have done a little personal pruning herself, but again, couldn’t find it within herself to give a shit.
Neither did Max apparently, given the voracity and fervour with which he licked at her.
It was afterwards, when she was lying naked on the floor with him that she began to feel it .
. . a warmth within her chest, somewhere between an ache of longing and feeling of belonging, which only strengthened when Max sat up, going to his piano and sitting naked on the stool.
He began to play again, the same piece as before, and she rolled onto her back, letting the notes wash over her.
“I love this one,” she told him, resting a hand on her stomach, and she saw Max nod.
“I know. Beethoven. ‘Adagio un poco mosso’. This is the piece that got me where I am today.”
“How so?”
Max shrugged, the movement slight as he played.
“I told you Geoffrey dumped me in boarding school after boarding school. One of them had a piano master. This was his favourite, and he taught it to me. Obviously, Geoffrey couldn’t take me home during holidays, so he left me in summer school too.
All I did was practice piano, day after day after day.
I had the whole concerto committed to memory by the time I was thirteen. ”
“Muscle memory,” Bo said softly, and Max nodded.
“This was my first recording. They called me a prodigy and the greatest classical talent since Benjamin Britten.” Max laughed.
“They didn’t know I was just a bored and lonely kid.
Still, it got me jobs. Orchestras, the proms, even the Royal Variety Show.
Private concerts followed, and more recordings.
I’m a professional musician because of this piece.
Pianists don’t often make money from their talent. I got lucky.”
“Do you ever write your own music?” Bo asked, and Max nodded.
“Not as much as I would like. I wish I had more time for it. I figure once I sell this place,” he gestured to the room around them, “I’ll spend more time writing. I’ve got a tour already got booked in but I want to take a year off.”
“Tour?”
Max shrugged. “I’ve booked to play a few concerts next year.
It’s not my priority though. Writing is.
It’ll be nice to do my own thing for once, instead of just playing the work of others.
At least Geoffrey could do that for me. His house, which was never my home, will give me the time I need to write. How’s that for irony?”
Bo sighed. “I don’t think it’s irony. Geoffrey never did anything without purpose. He told me from the first day we met that his house would one day go to you. He wanted you to have it. Maybe it was his way of finding absolution.”
Max stopped playing, turning to look at her with a raised eyebrow. “Absolution?”
She blushed. “That’s four years of Catholic school talking.”
“You’re Catholic?”
“No.” She blushed even harder. “But my mother thought they had the best uniforms.”
Max grinned. “I can see you as a Catholic schoolgirl.”
She rolled her eyes. “Behave, won’t you?”
Max grinned again before going back to his piano. They didn’t speak again after that, and Bo must have drifted off, because when she woke Max was beside her, and a blanket had been pulled over them. One arm was flung over her body, holding her close, while his other arm pillowed her head.
He was asleep, and Bo felt a thrill run through her.
They’d never slept together before, not like this.
She felt it again then, that warmth in her chest, though it wasn’t just warmth this time.
No, there was something quieter there too.
With surprise, Bo realized it was contentment.
Contentment, because Max Fitzroy, the man who confessed to barely sleeping, was asleep now.
Asleep, next to her. If Max could sleep by her side, maybe it did mean something.
Maybe, with her in his arms, he felt safe.
Or maybe it meant nothing at all. Maybe he was just tired, and she’d just happened to be there. With a sigh, Bo nestled into Max and tried to put her hopes to one side.
They had an arrangement, and she needed to stick to it.
* * *
She felt it again one afternoon when she was in Geoffrey’s kitchen — no, Max’s kitchen, she reminded herself — making a snack after work. She was exhausted, having gone with Ida to New Covent Garden Market at 4 a.m. that morning to help choose flowers for the shop.
She’d only had an hour with Max before she’d had to leave, the time between him getting home and her getting up.
Just sixty minutes of quiet, borrowed time where she made coffee and he’d leaned against her counter, watching her with a sleepy half-smile.
He looked exhausted, his shirt unbuttoned and tie askew, and they hadn’t really talked — there hadn’t been time — but he’d made love to her with a gentleness that took her breath away.
At one point he’d reached for her hand, stroking her fingers softly, and Bo had smiled at him, enjoying the time where their mismatched lives overlapped.
It had taken all her effort to peel herself away from him, and she’d had to remind herself again and again that she loved New Covent Garden Market and working with Ida and couldn’t let her down.
She’d had a good if tiring day. She’d been like a child in a candy shop, wanting to take home all the summer roses and sweet-smelling lilies, and had insisted on buying armfuls of stunningly bright gerberas to weave into bouquets with eucalyptus leaves.
Ida hadn’t been convinced at first, but eventually nodded when Bo produced the first bouquet, sighing as she touched one of the flowers.
“You’ve got such a natural talent for this,” Ida told her, not for the first time. “I meant it, Bo. You should go into floristry for good.”
Bo had shrugged in response, though once again, she’d been secretly delighted by Ida’s words.
Just as she was secretly delighted when all her gerbera bouquets sold out by 5 p.m., people leaving the shop with arms full of colour.
She’d made her way home then, exhausted in the best possible way, but too tired to throw anything more than a quick sandwich together, which Max eyed critically.
“You’ve been working,” he argued. “You need something more substantial than that.”
He then brushed both her and her feeble arguments to one side as he busied himself about the kitchen, pulling out vegetables and bread, chopping and stirring.
Bo sat by the kitchen table, resting her head on her hands, watching him with a kind of stunned disbelief. “But you don’t cook,” she reminded him. “Remember? In fact, you nearly hired me to do it for you.”
“Hey, I can cook,” Max replied easily. “I just never have the time for it.”
“You? You can cook?” Bo asked in disbelief.
“Sure.”
“Really?” She stared at him. “I find it hard to believe that Eton had a home economics department.”
Max laughed. “Oh, they didn’t. But after Eton, while I was at Oxford, I developed the most desperate crush on a girl who was a member of the Tea Appreciation Society. I taught myself how to make a Génoise cake to impress her, and my cooking kind of spiralled from there.”
Bo blinked at him. “I think that might just be the poshest sentence I’ve ever heard. Did it work?”
“What, cooking?” Max shrugged. “Try my curry and let me know.”
“No. I mean, did it impress the girl?”
Max grinned. “Yep. Nacressa and I were together for four years after she fell for the charms of my soft-baked sponge.”
Nacressa. Raphaella. Bo wondered if any of Max’s ex-girlfriends had names that weren’t straight out of Debrett’s.
She fell quiet, still resting her head on her arms, watching him cook for a time, feeling once again that ache of longing in her chest and trying to ignore it.
Maybe it was just hunger. Maybe it was just tiredness.
Or maybe, Bo thought with a nervous swallow, just maybe, it really was—
“You’re serious today,” Max suddenly reflected, interrupting her thoughts as he stirred a pot on the stove. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m just tired,” Bo replied quickly.
“I know. It’s not just that though. There’s something else.”
She shrugged, not knowing what else to do or say.
She couldn’t very well admit the truth, could she?
Couldn’t sit there and say, ‘Well, Max, remember that feeling you said I might have one day? I think I’m having it now, and for you.
’ Oh no. She couldn’t do that. If London had any real hills, Max would run for them.
Instead, she shrugged again, and Max frowned. She watched as he walked to the fridge, pulling out a pot of Greek yoghurt which he then dumped into a bowl. He brought the bowl to the table with a few vegetables, sitting next to Bo and munching on a carrot thoughtfully.
“You look like Bugs Bunny,” Bo told him, without moving.
“And you look miserable as sin. What’s up with you?”
“I told you, I’m just tired.”
“And I told you; there’s something else.” Frowning again, Max dipped his carrot into the yoghurt, before bringing it to Bo’s face. She jumped when the cold liquid hit her skin, and went to rub at the mark, but Max grabbed her hand, holding her steady.
“Didn’t I once tell you that you were three times as beautiful when you smiled?”
She nodded, and Max grinned at her. He released her hand, moving his own fingers so that they now lightly gripped her chin.
“I love your smile,” he told her, dipping the carrot into the yoghurt again and tracing it across her cheeks.
“I love it so much, I could look at it forever. But if you don’t feel like smiling, that’s fine.
” He moved the carrot around her mouth, before dipping it again into the yoghurt and moving it to his own face.
Bo watched, mesmerized, as Max drew an exaggerated smile around his own mouth, much like a clown would wear.
“Look,” he said proudly, when he was done.
“You look ridiculous,” Bo replied, and he nodded to her own face.
“So do you.”
She rolled her eyes, before pulling out her iPhone and reversing her camera.
She gaped when she saw what Max had done to her.
An exaggerated frown circled her mouth, the exact opposite of his exaggerated smile.
Without warning, Max leaned into her, so that his face appeared in the camera image, and he reached forward and clicked a photograph of them together.
“Are you happy with yourself?” she asked him, and he nodded.
“Immensely.”
“Our first photograph together and we’re covered in yoghurt.”
“So? Look on the bright side, given our normal activities we could have a photograph where we’re covered in—”
“Ugh. Don’t say it,” Bo cut in, and Max laughed.
“I was going to say sweat. Why, what we’re you thinking?”
She blushed. “Of something that looks a little like the yoghurt.”
Max laughed again, and he looked so ridiculous, sitting there with his dripping white smile, that she couldn’t help but laugh too.
Max sat back with a self-satisfied and smug grin, before leaning forward to wipe a drop of yoghurt from her skin.
“There’s that smile I love,” he whispered, and Bo couldn’t help herself, pulling him towards her and kissing him deeply.
Max answered her kiss hungrily, and soon both the yoghurt and her tiredness were forgotten.
Their dinner burned on the stove, but neither she nor Max cared.
Afterwards, when she was ordering them food from Uber Eats, the picture of them from earlier flashed up on her screen.
“I’d send it to you, but your Nokia 3310 would probably explode,” she remarked drily, and Max gave an easy shrug.
Maybe he didn’t care, Bo worriedly thought. Maybe she was the only one troubled by whatever the hell it was she was feeling. Maybe she was the only one invested in them, or in this, whatever this now was.
“Max?” she queried suddenly, rolling onto her side. “Did you love Nacressa?”
If Max was surprised by the sudden change in topic, he didn’t let on. Instead, he inhaled for a long moment, before exhaling just as deeply.
“I guess I couldn’t have,” he decided, the words identical to how he’d spoken about Raphaella weeks before.
“If I had, we’d still be together. She was sweet though,” he added.
“But then I guess young love always is. We broke up a year after we graduated. She married a hedge fund manager, in the end.”
There was a bittersweet tinge of melancholy to his voice, and inexplicably, Bo couldn’t bear the thought of him being sad. She reached up to lay a soft hand on his cheek, tracing his jaw with the pad of her thumb.
“I bet he doesn’t make her Génoise sponge cake,” she whispered, and Max laughed, hugging her to him.
“No. I bet he doesn’t.”
There it was again, sharp within her. That ache of want. That ache of longing. That sense of belonging, sure and absolute. It was an adult emotion born of adult feeling, and Bo, uncertain and inexperienced, was temporarily blinded by it.
“Bo—” Max suddenly began, but Bo, still reeling, rolled away from him, hugging her arms around her stomach.
They had an arrangement, she reminded herself. She needed to stick to it.