Chapter Twenty-Six
In all the time she and Bo had been friends, Willa was a restrained drinker.
When they’d first met and Willa refused offers of second glasses of wine or shots of vodka, she would mention acting classes and puffy skin as her reasons for abstaining.
Of course, Bo later learned that Berg was the real reason for Willa’s lightweight attitude to alcohol.
Berg was an addict, and Willa would have sold her soul to get him into recovery.
It was almost as if every drop Willa didn’t drink was a silent offering to the Gods to keep Berg from the drops he did drink (as well as things he smoked, swallowed, snorted and injected), and it had been painful to watch Willa go from disappointment to disappointment every time Berg relapsed, regressed or, on one awful occasion, had to be revived.
So, to watch Willa now, happily throwing back wine and letting Max top her glass up liberally was a shock to Bo.
She crossed her arms over her chest, watching as Willa smiled and laughed up at Max, and she wondered with more than a hint of annoyance why Willa was being so nice to the man who’d just smashed open her heart.
She watched for another few minutes, waiting for Willa to gesture to the garden, the pond or her, only for Willa to carry on laughing, smiling and chatting.
Max meanwhile was nodding at what Willa was saying, clearly unaware he was in the presence of one of the most famous women on the planet.
Briefly, Bo remembered that Max had never heard of Willa when she’d mentioned her and had never seen her in any of her films. For all Max was aware, Willa was at his party as a friend of a guest, and not as the best friend of the woman he’d been sleeping with over the summer.
After a few minutes, it became more than clear that Willa had failed in her mission to tell Max about the pond. As Max topped up her glass once again, it was apparent that she’d completely forgotten about the trespassers, the pond’s great crested newts and Bo.
Bo sighed. She knew she would now have to go and recover both Wills and this situation, which meant, she realized with a sinking feeling, she would have to talk to Max.
Max, who thought of her only as a brainless and talentless fling he could never be serious about.
With a renewed sense of anger, Bo wrapped her cardigan tightly around her and stalked up the garden towards the house.
Max saw her coming and — and was he flinching?
Max? Flinching at the sight of her? With barely repressed anger, Bo stopped in front of Willa and Max, prodding Willa in the shoulder so that her wine sloshed in her glass.
“Willa, come on, let’s go,” she ordered.
Willa blinked up at Bo in surprise, and Bo sighed. Willa’s eyes were unfocused, her cheeks were flushed, and she’d clearly downed about three glasses of wine in the past twenty minutes.
“Bo!” Willa exclaimed happily, throwing her arms around her, and now the wine sloshed onto Bo’s cardigan, leaving a damp stain.
“Come on, Willa. You’ve had enough.” Bo was careful not to meet Max’s eyes. She didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to talk to him. She just wanted to extricate her best friend from this situation and get the hell away from him.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Willa protested, unsteady on her feet. “I still need to finish my wine. This gentleman,” Willa gestured to Max, “was kind enough to refill my glass.”
“Your glass is empty,” Bo said, pointing to the stain on her cardigan. “And you don’t need any more. Let’s go.”
“No, no, no, no, no. We still need to find Max.”
“What?” Max finally spoke, and now Bo looked at him. He was looking right back at her, puzzlement in his gaze, and it dawned on Bo that Willa had no idea who Max was, or what he looked like.
Willa had been looking for Max but hadn’t known who to look for. More than that, she’d been talking to Max for nearly ten minutes now, without a single fucking clue who he was.
“That doesn’t matter now,” Bo insisted, trying to pull Willa away. “Come on.”
“No, we need to find Max,” Willa replied, refusing to budge, and honestly, for all Willa’s small and delicate stature, you could tell she worked out. She was strong.
Fucking Pilates, Bo cursed internally.
“You need to find Max, do you?” Max suddenly asked, and his tone might have been blank, but his eyes were deeply curious.
“Yes!” exclaimed Willa, grinning up at Max stupidly. “Mr Two out of Ten.”
“Who?” Max asked sharply.
“Wills—” Bo said instantly, desperately trying to cut her friend off, but Willa carried on talking regardless.
“Mr Two out of Ten,” she said again. “That’s what we call Max.”
“Why?” Max asked, his tone now deadly, and the look he gave Bo was even worse.
“Because that’s how Bo here rates him,” Willa explained, throwing her arm around Bo’s shoulder. “Looks-wise, that is. She’s not really attracted to him, you see. But apparently, he’s pretty good in bed so she tolerates him, right?”
Silence fell and God, it was awful. The look in Max’s eyes changed from deadly to one of stunned and hurt confusion, and Bo’s stomach turned over itself.
He looked pained, and Bo realized that this conversation must truly have hurt him.
He stared at Bo, with that horrible hurt in his eyes, and she stared back at him, without knowing what to do.
“Max,” she said, but nothing else would come out because what else could she say? How could she make any of this better?
Max shook his head though and looked to the ground, away from Bo’s gaze.
When he looked back up, his expression was once again emotionless, his face set into carefully trained lines of bland boredom.
Maybe he should have been the actor, Bo couldn’t help but think.
His face was so empty, so hidden of real feeling.
“Max?” Willa blinked in confusion, but she was too drunk to know how to process the situation. “Where’s Max?”
“Here. I’m Max, you see,” Max replied, and his tone was just as expressionless as his face. “Mr Two out of Ten, right?”
Willa’s face changed, and even in her drunken state, Bo could see that Willa realized she’d inadvertently fucked up.
“Max,” Bo tried again, but once again, nothing more would come. She knew she’d hurt Max, but then, hadn’t he hurt her too?
Max shook his head again though. “Take your friend back to your summer house, Bo,” he instructed. “I don’t have anything to say to you right now.”
“Max—”
“Actually, that’s not true,” Max abruptly added. “I do have something to say to you. Fuck you, Bo.”
“Max.”
“Fuck you, Bo, and get the fuck off my property too.”
* * *
She let Willa pass out on her bed. Her best friend had gone to sleep full of abject apologies and protestations that she hadn’t meant to do it, but Bo had only shrugged.
“I know you didn’t mean to. It isn’t your fault.”
“It is, but I didn’t mean it.”
“No, Wills,” Bo insisted. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who said that terrible thing. It was bound to come out some time, and tonight was as good a night as any. I hurt him, he hurt me. It’s a fitting end to it all, actually. Completely and horrifically apt.”
“He hurt you? What do you mean?”
Bo shrugged. “Remember the two trespassers?”
Willa had closed her eyes. “No.”
“You’ve had too much wine.”
“Sorry.”
“One of them was Raphaella. Max’s ex. She was talking to her friend about Max and I overheard them.”
“Oh. What’d they say?”
“That Max thinks I’m brainless and talentless. That he isn’t serious about me. Oh, and that I’m just a fling.”
Willa’s eyes had flown open at that. “Bastard.”
Bo had only shrugged again though. She’d felt empty, beyond feeling anything other than the reality of everything.
She’d never considered herself pragmatic before, but now, she knew that was just what she was.
It was another new adult emotion, this time born from utter and abject disappointment, and underneath it all was the feeling that she deserved everything she’d gotten.
She’d been cruel, Max had been cruel, and now they were both left feeling that cruelty.
“Maybe he is. What does it matter now? After tonight, he can add one more word to that awful list of what he thinks of me: bitch.”
“You’re not a bitch, Bo,” Willa had told her, her eyes closing once more.
Bo had sighed. “Maybe I am. The look in his eyes . . .” Bo shuddered to remember it. “The look in his eyes made me felt like I was.”
Willa had fallen asleep soon after, and Bo had lain beside her, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes, all she could see was the hurt in Max’s eyes when he’d learned what title she’d bestowed upon him.
It made her feel sick to the stomach to remember that pain, the sadness and hurt confusion that had crossed his face.
Bo winced when she thought about how Willa phrased it, winced when she realized Max now thought she merely tolerated him because he was good in bed.
The worst of it all was that it wasn’t even true.
She loved Max. She’d fallen completely and spectacularly in love with him, and with that love was a love for his personality as well as his looks.
She loved the lips that were slightly too large and wide for his face.
She loved the messy hair that always looked slightly dirty and was always falling in his eyes.
She loved the glasses that were always slipping down his nose and the watery blue of his eyes.
Yes, Bo loved everything about Max, and nothing about him had needed toleration, not when everything about him was so wanted by her and her heart.