Chapter 17. Maxim
MAXIM
“My mouth is on fire, Doc.” Lennix waves her hand in front of her pouty lips, her eyes watering. I laugh and lift my glass of water for her to drink. Between greedy sips and gasps, she grins.
“I told you to slow down.” I fork through the portion of daging blado on my plate, the spicy, tender braised beef singeing my tongue and setting my taste buds on fire.
“Well, I, for one,” says Kimba, “am loving the hell out of this fish. It’s spicy, too, but so good. What’d you call it, Max?”
“It’s sate lilit ,” I reply. “Glad you like it. How’s yours, Viv?”
The pretty brunette’s glasses are practically fogged from the heat piled on her plate. “Everything is delicious. Thank you for bringing us here.”
“Best rijsttafel in the city.” I glance around the table, loaded with more than a dozen dishes of meat and vegetables and rice. Lots of rice, which is kind of the point. “You can’t come to Amsterdam and not have rijsttafel .”
“It’s a lot of food,” Lennix murmurs, scooping up rice and sate kambing , the savory goat she agreed to try.
“This is one of my favorite places in the city for it,” I tell them. “We had some in Utrecht, but this one’s better.”
“So you studied climate change there?” Kimba asks, chewing goat meat carefully as if considering whether she likes it.
“Climate science is my degree, but climate change is certainly a part of it, yeah.”
“What will you do with it?” Kimba asks.
“Everything,” I answer simply.
Kimba and Vivienne laugh, but Lennix watches me, her eyes and mine locked in recognition. She’s glimpsed my ambition in flashes, in the few things I’ve shared. She knows I won’t be deterred by anything when pursuing my goals.
“I also have a degree in business,” I clarify, answering the questioning looks the other two women give me. “I’m interested in the intersection of clean energy and commerce.”
“In other words,” Lennix drawls, her smile affectionate and cynical, “he wants to make lots of money off the planet.”
We all laugh, but I feel the need to reassure them I’m not some heartless capitalist asshole who would compromise greater good for greater gain. I’m not my father.
“It’s true I want to monetize green energy innovation,” I tell them, sipping the last of my Bir Bintang. “But I also refuse to let this planet go to crap without at least trying to convince people we should stop treating it like a bottomless trash can.”
“That’s why you’re going to Antarctica next week?” Lennix asks.
“There’s a lot to learn there, yeah.”
“Is it dangerous?” Vivienne loads a little more beef and rice onto the small plate in front of her.
“It’s the most remote place on Earth,” I reply wryly. “And basically, an ice-covered desert. Civilization is literally thousands of miles away, and you’re surrounded by icebergs. Not to mention the weather changes faster than you can say blizzard, so yeah. There’s some risk.”
Lennix’s brows knit into a frown over concerned eyes.
“I mean, not that much,” I rush to tell her. “We’ll have some limited phone and internet access for the most part.”
Not always frequent or reliable, but I’ve already made it sound bad enough.
“How long will you be there?” Vivienne asks.
“We fly out next week and will be there until November,” I reply.
“So about eight months. One of the major hazards, beyond the weather and unpredictable conditions, is depression. Most of that time, there will be no sun. It’s dark for months in the winter, and a lot of people deal with seasonal affective disorder, some depression. ”
“It sounds intense,” Lennix says.
“It can be. We have to adjust to chronic hypobaric hypoxia.”
“Um…what?” Kimba asks.
“Sorry,” I say, laughing. “We’ll be living for a long time with a third less oxygen than is available at sea level, but we’ve been training for these conditions. There’s a former Navy SEAL in our group, and I worked with him for weeks and have been maintaining the regimen he suggested.”
“So that’s why you’re so much bigger,” Lennix says. She grimaces a little when her friends giggle and snort. “I mean… You’ve just… It was four years ago. Just more muscle or whatever.”
Under the table, I slide my hand across her lap and find her hand, a courtship between our fingers. I chuckle and kiss her temple. She shifts to catch my lips, opening to briefly brush my tongue with hers. My unoccupied hand knots into a fist, and I fight the urge to haul her onto my lap.
“Ahem.” Kimba clears her throat and then stretches into an elaborate yawn. “I’m beat. Aren’t you beat, Viv?”
“Huh?” Vivienne looks up, her jaws stuffed with rice and beef. “No, I actually wanted to order another beer. Do we have this stuff back in the States?”
“But aren’t you ready to go ?” Kimba widens her eyes and ticks her head subtly in our direction.
“Go?” Vivienne shoves an errant grain of rice back into her mouth. “I haven’t even tried the goat yet.”
“Well, I’m beat,” I say, letting Kimba off the hook and deciding we’ll be the ones to leave. “And stuffed and ready to go. My treat, ladies. You two stay as long as you like, and I’ll take care of the bill on my way out.”
I brush the hair back from Lennix’s face and whisper in her ear, “You still staying with me tonight?”
She turns her head, and the need and desire in her eyes match everything I’ve wanted since she left my house this morning.
“Hey, guys.” She drags her gaze back to her friends. “I’m going with Maxim, okay?”
Their knowing grins and nods answer. I fully embraced the idea of eating dinner with Vivienne and Kimba. It gave me time with Lennix but also assuaged her guilt for spending less time with her friends on holiday.
“We’ll see you in the morning,” Kimba says. “Thanks for tonight, Maxim. It’s been great.”
“And I don’t think you’ve checked your phone once to see if Stephen called, Viv,” Lennix teases.
Vivienne instantly digs into her purse and retrieves her phone.
“He did!” She holds the screen for us to see, her face triumphant. “Two missed calls. God, that man loves me.”
They continue chatting while I settle the bill. Vivienne and Kimba are still nibbling from half-empty dishes and sipping their beers when Lennix and I slip out the door, rich aromas following us into the street.
“That was really sweet of you.” Lennix grabs my hand and pulls me closer until she’s pressed into my side. “Dinner for them, I mean.”
“Small price to pay for time with you. I was more than willing. Besides they’re great.”
“They’re the best. Kimba and I met at a voter registration drive on campus.” She chuckles against my shoulder. “We registered Viv to vote. We’re both public policy majors. Vivienne is journalism.”
“Nice. She and her boyfriend seem really serious.”
“Fiancé, and I can’t believe he let her out of the country. He’s as bad as my father. Stephen and Viv are joined at the hip.”
“That’s great, that they’ve found each other so young.”
“I guess. I do worry sometimes that it’s a lot. I mean, he’s out of school already. Living in New York. He’s in finance. She’ll move there when she graduates for sure.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“She’s turning down the LA Times to be with him.”
“And you don’t think that’s wise?”
“I wouldn’t do it. I mean, it’s New York, so she’ll probably find something else, but there’s no guarantee. Would I set aside my ambitions and goals to follow some man?” Her scoffing breath clouds in the cool air. “No way.”
“Good for you. You already know how I feel.”
“Yep.” She turns her head from my shoulder to consider the glimmering canal bordering the street. “No attachments.”
“Right.” I thread our fingers together and pull her closer. “No attachments.”
The silence deepens between us while we walk, and I wonder if I said the wrong thing somewhere along the way—if I’ve been too honest about how things need to be between us.
“So what about you?” I ask after a few moments. “Thought any more about which of the three opportunities you’ll take?”
“There’s actually a fourth on the table now. My godmother called today. Her friend is running for Congress, and she thinks I should be on his team. He’s Native and smart and has been doing great work for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.”
“Wow. That sounds like it could be amazing. You gonna do it?”
Her shrug is quick. “Mena, my godmother, is sending some stuff for me to look at so I can see what he’s all about. This could be it, though.”
“It?”
“I feel like a missile ready to go but waiting for launch codes and a destination. Poised, powerful, but not sure where to aim. Today when Mena was telling me about this campaign, I wondered if this is my target. Something seemed to…I don’t know, make sense.
You ever thought about going into politics? ”
“Hell, no.” I fake a shudder. “Dirty business, politics. You can’t have a soul and be a politician. Believe me, I have a family full of them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, my uncle was a mayor. We’ve got a few congressmen in our illustrious family tree. And my older brother’s a senator. He’s gonna be your president in about ten years, by the way.”
“You say it like it’s only a matter of time.”
“You haven’t met my brother,” I say dryly. “When he sets out to do something, it’s a foregone conclusion.”
“Sounds like it runs in the family.”
I pause, considering. I’m a Cade. Ambition, achieving was never a choice for me. It was just a question of if my ambitions would take me down a path that satisfied my father. But I’ve removed that factor. I may have shunned the Cade name, but the Cade nature is not so easily shed.
“You didn’t want to get into the family business, so to speak?” she follows up.
“Let’s just say the family business is not for me.” Neither of them , I add to myself.