Chapter 45. Maxim
MAXIM
“And then Lennix says, ‘Happy holidays…” I pause for emphasis. “… Doc .’”
David and Grim don’t look as impressed by this last bit of information as they should. They actually look slightly disinterested.
“You get the significance of that, right?” I demand. “Remember I told you she used to call me—”
“Doc Quixote,” they both finish flatly, arms crossed over their chests.
They’re slumped into the sumptuous sectional that takes up a quarter of the room.
We’re at my place embedded in the slopes of the Aspen Highlands.
Neither of them have immediate families, and mine… Well, it’s obviously complicated.
“Not all the time. Mostly she would just call me Doc, but there was that one time we went—”
“Bike riding,” they say together again, exasperation creeping into their voices.
“I told you guys about that?” I frown. “About the windmills when we went bike riding in Amsterdam?”
“Holy shit,” David groans, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t know about you, Grim, but if he says ‘Amsterdam’ one more time…”
“Yeah.” Grim reaches for the heavily spiked eggnog my chef has perfected over the years. “I’ll figure out how to chew my own ear off.”
“Good one.” David chuckles and clicks his mug to Grim’s. “Now, Max, you say Kimba is your main contact for the campaign, right? She still got that great ass? Did she ask about me? I mean, she and I also had a great week in the city that shall not be named.”
“Really?” Grim turns to him, his brows lifted. “You tapped that?”
“Dude…” David closes his eyes and tips his head back into the cushions. “Like one of my top ten fucks of all time.”
“Top ten?” Grim does look impressed by that. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupt. “But I was kind of in the middle of asking for your advice.”
“Are we still talking about you?” David frowns. “I didn’t want to say it, man, but Kimba and I had a week, too, and you don’t hear me going on and on about it.”
“Because it meant absolutely nothing to either of you. She passed her goodbye through me on the street and told me it meant nothing.”
David cocks his grin to the side. “But I bet she remembers my dick fondly.”
He and Grim bump fists, and their bawdy laughter echoes through the room.
“I was trying to ask if I should call Lennix,” I tell them. “She hasn’t called me Doc since I’ve been back. Hell, she’s barely looked me in the face.”
Through the floor-to-ceiling window, I contemplate the mountains.
Nearby properties glitter with Christmas lights, and the moon hangs low in the sky like an Earth-sized ornament, illuminating the snow-dusted rise of mountains.
It’s a scene from a holiday postcard, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. Not really.
I talked to Owen and Millie and the kids yesterday before they left for my parents’ place in Dallas.
The kids loved the gifts I sent, and I could hear their squeals of laughter and their cocker spaniel barking in the background.
It reminded me of Christmases growing up, Owen and me running downstairs at one minute past midnight and tearing into our gifts.
My mom and dad would get up with us to watch.
I had a fantastic childhood. I can appreciate that now.
Not for the reason people would assume, for all the money, but for my family.
I think I blocked some of it so the separation from my father wouldn’t hurt as much, but tonight, I feel it.
Dad was busier than I could even comprehend then, but I caught him once assembling our bikes himself so they’d be under the tree when we woke up.
He stood there with my mom, bleary-eyed in his robe, grinning when we rode the bikes up and down the halls.
I miss my parents. I miss my dad. I don’t allow myself to acknowledge that most days. The enmity has calcified between us—hardened into bone that might now prove too painful if we break it.
“If you don’t call,” Grim says, pulling me away from past holiday mornings, “you’ll just keep thinking about it.”
“And, God help us, talking about it,” David says. “So just call.”
Dammit, they’re right. I step out onto the veranda overlooking a string of pearl-topped mountains. I dial the number, waiting while the cold pierces through my thick sweater.
“Maxim!” my mom says, her voice breaking over my name.
Maybe I’m a coward. This was the easier call to make.
“Mom, hey.”
“I was hoping you’d call. I planned to call you in a few minutes, so I’m…” A silence thick with emotion builds between us.
“It’s good hearing your voice,” I say, forcing a lighter tone. “Those kids of Owen’s driving you crazy yet? They’re the loudest little monsters I’ve ever met. They drive me bonkers in DC.”
“I’m pretty sure if I survived my own two little Kingsman monsters,” she says, her voice warm, “I can survive Owen’s.”
I hadn’t thought of that in years, how she used to chase us around the house yelling, “I’m looking for all the king’s men!”
“I’m so glad you’re with Owen while he’s running,” she continues. “He needs someone he can trust, and politics is a dirty game.”
“One he’s been playing for ten years,” I remind her dryly.
“Yes, but this is another level. It requires even more ruthlessness.” She pauses to laugh. “And we both know you’re ten times as ruthless as your brother.”
“Not sure how I feel about that, Mom. Thanks?”
“You get it from your father,” she says, humor and affection in her voice. “You both play dirty when you have to. I’m glad Owen has you at his back. Take care of your brother, son.”
It should be an odd request considering I’m younger, but she’s right. Owen has a heart of gold, but I’ve always been the fighter of us two.
“I will, Mom,” I promise. “I got him.”
“Would you, um…like to speak with your father?” she asks, her voice trying to sound normal.
I try for normal, too, as if my father and I talk every day instead of once every few years. “Sure.”
It is Christmas.
“Okay,” she says, clearly happy and relieved. “Let me get him. I love you, Maxim.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
“Maxim.” My father’s deep voice booms over the phone, and I’m transported back to sunlit days standing in water past our knees, him yelling down the river while we cast lines fly-fishing.
“Dad,” I reply, keeping my voice even. “Merry Christmas.”
I remind myself that I’m not that college kid he reamed for not being ruthless or focused enough. Not the one who wondered if my father was right when he said I’d never make it without the protection of his name. I’m the man who fled his father’s shadow and flew on his own.
“Merry Christmas,” my father says. “I hope it’s been good for you so far.”
“Yeah, great.”
“You’re in Aspen?”
How the hell does my father always know where I am? “Uh, yeah. With David and Grim.”
“Be sure to give them our best.” A long pause neither of us seems to know how to fill follows before he continues. “It’s good you’re in DC with O.”
“Yeah,” I reply, grabbing hold of something we can agree on. “I think he has a real shot. Actually, according to all the numbers, the best shot. He leads in every early poll.”
“I don’t trust polls, and I don’t trust that girl he has running his campaign. Under the expensive clothes and fine education, she’s the same bothersome baggage who tried to stop my pipeline. And she keeps trying to stop them, little nuisance.”
I clamp my teeth around the sharp edges of the words I want to hurl at him.
“She’s the best in the business, Dad,” I say, my voice stiff as a mannequin. “They don’t call her the Kingmaker for nothing.”
“You think I don’t know about the soft spot you have for Lennix Hunter?” he asks, a bitter note entering his voice. “That dick of yours is gonna lead you somewhere you don’t need to go one day. Oh, wait. It already has. Amsterdam, wasn’t it?”
I grip the phone until I think it might snap in my fingers. “Stay out of my business, Dad.”
“Tell her to stay out of mine.”
“You know I can’t control Lennix. Every time you try to lay a pipeline on tribal ground, she’s coming for your ass.”
“Well, she better hope I never come for hers.”
A block of ice solidifies in my chest. I know what my father’s vendettas look like. Ruined careers. Lost fortunes. Shattered lives.
“Let me make something abundantly clear to you, Warren ,” I say in a low rumble of danger I don’t even recognize as my own voice. “You think things have been bad between us the last fifteen years? Touch her and I will make the worst you’ve ever done look like child’s play. Do you understand me?”
A frigid silence accumulates across the miles, as cold and densely dark as the Antarctic winter. Snow starts falling, huge crystalline flakes that land on my hand and melt before I can touch or appreciate them.
“You’d choose that little bitch over your family?” my father asks, his voice tight and furious.
“I’d choose her over you.”
He replies with a disgusted huff of breath. “The only reason I’m tolerating her at the announcement is because Owen seems to believe she knows what she’s doing and won’t listen when I tell him to fire her ass.”
“I don’t want to see you within ten feet of her on New Year’s Eve.”
“You won’t see me within ten feet of her ever if I can help it,” he says, his voice taut with rage. “Goodbye, Maxim, and merry Christmas.”
The line goes as dead as any affection I thought I’d salvaged for him. Every time I think we might be able to fix all the things that have gone wrong between us, my father does something to remind me why I left in the first place.
This isn’t how I saw Christmas going. Somewhere in my mind, I hoped Lennix and I would have worked things out by now.
She said each Christmas she goes to the site where she whispered her mother’s name and laid her to some kind of rest. She probably sees the Cade Energy pipeline there and remembers all the reasons she shouldn’t trust me.
My father. My family’s business. My lies.
None of those are things I can fix or change. How I hurt her, deceived her, is in the past, but standing out here in the cold alone under a Yuletide moon and falling snow, I wonder if we’ll ever find our way to the future.