To the Max

by Julie Lynn Hayes

  “What!” I look up at my sister, very annoyed.

  “Max, pay attention!”

  “Say something intelligent and I will!” I snap. Okay, I’m lying. I think that, but what I really say, being the wimp that I am, is, “I am listening. You just asked Bastian a question about Rachel. There.” And I stick my tongue out at her. Childish, yes. Satisfactory? Maybe a little.

  “And you heard his reply, did you?”

  “Um… er… well….” She has me there. And I can’t even hide behind the paper now. Damn. I sigh, caught red-handed. “All right, all right, what did dear Sebastian say?” I spit out in my best Max-is-exasperated voice.

  “Max, you have no concept of the real world do you?” Diana sputters, which has nothing to do with anything we have been talking about. My wonderfully illogical sister. “God almighty, how long have you known Rachel, and I bet you still don’t know that Sebastian is doing her, and has been for years?”

  Whoa! Now this gets my attention. I mean, what the fuck? What the fuck?

  My eyes grow to be the size of planets as I turn my gaze on Sebastian. He doesn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed at being found out, standing there with his backside pressed up against my books, talking about shagging my best friend (other than Richard, but let’s not muddy the waters at this moment). Damnation!

  “Max, we’re both of age,” he points out. “And then some.” I don’t care. How can I not know this? What, has it been carried out in some sort of covert plan, Operation Keep Max in the Dark? Clandestine meetings, furtive gropings… my mind refuses to carry on that line of thought, it’s too… too… creepy.

  “You… and… you… and… Rachel… and… you….” I stammer idiotically. Diana shoots Sebastian a little conspiratorial look. What, are they children?

  Just then my better half appears from out of our room, having given up on me, I suppose, or deciding that he doesn’t wish to get pruney waiting for me, dressed in his own bathrobe, which is the mate of mine (I know, aren’t we so cute?), and he proceeds to flop down beside me on the couch, tossing his feet into my lap without so much as a by-your-leave. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he shoots out as he watches me do my flounder imitation. God, I just love his tender moments.

  Before I can respond, Diana interjects. “Max just found out that Rachel and Sebastian are friends with benefits.” I can see my lover’s eyebrows shoot up at the news. Good, I’m not the only one here that didn’t know.

  “Interesting,” is his only comment.

  “We’re off the main topic here.” Sebastian sticks in his penny’s worth—I don’t give him credit for having two cents at this point. “Let’s stick to what we were talking about originally, before we were interrupted.” This is a jibe against Richard, of course, and not even true, we got offtrack long before he appeared. But any chance to get a jab in.

  “Yes, back to Juliet. And Amy,” Diana agrees.

  Again Richard’s eyebrows shoot up as he looks at me curiously. I know what he is asking tacitly: what is your crazy family up to now? I shrug at him.

  “Don’t you think we should stop this churchgoing thing?” Diana continues, as if we have never stopped talking about it.

  “Hello? Churchgoing thing?” Richard asks.

  “Apparently Juliet is attending some weird church with Amy now,” I fill my lover in, giving him that what-can-you-do look.

  “And that’s bad why?”

  Sebastian snorts disdainfully but doesn’t deign to reply, his not-so-subtle way of saying none of your business. Diana is nicer.

  “Because I know there’s got to be a catch,” she insists excitedly, “there’s something wrong with the idea. I know you don’t trust Amy, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Have you ever known her to be religious in any way? And here she is, acting all holier than thou, and she drags Mother off a few times a week to this Church of Divine Providence. I mean, come on, going on Sunday would be bad enough, but who goes to church more than once a week?” There she goes again, using her hands and arms to punctuate her words, like some kind of demented octopus.

  “You’ve got a point there, Di,” Richard admits. Diana flashes a triumphant look at Sebastian.

  “I already agreed with you; don’t look at me like that!” he addresses her, ignoring Richard. “Tell Maxie, not me!”

  I counter her next words. “Look, until you have something more concrete to go on than the fact that she takes Mother to church a few times a week, I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it. Mother’s a big girl; she can do what she wants.” I shake my head, determined to not let them gaslight me. “And besides that, I want to talk about you and Rachel!” I glare at Sebastian.

  Sebastian pushes himself off from my bookcase, which only sets me to smoldering again. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he says flippantly. “Really, Max, you need to grow up!” Normally he is very protective of me, Sebastian is, but today he is simply acerbic.

  “You can’t drop a bomb on me that size and not expect me to want to at least discuss it!” I protest. But my protests are largely disregarded, as usual.

  “Max, this is precisely why we didn’t tell you,” Sebastian goes on in that oh-so-smug professorial voice he adopts when he is acting superior. “We knew you wouldn’t handle it well.”

  “We? We?” I mimicked him, pitching my normally baritone voice into a sarcastic falsetto. “Oh, we’re a couple now, are we?” And I’m not even sure now why it is that I am so upset. Is it more because of what they have apparently done, or the fact that they have chosen to hide it from me? Hello? Max here, best friend, cousin, remember me? Why the secrecy, the furtiveness? And how stupid must I be to never have noticed?

  I am becoming increasingly more agitated. Naturally. Allowing the wolf a little more leeway than I should. Ready to blow a major head gasket with little provocation. At this rate, I’ll develop high blood pressure before I hit fifty. Pissing and moaning about fidelity and honor and the nobility of the human spirit. And so on and so forth. Etcetera, etcetera. Until suddenly I become aware of Richard’s rather furtive movements which have heretofore been masked by my great distraction. His bare toes have been messing around with the tie of my robe while I have been ranting and raving, and he has managed to, with a rather prehensile ability, loosen it, snaking his foot inside the folds until it has come to rest on a portion of my anatomy which has just sent a notification to my brain that the flag has been raised and is standing at full mast. Oh damn, that feels good.

  I stop speaking mid-sentence, swallowing hard and trying to not appear as if I am in the process of being foot-fucked, but I am fairly sure that the mindless look of pleasure plastered on my face gives that particular game away. That and maybe the whimpering sounds that are emanating from the back of my throat.

  “Want to take a shower, Max?” The lecherous tones of my lover merely serve to enhance my state of extreme neediness as I slowly become oblivious to everyone and everything else.

  It is my sister who catches on first. I think she is more highly attuned to that sort of thing. Or maybe it simply runs in the family. “C’mon, Sebastian,” she says, motioning to him as she scoops up her purse from the floor by the piano, “I’ll let you take me out to breakfast.”

  “Breakfast? Didn’t you eat before you left home?” he asks, then, “Ohh, yeah, okay,” as she catches his eye, making a crude gesture with her fingers: the universal symbol of getting laid. Doing the dirty deed. Laying pipe. Whatever.

  They are almost out the door when my sister has a sudden thought, turning abruptly, causing Sebastian to damn near collide with her. “Max, come to the church with me,” she entreats me, “help me find out what’s going on.”

  “Um… no.” That’s all the breath I am willing to waste on the idea. Richard only shakes his head before she can think to ask him, rubbing against my hard-on even more blatantly. Damn, are they still here?

  Diana sighs. “Twenty years later and yo
u two are still at it? Jeez!” But I can detect a distinct note of admiration and some jealousy in her tone.

  “Take Sebastian!” I manage to croak out in my best Kermit voice.

  At this point, I think they finally leave, although I don’t recall saying good-bye to either one of them or hearing the front door slam shut behind them. But I’m fairly sure they are gone. At least I hope so. All my being is centered now on those talented digits that are causing me to rapidly lose my command of the English language, albeit in a very pleasant way.

  The next thing I do remember is having my robe slipped off my back and tossed carelessly aside, where it is joined by Richard’s—I’m guessing that they hit the floor together, if not, perhaps they’ve landed on top of the piano—and he is straddling my lap, his lips burning a message into my own, while his amazingly hard cock is pressed against mine in an all-consuming urgency, as if the message has just arrived that the world is going to end in the next twenty minutes so you better fuck as if your life depends on it.

  This is better. I moan into his lips, grabbing at those surfer-blond tresses, winding them through my fingers and holding them hard, pushing his head up against mine, the better to taste his lips. He moves his hands between us, spitting into his palms first, cupping both our erections together, grinding them against one another as he rubs them both, increasing the friction between our cocks ’til it is nigh unbearable. Oh God, that feels so good!

  “Shower time, Max,” he whispers into my kiss as he withdraws himself from my embrace. The sudden absence of his warm body leaves a chilly vacuum in its place, and we all know that nature abhors a vacuum. My body rises, not of its own volition, but as if being pulled on an invisible string, made to dance by the master puppeteer—can we say whipped, boys and girls?—and yet I follow him willingly, gladly, eagerly. Whither thou goest, I will go. ’Til death do us part.

  No-holds-barred loving, to the max, and making no secret of it.

  Chapter 8

  Descent into the Maelstrom

  I PUSH the button marked 3 and watch the doors laboriously clang shut with a sound like the closing of a coffin lid. I am alone in this oversized gunmetal-gray elevator, everyone else having started their work day already. I am not actually here to work, though, hence having waited for a more reasonable hour than dawn in which to arrive. Or eight a.m., actually. No, I am not here to work today; I am here to interrogate.

  Richard and I have come together, but he is allowing me some time to get past the preliminaries, rather than coming up with me immediately, heading toward a local bookshop that is within close walking distance of the office. We know the owner pretty well, he has a wonderful selection of used books, many of which now grace my bookshelves, and in the back of his store he has a private reading room with more adult material, where my lover has gone to buy us some inspiration for later on. Sometimes we read erotic stories to one another in the privacy of our bedroom, recreating the more interesting parts, or simply looking for new ideas to experiment with. One of our favorite authors is Bob Vickery. Damn, his stories are hot, and we find them to be a great source of pleasure (read: wanking material).

  Third floor, time to exit. The city room, at least this portion of it, where the various people who work under Rachel’s watchful eye congregate, is its usual busy self. Always something to be done, papers to be processed, people to talk to, deadlines to meet. I’m glad that I’m not a part of this madness. My lifestyle suits me just fine. For the most part, that is. Rachel’s office is located near mine, which means I have to traverse the entire room before I reach it, and hopefully Amy won’t be at her desk. I have no time for her now.

  The first desk I pass belongs to my friend Maggie. Maggie is a sweet girl, fresh from journalism school, eager and enthusiastic. She wears a shy smile as she greets everyone who enters these premises, a far cry from the snarling young man who held that position before her. He needed to be muzzled, seriously. His people skills were virtually nonexistent; he acted like he was doing you a favor if he even deigned to speak to you, and as for answering the phone, well, that just seemed to be too much to ask of him, not to mention that he spent most of his time playing games on his cell phone. I suspect that’s what he is doing even to this day. Maggie, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air and a pure delight to talk to. She has a warm smile for my lover when he accompanies me, and the two of them waste no time in launching into enthusiastic discussions of their favorite topics from Doctor Who to Blackadder to Father Ted. They love them all and never tire of talking about them. Or watching them. It’s not unusual for us to go to Maggie’s place, or her to come to ours, to watch movies and eat popcorn. And yes, they do call it a sleepover, even as old as we are, but so what? We have fun. Richard has promised Maggie that he will take her to Archon some day, and I hope that he does. I’m sure that they’ll have fun. Whenever I go into the office, I bring something extra for Maggie, a little something special. Today is no exception. I reach into my pocket, produce a bag of Jelly Babies, and give them to her with a smile.

  “Thanks, Max.” She blushes prettily, taking the sweets into her hand. “You’re the best.”

  I look warily across the room. “Is the dragon lady in?” I ask.

  “Nope, haven’t seen her,” Maggie replies. “Isn’t Richard with you today?” She sounds a little disappointed, and I try to hide my grin. My, my, how the ladies love Richard, even the ones who know that he’s gay. He just seems to attract them, like he’s got his very own groupies. I don’t mind a bit. It’s not the girls that bother me. Those I can handle. It’s the guys that find him attractive that disturb me. But I’d rather not go there right now, so I’ll move on.

  “Richard’s coming in a bit,” I reassure her, and her sunny smile returns. “You don’t think I’d forget to bring your boyfriend, do you?” I tease her.

  “Max, you’re so funny!” She giggles, holding out the bag of Jelly Babies to offer me one. I take one, popping the sweet into my mouth, sucking on it for a moment. “Tell him I got a new Doctor Who book, if he wants to read it. It’s a sixthy.” (This is her code for sixth Doctor, Colin Baker).

  “Tell him yourself; you know you want to. He won’t be too long. Is Rachel busy?”

  Maggie shrugs. “She’s in. I dunno if she’s busy or not. Go on back, why dontcha?”

  “I think I will, thanks.” As I pass beside her desk, I lean in a bit so that I can whisper confidentially into her ear, “If you’re going to steal Richard away from me, I think I should warn you: he snores.”

  This sets Maggie off into peals of laughter. She just shakes her head at me, blushing severely. Oh yes, I know she’s got it for him bad. It’s a standing joke between us. She actually has no interest in dating at the moment, though, focusing on her job and her own writing. Someday she’ll be a published writer, I know, she’s that good. “Max, you’re a riot.” She grins. “Maybe you guys can come over this weekend, watch some DVDs? We can order in some Chinese.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I agree. “We’ll bring dessert. What would you like me to make?”

  “Anything you make is good, surprise me. As long as it has chocolate in it.”

  “I knew that, didn’t I?” I laugh, walking away from the desk, waving my fingers behind me.

  Okay, next step: confront Rachel and see what the hell has been going on behind my back. And why.

  Her door is closed, but that never stops me. I stand at the door for a moment, taking advantage of the wolf’s keen hearing to listen for the sound of voices. I think I hear a man’s voice, but it’s muffled, and I can’t be sure. Oh well, what the hell. I open the door and quietly let myself in.

  Rachel is there, just as Maggie said, transfixed in front of her computer monitor, which I can’t see from this angle. I wonder if perhaps she is watching a late breaking news story, as she seems rather intent upon the screen. Maybe someone died? Or some nation has gone to war? So engrossed is she that she doesn’t notice my entrance, in fact. But when I walk around behind
her desk, I quickly discover why: there on the screen I see one crazy fucked-up DEA agent, popping pills and going on about how he likes Beethoven. I should have known. She’s watching The Professional. Again.

  Realizing that she still isn’t aware of my presence, I lean close to her and whisper in her ear, “What are we watching?” and am rewarded for my efforts when she jumps so suddenly she rams her head into my jaw, causing me to bite my own tongue. Damn, that hurts.

  “Max!” She glares at me. “That’s not funny! Hope it hurt!” She feels about on her scalp for injuries, while I run my tongue around the inside of my mouth, checking for blood. There isn’t any, luckily.

  “Yes, it does,” I reassure her. “It’s not my fault you’ve got your head shoved so far up Gary Oldman’s ass that you didn’t hear me come in!” I add in my wounded voice.

  “Where should my head be, up your ass?” she asks flippantly, swiveling to face me, satisfied that she is indeed not injured, grinning now. A typical Rachel shit-eating grin.

  “No, but maybe it should be up Sebastian’s?” I say archly, giving her a knowing look.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She scowls, but something in my expression must tell the story, ’cause she stops pretending. “Oh,” she says softly, obviously at a loss for words.

  “Oh,” I repeat sarcastically. I fold my arms across my chest, giving her a combination injured/aggravated/putout look.

  “You’re upset with me.” She states the obvious.

  I don’t say a word, let my eyes do the talking.

  “Max,” she says softly, “it’s not like we’re in love or anything. He’s just a friend.”

  “A friend with benefits,” I add snarkily.

  “I knew you wouldn’t take it well. Why do you think I never told you?”

  Maybe she’s right, but that doesn’t make it any better.