To the Max

by Julie Lynn Hayes

  “All right,” I repeated automatically. “That’s nice of Rachel, don’t you think?” I only wanted them to get along. It would certainly make my life much easier.

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed. “I guess she doesn’t really hate me, does she?” I knew he was jesting, but at the center of that was a kernel of truth: that he thought she hated him. Not that she actually did. Rachel liked Richard, but she always looked out for her Max, and she just didn’t like the way he treated me sometimes, and she didn’t hesitate to say so.

  “No, she doesn’t hate you,” I assured him for the umpteenth time.

  “Good.” He kissed me again, a kiss which held much promise of things to come. “See you in just a few then,” and he disappeared in the opposite direction. I simply stood there for a minute, my mind and heart holding onto his touch, just savoring it, before I called myself back to reality. If I didn’t move, I would never get to the room, and none of what I was imagining would take place.

  Being a dutiful son, I looked about me for my mother, to let her know we were leaving. I found her helping herself to punch and looking over the photos of Amy that were arrayed about the cut-glass punchbowl. She appeared to be rather pleased with herself and didn’t even argue when I let her know of our imminent departure. “Just say good-bye to Amy first, will you?”

  Well, I really didn’t want to do that, especially after that very uncomfortable dance, but I obediently cast my eye into the crowd, searching for her. She was nowhere to be seen. Not my fault, now was it? But I delayed my departure for another ten minutes, waiting for her to reappear, which she didn’t, so I told my mother I had to go, kissed her cheek and told her I’d talk to her soon, and fingering the key that seemed to be burning a hole in my pocket. I headed to the lobby, and the elevator. As I passed by the front desk, I thought the desk clerk gave me a goofy grin, but I put that down to my own brand of paranoia and continued on my way.

  Richard wasn’t in the room when I got there, which alarmed me at first until I realized that I had the key, so he’d no real way of getting in. Max, get a hold of yourself, I thought. He’ll be up when he finishes with his business. After all, I wanted him to be successful, didn’t I? Of course I did. It was a nice room, actually, with a generous full-size bed, a mini-bar, and a coffeemaker. All the amenities. Nice, very nice. Not that I had much experience with hotel rooms at that time. Or any. I’d never really been anywhere; our traveling days were yet to come, we were still saving up for our home, and we were on a very limited budget.

  I wandered into the bathroom. How nice to have a bathroom to one’s self that one didn’t have to go down the hall to use. I saw the complimentary toothpaste, mouthwash, shampoo, and deodorant and was naïvely impressed. The towels for us to use were thick and soft, and on an impulse I decided that I wanted a shower, wanted to prepare myself for my lover’s arrival. Later on, he and I could take one together, but for right now, it would be just me. And by the time I came out, surely he would be there. Yes, and imagine his surprise when I sashayed into the other room in my birthday suit.

  That decided it for me. The look that would be on my Richard’s face, the hunger that I would see in his eyes for me, all for me…. I stripped quickly, folded my clothes, and set them neatly into one of the drawers in the bedroom. Then I stepped into the shower and turned on the hot water; how good that felt, little hot fingers that stung at first, but I easily got used to the sensation and simply stood there, basking in it. I stuck my face into it, closed my eyes, and merely luxuriated. My thoughts turned, as they invariably did, to Richard, and I felt the familiar response of my body as it touched upon that well-loved chord. I turned, letting the water run in rivulets down my back, over my ass, and down my legs, caressing my own hardness gently. Warming up, I guess you’d call it. I heard a click from the other room, even above the sound of the cascading water, and I smiled to myself. Just in time, I thought. But I didn’t want to appear too eager, and I also wished to give him time to prepare for me, as surely he would hear the running water and by the time I emerged, he would be ready and waiting, probably naked….

  But neither could I wait for very long, as I was indeed eager myself, and it showed. I grabbed one of the thirsty towels, dried myself thoroughly so that I wouldn’t drip my way into the other room, smiling to myself in anticipation. This would be one splendid night, indeed. As I emerged from the bathroom, toweling my hair, I wondered if we might even splurge on room service, have them send up a bottle of champagne or something. After all, it wasn’t every day that we—

  I pulled up short at the sight which met my eyes, which was definitely not what I had expected. Oh, there was a naked body on the bed all right, but it wasn’t the right naked body. It wasn’t Richard Burke. It was goddamned Amy Rose Banneker!

  She was draped across the top of the bedspread, splayed out in a very “hello sailor” manner I didn’t find even the least little bit appealing, even if I had been into women, which I definitely wasn’t. I knew I would never find her attractive in any way, shape, or form, not in this lifetime or any other. I was taken so much by surprise that I just stood there, stunned and immobilized, before I realized that her eyes were practically raping me, and I recalled my very nude condition. Hastily I threw the towel around my loins, even as I managed to finally find my voice. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? How’d you get in here? And how’d you know I was here?” The words tumbled out indignantly.

  “I asked the desk clerk,” she admitted with a self-satisfied grin. “Your mother told me about the room discounts and that you had gotten a room.” I groaned when I heard that, Being my usual anal, considerate self I had told my mother about us getting the room so she wouldn’t worry about us when we didn’t show up back at the house. “So I told him that I was your girlfriend and I wanted to surprise you—”

  “Amy, you aren’t my girlfriend,” I pointed out, “and never will be. And neither will anyone else, and you know damn well why!”

  “You deserve a lot better than Richard Burke!” she insisted. “Max, do you have any idea how very sweet and adorable you really are? Not to mention very sexy.” She ran her eyes over my body again, and although I knew that everything was safe from her gaze, still I shuddered. I found the whole situation very creepy, almost like she was stalking me. Which, in looking back, in essence she was, but I didn’t have a name for it then. “Max, I love you!”

  I gazed at her in startled horror. “No, you don’t. You can’t; you don’t even know me,” I protested. “Amy, this is ridiculous. You know that I love Richard, and he loves me, and we’ve been together for more than three years—”

  It was like talking to a brick wall. No, worse than talking to a brick wall, ’cause brick walls don’t talk back.

  “Max, look at the way he treats you! He comes and goes whenever he pleases, fucks other guys, maybe women, too—who knows? But any way you slice it, he’s not faithful! Doesn’t that bother you?”

  I wasn’t about to discuss my relationship with my lover with Amy, not here, not now, not ever. “Amy, I think you just need to get out of here. Now. I’ll forget about this if you just go, before Richard gets here.”

  Fall on deaf ears my words did. Not listening to me she was. “Max, I can make you happy, as happy as you deserve to be. Come to New York with me. I have an apartment there; we can share it, just you and me. I’m going to make good money now. I’ll be able to take care of you.”

  “Amy, no! This is ridiculous!” I shook my head at her, and her absurdly rose-tinted vision of the future that she envisaged for us. I only half-heard her protestations of love and devotion; I just kept thinking that Richard would blow a head gasket if he saw her, heard her—

  And then something she was saying finally got my attention. “I don’t mind what you are, Max. We can deal with it, I promise you, together—”

  “What? Deal with my being gay? Thank you very much!” I said sarcastically.

  “No, deal with you being a werewolf,” was her response.


  My eyes grew very large at that point, and I blanched to an even paler shade than normal. What the… how the… how could she know? No way that either my mother or my sister or Rachel told her my most intimate secret, no fucking way. And Sebastian despised her more than he disliked Richard, so it wasn’t my cousin, either. But how?

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” I bluffed even as my mind raced. This did explain something, though, that I’d always wondered about, the strange picture of the wolf I’d found that I had suspected was from her a couple of years before, a few casual wolf references since then. Nothing overt, just enough to give me pause.

  “Max, you don’t have to hide who you are; you’re not the first one I’ve met,” Amy said as if we were having a casual discussion about the weather or the political situation in a far-off third world nation, not a life-threatening personal revelation such as this. It wasn’t even so much that I was ashamed of what I was, as it was that it had always been deemed more expedient to keep the nature of the beast hidden. People being the oddities that they were, you never knew how someone would react to the news that they were in the presence of a creature usually associated with old horror movies, an allegedly blood-thirsty killer. She patted the bed beside her, beckoning to me with one thin finger. The thought of getting that close to her was most distasteful to me.

  “Amy, get dressed,” I repeated insistently, “and get the hell out. I don’t want you here, no matter what you think you may or may not know about me.”

  Her face grew hard, her brown eyes narrowed into little muddy slits, and her skin flushed an angry, mottled color. “Max, if you don’t come to New York with me, I’ll tell everybody what you are!” she threatened in a hoarse voice.

  She was lucky it wasn’t the full moon, or I think the wolf would have torn her limb from tacky limb. As it was, I swallowed my anger in the interests of keeping control over the slumbering beast. “So what you’re saying is you want me to fuck you or else?” I stared at her in disbelief, maintaining my distance from her.

  She started to reply—something scathing, I’m sure—but then we both heard it, the rattle of the doorknob, followed by the sound of the door falling open, and a very familiar voice. “Damn, I’m sorry I took so long, but this woman can really talk your ear off; it was all I could do….” And then silence. Two heads swiveled to the source of the voice.

  Richard stood poised in the doorway, taking in the tableau before him, before closing the door and looking back and forth between me and Amy. She didn’t even have the modesty to cover herself at this point. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Amy was just leaving.”

  “Max, don’t do this!” she snarled. “I’ll do it, so help me God, I will!”

  “Do what?” Richard asked smoothly, moving to my side, positioning himself between me and the she-devil on the bed, a protective arm around me as I instinctively slid into his grasp. “Max, please tell me what the fuck is going on. What is she talking about?”

  I was tired of trying to reason with her. She was beyond my power to save at this point. “Amy thinks I’m a werewolf, and she’s going to tell everyone about me unless I fuck her,” I replied without thinking.

  “That’s right,” she said as she fairly smirked. “What do you intend to do about it, Dick?” She should never have said that.

  “You fucking bitch!” I heard the words, and I felt him move away from me, but even I was surprised at the swiftness with which he jumped onto the bed and put his hands around her throat to begin to throttle her. She threw her own hands up defensively, but her strength was certainly no match for his, and all I could hear from her were wordless gurgles.

  “Richard, don’t!” I grabbed at my lover, pulling on him with all the strength the wolf possessed, which was deceptively formidable at times, and I managed to dislodge his grip on Amy’s windpipe, tumbling us both backward onto the floor. I wrapped myself about him, so that he couldn’t get back up, nor continue with his attempted murder. “Sshh, sshh, love, don’t, she’s not worth it,” I begged him not to move, willed him not to move, nor to follow up on his actions. I could feel the heaving of his chest beneath my hands as he struggled to regain his breath, feel the warmth of the anger which flowed from him with a terrible heat, a searing intensity, his fingers clenched into tight fists.

  For her part, Amy was holding her throat, gasping for air, and shaking. “You- you’re insane!” she managed to croak out. “I- I’m going to tell people how insane you really are! You tried to kill me after you tried to rape me! Both of you!”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “What? Who would believe that? Why would we want to rape you? That’s a disgusting idea!”

  “Doesn’t matter, they’ll believe me,” she retorted, “and you being a werewolf will only be the icing on the cake.”

  “You won’t say a word,” Richard said swiftly, “not a damn word to anyone!” I held tightly to him, feeling his muscles gather together for another leap, holding him back.

  She glared. “And why is that?”

  “Why? You wanna know why? Because I’ll tell everyone and their brother what I know about you. And you know you don’t want that!”

  Amy visibly flinched as if she had been struck. Bingo! A direct hit. On what, I had no idea. And I didn’t really care.

  We pulled ourselves up from the floor, as I straightened the towel that threatened to fall from my hips. “You just need to get dressed and get out of here,” Richard said, and although his tone was calmer, it was also deadlier. The tone of someone that meant every word he said and should be heeded. “Go to New York, and do your thing, whatever the hell that is, be successful, fail, I don’t give a fuck—but stay the hell away from us!”

  “Max!” She tried to appeal to me, and for just a moment, I thought that I saw tears glisten in her eyes, which made me distinctly uncomfortable. “You know I love you more than he does! I’ll be good for you, I promise! And I won’t cheat on you!” Gah!

  “Max, remember that she’s an actress,” Richard said coldly, and as soon as the words left his lips, I saw her mask fall, and I realized how right he was. “For God’s sake, Amy, leave with a little dignity, why don’t you?”

  She rose silently from the bed, her back stiff, her head held high, as she gathered her clothes. We turned our heads as she proceeded to dress. Was this but a performance, I had to wonder? Was nothing about her real? Her eyes were not pretty, not pretty at all, and I wondered to myself how I had ever thought she was nice. And what would Rachel think about this? I couldn’t not tell her, though. That wasn’t even an option.

  She was now dressed as she had been at her farewell party, everything seemingly in place, although I wasn’t really concerned—her appearance was hers to worry about, nothing to do with me—even as I wondered how she would explain her absence from her own party? But neither did I really care. She walked slowly to the door, before turning to face my lover and me. Her eyes narrowed at us, and they seemed to glow with an almost preternatural light. “You’ll be fucking sorry, both of you,” she spat out. “Someday I’ll get even with you. Don’t even doubt it!” And she made her grand exit, pulling the door closed behind her with great force.

  Son of a fucking bitch! I turned to Richard, because I always turned to Richard in everything. Somehow I felt like I was partially responsible for what happened, even though logically I knew that I wasn’t. “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, reaching out and stroking my cheek gently, as he calmed down. “Nothing to do. She won’t talk, and even if she does, so what? It’s not like it’s illegal or anything. Don’t worry, Max, she won’t talk. I promise you.”

  “What do you know about her that scared her so much?”

  A big grin spread across my Richard’s face. “Nothing,” he replied.

  “Nothing? But then why did she act so frightened?”

  “Because obviously there is something to know about her, we just don’t know what
it is. She doesn’t know that, though. And as long as she thinks we do, I think she’ll leave us alone.”

  I guess that made sense, but still. I don’t appreciate being blackmailed, and I don’t like the idea that she knows about me. Not that I am ashamed, but basically it’s my business who I tell and when I tell. After all, it’s my fucking life, isn’t it?

  Richard pulled me to him and handily removed the towel from around my midsection. “You didn’t really need that, now did you?” he asked softly. He looked me up and down hungrily, but with a good kind of hunger, not with the almost desperate looks I received from Amy. “I hope she ate her heart out looking at what she can never have,” he said, rubbing up against me, raising my cock from half-mast to full-fledged hard in a matter of moments.

  “It’s all yours,” I assured him as I pushed him toward the bed, my fingers reaching for his buttons, stripping him with wild abandon. With one accord we turned toward the bed, and I just knew we were picturing the same thing: the unappetizing image of a naked Amy spread out there.

  Richard swiftly yanked the despoiled bedspread from the bed and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor, leaving the sheets intact, which she had never soiled with her touch. “There, that’s better,” he declared. “Now, where were we?” And I gladly answered his question, continuing to remove his clothing….

  AS WE pull into the parking lot of the King’s Regency, I get the worst feeling of déjà vu I’ve ever had. I want to turn tail and run, get out of here now before something truly bad happens. Take the coward’s way out—at this point I don’t even care.

  Let my mother yell. Let them all yell. Some things supersede others, such as serious self-preservation instincts. But do I act on these instincts?

  Of course not.

  As we get out of the car, Richard puts his arms around me. “Everything is going to be fine, Max,” he reassures me. He takes my hand and off we go, which reminds me of a line from Tennyson. “And into the valley of death rode the six hundred…” We may be only two, but the feeling is still there.