by Bec Linder
So when I turned eighteen, I applied for housing assistance. It took a few months after that for me to climb to the top of the waiting list, but then I had my own apartment—small, but mine. I got a job shelving books at the library, and another job as the overnight cashier at a convenience store. I signed up for a writing class at CUNY. I made ends meet.
I got out.
Renzo didn’t. He moved from marijuana to heroin, and then he started dealing and stopped returning my calls. I lost touch with him altogether after he was sentenced to a short prison stint for selling to an undercover cop. I looked for him, but without a last name to help me, and in a city the size of New York, it was a futile effort, a search for the needle in the proverbial haystack.
I missed him still. I missed both of them: Renzo, and the Max I had known, the boy I’d fallen in love with.
But he wasn’t dead after all.
He had just left me. He had let me think he was dead, for years, and now he had strolled back into my life like no time had passed at all.
God. What was I going to do?
CHAPTER FIVE
Beth
I showed up late to dinner on Sunday. Not too late, only about fifteen minutes, but late enough that I hoped Max was squirming in his seat, wondering if I would come after all.
It was very petty of me. I knew that, and I did it anyway. He made me feel so powerless, and I was desperate for some measure of control, illusory as it might be.
He had given me an address in Columbus Circle, and I took the train there without considering the implications or looking it up on the Internet first. I regretted that decision as soon as I exited the subway, glanced up, and saw the Time Warner Center in front of me.
Oh, God. Leave it to Max to pick somewhere unbearably fancy. How on earth was he going to afford this?
Because I certainly wasn’t going to offer to split the bill with him. Dinner was his idea; he could pay.
I went into the lobby of the building and took the escalators to the top floor of the atrium. I had worn a simple black sheath dress with heels and my grandmother’s pearls: nice, but maybe not nice enough, and I felt incredibly self-conscious as I approached the restaurant’s glossy blue doors. I should be wearing a floor-length gown and a mink stole. It was that sort of place.
But Max was sitting on a bench just outside the restaurant, wearing nothing fancier than slacks and a jacket, and I relaxed slightly. If he wasn’t dressed to the nines, then I didn’t need to be, either.
He looked up as I approached, and I saw an expression flicker across his fast, too swift for me to read. “You’re here,” he said.
“I’m late,” I said, acknowledging it, not apologizing. “This is a fancy restaurant. Are you sure you can afford it?”
Another flicker. I was teasing him, but he seemed to take my question at face value, because he said, “Pretty sure.” He unfolded himself from the bench and stood up, towering over me, even taller than I remembered. I was very short, so even average-sized people seemed giant, but Max was legitimately much taller than any person had a right to be.
We were too close, suddenly. I swallowed and took a step back. His crisp white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, revealing the soft hollow of his throat. His big hands dangled at his sides. I remembered what those hands felt like on me, holding me close, touching my hips and breasts. The memory hit me sharp and sudden, and a wave of heat rolled through my body and warmed my cheeks. God. I couldn’t think about these things with Max standing right there watching me. He would see it on my face.
“Are we going to eat?” I asked.
He grinned then, showing his even white teeth. “Beth, you’ve never had a meal like this in your life.”
We went into the restaurant. A man greeted us, nodded to Max in a strange little half-bow, and said, “Right this way.”
I glanced at Max, suspicious, as we followed the maitre d’. The man had recognized him, which meant either that Max had come into the restaurant before I arrived to make his presence known, or that he was a regular customer. The former seemed more likely, but I wasn’t convinced. Max seemed totally at ease here, hands tucked casually in his pockets, like he ate at places like this on a routine basis. It was hard to envision. Max the urchin, all grown up and—what? Some sort of business magnate? Max the tycoon.
A lot could happen in eight years.
The maitre d’ led us to a door at one end of the restaurant, which he opened to reveal a private room, not large, with a table in front of a wall of windows overlooking Central Park.
My breath caught in my throat. It was past dark, and the lights of Columbus Circle shone below us, and the lit candles on the table were reflected in the glass. Were we really going to eat here, all by ourselves, suspended in a warm, glowing bubble high above Central Park?
Evidently.
“Enjoy your meal, Mr. Langdon,” the maitre d’ said.
Langdon. I filed that away. As soon as I got home, I was going to do some serious Internet stalking.
I didn’t know much about restaurants or fine dining, but I knew this was one of the best in New York—maybe the best. And Max had reserved a private room for the two of us, and the maitre d’ knew him by name.
You could steal a suit, but you couldn’t steal dinner reservations.
“I thought about reserving the entire restaurant,” Max said, like he was reading the thoughts right off my face, “but I decided you would accuse me of gross ostentation.”
“This isn’t much better,” I said. “Honestly, Max.”
“It’s going to be great,” he said. He settled one hand against the curve of my lower back and guided me over to the table. “We’ll have a good meal and catch up. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
I shrugged. “If you say so.” Being around him gave me an unsettled feeling in my stomach, like in a dream about falling, just before I hit the ground. I just wanted to get dinner over with. He would unburden himself of whatever it was he wanted to say to me, and then I would never have to see him again.
A black-clad waiter came in with our menus and the wine list, and then brought us water and canapés while we deliberated. I frowned at my menu, pretending to be deeply absorbed in choosing my dinner.
“You’ll have to talk to me eventually, you know,” Max said, sounding amused.
I ignored him and raised my menu a little higher.
“I’ve ordered the tasting menu, anyway,” he said. “I called ahead.”
“You could have told me that in the first place,” I snapped. I closed the menu and set it on the table. Max looked smug. “Why’d he even bring us menus, then?”
“Habit, probably,” Max said. “Don’t fuss. Eat your gougères.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. The restaurant was too fancy for me. It was making me nervous. The club was fancy, but in a familiar way, and it wasn’t like I ever went there for fun. There was a difference between being the help and being a customer. I couldn’t pronounce anything on the wine list, and I couldn’t identify the beige spheres in their little dish. Gougères. I didn’t speak a word of French.
“They’re cheese puffs,” he said. “Eat one. You’ll like it.”
I did, and he was right: it was delicious. Then I ate the other thing, which looked like a miniature ice cream cone but turned out to be some kind of salmon paste, and equally delicious.
Dinner wouldn’t be so bad as long as I could keep Max from talking to me. I could sit there and stuff my face with incredible food, and then somehow roll myself back out to the subway.
“You’re paying, right?” I asked him, eating the other cheese puff.
“Of course,” he said, watching me, eyes bright, mouth curled at both corners. He was enjoying himself.
“Is there something funny about me eating?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m just happy that you like the food. I’ve eaten here a lot, and it’s always nice to bring someone here for the first time. Also, I seem to have
a weird urge to feed you.”
“That’s because we used to be hungry all the time,” I said. “It’s Pavlovian. You see me and you remember how much time we spent talking and daydreaming about food.”
It was the first direct reference I had made to our shared history, and Max turned his head to gaze out the window, lips compressed. I wished I could read him better. He was the same in many ways—his expressions, the way he tilted his chin to one side—but he was a man, now, and evidently more accustomed to concealing his thoughts.
The waiter returned with a bottle of wine. “Is that the Sine Qua Non?” Max asked.
“The 1997,” the man replied. Max nodded, and the waiter opened the bottle and poured two glasses.
When he was gone, I said, “I’m not going to ask how much that wine cost.”
Max laughed. “You don’t want to know.”
“Do you really have this kind of money?” I asked. “To be honest, when you showed up at the club wearing that suit, I thought you probably stole it.”
He laughed again. “I’m out of that business, Beth. A pickpocket no longer. I’m a respectable businessman now.”
“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say respectable,” I said. “Businessman I can believe.” I took a sip of my wine. I knew a little bit about wine after working at the club for so long, and this was the good stuff. I rolled it around in my mouth, enjoying the flavor.
“A direct hit,” he said. “And she reloads to take another shot!”
“Oh, stop it,” I said, amused despite myself. “What is it that you do, then, respectable businessman?”
“This and that,” he said, with an airy gesture. “Dabbling. Buying and selling.”
“Very informative,” I said. “It’s something illegal, isn’t it? I bet you’ve set up a—a cheese smuggling ring, exporting the finest goat cheeses from—where do they make goat cheese? Spain?”
“I am most certainly not smuggling goat cheese,” he said, and then the waiter came with the first course before I could interrogate him any further.
The food was even better than I had expected and just about as weird. Each plate came with a few tiny bites of food on it, elaborately arranged and usually drizzled with something that I couldn’t pronounce or identify. Some courses were adorned with a single green leaf at the edge of the plate, or a smear of a mysterious paste that I wasn’t sure how to eat. Scrape it up with my fork? Lick the plate? I watched Max, mostly, and did what he did. He hadn’t been lying about his familiarity with this sort of fine dining. He knew exactly which fork to use, and he chatted with our waiter about wine pairings like he had been a sommelier in a former life.
We made light, pleasant conversation over dinner. It felt strange to me to chat with him about the weather and the 2nd Avenue subway, but it was also really nice. I rarely talked to anyone about anything other than work or writing, and it was easy, with Max, to pretend that no time had passed, and that we were still teenagers sharing secrets in the dark.
Easy, and dangerous. Deceptive. We weren’t those people anymore, and I would do well to keep that in mind.
“So explain to me how you came to be working at a strip club,” he said, after the cheese course had arrived. “It’s not the last place I expected to find you, but it’s certainly in the top ten.”
What was last, I wondered: prison, or a grave? But that was too cynical a thought. “It’s not a strip club,” I said. “It’s a sex club.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Is it really? My goodness, Beth. What other unplumbed depths have you been hiding from me?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have sex. I’m just a waitress. And I’m working there because it’s good money, I like my boss, and the hours are flexible. I can take a night off with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, for instance, to have dinner with an old—well. How should I describe you?”
“An old friend,” he said, watching my face, and then, “An old lover?”
I wasn’t ready to go there, although the way he was looking at me kindled a low fire in my belly. “Tell me how you found me,” I said.
He smiled, and swirled his wine in its glass. “You won’t be happy. I hired a private investigator.”
“You did what?” He was right: I wasn’t happy at all. I pictured a short, fat white man, middle-aged, peering at my bedroom window through his smudged binoculars. Unbearably creepy.
“Well, how else was I supposed to find you?” he ask, altogether too calm and reasonable. “A short woman named Beth, black hair, brown eyes, skin the approximate color of a Hershey’s chocolate bar—”
“Please don’t compare me to food,” I said, irritated even though I knew he was saying it just to get a reaction out of me. “How would you feel if I compared you to mashed potatoes?”
“I wouldn’t be too upset,” he said. “Mashed potatoes are delicious.”
Unbelievable. “Why did you wait this long, then? If it was as easy as setting a private eye on me, why didn’t you do it years ago?”
He shrugged, guileless. “Many reasons. I was ashamed. I thought you would be angry with me. I was in California for a long time. I’ve only been back in New York for a couple of years. I didn’t even know if you were still in the city. I got lucky. You could have been anywhere by now, and then I never would have found you.”
“What were you doing in California?” I asked.
“I went to Stanford,” he said. “And then I dropped out to run a start-up.”
Tech money. That explained the suit, and the fancy restaurant. How on earth had he gotten into Stanford in the first place, though? Forged transcripts, maybe. An essay about overcoming his life on the streets. That was what I had written for my own application, and it had worked. I spent two years at NYU with a full scholarship before I started working at the club and decided that I cared about having money and time to write far more than I cared about getting An Education.
I pushed a small brown thing across my plate. It might have been a caper. “Are you still doing that?”
He shook his head. “I sold that company for—well, for a considerable amount of money. Then I started another one, and sold that, too.”
“And now you’re dabbling,” I said. “Buying and selling.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I’m working on a few personal projects. I may start another company at some point, but frankly, I don’t need the money, and tech ventures seem to lose their shine after the first few iterations.”
Didn’t need the money. How nice for him. I sternly told myself not to be bitter. It was nice for him. And it wasn’t like I was scraping by in dire poverty. I had enough money for everything I needed. More than enough money. God, I owned an apartment. In Manhattan. With a huge mortgage, but still. It was mine. Feeling sorry for myself was absurd.
But Max wasn’t talking about “just enough” money. He wasn’t even talking about “plenty of” money. He meant the kind of money that made it so you never had to think about money again.
“Good for you,” I said, and meant it. “Congratulations. I’m not surprised you didn’t look for me before, then, if you were busy taking over Silicon Valley.”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t say taking over,” he said. “Contributing to. Enmeshing myself with. That’s done now, though. I’ve had enough of California. The weather’s too nice. I missed winter.”
“This was a really mild winter, you know,” I said. “Maybe you’ll change your tune after one of those winters where it snows all the time and that cold wind blows off the East River—”
“You’re right, that sounds pretty terrible,” he said. “I’ll have to buy a helicopter to make sure I never have to go outside.”
I still found him charming. Heaven help me.
Dessert came, a delicate arrangement of chocolate and almonds and dabs of peanut butter. I was already stuffed from the multiple-course meal, but it looked so appealing that I had to try, and then it tasted so incredible that I ended up cleaning my plate. Then the waiter c
ame back around with a box of chocolates, and a three-tiered tray of chocolates and little cookies, and I stared at Max in mute horror.
He started laughing at me with the waiter still standing right there, and I discreetly kicked him beneath the table. He didn’t so much as flinch, and he said, “You have to finish it all or they add it to the bill.”
“That isn’t true,” I said, with a glance at the waiter for confirmation. He smiled at me, and then winked, and I scowled at Max, who was reclining in his chair like a lazy lion, dinner over, now digesting his meal. “You can’t possibly expect me to eat all of this after the meal we just had.”
“One bite of everything,” he said. “And can we have some coffee, please? Beth, do you still take cream?”
I nodded. “Please. Coffee sounds wonderful right now.” I’d had a bit too much wine with dinner, and my head was swimming a little, a pleasant blur. Coffee would help. I wanted to be in full control of my faculties while dealing with Max.
Our waiter brought coffee to us in small, delicate china cups, and creamer in a modernist silver pitcher, square on the sides and with a long, arcing spout. We drank in silence. I gazed across the table at Max, considering the curve of his mouth, the straight line of his nose. He was very handsome. It would be easy to get sucked back in. Part of me still trusted him innately, instinct winning out over good sense, and I could clearly picture what our life together would be like: lazy breakfasts, art fundraisers, casual trips abroad.
But most of me knew that he was trouble. He wasn’t telling me the truth. Parts of the truth, certainly, but not all of it. I had seen the way his eyes shifted away when he told me about California. He was hiding something.
I set my empty cup back on its saucer. “Why did you want to have dinner with me tonight?”
Okay, Max. Your move.
His expression didn’t waver. “Can’t I have dinner with an old friend?”
