Too Hot to Touch

by Louisa Edwards

Max felt his balance go an instant before he wavered, but all it took was the pressure of a slim, strong hand on his back to steady him.

  “He’s going to be okay,” she said, resting her forehead on his shoulder and encircling him with her leanly muscled arms. Encompassed by her warmth, her support, Max regained his equilibrium.

  “Of course he will. Stubborn old bastard—no lousy heart attack is enough to keep him down.”

  “He’ll be okay,” she repeated. “He has to be.”

  Max heard the catch in her voice, the way it broke on the word “okay,” and turned to give Jules a brief, hard hug that comforted him as much as her.

  After that, Max made it through the rest of the day by stopping every ten minutes to breathe, center himself, and allow the crashing waves of fear and guilt—why had he fought with his father that afternoon? Why hadn’t he noticed how tired he looked? Were there other signs he’d missed?—to break over him and then pass through him like water through a sieve.

  The next hour was an interminable blur of calming his mother down and negotiating how they’d all get to the hospital, a too-bright waiting room with uncomfortable chairs and a coffee vending machine that produced nothing but hot chocolate, no matter what button was pushed.

  When Max brought Jules one of the paper cups of extremely mediocre, not-all-that-hot chocolate, he was surprised when she reared back and away from it as if it were a steaming cup of yak butter tea.

  “No,” was all she said, though. “No, thanks, I’m fine.”

  Max was pretty sure she wasn’t fine—he hadn’t gotten more than ten words at a time out of her since they’d arrived at the hospital. She was silent and still, her eyes wide and somehow bruised looking, as if she’d been awake for two days straight.

  Not that she complained, or cried—in fact, she was the one who got up and went to Danny when he found them all in the waiting room. He’d been the one to ride along in the ambulance, and the look on his face when he walked in and said the doctors were prepping Dad for surgery was one Max hoped he’d never have to see again.

  Jules hugged him tight, let him bury his face in her shoulder, and all the time, Max could read the mute suffering in her eyes as clearly as if she were weeping and rending her garments. But she never broke down.

  When they’d been waiting with no word for three hours, she and Winslow went to the hospital cafeteria and brought back food that no one wanted to eat. Beck had already gone over to the restaurant to deal with the locking up and closing down everyone had been too upset to do earlier. And a little while later, Winslow needed to run home to his apartment to let his dog out. Both had extracted solemn promises of updates the minute there was any news.

  When Nina started to pace and fret, Jules went and quietly asked the nurses if they knew when the doctor would be coming back to tell them something. Anything.

  And when a slight, trim man in rumpled green scrubs finally came out and asked to speak to Gus Lunden’s family, Max held out his hand to Jules, and she took it and let him crush the life out of it while they listened to what the doctor had to say.

  The words washed over Max, strung together like waves on the shore, and almost as hard to follow. Stable angina progressed to severe—didn’t respond to beta blockers—surgical option—stent—intensive care—

  “Oh, thank God. Thank you, thank you, God,” Nina breathed, her eyes shining with unshed tears, and that was when it finally made sense to Max.

  His dad was going to be okay.

  “Of course we hoped to avoid all this, after the collapse in May,” the doctor continued, “but sometimes a reduction in stress and a change of dietary habits aren’t enough. And in this case, the second collapse may have been a blessing in disguise, because putting in the stent should help to keep the artery from narrowing down again. Barring complications, Gus should be back on his feet, nearly as good as new, very quickly.”

  Max’s mind went blank and still, a frozen tundra buried under a whiteout blizzard.

  Second collapse?

  “Can we see him?” Danny asked eagerly.

  “He’s still pretty out of it,” the doctor warned. “But he’s been moved out of Recovery and into ICU, so you’re welcome to go back. Family only, of course.”

  Clinging to Danny’s arm, Nina let the doctor lead her down the hall. It made his breath stop, but Max let them go. He wanted to keep them right next to him with a deep, frantic need that he knew was at least partly based on his brand-new fear of letting anyone he cared about out of his sight for a second, but he had to talk to Jules first.

  He looked down to find his fingers crushed too tightly around Jules’s more slender hand. She didn’t complain, though, simply looked back at him with her wide golden-brown eyes, red-rimmed but dry.

  “What was the doctor talking about?” Max demanded, barely recognizing his own voice under the growl of fear and pain.

  Jules closed her eyes for a brief instant, and when she blinked them back open, Max could see the mirror of everything he was feeling. But her voice barely wavered, steady and soft, as she began to explain.

  “A few months ago, your father passed out during dinner service. We all thought it was just exhaustion, or heat—you know how it gets in the kitchen, like being trapped inside a pressure cooker—but it was more than that.”

  “His heart.” Max felt every beat of his own heart like an accusation, a slap, a punishment.

  You should have known. You should have been here. You should have helped.

  Jules nodded. “High blood pressure, mostly, but high enough that the docs were concerned, made him promise to slow down, eat better, cut out as much stress as he could.”

  “The competition,” Max realized. “That’s why they called me back to take his place. Not for my expertise, but because Dad’s heart couldn’t withstand it.”

  “That was your mother’s argument,” Jules said.

  Guilt and anger made for an ugly combination, roiling in his belly. “And what was her argument against telling me exactly what the fuck was going on? Or maybe I didn’t deserve the truth, since I apparently forfeited my place in this family to you.”

  Jules flinched, her pale, waxy skin acquiring a red stain across her high cheekbones. “For what it’s worth,” she said in a low voice, “I thought you should know.”

  Sick rage churned through him as he began to understand the extent of the deception. Everyone had known—his mother and brother, of course, but all the kitchen workers, the servers. The team.

  Jules.

  They all knew more about his father’s failing health than Max did. And not a single damn one of them had the balls to tell him the truth.

  For one blazing instant, he hated them, all of them, for letting this happen. For shutting him out and blindsiding him with the most agonizingly frightening experience of his life.

  But not all of them were right there, in front of him. Only Jules. The woman who’d kissed him, held him, allowed him into her body—all without knowing Max well enough to understand how much this secret would devastate him.

  Or maybe she’d known, but just hadn’t cared.

  “You thought I should know,” he echoed, swallowing down the rising bile of terror, shame, and betrayal. “But you still kept it from me.”

  He watched her recoil from the vicious fury in his voice, from the snap of his angry stare, and winced as a new layer of guilt spread thinly over the throbbing pain of bad son, bad brother, they didn’t tell you because they knew they couldn’t count on you.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he could see that she was. It didn’t actually make him feel any better. “The important thing is that Gus is going to be okay.”

  “You’re right,” Max said, reaching for his Zen calm and feeling it drip between his grasping fingers like water. “Come on, let’s go see how he’s feeling.”

  She tried out a smile, but it didn’t stick. “Go ahead. I’ll call the others and let them know Gus is out of the woods.”

  He
hesitated. Angry as he was, he knew how much Jules loved Gus Lunden. And vice versa.

  “It’s fine,” she said, as if sensing Max’s reluctance. That same sad excuse for a smile twisted her mouth. “Immediate family only, remember? They wouldn’t let me in, anyway, and someone has to let Beck and Win in on the good news.”

  Max looked away, staring down the hall at the brisk nurses and patients with wheelchairs and walkers and IV stands. It wasn’t pretty, but it was easier than standing there, feeling how the good, bright thing between him and Jules was broken, sharp and pointed and slashing into him with every breath like a cracked rib.

  “Okay. I’ll tell Dad you were here.”

  Her throat worked for a second, making an audible clicking, before she said, “Thanks.”

  She walked away, head down and shoulders slumped, and in spite of it all, Max wanted to go after her more than he’d ever wanted anything.

  But a tug to his elbow had him glancing down at a short, plump nurse with kind, tired eyes.

  “Mr. Lunden? Your father is asking for you. Come on, I’ll show you where his room is.”

  And when Max looked up again, Jules was gone.

  * * *

  Jules walked out of the hospital feeling as if her heart were tearing itself in half, wanting to stay there, in the impersonal, concrete-slab building that held the family and future she’d always wanted.

  But she wasn’t allowed—wasn’t family—and it was better this way.

  Better for Max, who’d hardly been able to stand the sight of her once he’d realized the truth they’d all been hiding from him for weeks.

  Shoving her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants, she fumbled her cell phone open and dialed Beck and Winslow on automatic pilot, relaying the news and feeling like a total imposter the whole time.

  They were so happy, their joy as uncomplicated and pure as Jules’s was shadowed by guilt and regret. She made an effort to sound normal, though, and they didn’t notice anything off. Jules had always been good at that. It was an old skill, but it turned out to be like any other often-repeated action—the same way she’d never forget how to turn an artichoke heart, she’d always be able to fake normalcy even when everything inside her was screaming.

  Screaming, “It’s over. It’s over. He hates you for lying to him. It’s over.”

  Not that she hadn’t known it would end, she reminded herself. But she’d been counting on the next few weeks to store up a lifetime’s worth of memories before Max left for Italy.

  Now she wouldn’t even have that.

  Halfway down the stairs to the downtown train, she hesitated. The downtown train would take her back to her apartment.

  Her apartment that Max had been to, knew how to find, and might take it into his head to visit tonight so he could make it one hundred percent clear that they were over.

  No. Even the possibility … she couldn’t bear it. She chewed her lower lip until it was sore.

  After the hospital, and Max’s anger burning over her skin like spatters of hot oil, she needed a few hours to regroup. To rebuild her walls so that whatever happened after, Jules would be able to survive it.

  But where else could she go? She’d run out of the restaurant today without her backpack; hadn’t even realized it until she’d had to get Win to spot her for the pile of stale cellophane-wrapped sandwiches at the hospital cafeteria. Her Metro card was in her pants pocket, as always, but that was all she had.

  Everyone she could go to for help was either at the hospital or would want to talk about what happened at the hospital.

  Everyone … except one person.

  Shoulders sagging, Jules turned around and trudged back up the stairs and across the street to the uptown train, pulling her phone back out as she went.

  Before descending into the dark, heated mouth of the subway station, she flipped open her phone and punched in a number.

  “Mom?”

  Chapter 24

  “But where else would she go?”

  Max was starting to feel a little frantic. It didn’t help that he hadn’t slept all night. He’d sat up with his mother in the hospital waiting room after she’d refused to go home, and at this point, he hadn’t showered in so long that his scalp actually itched.

  Gross. The life of a wandering mystic who slept by the side of the road may have been an enlightened one, Max mused, but hot, running water was starting to sound like a true religious experience.

  Danny shook his head. He looked about as wiped out as Max felt—there were deep purple smudges under his gray-blue eyes, and his brown hair stood up in funny tufts all over where he’d gripped it. “I don’t know, Max. She hasn’t checked in with anybody, she’s not answering her phone, and you said Winslow told you she wasn’t at her apartment when he dropped by this morning?”

  “And Win’s all worked up now, too.” Apparently, Winslow had Jules’s extra key, so when she hadn’t responded to the doorbell, he’d gone in to check on her. He’d told Max it looked as if Jules hadn’t been there all night.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Danny said, darting a look at the bed in the corner of the hospital room.

  Gus was asleep, finally, after a long night of interruptions and checks by the brisk, attentive nursing staff. Danny had persuaded Nina to run home for a shower and some clean clothes by promising to stay in Gus’s room and make sure he slept until she got back. Barring some sort of medical emergency, he was supposed to keep everybody out.

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Max declared in a low undertone, chest tightening.

  Danny gave him a narrow look. “Why?”

  Max didn’t know what his tell was, but something tipped his kid brother off because Danny’s eyes got big and accusing. “Max! What did you do?”

  “Okay, we had a fight,” Max said. “I was so pissed when I found out you’d all lied to me about Dad’s health. I laid into her.”

  “What did you say?” Danny’s voice was low and angry.

  “The same stuff I said to you, basically.” Max had pulled his brother aside a couple of hours into their bedside vigil, but by that time, he’d had a chance to calm down. To get both his lungs and his brain working again. And when Danny shrugged and told him it was their father’s decision—his health, his heart, his choice—Max hadn’t been able to argue.

  Cursing under his breath, Max paced the length of the small, private room that was starting to feel as airless and confining as a prison. “I shouldn’t have let her go. I was pissed, but I should’ve listened to her.”

  “Yeah, you should’ve.” The voice was weak and rough, but unmistakably his father’s.

  Max stopped his pacing and went to the bedside. “Hey, Dad. Go back to sleep, or Mom’ll kick our asses when she gets back here.”

  “I’m tired of sleeping,” Gus said, irritably hitching himself higher on his flat hospital pillow. “I feel like I’ve been asleep for a week. And besides, you boys clearly need a kick in the pants to get you going. What the hell are you both doing sitting around here? We’ve got a culinary challenge to win! And, more importantly, a missing member of the team.”

  Exchanging a glance with Danny, Max couldn’t help but grin at the overwhelming burst of relief. After hours of seeing his father pale and passed out in that bed, hooked up to tubes and bleeping machines, Max was ecstatic to see Gus’s blue eyes open and aware and full of his old fire.

  “Mom said we have to stay here,” Danny protested. The corner of his mouth twitched, and Max knew his brother was hiding a smirk.

  “I don’t need a goddamn babysitter,” Gus growled. “Let alone two of them. What I need is to know that Jules is all right, and that you boys aren’t going to squander all the hard work she put into getting us this far in the RSC.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Max asked.

  Gus raised his bushy brows. “I want you to get your head out of your ass and realize that the only reason we didn’t tell you about my stupid heart problems was that apprenticeship in Italy. I
know how much it means to you, what a great opportunity it is. Once in a lifetime. And I will be damned before I’m the one standing in your way.”

  “Dad.” Max’s throat felt swollen and achy, like he’d eaten too many Thai chiles, but he couldn’t step grinning at the return of Gus’s normal levels of piss and vinegar.

  Gus coughed, then grimaced. “Damn. I can’t wait to be out of this hospital. Thank God for modern medicine. Did you hear the nurse? She said I’d be up and about in a matter of days!”

  “Doing physical therapy,” Danny reminded him. “Not running a marathon.”

  Gus waved that away as a trifling detail. “Point is, I’m going to be fine by the time the next phase of the RSC rolls around.”

  Max blinked. It hadn’t even crossed his mind, what would happen if Gus weren’t able to join the team as planned. Without thinking about it, Max assumed he would’ve stayed on, helped out—and missed the chance of a lifetime to study under one of the world’s living culinary giants.

  Fighting a weird mixture of relief and disappointment, Max said, “Until then, I guess you’ll just have to run things from here.”

  Brightening at the thought, Gus hitched himself higher on the bed. “The way I see it, we’ve got to come up with a plan for the RSC meal, then shop and prep for it. We also need to track Jules down, and you need to make up with her, because that girl shouldn’t have to be your scapegoat. Did that trip to Essex Street give you any ideas?”

  Max’s stomach clenched at the mention of that trip to the market. “Dad,” he said slowly. “About the way we argued yesterday—the things I said—”

  Gus waved a hand and scowled at the IVs attached to it. “Don’t worry about it. I was out of line,” he said, all gruff and not meeting Max’s eyes. “I wasn’t feeling too well … and I guess it’s obvious now why that was. But I shouldn’t have tried to stop everyone else from going. It was stupid of me. I guess I just didn’t want anyone to think I was slowing down, getting old and weak.”

  “That was stupid,” Danny agreed. “None of us would’ve thought that—we know better.”