by Anne Marsh
She did let me give her a new charm for her bracelet, which I put in the win column. I’d picked out a diamond that belonged once upon a time to a Russian empress. When I think of Russia, I think of ballet—and ballet always makes me think of Maple.
The charity dinner itself is stuffy and loaded with pretentious people. While Maple networks, I do my best to smile and look like I’m not bored while I mentally draw wireframes for a new app. It has to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users because delayed gratification is only fun when we’re talking orgasms. Occasionally, I glance around the table. The pair from the yoga company hang on Maple’s every word, which I take as a good sign.
Getting into the limo to go home is a relief. I tug her into my side and slip an arm around her shoulders—nice—since she ruled out sitting on my lap in a moving vehicle weeks ago—safety hazard. I can still kiss her like this, but I’ve barely pressed my mouth against the soft skin of her throat when she starts talking. From her point of view, it’s been a great night already. The yoga legging people loved her and have hinted they’ll be sending a contract for her to review. She’s not sure whether it’s the international travel gig she covets the most, or if it’s a smaller campaign, and she doesn’t want to count unhatched chickens and yet... Excited words spill out of her mouth one after the other, so block after block slips by while she talks—and yawns.
“Sorry,” she mumbles eventually. “Too many late nights.”
I know she’s been working hard to rebuild her influencer gig after the video catastrophe. She signed with a new agent last week and already booked two smaller campaigns for something called a “bag spill” that sounds suspiciously like tipping out the contents of her purse and snapping pictures of the artistically arranged mess. Whatever. It doesn’t matter that I’d personally rather stand naked on a BART train during rush hour than prance around a studio letting a photographer take shots of me. Lots of people find programming mind-numbingly boring, so if your passion also pays your bills and you aren’t literally prostituting yourself, it’s all good.
“Do you want me to take you home?” I’d been planning to take her back to my new penthouse condo and break in the dining room table, but I’m up for a change in plans.
“Do you mind?” She snuggles down into my chest.
“Your wish is my command.” I can hear her breathing growing slower and deeper as she relaxes into me. I run a hand down her ponytail, fisting the soft length. “Are we playing Sleeping Beauty tonight?”
She hums something that might be a bit of the music from dinner but we’re already turning on to her street. I’d hoped we could spend the rest of the night having sex together. Actually, I’d looked forward to round two of truth or dare but I clearly have to rethink that plan. I get out of the car and hold the door for her as she gathers up her monster skirts, finds her feet and gets out.
I steer her to the door, kiss her one more time, and then force myself to let go. We still have time left before we fake break up with each other and go back to our regular lives. I want to spend all of those hours with her, however many or few there are. I don’t want to go back to being pre-Maple Max.
I think she’s about to head up the stairs like she always does, but then she hesitates and turns brown eyes up to me. “Do you want to come up? You’re welcome to crash and then I’ll make it up to you in the morning.” She leans up and brushes her mouth over mine. “No pressure if you want to get going. I can go up and go to sleep.”
I thread my fingers through hers. “Lead on, Macduff.”
She winks at me and opens the door. The house is a San Franciscan Victorian, so there are a lot of stairs. Plus, Maple’s designer dress isn’t made for a narrow stairwell. She finally settles for hiking it almost up to her waist, which is downright cruel. I follow her, eyes glued to her ass. She’s wearing panties—almost. I’m not sure the green thong with white polka-dots qualifies as underwear.
When we reach the top of the house, she hesitates. “The housekeeper comes never. Because I don’t actually have one.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m not interested in sleeping with the housekeeper.
She doesn’t move. “So I’m a bit of a slob.”
“Okay?” How bad can she be?
“If you promise not to judge me, I promise to wake you up with a blow job tomorrow.” Maple gives a jaw-cracking yawn and shoves her key in the lock.
As if I care about her housekeeping skills. I close my hand over hers and turn the key. The door opens and I get my first idea what she’s on about. Maple has a lot of...stuff. Not that she’s a hoarder (yet), but she has piles and piles of things stacked up around the room. Because it’s a studio, what you see is almost entirely what you get.
The bones are good. The room has a high, vaulted ceiling and a tiny French balcony with big glass doors. It’s just that you don’t notice those things because...stuff. Clothing racks line one wall and black lacquer bookcases with crystal doorknobs front the other. There’s also a miniscule galley kitchen and a door that must lead to the bathroom.
She jumps onto the bed with a groan of relief. Or at least I assume it’s the bed—whatever it is, it’s buried in faux fur blankets (because I’ve yet to meet a lavender mink) and pillows. Her heels go first and then she starts wiggling her way out of her dress. She’s asleep halfway through, so I finish undressing her, tuck her in and crawl in beside her.
* * *
I wake up to find Maple curled up in bed beside me, eyes glue to her phone.
“They offered,” she says, turning the phone around so I can skim the email.
Remember when I said I only wanted the best for her? Yeah. Me, too. There’s only one thing to say, so I say it. “Congratulations.”
“I’m going to travel the world.” Maple flops back on the bed. At some point during the night, she’s gotten up, because now she’s wearing my dress shirt. It looks far better on her than it ever did on me, or maybe it’s the deep V that frames her breasts. She scissors her legs into the air, kicking gleefully.
“They’re going to pay me,” she continues. “I’m going to design a capsule collection for them.”
Ask a question. Show interest, you idiot. “When do you leave?”
“Next week.”
She rolls over onto her stomach, her fingers touching the screen of her phone as if she needs that contact to believe it’s true. Her voice is happy. Excited. She’s looking at her perfect future and there doesn’t appear to be a place for me in it. It’s not that I was expecting forever or promises or a ring. I’m not that man, even though she’s definitely that woman, and I know this is the end for us. I should say something, but I don’t know where to start.
So instead I show her how I feel.
I straddle her butt and legs, running my hands down the length of her spine to work out the knots.
Say something.
Don’t let her go.
Selfishly, I want one more memory, one more time. So I lean down and kiss her neck and shoulder. The straight, proud line of her spine and the dimples just above her ass. And then I go lower, giving her the very best, very dirtiest sex I can think of.
Giving her memories.
And when she’s moaning face-first into the sheets, my face buried between her legs, I show her everything I’m feeling, everything I have no words for.
Give it to me.
Let go.
Let me—
“I love this.” She gasps the words out and that’s my greenlight to give her more until she’s hollering my name, fingers digging into the sheets, and I slide into her from behind.
We don’t have to say goodbye.
Not yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Max
I DON’T FEEL RIGHT. I wander from room to room in my Santa Cruz place. I could assemble some of the furniture that’s still in fourteen boxes in my d
ining room. Maple left before we could put that stuff together. If I’m not in the mood for some Allen wrench action, I could change up the line of orderly soldier pillows marching across my ten-foot leather couch with the stupid hairpin legs. The blue pillow could go next to the new brown pillow. Or the white with the crocheted lumps on the front. I bought two leather pillows, as well. So many choices. Life’s exciting at Chez Max’s. Noise, noise, noise.
You know what’s wrong with me?
Not the flu.
Not Ebola.
Nothing that antibiotics can cure.
I have a bad case of the Maples. That’s not me, this mopey, sad llama who works a record number of hours and doesn’t even bother to count them. That’s not my life. The one where I work ten-hour days and divide the rest evenly between sleeping, surfing and fucking, with the occasional well-timed break for personal hygiene. I’m the Jedi Master of productivity—or I was.
Maple.
Maple Maple Maple Maple. If I say it fast enough and often enough, the words blur together until I sound like a drunk. I’d never understood what made two people decide that they were it for each other, that one person was enough—more than enough—for the next sixty, seventy or infinity years. Maple and I agreed—we were just a hookup—so why did I want to change the rules of the game now?
How long until I’m over her? Two hours, two days, two months? I don’t think I can handle much more. I have deadlines, a company to run, a life to get on with. And yet, I’m moping around my house, online shopping for pillows I don’t need, doing nothing. It’s annoying.
This is why I’m out on my board, in the dark. Surfing in the daylight is too easy. Sharks? Jagged rocks? Skull-cracking meet and greet with the ocean floor? Pfft. Bring it on. Surfing at night is risky, but so is life. There are variables in the ocean—shifting light, rogue waves, a rock I didn’t know was there. But since there’s a full moon tonight and I can’t sleep and don’t want to code, I’m out here. Frigging moonlight spilling over the water makes it almost too easy.
I blame all that light for Jack showing up beside me. So much for hiding out. I ignore him and sit there on my board, rocking gently up and down. A tsunami would be good right about now. A hurricane. Anything to stir things up and get them moving.
“Hey,” he says finally.
I eye the ocean, but there’s nothing worth the risk of riding, not yet. It’s all baby waves when I want a huge, epic wave, the kind that hammers you into the ocean floor if you make the wrong move but that also promises the ride of a lifetime.
“You want to talk about her?”
Notice that he doesn’t say it. He goes straight for the jugular and the elephant in the room. Ocean. Whatever.
And... I cave.
“How did you know with Molly?”
“That we were in love?” Jack sizes up the wave rolling toward us. It’s not bad, but not worth riding.
“Sure.” I shift on my board. “Tell me your firsts. The first moment you knew you loved her. The first time you asked her to marry you. The first time you realized that forever didn’t seem like too long.”
“You know how we met.” Jack glances at something swimming beneath us. It doesn’t come equipped with a dorsal fin, so no worries. “College keg party. She wasn’t a fan of cheap beer in a can, so I volunteered to fetch her something else. Since I wasn’t of legal buying age, it took a couple of hours to hack a fake ID. She’d left the party by the time I came back, so I tracked her down and convinced her to drink mimosas on the beach with me and watch the sunrise.”
It’s silly and probably cute, but I don’t understand what made it work. Clarification is in order. “And that’s when you knew?”
He rolls his shoulders. “It’s not a checklist kind of thing, Max, or an array that you feed numbers into to get the predicted output. We met and then there was just something about Molly that made me look twice.”
“I looked twice.” Still waiting for that tsunami, FYI.
“At?”
“At someone else.” No wonder Catholics go to confession in those booths. There’s no way I look Jack in the eye right now. “I fell in love with her. Maybe. How do I know?”
He doesn’t give me shit, but he doesn’t start laying out a ten-step plan, either. Jack fixes things. He takes broken, inefficient, jacked-up companies and he turns them into first-class performers. I’d appreciate it if he could work that magic on me, but instead he just stacks his hands behind his head and gives me a once-over.
“Give me the list,” he says. “The Ten Things I Love about Maple.”
I can give him the first ten things, the ten things I thought about today, the ten things I love but that also make me want to move to Canada or pull my hair out. But just ten? That’s the impossible task. So I deflect.
“What’s on your list?”
“For the record,” he says, “things aren’t so good between Molly and me.”
“That sucks.”
Not profound enough for you? It’s heartfelt. Accurate. I mean, there’s nothing you can say when someone’s raked over by their relationship. To extend the analogy, Jack is getting his ass pounded by some pretty powerful waves as he fights to paddle out and catch a wave. And that sucks and we both know it.
The incoming wave is beautiful. The peak breaks to the left in the moonlight and there’s room enough for both of us to ride, although we’ll have to ride in opposite directions.
“Give me a list,” he says again, his eyes on the wave. He wants to ride it, too. “Stop standing on the side of the pool holding your dick because you’re too chickenshit to engage. Jump. You remember the night you lost your virginity?”
“Afternoon,” I correct, “and you want me to think about another woman now?”
He ignores me. “That was all about your dick. Sure, you popped that cherry, but that was just sex. You’ve never had a relationship, so Maple is your first.”
A relationship virgin? I suppose it’s possible. I laugh.
“So you think I should give it up?”
He starts paddling toward the right side of the wave. “I think you should ask yourself why you’re holding on to your cherry. Who are you saving yourself for?”
Is it PC? No. We’re guys. Cut us some slack.
I think about it as I paddle hard toward the left side of the wave. Remember that list I made the day I met Maple? The things I was so sure I knew about her? It wasn’t complete. I didn’t know her then. All I had was a list of facts, which was like having the dots for a puzzle but no pencil. I didn’t know how to connect them.
The wave’s breaking in the center now and it’s a thing of beauty. I explode onto my feet, pushing up off the board and finding my center. The night-dark ocean stretches out in front of me as I fly toward the beach, board skimming the wave.
I know so much more now.
1. Maple takes pictures so she can’t forget.
2. Sometimes Maple hides behind her clothes.
3. Maple worries that she isn’t enough.
4. She worries that she weighs too much and her partner won’t be able to lift her—and that’s a metaphor.
5. She loves to go barefoot.
6. She hums when she’s thinking. Or sad. Or happy. Pretty much all the time.
7. She needs more puppies and kittens in her life. I don’t know how she feels about babies, but I want to ask. I want to give her the family she dreams about, but I need to listen first. I need to hear what she wants.
8. She’s run four thousand miles away.
9. She’s amazing in bed, but she’s equally amazing out of it.
10. I never want to stop this.
The wave peters out and I glide toward shore. It’s that last one, good old number ten, that sticks in my head. Okay, I’m not exactly forgetting number nine, either, but I’m an excellent multitasker.
All I need is a plan.
And a plane ticket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Maple
#meetmeinparadise #livingmybestlife #iaorana
TAHITI AND ME? It’s love at first sight. When I stagger off the nine-hour flight from Los Angeles, the sky is dark and a rainstorm has just passed through. The tarmac beneath my sneakers breathes that wet, lush scent of asphalt into the air. And then when I breathe in, there are flowers. So many flowers.
The lines that form for immigration snake outside the tiny airport, but I don’t care because there’s drumming and singing, two sarong-wrapped, floral-shirt-wearing men banging out a primal rhythm as they sing that’s echoed faintly by the ocean drumming on the reef close by. The unfamiliar words of a love song wash over me. I can’t tell if they’re happy or sad, but they’re beautiful.
As is the dancer.
Did you think I’d miss her?
Barefoot, wearing a long grass skirt and one of those ridiculous coconut shell bras, she dances joyfully, arms extended, feet moving in ancient patterns. Someone’s dressed her up to match the postcards, but her long, dark hair ripples down her back as she moves, lost in her own world.
She’s neither young nor skinny and most of her audience is jostling for position in the immigration queues, but she dances with undeniable magic. I stand there until the line’s almost gone, watching, learning, smiling. My first instinct is to text Max a picture, which is when I remember that there are four thousand miles (and more) between us. I still take my phone out, though, checking to make sure that it’s no longer set to airplane mode and that it’s picked up the local cell phone service.
