“Are you looking for Max?” he asked, his voice familiar. Deeper now, but something about the rhythm and pacing of his words was the same.
“How do you know him?” I reached down and squeezed my waist. Hard. Hoping I would squeeze away the feeling of his hands there, which seemed to be lingering like an echo that would not stop repeating.
He looked down momentarily and his hair—fuck, he had great hair, the kind of hair a woman wants to grab hold of—tumbled into his face. And then he looked up again and locked eyes with me. “Icyblue meeting warm chocolate.”Cheesy and nonsensical, but that’s what we used to say. And now here he was, looking at me in the exact same way he’d looked at me when he’d first caught me at school all those years ago. But that was an entire lifetime ago.
“I’m Max,” he said softly, his smile nowhere to be seen now.
“No. You’re not. I’ve been speaking to Max for nearly a month now. Not you. What the hell is going on here? I don’t understand.”
“You’ve been speaking to me.”
“No, I haven’t. Your name is Logan M. McAdamson Junior. Not Maximillian Adam—” I stopped and blinked in confusion.
“I dropped the Mc and used my middle name, sort of.”
“Your middle name is Maximus.”
He smiled at me. “You remember how much I hated that, and how you teased me that it sounded like a pompous old guy’s name.”
I shook my head vigorously. “I still don’t understand what’s happening here, Logan.”
“I’ll explain it all to you, but we do have to go now.” He pointed to the plane, and I’d almost forgotten that we were meant to be going anywhere.
Then something hit me as I eyed him up and down, looking so cool, calm and collected. “Why don’t you look shocked to see me?” I paused and let the implications of that sink in. “Wait, you knew you were going to see me?”
He nodded.
“You knew who I was this entire time?”
“No, not this entire time, but when you told me your real name and sent me yourID.”
“That was two whole days ago!” I stared at him in absolute shock.
“And trust me, two days ago I was just as shocked as you are.”
“You’ve known for two days and you didn’t tell me?”
“I’ll explain it all to you when we’re on the plane.”
I shook my head. “No. Explain it to me now. I need to know what’s going on here. I explained my name to you, so why are you no longer Logan Maximus McAdamson Junior?”
“Because I didn’t want to be Logan Maximus McAdamson Junior anymore after my dad had an affair and left my mom and decided he no longer wanted his existing kids either. That’s why I changed my name.”
“Oh.” I was totally taken aback by this response. It had not been at all what I was expecting. “Fine. Okay. Sorry. But still, you should have said something the second you knew it was me.”
“I know I should have.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Would we be standing on this runway right now if I’d told you? Things didn’t exactly end well between us . . .”
I scoffed, shock beginning to give way to anger now. “End well? Are you serious? They didn’t end at all—you just disappeared. I haven’t seen or heard from you in thirteen years, and now here you are standing in front of me with a different name and . . . Oh God . . .” I put my hands over my eyes as if trying to make him disappear again. “We’ve been, you and I . . .” I couldn’t get the words out they were so utterly horrifying.
“Flirting,” he said matter-of-factly, and I took my hands off my eyes and looked at him again.
“Did you know it was me when you were being all flirty and suggesting semi-something-cheese dates?” I asked.
“You were flirty back.”
