Until now.
He sat in his dead sister's kitchen on his dead sister's birthday and couldn't, for the life of him, hear her laugh.
But he could hear the other one, and that was what had his chest tightening painfully. Almost suffocatingly even.
This wasn't right.
Maximo leaned forward to blow out the candle himself, and as he watched smoke uncurl from the candle, it was almost like an omen, a glimpse of how his time with Jassy was about to dissolve.
Because the way she was making him forget what he wasn't supposed to forget...
It had to stop. Whatever this was, whatever she was becoming to him, it had to stop tonight, before Mary went silent for good.
Chapter Twenty-One
I COME HOME FROM THEovernight shoot to a stranger wearing Maximo's face.
He's up before me, dressed like a man going to war with a spreadsheet, coffee already made and no second cup set out. Which is such a small thing. Which is such a loud one.
"Morning," I try.
"There's a schedule on the counter." He doesn't look up from his phone. "The driver takes you to set and back. Anything you need, ask the housekeeper."
"Did I do something?" I ask, and it comes out unevenly, smaller than I mean it to.
"I'm busy this week." He says it coldly, without heat, the way you'd hand a stranger the time.
And that's the whole conversation. That's breakfast.
It doesn't get better. It gets colder, one careful degree at a time, a man dismantling a summer he never admitted to building. He stops eating dinner at home. The lessons are over, obviously, but so are the arguments, the glares, the reluctant almost-smiles I used to collect like a magpie. He saysgood nightthe way you'd say it to a coworker. He calls me Jassy, only Jassy, never anything with a shape to it.
I do what I do. I throw everything I have at the wall of him.
I leave terrible jokes on sticky notes, I heckle his phone calls, I sit on the forbidden side of the couch and narrate the news until my throat hurts, all of it waiting for the jaw to unclench, for the door to crack, for one accidental smile I can live on.
Nothing.
And the whole time my borrowed heart keeps reaching for him anyway, which it is not supposed to do, after a man who's decided he'd rather I didn't exist. A smart girl would take the schedule and the housekeeper and the coworker good-nights for the clear no they are. But smart girls never stop trying, and neither, it turns out, does a heart that isn't even all the way mine.
"You'd tell me," I ask him one night, standing in the study doorway, dropping the act for exactly one sentence, "if it was something I did?" He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves behind his eyes and gets locked back down.
"Go to bed, Jassy."
I tell myself he's just stressed even as I find myself curling my body in a ball. I tell myself it's work, or money, or one of the thousand grown-up weights I can't see. It has to be one of those things, or all of those things even. Because a man can't kiss a girl like the world's ending one moment and then throw her away for no reason the next.
Right?
Chapter Twenty-Two
A SMART GIRL WOULDhave quit at the first cold morning. But a smart girl also knows the difference between a man who doesn't want you and a man who wants you so badly he's gone to war with himself over it, and I'd bet my last dollar my Maximo is the second kind.
So...when a week goes by, and things still don't feel right between us...
A cheap trick it is.
"I have a reshoot," I tell him, planting myself in the kitchen where he can't leave without going through me. "The kiss scene. They want it again next week, and I'm rusty, and I need—" I make myself hold his eyes and not blink. "A lesson."
For a second I'm sure he'll say no.
