Chapter Thirty-Four
Parvati came home to the sound of OneRepublic blasting from the master bedroom. “Max?”
She followed the sound, finding the bedroom empty, but the bed strewn with threadbare screen t-shirts, ratty cargo shorts, hiking boots, and a battered green backpack that looked like it had been around the world three times and dragged through at least six muddy rivers.
“Parv. Hey. I didn’t hear you come home.”
“I’m not surprised,” she shouted over the music declaring I lived in a power anthem.
Max took the hint and turned the music down en route to the bed with another armful of clothing from his run-away-to-Thailand phase, his movements brisk.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Hmm?” Max chucked a poncho that had long since ceased being waterproof onto a pile that looked to be trash and glanced at her, his expression barely shifting as his gaze traced her face. “Oh. No. I just hadn’t looked at this stuff in a while. Spring cleaning.”
“Uh huh.” Except it didn’t look like spring cleaning. It looked like Max was having some kind of nervous fit that somehow involved all of his old backpacking gear. “Are you okay?”
“Great. Talked to my father. Sidney wanted me to confront him about his dickishness regarding her wedding.”
“How’d that go?”
“He wants me to run Titacorp.”
Parv blinked, thrown by the non sequitur. “What?”
“His company. Titacorp.”
“I know what it is.”
“Apparently his new wife has convinced him that his relationships with his children are broken and she doesn’t want the same thing to happen to her kid, so she’s insisting he retire—or at least cut back. She wants to patch up his relationship with me by bringing me on as his successor. And apparently she’s also the reason he’s been such a dick to Sidney. She encouraged him to be more ‘parental’ toward her—which he translated as going after her fiancé with a metaphorical shotgun. And he’s insisting Sidney invite her to the wedding because she wants us all to be one happy family. Not sure how she sees my mother fitting into that picture.” Max frowned at a broken belt as if it had personally offended him by cracking. “I’m not sure if she has him totally whipped or if I just never had the first idea who he was. Maybe both. I thought they’d have to pry his business from his cold dead hands. Queen Elizabeth seems less attached to the throne of England than he is to Titacorp.”
“Do you want it?”
His chin jerked. “It never seemed like a possibility. The idea of wanting Titacorp is so foreign I can’t even process it.”
Which wasn’t a no. And Titacorp was headquartered in Switzerland. Thousands of miles away.
“You already have a business,” she reminded him.
“I know. That’s what I told him.” Max paused to study a hat, a slight grin tipping his lips before he tossed it onto the bed with the other items she assumed were part of the keeper pile. “He said he knows someone who has been wanting to buy out Elite Protection for a while. Some British company that specializes in political sector close protection in Europe and wants to expand into the celebrity side of things as well as the U.S. market. It could be a smart move. Always good to sell while you’re hot. When you need to sell is when you’re gonna get screwed.”
“Why do you have to sell at all?”
He didn’t answer, frowning at a perfectly good shirt and chucking it onto the trash pile with a grunt.
“Max?” He was obviously intrigued by the idea of selling Elite Protection—far too intrigued for Parvati’s comfort. Had he even thought of her once as he wrestled with the decision? “Are you going to take over Titacorp?”
“No. The one thing I know is that I don’t want to be my father. And as nice as the idea of being one big happy family is to my step-mother—who’s younger than me, by the way—I don’t live my life trying to make him proud anymore.”
It sounded like he was lying to himself, but Parv kept her opinion to herself. “What are you going to do?”
“Just because I sell Elite Protection doesn’t mean I have to work for him. I could just get away. There’s nothing like the perspective you get when you’re traveling. You never know yourself better than when you’re outside your comfort zone. It’s tempting. To just take off. Hit the reset button.”
She didn’t want the reset button. She liked where they were—but if she was the only one in this relationship who liked it, that wasn’t worth much. It was obvious he wasn’t taking her into account, which really drove home the fact that they weren’t a couple, no matter what they called themselves. He had one foot out the door—on a plane to Thailand.
“I’m always judged by him,” Max said, his focus far away—and on the items he was sorting. “No one would have paid attention to the sale of my first business or really cared much about Elite Protection if not for who my father is. Forbes wouldn’t have given a shit about me if not for my father, but Titus Dewitt’s son gets a feature. And all anyone ever wants to say is how alike we are. How I’m a chip off the old block. But I never wanted that. I never wanted to be him—and here I keep turning into him anyway. All work. No balance.”
“You’re nothing like your father. You’ve built a family at Elite Protection—it’s more than just a business.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “For once it would be nice to be my own man, but I’m never going to escape the connection. Not unless I change my name and move to Guam.”
“So you’re going to Guam?”
He looked at her, finally seeming to see how his words were hitting her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“But you want to.”
“Part of me is always going to want to, Parvati. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
But he wanted it. And that scared the crap out of her. She was never going to be able to love him enough to make him want to stay.
Was Sidney right? Was she walking into a tornado with a stupid smile on her face?
“Running away doesn’t solve anything—”
Max’s head snapped toward her, with a frown darker than any other she’d seen on his face. “I’m not running. That isn’t what this is.”
It was just what it looked like…
He shook his head, as if he’d heard the words she didn’t say, and swiped up his gym bag from the chair beside the bed. “I’m gonna go workout.”
And he said he wasn’t running. “Max. Don’t go. Talk to me.”
He was already across the room. “I need to think.”
Parvati watched him vanish out the door with a sense of ominous foreshadowing. Was this her future? Watching him disconnect and walk away?
Her phone buzzed and she fished it out—he couldn’t be any farther than the bottom of the driveway, but she wanted it to be Max, just something silly to reassure her that they were still good. But instead the name on the screen was Sidney’s.
I’m sorry. I hope you’re still coming to my bachelorette party. It wouldn’t be right without you.
Unexpected tears pressed against the backs of her eyes.
Thank God.
She needed her friend back. Her thumbs raced over the screen, composing her reply.
I’m sorry too. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
* * * * *
The bachelorette weekend festivities began on Thursday afternoon. All the local attendees were meeting at Once Upon a Bride where an SUV limo would pick them up to drive them down to Ensenada to meet up with the women flying in from across the country, since Tori was too far along to get on a plane.
Parvati was the first one there, her little roller bag propped against her ankle as she waited in the small parking lot behind the shop. She hadn’t worked today, Thursday being one of Madison’s regular days, and as tempting as it was to peek inside to see how her former employee was liking Once Upon a Bride, she didn’t want to disturb her while she was working.
And she was preoccupied anyway. Busy worrying about how things would go with Sidney and all of her new reality television friends. Busy worrying about Max.
She’d fallen asleep on the couch waiting for him the other night and woken up beside him in bed the next morning. She would have regretted that she’d missed him carrying her to the bedroom, if she hadn’t been so worried about his sudden outbreak of wanderlust.
The backpacking gear had been nowhere in sight, all of it tucked back away into a far corner of his closet, and Max had rolled over and kissed her shoulder when his alarm went off and asked her if she wanted a quick omelet before work. As if nothing had happened. As if all her fears were just her own paranoia.
And maybe they were. But that didn’t make them feel any less real.
“Well, I’ll be damned. What’s up, boss lady?”
Parvati turned at the familiar voice, a smile already tugging up her lips when she saw her former barista, her row of earrings glittering in the late afternoon sun. “Anna! What a great surprise. How’ve you been?”
“Can’t complain.” She raked a hand through her short hair, revealing a new tattoo on the underside of her arm. “That internship thing has been amazing. They’ve already offered me a job for when I graduate in two weeks.”
“Oh my goodness, I forgot it’s May. You’re graduating.” She teared up like a proud parent and Anna just shrugged.
“The ceremony’s on the fifteenth. It’d be cool if you came. It kinda sucked that we stopped hanging out after Common Grounds went down.”
“It did suck. I’ve been hoping we’d bump into one another around town, but I guess without a job here you don’t have any reason to come to Eden.” Parv frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to pick up Madison.” She hooked a thumb toward the back door of Once Upon a Bride.
Parv blinked. “Madison?”
“She didn’t tell you? We’ve been together for, I don’t know, two months now?”
“Together. Like together together?” Though Parv didn’t know another interpretation for the word. “I thought you weren’t interested?”
“I wasn’t. And I was kind of a dick about it. But she called me a few weeks after Common Grounds closed—right as the new term was beginning—and gave me this lecture about judging people, about how I was poisoning myself with my misconceptions about her, telling myself these stories about who she was until that was all I could see.”
“And you started dating?”
“Nah, I was still a dick. But I kept hearing what she said over and over in my head. It was like she was haunting me. Then a couple months later, I bumped into her on campus and she was with another chick. Like hardcore sucking face ‘with’. And my mind just exploded. That level of PDA went against everything I knew about her. She was breaking my preconceived notion of her and I was pissed. Which might have also had something to do with the fact that I have never been so jealous in my life as I was in that moment.” Anna grinned, as if the memory of her jealous rage was a fond one. “I marched over there and started shouting at her in the middle of the student union. And she told me I was just jealous because I’d missed my shot at something amazing because I’d had my head too far up my ass to see it—and of course she was right, but I was too busy losing my shit to hear it. She walked off with that girl—I don’t know why I expected her to break up with her on the spot because I was having a tantrum—but then two weeks later she texts me and asks if I’d like to get coffee. So we got coffee. And it was crazy. It was like we were two completely different people than I’d always thought we were. Our vibe was totally different. I don’t know. I’d been so busy telling myself I knew who she was that I’d completely missed her. And when I finally saw her, everything changed. She told me she wasn’t with that girl anymore and we’ve been seeing each other ever since.”
“Wow. That’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you.” And she was, but she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Madison’s words, as relayed through Anna. Poisoning herself with her own misconceptions. She could feel the echoes of those words in her own life, but couldn’t quite put her finger on where.
“It’s pretty great,” Anna agreed. She hooked her thumb toward Once Upon a Bride again. “You going in?”
Parvati shook her head. “I’m going to wait out here. We’re congregating for Sidney’s bachelorette weekend.”
“Right. Maddy mentioned that. T-minus nine days until the Wedding of the Century, huh?”
“Yeah.” But it still didn’t feel real. Sidney was getting married. And Parv was losing her.
“I should go let Maddy know I’m here.” Anna gave her a hug and started toward the door. “Have fun on your trip. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That definitely leaves room for going wild.”
“Damn right it does.” Anna grinned. “Good to see you, boss lady. Don’t be such a stranger, okay?”
“I won’t,” Parvati promised—wondering if she would ever be as confident and self-composed as Anna. At twenty-two she seemed to have more figured out than Parv had managed with almost another decade of life experience.
Anna knew who she was. She knew what she wanted. And even when she was wrong—as she apparently had been about Madison—she grinned when she told the story, completely comfortable with her own mistakes.
If only Parv could be Anna when she grew up.
The back door to Once Upon a Bride opened again within a minute of Anna disappearing inside and Tori poked her head out. “There you are! Everyone’s already here. Come inside, you’re missing the kick-off toast.”
Parvati gathered up her roller bag, feeling more nerves than excitement as she went to join the party, apparently already in progress.