IN THE WEEKS that followed Lola and Dev’s engagement, I expect something to change, but nothing does. Max and I spend most of the nights together. We may have started out as a hookup, but now? Now I don’t have a clue, although it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Max has never had a relationship in his life.
Item: He wrote a hookup app so an algorithm picked out his perfect match.
Item: He let a million billion strangers use it.
Item: And then when he was filthy rich because everyone wanted to throw cash at their dating problems, he had women (and men) throwing themselves at him because filthy rich plus mad bedroom skills makes Max a very, very popular boy.
It’s hard not to resent that, even if he claims he doesn’t even notice it happening anymore. When he attends industry events, business meetings or even the Whole Foods grocery because he needs beer, bread or toilet paper, women come up to him. They give him their numbers or offer to send pictures, all while making dirty suggestions in the produce aisle. He dismisses it as the side effect of the billion dollars. In Max’s world, money is the ultimate aphrodisiac and if he was broke, he’d be able to pick out tomatoes unmolested.
I’m not sure he’s right, but a controlled, scientific A/B study isn’t possible. Max is super careful with the billion dollars. This is a guy, after all, who plans everything, up to and including an orderly, aisle-by-aisle assault on the grocery store. There’s no way he’d lose a fortune...and that is why women hunt him down in public like he’s the last lion or bear or unicorn. For all his bad boy, dirty sex outside, the Max inside is safe. More important, he keeps the small handful of people he cares about safe.
I, on the other hand, barely have a nodding acquaintance with safe, as my dating history bears witness. My high school boyfriend loved dirt bikes and race cars. He sped through life, and giving him my virginity was simply another speed bump he flew over with reckless disregard. We had sex on the hood of his car, and I was pretty sure he was already thinking about his next race and his next track bunny before he pulled out.
My second boyfriend was a fellow dancer I met as an apprentice at the New York City Ballet. He up and left when he got offered a company position in Moscow. I maxed out my credit card to pay him a surprise visit, but the surprise was on me as I discovered him in bed with not one but two dancers. My dreams of monogamy and happily-ever-after dashed, I raced back to New York.
And then there was Madd.
Madd who I’d been ready to propose to and who’d also decided that I wasn’t enough.
My man picker clearly needed a reboot, so it was a wonder that I’d hooked up with Max. Or maybe that was why we were together—because he’d made it perfectly clear from the very beginning that he never, ever did long-term relationships. He hooked up. He moved on. I was the one tempted to linger.
Max and I? We aren’t a real couple.
Someday soon, he’ll stop texting or I will, and then we’ll be done, too.
I don’t know who he is, not really, not any more than he knows who I am. I know the superficial things, like the drink he’s most likely to order (or not) from a bar menu. I know the names of his favorite beaches and that if there was a surf competition, he wouldn’t be in it but he would be part of the security patrol zipping up and down the waves on Jet Skis and keeping things safe for everyone. I know he buys Fruit of the Loom cotton boxers and white Champion tube socks in a twelve-pack because that’s what he’s always worn and if it isn’t broken, he doesn’t fix it.
I know exactly how he likes his sex—and that I love it the same way, too.
But I don’t know the big things.
Or what goes on inside his head.
What scares him.
Or what he loves.
It isn’t just that we come from different worlds, or that his bank balance has far, far more zeroes than mine does. He lives his life shields up, shutting everyone and every intimate emotion out, and I understand that—even as I want to get inside him while keeping myself private. I could have feelings for him. Like greedy, greedy Icarus, not content to fly, I have to soar higher and higher, closer and closer to the one thing I’ve been told repeatedly is off-limits.
But—even though I know our breakup is coming more inevitably than Monday morning after Sunday—I am still glad when my phone buzzes with an incoming text. Are you free tonight?
Yes, I am.