CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Maple
#plottwist #shakespearewouldbeproud #choices

LAST NIGHT WAS—well, I’m not exactly sure what to say about last night other than that it pretty much turned out exactly like Romeo and Juliet. There was gorgeous music, some fairly memorable speeches, orgasms for all, and then it all went to hell and no one ended up happy.

After Max reluctantly left, I dragged the box of Madd’s leftover stuff down the stairs. Dealing with him feels like the dream where you suddenly realize it’s the end of the college term and you haven’t been to class once—but now you need to pass the class. I’m lost and running to keep up, but then I wake up and realize that it was just a dream.

We’re not going to get back together.

We’ll never be a couple.

I’m not going to score an A—and I don’t care. I don’t need to be who he wants me to be anymore. I wake up—alone—the morning after my Madd showdown and wait to feel regret. It’s like poking at the tooth that was sore for days or weeks and now there’s no pain and it feels a bit like a miracle. Madd’s flowers are in a vase on my bedside table. Which is also my kitchen table and my coffee table but...details. Perhaps I should have tossed the flowers in the dumpster, but I’m a sucker for hot pink stargazer lilies. Their gorgeous scent fills my studio. Someone’s even snipped off the orange stamens that stain your fingers and clothes so that there’s nothing to mar the pretty.

Madd himself? Well let’s just say that I suspect his harem was about as happy as I was with his unwillingness to pick a partner. He’s come back because I made him feel good and who doesn’t like that? Plus, now that his new girl’s kicked him to the curb, I’m useful again. Whatever. He may have traveled for business or been unhappy with his life or decided that I wasn’t Ms. Perfect, but that didn’t excuse his choice to cheat or to post our private video. This time, I want someone to choose me.

And speaking of choices?

Max has been a busy, busy boy. His latest text reads like the top ten from Kinkster, and let’s just say he knows how to make his case. There’s a reason (or nine) why he’s the king of hookups.

I stare at my screen for way too long, imagining him writing this. I can see his face, intent on the screen, the little crinkle he gets between his eyebrows when he’s working through a problem. Is he in his office even though it’s Saturday? In his enormous bed in his even bigger, emptier Santa Cruz beach mansion? I’ve seen him naked now, so it’s far too easy to dress him in a pair of faded blue jeans, feet bare, T-shirt gone so that I can mentally ogle his chest and remember what it felt like to anchor myself on his biceps.

Is he serious? I don’t even know what some of those places are, but already I feel like we share a little secret. That I’ll never see or hear those names again without thinking about having sex there. With Max. God, he drives me a little crazy.

Before I can remember the dozens—and dozens—of reasons why public sex is a bad idea, I’m committed.

He texts back a map pin. Meet me at 3.

Living in San Francisco, you learn quickly that so many things are less romantic or glamorous than you believed. Fog is cold and damp. You have to step over passed-out alcoholics and the homeless in order to exit the train station, and there are so many of them that it gets harder and harder to remember that they’re people, not obstacles. You see people doing things in the street—personal, private things—and sex is the least of it.

I know that meeting Max in a public place for sex isn’t romantic. It won’t be comfortable.

But I do think it will be exciting—and excitement is something that’s been missing from my life for a long time. I’ve spent years dancing to other people’s scripts, and while I couldn’t see myself making a habit of hooking up in a public park, I want to do it. Maybe just this once or maybe twice or however many times we feel like it. I don’t know how it will end, but it feels right. It feels like I’m finally embracing some part of myself that’s been hiding in the wings, waiting for her cue to come center stage.

I roll onto my back, letting the phone slip beneath my covers. I can feel the broad smile stretching my lips, but there’s no one here to see me grinning like a loon.

Light slips in through the windows, along with street sounds. San Francisco’s awake even if I’m not. Sirens blare over the muted roar of cars; Bob’s sorting cans in the alley between my house and the next. There’s music from downstairs because my neighbor likes to salsa while she housecleans. Later there will be the rumble of delivery trucks and the barking call of the food vendors who trundle their carts up and down 16th Street offering churros, corn on the cob and lime-and-chili-flavored slices of watermelon.

Not ready to move yet, I trace my ribs with my fingertips, stroking up over my breasts and then down. Max O’Reilly is funny and he goes for what he wants. Not in a greedy, I-have-to-have-it-all way. It’s more like he simply plans the shit out of his life and therefore gets more done than others.

Case in point? He has not one but two PhDs. Who needs more than one? Who has the time? He did his graduate work at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where someone told him he could only enroll in one program because no one could possibly complete the dual coursework, let alone write two dissertations. Max’s reaction was pretty much watch me. He lived on Red Bull. Lola says he never slept more than two hours in a row, so he didn’t bother renting an apartment—he just moved from lab to library and back. Now he has PhDs in computer science and philosophy.

Three o’clock seems far away. To kill time, I force myself to get up. Max loves my “bendiness.” I suspect he’s had the usual fantasies about dating a gymnast but has decided that a ballet dancer works, too. He’s right. As he’s seen for himself, I can indeed put my leg behind my head.

I work through my usual morning barre routine on the tiny scrap of balcony in front of my studio. Since my apartment sits on a bit of a hill, I have a view of the opposite hillside and acres of pastel-colored houses and roofs. The BART train snakes through it all—and since I overslept this morning, the fog has mostly burned off already.

As I launch into a series of pliés and tendus, Lieutenant Bob waves up at me, off to do whatever it is he does when he’s not sleeping in my driveway. Driveways are small and steep in this part of San Francisco. We curse the rare days when it rains because the water rolls down the eight feet or so of asphalt to decorate the garage floor. Bob doesn’t seem to mind the slant, though, and since none of us has a car, everyone in the house has decided not to mind Bob.

He and Max seemed to hit it off. There’s lots of lip service about the homeless in San Francisco, but few people go hands on. It’s too easy sometimes to just think of Lieutenant Bob as part of the landscape rather than as a person. Not that I’m shooting for saintliness or anything remotely like it.

But Max took the time to chat with Bob, and I like that. Sure, Max is still the elusive, sometimes cranky, often filthy billionaire who likely has a higher IQ than all of NASA combined. He prefers watching, but he also likes to fix things and I suspect that he’s slowly coming around to the idea that he and I are not a one-time thing. Not that we’re a real couple, but I almost thought, given enough time and dirty texting, that we could be friends.

I bring up the last picture I took last night. In it, Max is leaning against the edge of our box, his hands in his pant pockets. He looks like a Silicon Valley James Bond in his expensive tux, rich, powerful, but still rough around the edges because he doesn’t play by other people’s rules. I’d been trying to play it cool, but it had been tough. Billionaires aren’t part of my daily life, and just scoring the invitation to the charity performance had been huge. How I ended up, even temporarily, with a guy like Max is one of life’s fabulous mysteries. I’m not sure he even realizes just how much of a unicorn he is. He knows he’s good at his job and he has a pretty good idea of what he can do with that magic penis of his, but people look up to him for other reasons, too.

I want to reach right through the picture and lick him. He makes me laugh, he makes me come, he makes me feel as if when he looks at me, he sees me. I’m struck by that the most. I’ve spent all of my adult life dancing on stage, so I’m used to people watching me, but they saw only the character I was dancing. Between the costumes and the makeup, the sets and the lights, there was no way they saw me.

I think Max does.

Or at least as much as I’ve been willing to show him.

My finger hovers over the picture. I should post it to Instagram. My followers like frequent peeks at my personal life, and I follow the general rule of thumb of posting three parts promo to seven parts content. I show them what I eat, what I wear and how a ballerina works out. I let them follow me backstage, onstage—pretty much everywhere. That’s life in the influencer fishbowl and I have no reason to think Max isn’t aware of what I do. It’s no secret.

And yet I sort of don’t want to share him with my world. Max is mine. I scroll through the photo album on my phone. I don’t have many pictures of him, but Max isn’t the kind of guy to strike a pose. His poise on the red carpet last night surprised me.

He gave me a present—for no reason—and while I’ve never been a jewelry girl, I love my new bracelet. I feel my heart pick up its pace a little remembering the brush of his fingers against my wrist, his thumb tracing the pale blue veins beneath the fragile skin as he worked to do up the clasp. The car charm is to remember the opera, he’d said.

As if I could forget.

I’m humming a made-up tune patched together from my favorite ballets when I head into the steamy bathroom for a shower. It’s silly, but I take a picture. Of me in my towel.

And I send it.

To Max.

I’m not completely naked because I’ve learned that lesson and I really don’t know Max. Even if I am having fun getting to know him. I text.