“You look pretty excited for this beer.” He pushed a pint across the table and held up his own. “I took the liberty of ordering you a burger the size of your head, and some chips.” He grinned and then clarified, “A.k.a. ‘fries.’ ”
“Perfect. Thanks.” I set my purse on an empty chair and sat across from him. His eyes smiled, and then dipped to look at my lips.
“So,” I said, sipping my beer and assessing him over the rim.
“So.”
He looked positively amused with this turn of events. I wasn’t a control freak, but I was used to having a pretty predictable life, and in the past two months, I hadn’t been able to anticipate anything that had come my way. “Thanks for inviting me to the bar today.”
He nodded, scratching the back of his neck. “Thanks for coming.”
“Your friends are nice.”
“They’re a bunch of arseholes.”
I laughed, feeling my shoulders slowly relax. “That’s funny. That’s what they said about you.”
He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Are we on a date?”
I nearly choked on the sip of beer I’d just taken.
“For the love of God, woman, don’t have a fit. I just wonder if you’d like to reestablish ground rules. Should we review our previous set?”
I nodded, pressing a napkin to my lips and mumbling, “Sure.”
He set his drink down and began ticking my rules off on his long fingers. “One night a week, no other lovers, sex preferably in public—definitely not in my bed—pictures are requested, but no faces, no publicity.” He lifted his glass, took a deep drink, and then leaned forward again, whispering, “And nothing between us other than sex. Scratching an itch and all that. Did I capture it all?”
“Sounds about right.” My heart thundered under my ribs as I realized how far we’d strayed from that in only a day.
A college-age kid brought over two baskets with burgers bigger than any I’d ever seen before and enormous piles of fries.
“Holy crap,” I said, staring at my food. “This is . . .”
“Exactly what you wanted?” he asked in return, reaching for a bottle of vinegar.
“Yes, but way more than I can eat.”
“Let’s make this interesting, shall we?” he said. “Whoever eats more of their burger can set new ground rules.”
With a smile, he screwed the cap back on the vinegar and set it down. We both knew he was almost double my weight. No way could I eat more than him.
But was he hungry? Maybe he’d had enough beer to fill up and knew that I would eat more than he would? Or did he want to make the rules?
“Christ, woman. Stop thinking,” he said, lifting his burger and taking a gigantic bite.
“Fine. Deal,” I said, suddenly dying to know what Max’s rules would be.
I stared at Max as he wiped his hands on a napkin and then balled it up, dropping it into his empty basket.
“That was good,” he mumbled, finally looking up at me. He cracked up at the pathetic progress I’d made. I had managed to polish off only about a quarter of my burger, and it looked like I had barely touched my fries.
Dropping the burger back into the basket, I groaned. “I’m so full.”
“I won.”
“Was there any question?”
“Then why’d you take the deal?” he asked, pushing his chair away from the table. “You could have said no.”
I shrugged, then stood, turning to leave before he pressed me to answer. I could be curious about what he wanted between us, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit it.
My beer buzz from earlier in the day was wearing off, and with the weight of the burger in my stomach I could have curled up on the sidewalk and gone to sleep. But it was only half-past eight, and I wasn’t ready for the night to end. The idea of waiting until Friday to see him felt impossible . . . unless he changed that rule.
The East Village was crowded with twenty-somethings out for Saturday night drinking and music. Max reached for my hand, slipped his fingers in between mine, and squeezed. Out of habit I started to protest that we were not going to walk down the street like this, but he surprised me by pulling me into the dimly lit bar next door.
“I know you’re full, but sit in here, sip a cocktail, and you’ll wake up. I’m not nearly done with you.”
God I liked the sound of that.
Squeezed tight together in a booth, we sat in a dark corner, me sipping vodka tonics, Max drinking a few beers and telling me all about growing up in Leeds with Irish Catholic parents, and born smack in the middle of seven sisters and three brothers. They’d lived three kids to a bedroom, and it was so different from my childhood that I barely blinked the entire time he regaled me with stories of the time they decided to form a family brass band, or when, at eighteen, the oldest sister, Lizzy, was caught in the family Volvo having sex with their local priest, consensual sex. Max’s oldest brother, Daniel, left after high school to go on a Catholic mission to Myanmar, and had come home a Theravada Buddhist. His youngest sister, Rebecca, married right out of college and, at twenty-seven, already had six children. The others had stories just as riveting: the brother born just ten months after Max, Niall, was second in command at the London Underground; one of the middle sisters was a chemistry professor at Cambridge and had five children, all boys.
Max admitted that sometimes he felt mediocre compared to his siblings. “I studied art at uni and then got a business finance degree so I could sell art. In my father’s eyes, I was a miserable failure, both in my choice of career and in my failure to produce Catholic babies before I hit thirty.”
But when he said this, he laughed, as if being an absolute failure wouldn’t have really mattered that much to his parents in the end. His father, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer the week after Max finished graduate school, and his “mum” had decided she needed a change, so she moved with him to the States.
“Neither of us knew a soul here. I had a couple of indirect connections from uni, and some from my business program—friends of friends on Wall Street—but I knew only that I wanted to be involved in New York art ventures, and wanted to partner with someone who knew science and technology. That’s how I met Will.”
He sat back and finished his beer. Seriously, the man could drink. I’d lost count of how many beers he’d had and he didn’t seem affected at all.