Harder We Fade (3 page)

Six weeks later, I was feeling much better and had been working at Max’s film production company, an independent venture he had decided to rekindle over the last several weeks.

He no longer wanted to enter into development deals with the studios. The freedom associated with independently producing and distributing his own movies was something he had wanted for a while now. Back when he confessed to me that all he wanted to do was write, what he really wanted was independence from corporate filmmaking.

A development deal meant producing scripts that fulfilled the wishes of a focus group rather than Max’s own creative whims. He was established enough to tell the studios he was going independent and if they liked what he was doing they could discuss a price.

So, six weeks after moving in with him, I was settling into an office down the hall from Max’s.

The company was in Century City, a little more than halfway between Malibu and L.A., about thirty minutes from our house. It was a one-story brick building, and the walls inside were also brick, with thick oak rafters and wood floors in the open space. Max had decorated the place with movie posters — not just the ones he’d worked on, but some of his favorite movies as well — giving it a real studio feel, even though he was glad to get away from the confined nature of that part of the business.

There were four full-time employees whose responsibilities ranged from finance to talent acquisition to procurement of equipment to travel for location scouting and all other travel needs. Max had hired them away from the studio, grabbing the best people on his way out.

I was Max’s manager, which meant I pretty much ran the place, doing everything Max couldn’t do himself and didn’t want to hand off to just anyone. There was a definite learning curve, and Max, true to form, was a magnificent teacher.

My job was far different than that of an agent, so I wasn’t replacing Lyle Ridge, who had been Max’s agent for years. Lyle had a huge client list, but always took Max’s call or mine in a timely fashion. He was a soft-spoken man, and way more easy-going than any agent I’d ever been around, but he was sharp and had connections to everyone in town.

Max came into my office one day and said, “Let’s talk about money.”

I was sitting in my black leather chair behind the glass and chrome desk. Max sat down in one of the visitor’s chair, smiling.

“Money…as in the budget for the new film?”

He shook his head. “Your money. Your salary.”

We had touched on the topic previously, but hadn’t settled the issue.

“I’ve made up my mind, and since I’m the boss, you have to accept whatever I offer you or you are of course free to resign.”

I pushed my chair back and put my feet up on the desk, crossing my legs. “Shoot.”

“You’re distracting me,” he said. “Such a tease.”

His eyes started their journey at my bare feet and traveled up my legs. I was wearing a black pencil skirt and a caramel tank. I had slipped out of my heels shortly before he walked in.

“
Me
?” I said, feigning ignorance. “When do I ever tease you?”

“Just by being alive, you tease me. So how about you put those pretty legs down and let’s get on with business.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, swinging my legs back under the desk and slipping my feet back into my shoes.

“I’ll get right to the point. I’m going to pay you exactly what I pay myself,” he said. “That way, if you decide to leave, you won’t be a financial hostage to me.”

I sat there surprised. “I’m not going anywhere. Why — ”

“I don’t think you’re going anywhere, Liv, but if you do…well, you can. I need to know that you’re staying with me because you want to, not because you have to.”

I stood and walked around my desk over to Max, sat on is lap, put my arms around his neck, and kissed his forehead.

As gently as I could, I said, “Honestly, it feels like some kind of test. A while back you told me you felt like so many people wanted to be close to you because they could get something from you. And maybe that’s the case. But you told me I was nothing like that.”

He shook his head. “You’re not, and I know that. Just trust my reasoning. And, by the way…I’m not testing you, I’m making you rich.”

I did trust Max’s reasoning. I trusted everything about him. Completely. And the rich thing sounded pretty damn good.

He looked at me intensely, reached up and put his hand on the side of my face, pulling my head down, and he sealed his lips around mine.

Ever since Max told me how he came to be in California, I had wanted to meet his mother. Leaving home and coming out here was an intriguing and defining moment in his life, and I wanted to meet the woman who had raised him to be the man he was today.

Paula Dalton lived in Thousand Oaks, about 30 minutes away from our house. Max drove us in his BMW X5 SUV, opting for that instead of his Porsche, saying, “I don’t drive this as fast and I want you to see the scenery.”

It was a gorgeous sunny day, and we had the top down. I had to hold my hair in place as the Pacific breeze whipped through it. We didn’t talk, but instead listened to the songs on my iPhone as we rode up.

Max’s mother lived in a one-story ranch home. The lawn was perfectly manicured, and I made a comment to Max about it as we pulled into the driveway.

“Don’t get out just yet,” he said, looking over at me as he put the car in Park.

I thought he meant that he was going to open my door for me, but just as I was about to ask why, the answer was provided by the yelping of two white West Highland Terriers who were circling the car, checking it out, and barking a warning to their owner.

“They have free run of the place,” Max said, “but they have those electronic fence collars.”

He got out and the two dogs gathered at his feet. I opened the door and before my shoe hit the driveway, the little guys had lost all interest in Max and greeted me, the newcomer, instead.

I knelt down to pet them.

Max came around to my side of the car and said, “Meet Zeke and Dolly. Don’t ask me which is which.”

Just then I heard his mother’s voice. “Max, you can tell them apart by their collars.”

“The way they move so fast, it’s hard to tell.”

I looked up and saw Max hug his mom and kiss her on the cheek.

I stood from my crouching position, as the dogs yelped their disapproval of not having my full attention anymore.

Max’s mother was in her late fifties, but didn’t look it. The old pictures Max had showed me led me to believe she just might answer her door wearing an apron, with her hair up in a bun, and sporting glasses with a beaded chain. I guess maybe I was expecting someone who looked more like Alice the housekeeper from
The Brady Bunch
than a woman who looked like she could have been a character actress who stepped off the set of a soap opera.

She had blonde hair, deep blue eyes, and perfectly straight, white teeth. She was in as good a shape as any fifty-something-year-old woman I had ever seen.

She took a step toward me and opened her arms to hug me. “Olivia, it’s so nice to finally meet you.”

We hugged and I said, “You, too, Mrs. Dalton.”

“Call me Paula, I insist.”

She kept her hands on my shoulder as she pulled back to look at Max, then back at me. “He’s so secretive, I thought I’d never get to meet you.”

“I told you about Olivia months ago,” Max said.

“Well, when you’re this serious about a lady, you shouldn’t hide her from your mother.”

That’s when she looked at me, saying, “Don’t ever think you have to get his permission to visit me,” and then immediately asked if I wanted a “pop.” Ah, yes. “Pop.” Despite her newfound California style, Paula Dalton was still a Midwesterner at heart.

We spent a good portion of that Sunday afternoon at his mother’s house, eating roasted chicken with carrots and green beans and big helpings of rice. Paula, in true mom mode, showed me pictures of Max as a child, mostly school pictures, but also some from holidays. My favorite was one of him when he was seven years old, lying next to the Christmas tree, surrounded by wrapping paper. Paula said she had snapped that photo in the mid-afternoon, when Max had fallen asleep, exhausted from playing with his new toys for hours on end.

As she flipped through the pages of the photo album, I noticed that there were no pictures of his father. On the way home, I wanted to ask him about that, but decided not to. It was obvious why his mother had purged the albums of pictures of his father. And it wasn’t worth bringing up because the scars his father left on his life — and on his mother’s life — were of the kind that probably never fully healed, and I erred on the side of caution and let it go.

Over the next several weeks, I noticed a change in Max. There was a solemn mood about him almost all the time.

Sometimes I would watch him as he worked with a pen and notebook on the den couch, scrawling out ideas for a script he was working on, I supposed. I didn’t ask because as his manager, I’d be reading the first draft of his scripts when he was done. He liked my suggestions, but only after he got the whole story down first.

Occasionally, I would lie next to him, putting my head in his lap as he worked. We usually had the TV streaming something from Netflix or Hulu or playing a DVD. Neither of us liked much of what TV programming had to offer, except for a few shows on HBO and AMC, but that was about it.

One night, as I was lying there with my head on his thigh, drifting off to sleep and missing most of the end of a movie, he put the notebook in front of my face.

“What do you think?” he asked.

I had to blink a few times to clear my eyes.

Max had sketched a logo for his production company. For weeks, he’d been toying around with different names and couldn’t settle on one, even any that I suggested. It was important that he come up with something that would stand out, something recognizable, if not to the general movie-going audience then at least within the industry.

My eyes focused on the paper he held in front of me. The name of the company was in a simple, clear font with a curved line over the top of the name that ended in what looked like a flash — a shooting star of sorts.

“You aren’t serious,” I said, looking from the sketch up to his face.

His eyebrows rose on his forehead as his expression stayed serious.

I sat up, looked back at the paper, back at him, and said, “I love that.”

The name of the company would be: OliviMax.

“But,” I said, “doesn’t that sound too much like Miramax?”

He shrugged. “Who cares? This is what we’re going with.”

To think that my name — minus the “a” — would be part of a major film production company was as mind-blowing as anything that had happened to me since I arrived in L.A.

Well, almost anything.

One of the many perks of living with Max was that I no longer dreaded getting up in the mornings. I liked my sleep, always had, and the sound of an alarm clock was something I’d always hated. But now, being shaken out of slumber by that awful sound was becoming a less frequent occurrence.

Max liked to wake me up in other ways. Sometimes it was his hands caressing my back or my legs. I always slept with my back to him, snug in his embrace. So sometimes I woke up to the feeling of him circling a finger around my nipple as he pressed and rubbed himself along my bottom.

But my favorite — and apparently one of Max’s — was the mornings I’d wake up on my back, legs spread, with Max’s head between my legs. He would always have pushed the comforter and the top sheet off the bed to the floor, and it was just the two of us naked there on the bed.

“Good morning,” he would always say, stopping for a few seconds when I looked down my body and made eye contact with him.

But there was a morning, just a few short weeks after he renamed the company, a Monday morning when we were about to hire a casting director for Max’s new film, that I woke up as Max was turning me over onto my stomach.

“Good morning, dream girl,” he whispered into my ear.

I smiled in response, as I turned my head to the side and rested it on my folded arms.

Max moved my hair to the side and kissed the back of my neck. He was sort of hovering over me and I could feel his hard cock against the back of my thigh, then along the cleft of my ass, as he moved back and forth slowly, enjoying the soft friction.

Soft for him, anyway. For me, it was different. “You’re rough,” I said, sleepily, referring to the fact that he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

I lay still in that position, not getting a response from Max. Or maybe he did say something and I just didn’t hear it, because the next thing I knew I was waking up again, and about five minutes had passed.

I heard water running in the bathroom, so I got up and padded across the carpet to find Max in there, sitting on the edge of the tub, with his back to the door.

“I’m sorry I fell asleep on you,” I said.

“No worries, Liv. You were right. I was kind of rough.”

I walked over and sat beside him.

“I don’t know why I’ve never seen you do this before,” I said.

He turned his attention away from what he was doing, looked at me, smiled and said, “Me neither.”

The tub was filling up with water, and I was already naked, so I got in. I sat cross-legged in front of Max as he remained on the edge of the tub.

His groin was lathered up with shaving cream and he held a razor in one hand.

I splashed some water on my body. Max watched it trickle down from my neck, over my breasts, and I looked down and saw a bead of water clinging to my right nipple.

I’m a firm believer that men should take care of themselves down there, just as they expect women to. I’d always liked the closely trimmed look and feel, but when I suggested to Max one day that we give it a try with both of us completely shaved, we loved it and were sticking with it for now.

There’s something completely different and sensual about the feeling of pure, soft, smooth skin-on-skin action. Or tongue-on-skin, for that matter.

“Here,” he said, holding the razor out to me. “I’ve shaved you before. Now it’s your turn.”

My eyes shot open. I hadn’t been expecting that in the least. “Serious.”

“Serious,” he said. “Go slow.”

I took the razor and settled in closer to him.

I started above his cock, letting the blade glide across his taught muscle slowly. He had been keeping up the grooming, so there wasn’t much to shave, but I was still taking my time with this unexpected thrill.

The trust it took for him to allow me to do this was even more of a rush.

With my left hand, I held his length, now growing erect, as I lightly dragged the blade around his balls.

Max got harder the longer this went on, his erection jutting out. At one point, I moved my face closer to him, sticking my tongue out and licking a little droplet of precome from the head.

“Dammit, Olivia, I can’t take this much longer.”

“What? Me holding this sharp object so close to your balls?”

He didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile at my joke. “No. Being this close to your mouth.”

I was finished shaving him, so I placed the razor in the holder on the wall, then filled my cupped hands with water and rinsed him off, removing what was left of the shaving cream. I did this three or four times, completely cleaning him…

And then I took the head of his cock between my lips, massaging it like that, running my tongue over the slit, driving him even more to the edge.

Max moved his hips forward a little, sliding more of his cock into my mouth. I opened wide and took as much of it as I could, closing my lips around him.

He ran his hand though my hair, gathering it in a bunch and holding it at the back of my head — not forceful, but guiding the action.

I felt him throb. He wasn’t about to come. He was flexing the muscle beneath his balls to make that happen. It was a sensation that he had created before, and I had told him how much I loved to feel it, both in my mouth and when he was inside me. He didn’t always do it, preferring instead to surprise me with it.

And he did, just then. I smiled around his cock.

“Bed.” That’s all he said. One word. That was a rare thing with Max, but when he did so, I felt a surge of unique excitement at his blunt command.

He stood, taking me by the hand as I stepped out of the tub, and he pulled me along to the bed, where he spun me around and I landed on my back. We hadn’t bothered to dry me off, so I was still damp from the waist down from sitting in the bathwater.

But, at a moment like this, who could possibly care?

Max’s head was between my legs in a flash, his face buried in my sex — his nose pressing on my clit as his tongue greedily lapped, then entered me.

He grabbed my ankles and moved my feet closer to my hips, bending my knees in the process, allowing me to lift my lower body off the bed. I bucked my hips as he fucked me with his tongue in hungry, excited, but feathery soft wet strokes.

I reached down and took a handful of his hair in my fist. I loved feeling how his head made a circular motion as his tongue massaged my clit.

I moved my hips up and down, faster against his face, and felt the first wave of orgasm ripple through me.

“Come in my mouth,” Max managed to say, his words intensifying the nerve-tingling rush he had brought me to.

He kept his tongue on my clit until the sensation was too great, and I pushed his head away. He rose on the bed, positioning himself between my legs. I felt the weight of his erection against my sex.

Max’s mouth went right for my breasts, first sucking on my left nipple, then my right, alternating between the two. He moved his hips, rubbing the plump crown of his penis against me. His tongue licked and flicked across my nipples, until finally he took one between his tongue and his upper teeth, a feeling I loved so much it made me arch my back involuntarily.

“Offense or defense?” he breathed.

It was a running joke between us — who would be on top to start? Offense was top, defense was bottom.

“Is it my turn to choose?” I asked. “Because right now I don’t care — ”

And just like that, having given him the faintest green light, he plunged the tip of his cock into me, then stopped. He slipped it out a little, then pushed back in.

“I love teasing you,” he said.

“You love trying to make me beg for it.”

Max didn’t say anything. He just kept up that taunting motion.

This too was part of the offense-defense thing we had — seeing who could hold out the longest.

I usually won this part of the battle, because Max always made me come before sex. Sometimes with his mouth, other times with his hand, and sometimes he even did it in this position using just the teasing glide of his rigid length across my wet folds.

Today, though, Max was going to win. After letting me shave him, and after that sheet-clawing orgasm he’d just given me, I wanted him inside me.

“Fuck me,” I said, reached out and putting my hand on his clenched ass, pulling him into me.

He slid in with one smooth thrust.

His head dipped and his lips sealed around mine. He groaned low in his throat as he drove his cock into me to the hilt. I threw my head back and his mouth went right for my throat.

Max then got up on his knees, placing his hand under me on the small of my back, lifting me slightly. It gave him a different angle of entry and he fucked me deep and hard until I felt his cock throbbing — not the kind he controlled, but the kind I always felt as his body geared up for orgasm.

I reached up and placed my palm flat on his stomach. I loved feeling the way his muscles contracted as he moved in and out of me.

The need. The desire. The power. Everything about his intense maleness while he fucked me sent my nearly helpless body right to the edge of orgasm again.

As I clenched around him, his own throbbing increased. I felt the first hot spurt of his come jetting out of his cock, then more, more, our skin-on-skin becoming warmer and slick, until we were both spent.