Mr. Personality (29 page)

“So you’ll really sue her father?” Pete sawed a particularly tough piece of meat.

“It was a clear case of plagiarism,” Max said in a cold voice, refusing to even acknowledge the fluttering of fear in his gut. Instead, he thought about the deal they’d made, he and Nicole; the one in which she was blatantly in default of as he’d pointed out to Cynthia.

He’d always doubted Nicole’s staying power. Hadn’t he told himself she’d eventually run out on him? He knew not to let a woman too close.

“I wasn’t sure you two were involved,” Pete confessed, chewing.

“’Involved’ has various connotations,” Max said, ignoring an inner protest at this piece of Judas-like denial. “She’s a beautiful woman who did my typing. End of story.”

“Pardon me if I contradict you.” The look Pete slanted him was uncharacteristically dry. “I don’t know about dating, but you took her out. She was with you at the writer’s association banquet…and, more significantly, that day we met in the park. I saw her as I walked away.”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend,” Max reiterated stubbornly.

More like she’d moved into his inner psyche somehow before he’d realized it. An unwelcome emotional squatter. Max tried to deliberately relax the tightness in his stomach. Most unacceptable to him were his moments of whimpering panic. They came out of nowhere and were worst at night. Like a child, feelings of abandonment sometimes swept over him when he thought about Nicole. No matter that he refused to accept her as important to him in any way other than his typing, he still struggled with the emotions her loss roused in him.

She wouldn’t be put aside, this woman, he thought angrily. And now, a month after she stormed out of his apartment and his life, he still wasn’t able to bury himself again in his work.

Even after the debacle when Pete discovered his perfidy, he’d worked.

“I’ve had dozens of typists,” he reminded his brother with a thin smile, “and slept with a fair number of women. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“No.” His brother’s face was forbidding and all at once Max realized Pete shared his own unwillingness to let the world see his hurts.

“Do you suppose,” Max said carefully as he resumed his meal, “if we continue meeting like this that we’re going to have to talk about what happened with Alexa sooner or later?”

Pete looked up and Max met his gaze squarely.

“I…can’t excuse what I did with your wife. I let her get too close and, I’ll admit it—I wavered when she offered—“ Max stopped, unable to continue forcing the painful words out in a even tone. “You have every right to detest me.”

“I know, and I did hate you…for at least two years,” Pete admitted after a few moments. “But that actually just seems to keep the hurt alive. I realized that a while back. Besides, you’ve already apologized…and it wasn’t like I didn’t know Alexa’s true colors. But by that time, Ryan had come along and…I guess I didn’t know how to deal with it. Our marriage wasn’t good. I guess that was as much my fault as hers.”

“Women are intrinsically destructive. The only way they feel power is by bringing us to our knees,” Max declared with a surge of anger at his own weakness. In a moment of stupidity, he’d lost sight of his responsibility to his brother and allowed a woman to nearly ruin their relationship.

Would his insanity with Nicole take an even bigger toll?

He hadn’t been able to work for days now. Once again, his words were gone. Dried up like a precarious spring, his mind refused to work on anything of importance. Brooding about Nicole didn’t count.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I think you should try to get her back,” Pete said abruptly a few minutes later. He’d put down his fork and, his square face serious, now regarded Max with a level gaze.

“Well,” Pete picked up his fork again, “first off, I’m not sure you’d be here eating with me if it wasn’t for her. You said she nagged you into coming to the banquet so we could patch things up.”

“Which was a huge success,” Max retorted sarcastically.

Pete shrugged. “It got us talking again. Sort of broke the deadlock.”

“Only because we were tired of being estranged,” Max argued, as much to convince himself as anything. “We probably would have found a way to make contact if I hadn’t gone to the banquet. It’s not like I needed her harping at me about you for weeks. I knew I wanted to reconnect.”

“Sometimes,” Pete said stubbornly, “we know we need to do things, but we don’t do them until someone cares enough about us to harp at us about it. I’m just saying she was the catalyst for you. Not just with me. You also said she got you going on your book. I don’t know…she seemed nice.”

Struck by his brother’s persistence, Max said suddenly, “You like her. That’s why you’re pleading her case.”

“Sure, I liked her. What’s not to like?” Pete met his gaze staunchly.

The remnants of Max’s appetite deserted him as he sat with his brooding gaze on his plate, but Pete went on eating with his usual bedrock kind of immobility.

“Don’t get stuck on the past or what happened in my relationship,” Pete said awkwardly. “Nicole has a major thing for you. She’s not like Alexa. Now, if you don’t treat her right…then things might go wrong, but otherwise….”

Max hesitated for a moment, not wanting to disrupt their relatively pleasant interaction. “Is that what happened in your marriage? You didn’t treat Alexa right?”

“That was part of it,” Pete admitted, pausing to take a drink. “Apparently, I’m not very good at listening. Not to feelings anyway.”

Waiting, Max wondered for the first time if Alexa ever had remorse for the events between them.

For a brief moment, Pete’s usually stoic face showed both resignation and sadness. “She said I shut her out, which I probably did. I don’t talk about emotional things much.”

He looked up at Max. “You know how we were raised. No one talked at all, much less about ourselves or our feelings.”

“Not the ideal family,” Max concurred.

“No.” Pete shook his head. “Even when things were falling apart with Alexa and me—and they were falling apart for several years—I didn’t want to talk about it. She tried. I guess I was afraid. If I didn’t talk about it, it was like it wasn’t there.”

An abstracted silence ticked by for several minutes. Remembering Nicole’s smile, Max struggled against the sweep of emotion that came over him. She represented so many things he knew he couldn’t have, couldn’t do…but despite that he wanted her with a fierceness that left him immobilized. Along with the more vague feelings came anger, blasting through his brain. How could she have just walked out on him like that?

“Have you ever let yourself love someone?” Pete asked abruptly, his reverie apparently suspended.

Max knew he met his brother’s eyes with a troubled gaze. How could he ever really love? How could anyone, when they saw the devastation it brought? If Pete, in his normalcy, couldn’t make it work, what chance did Max have?

Drawing a pattern on the tablecloth with the end of a butter knife, Pete said, “Have you ever loved a woman? Really loved her? I thought Alexa and I loved each other and then things went wrong. I know I was part of the problems. We started out okay, but we lost each other somehow.”

“Isn’t that the problem?” Max raised an ironic eyebrow. “People get horny and sappy and they call it love. How many of us know how to hold on to that?”

“Horny and sappy are not love,” Pete declared, his voice flat. “Love is different. When you love someone you…you want everything good for that person, even if it scares you. I’m figuring that out. It’s about not holding her back, even if you have to learn to deal with your own fears. Fears of losing her or yourself.”

“I’m not interested in her myself,” his brother denied impatiently. “I’m just…trying to help you keep from making my mistakes. I let my fear get control of me in my relationship. You shouldn’t make the same mistakes.”

Max stared across the table at his brother’s solemn, almost pugnacious face.

“I’ve spent the last three years hating you,” Pete said roughly, “but that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved you, too.”

Max fidgeted with his cutlery, uncomfortable with the sudden clog of emotion in his throat and the prickling behind his eyes. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Pete said, his manner awkward as if he, too, were uncomfortable being so warm and fuzzy. “I just think if you love Nicole and she’s good for you, you ought to go after her, that’s all.”

“Oh.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

Finishing their meal with a new kind of constraint between them, they made plans for lunch the next Thursday and parted after a brief, hesitant, and thoroughly awkward, hug.

Walking away from the restaurant, Max tried to come to grips with the jumble inside him. Although he knew he was grateful for the healing between he and Pete, he couldn’t easily sort through his emotions about Nicole.

Whenever he attempted the unaccustomed act of checking into his emotional state regarding her, he felt the blast of anger, then a kind of empty, choked blankness. He walked along the crowded, noisy streets and forced himself to sort, strand by strand, through the inner shell of himself. Several blocks later, he’d come to realize his anger was only the surface of a complex mix. Beyond the haze of his fury with Nicole, he found a loss and a grief so strong, he felt himself seeking for the rage again. That emotion at least wouldn’t leave him feeling imploded.

His footsteps carrying him homeward, he resisted the urge to block the troubled flow of his thoughts. Memories of her clogged his mind, catching and pausing in his consciousness like the leftovers of a flood. He kept seeing her climbing the stairs to the landing where he worked, her brow furrowed over a scribbled word. The time she’d been so furious with him after learning of his stupidity with Alexa…and still she’d been able to hear his voice in his work. She’d come up to his bedroom with awe in her face to tell him how his work had moved her.

Hands clenching against a shudder that shook him, Max hunched his head lower and walked unseeing along the street. This was why he fought to keep from thinking of her. This cresting, drowning loss. He felt he couldn’t breath for the wave of grief crashing over him and he struggled to hide the harsh gasping sound of his breathing from those he passed on the sidewalk. Hearing himself, he realized the absurdity of it. From the sound of it, he should have been running a marathon rather than this easy walk back to his building.

She’d said she cared for him. He felt overwhelmed, suddenly desperate for her affection and caring, needy and hungry to soak her into his pores. He felt terrified, too, by the very desperation of his reaction.

God, he wanted to hear her voice again.

No matter how he looked at it, calling Nicole wouldn’t change who he was. He’d set certain parameters on their relationship. Even as those had changed and evolved to include their sexual intimacy, he couldn’t see a way to become a man she could love. All his life, he’d followed that path seldom seen by others. It hadn’t really been a choice. He couldn’t change his uniqueness anymore than he could alter the pigment of his skin.

As if yanked up from the spinning, drowning tarn of his thoughts, Max looked up, his unfocused gaze sharpening on the doorman who had spoken to him.

In his gray and black uniform, the man was a tall, slender, dark-skinned figure with a shy-doe smile.

To Max’s surprise, he found himself responding automatically to the other man’s facial expression. His own was a pitiful attempt at a smile, but an immediate broadening of the answering grin on the other man’s face startled Max.