Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
"Maximo..." "Don't."
"You kissed the girl who has your sister's heart."
"I said don't."
Theseus studied his friend unsmilingly. He knew exactly what a man like Maximo did with a want he had branded forbidden, and it was never to reach for it. He would wall it off and call the walls mercy, and the girl carrying his sister's heart would be the one left to pay the interest on his restraint.
Chapter Twenty
MAXIMO HAD THE APARTMENT to himself, which he'd arranged on purpose, the way he arranged everything.
Jassy was on an overnight shoot. He'd sent enough security with her to invade a small country and had told himself it was about the neighborhood. It wasn't about the neighborhood. It was that today was the ninth of the month, and on the ninth of this month Mary would have turned twenty-one, and Maximo didn't want a witness for what the ninth did to him.
He did what he always did. He bought the terrible grocery-store cake with the blue sugar roses she'd loved without irony her whole short life, set it on the counter with a single candle she wasn't there to blow out, and sat across from it in the dark kitchen the way you sit across from a person.
And he tried to hear her laugh.
That was the ritual, the real one, the only gift left to give. Every year on the ninth he closed his eyes and called it up, the exact sound of it, Mary at the piano, Mary in the passenger seat, Mary shrieking at some joke only she found that funny. Every year it came.
Until now.
He sat in his dead sister's kitchen on his dead sister's birthday and couldn't, for the life of him, hear her laugh.
But he could hear the other one, and that was what had his chest tightening painfully. Almost suffocatingly even.
This wasn't right.
Maximo leaned forward to blow out the candle himself, and as he watched smoke uncurl from the candle, it was almost like an omen, a glimpse of how his time with Jassy was about to dissolve.
Because the way she was making him forget what he wasn't supposed to forget...
It had to stop. Whatever this was, whatever she was becoming to him, it had to stop tonight, before Mary went silent for good.
Chapter Twenty-One
I COME HOME FROM THE overnight shoot to a stranger wearing Maximo's face.
He's up before me, dressed like a man going to war with a spreadsheet, coffee already made and no second cup set out. Which is such a small thing. Which is such a loud one.
"Morning," I try.
"There's a schedule on the counter." He doesn't look up from his phone. "The driver takes you to set and back. Anything you need, ask the housekeeper."
"Did I do something?" I ask, and it comes out unevenly, smaller than I mean it to.
"I'm busy this week." He says it coldly, without heat, the way you'd hand a stranger the time.
And that's the whole conversation. That's breakfast.
It doesn't get better. It gets colder, one careful degree at a time, a man dismantling a summer he never admitted to building. He stops eating dinner at home. The lessons are over, obviously, but so are the arguments, the glares, the reluctant almost-smiles I used to collect like a magpie. He says good night the way you'd say it to a coworker. He calls me Jassy, only Jassy, never anything with a shape to it.
I do what I do. I throw everything I have at the wall of him.
I leave terrible jokes on sticky notes, I heckle his phone calls, I sit on the forbidden side of the couch and narrate the news until my throat hurts, all of it waiting for the jaw to unclench, for the door to crack, for one accidental smile I can live on.
Nothing.
And the whole time my borrowed heart keeps reaching for him anyway, which it is not supposed to do, after a man who's decided he'd rather I didn't exist. A smart girl would take the schedule and the housekeeper and the coworker good-nights for the clear no they are. But smart girls never stop trying, and neither, it turns out, does a heart that isn't even all the way mine.
"You'd tell me," I ask him one night, standing in the study doorway, dropping the act for exactly one sentence, "if it was something I did?" He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves behind his eyes and gets locked back down.
"Go to bed, Jassy."
I tell myself he's just stressed even as I find myself curling my body in a ball. I tell myself it's work, or money, or one of the thousand grown-up weights I can't see. It has to be one of those things, or all of those things even. Because a man can't kiss a girl like the world's ending one moment and then throw her away for no reason the next.