Max beams at me. “He still is. You have no idea.”
“Remember when he was always starting those wacky businesses he’d try to get everyone involved in? The dance mob birthday business. Or that guerilla serenading YouTube channel? Getting kids to serenade jaywalkers and things?”
“He almost got hit a few times off that. He’s lucky he didn’t.” We laugh about Parker businesses.
The scones come. They’re warm, served with clotted cream. I nearly die of bliss.
“Right?” he says.
“They’re almost as good as a pork roll sandwich from Mort’s Diner back home.”
“Mia.” His tone is warning.
“What? Have you ever tasted one?”
“Are you talking about that fried ham stuff that you get in a can? Tell me you’re not.”
“Taylor ham, and it’s amazing. Though these little cucumber things? Giving the pork roll a definite run.”
We try the different sandwiches. It’s like we’re right back how we were that summer. The way we go together, it feels like we were forged in the same oven, pieces from the same set that got separated, and now we’re back, but better, because Max is all grown up, and there are exciting new sides of him.
The song changes. It’s background classical music, but it’s not background-ish for Max. It’s a song he once played really well. I secretly watch his expression. He probably has opinions on this version. I can see the knowledge in his eyes, following the notes. He could play it backward and forward. Back then, anyway.
“Why’d you quit, Max? With the music? Not that you haven’t done obnoxiously well for yourself and all. But you were so good and you left it behind.”
“You said I attacked the keyboard like Terminator.”
“That’s not answering the question.”
He turns his champagne glass in the light, studies the bubbles. “It wasn’t for me.”
“You had to get to the most elite level of musicianship to realize music wasn’t for you?”
There’s a beat where I think he might not answer. Then he says, “I always knew I hated it.”
The admission hits me in the gut. I think back to him bent over that keyboard, working so hard. Did he hate it all that time? “I’m sorry,” I say, bewildered. “You hated it?”
“Ferociously.”
“Something that you did like eight hours a day.”
“You’re supposed to be miserable in high school, right?” he asks. “Isn’t that a rule?”
“I kind of can’t get over it. You were in a performing arts school and you hated performing.”
“Not all performing.”
Oklahoma! I think it like it’s a lost thing. Maybe it is. “You liked Oklahoma!.”
“I loved it. That summer…I’d always loved that music. I mean, I never had the chops for doing it professionally, but I loved it. Maybe that’s part of why I loved it. And then for them to put us together.”
“Why didn’t you just go over to the theater side? Max, you were having fun up there. They probably would’ve let you.”
“My folks would’ve pulled me out of that school so fast. You don’t know. I could’ve been snorting coke and making bombs, and they wouldn’t have pulled me out as long as I was performing at an elite lever, but show tunes? The seventh ring of hell.”
“It’s pretty far from Mozart, I guess.”
“Classical music is the Miller family business.” He tips his silver butter knife this way and that, playing with the reflection. “If I’m honest, I liked what came with the child prodigy status. It was an instant place on top of the food chain.”
“Like being star quarterback,” I say. “You get all the popularity for being good at some game.”
A group seems about to approach us. Max uses his knife to cut a scone, and the group fades off. “See that? They usually won’t talk to you if you have food in front of you. Unless they’re complete assholes. FYI.”
“You played angry.”
He spreads cream onto the scone. “Yes, and like a robot. Without feeling. Terminator, you said. You heard it and you were right.”
“I didn’t say that to be cruel.”
“This might sound a little strange, but it meant something that you saw it. You saw me. It made me feel less alone.”
19
The world is your cocktail party; never forget it.
~The Max Hilton Playbook: Ten Golden Rules for Landing the Hottest Girl in the Room
* * *
Max
I hit the button for my penthouse, relieved to have Mia all to myself without the eyes of the world on us.
The elevator doors shut and she leans back, hands on the rail behind her, luminous in her pink dress.
“Nice elevator. There’s just one thing missing,” she says. “What could be missing?”
I go to her and cage her with my arms. I love her sassy smile. I love that she gives me shit about the Max Hilton lines.
“What could it be?” she teases.
I shut her up with a kiss. She grabs my shirt, pulls me in hard. I’m stunned all over again at how well we fit. The more time I spend with her, the less I want to let her go back to her apartment, her job, her world.
The door opens and we’re there.
She turns. “So this is where you live.”
“When I’m in the city.”
“Ah, of course.” I can hear the smile on her lips as she says it. More Max Hilton mockery, but she likes that I’ve built this. Mia loves competence. She always has.
I hang behind and watch her look around. “Where are the giant freak lips?” she asks.
It takes me a moment to realize what she’s talking about—a massive posterized image of lips that was above the fireplace once upon a time. My designer hung it as a favor to the artist for the magazine shoots.
“Somebody is obsessed with me. Did you collect all of the articles ever written about me?”
“You’re inescapable,” she says. “You’re even on the sides of the busses? Somebody loves his own face.” She goes to the window and peers out over the park.
I go up behind her. I move her hair aside and kiss her neck. “I think you love my own face.”