“Give it here.” I gesture for the glass. He has a rule about ordering drinks. #45: sip all my drinks first. I don’t trust bartenders.
He slides over his Fizz Life and takes a moment to eat another potato skin.
I swig his drink. No alcohol. “It’s good.” I slide the Fizz Life back.
Maximoff Hale doesn’t drink alcohol. He never has. It’s public knowledge that alcoholism runs in his family, and he chose to be sober. Bartenders sometimes purposefully spike his drink. Hell, some people pay the bartender to do it.
Just to see a celebrity break sobriety.
Maximoff washes down his food with Fizz Life. Then he motions to me. “What’s your favorite childhood memory?”
I smile and eat a fry. “What’s with the twenty questions?”
“You can Google me. I can’t Google you.” He wants to be on equal footing.
Okay. I swig my own drink. “My favorite childhood memory is the only memory I have of my mother.” He’s aware that she died from breast cancer when I was four.
Maximoff holds my gaze strongly.
“I can’t distinguish her features, but I can hear her silky voice as she says my name. That’s all, just my name.”
Farrow.
She named me. And she could’ve picked Edward Nathaniel Keene after my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, all the men in a long legacy before me, but she chose differently. Apparently she loved the old film version of The Great Gatsby, and she named me after the two lead actors.
Mia Farrow.
Robert Redford.
And I’m a Keene.
I recognize how special and unique Maximoff’s name is too. His parents also named him after something they love, and it’s why neither of us ever use our names in banter—and why I’m trying to honor whatever the hell he wants me to call him.
He nods a couple times, appreciative that I told him that story.
I dunk a fry in mustard. “Anything else?”
“If I asked about medical school, you’d tell me…?”
“That you have to be more specific.” I pop a fry in my mouth.
“For someone who completed all four years, you have to like medicine at least a little bit, right?”
“There are people who suffered through med school, but I wasn’t one of them.” I slide the mustard aside and grab the glass ketchup bottle. “I enjoyed medicine, just not like my family.”
“What do you mean?” He uses a straw to push the ice in his soda.
I unscrew the bottle. “It’s not just about medicine for them. My father, my grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather all share the same name and the same profession.” I pour ketchup in the French fry basket. “There’s status and pride in continuing this legacy and obtaining the MD. And I really couldn’t care less about honoring a generational tradition.”
“Why not just be a doctor for you and say fuck them?”
“That’s why I finished medical school.” I wipe my hands on a napkin. “I genuinely wanted to help people. But every day I thought about how I was another Keene falling obediently in line, and I just couldn’t breathe. I remember doing rounds in med school and feeling wrong. Like out-of-body.” I rake my fingers through my hair. “Like I was experiencing someone else’s life that wasn’t supposed to be mine.”
Maximoff nods. He’s a good listener; he always looks interested in what people have to say. At least when he’s not staring off into space.
“There’s a possibility,” I tell him, “that I only liked medicine because it’s all I knew; it’s what I was conditioned to do. And I can honestly say it’s the only thing that’s ever terrified me.”
He thinks for a second before asking, “So how’d you decide that security detail was the right fit?”
“I’d been taking MMA classes for years at Studio 9. Akara suggested I try security training. I liked it.”
Maximoff is quiet for an even longer moment.
“You can say it. I’m not easily offended.”
He leans forward some. “So you like the fame without being famous: the fine-dining, the yacht trips—”
“Me?” I give him a look. “I was born to an aristocratic lineage of pretentious assholes; I didn’t need to guard a celebrity to get a five-star meal.”
He begins to smile. “Then why do you like it? What’d you tell me yesterday about security work?”
“This profession is notorious for inducing three things.”
Maximoff nods, remembering what I said. “Sobriety, celibacy, and sleeplessness.” He gestures to my chest. “Why put up with the weird hours, isolation, inconsistent days and sleepless nights?”
“For your life,” I say. “I’m here to protect you, and I love being put in high-stress situations and coming out on top. Wearing a white coat isn’t the only way to impact a life. My father never understood that.”
He’s speechless.
Maximoff keeps swallowing, and he turns his head, a smile forming.
“You’re grinning,” I point out.
“Shut up,” he says flatly and then rubs his jaw, looking right at me. “We’re so different.”
“I know.” He has enough siblings and cousins to create their own flag football team. I have one older stepsister who lives halfway across the country. I see her maybe once every three years. If that. And it’s something deeper.
It’s how his family is a life force that keeps him breathing and waking up in the morning. Mine was suffocating me. I made a career decision at the cost of hurting my father.
Maximoff would probably sooner fall to his death than betray his.
Where I go rogue, he stays loyal.
I recall a brief conversation we had a few days ago. He told me that he didn’t go through with a Batman tattoo because it’d kill his dad. Everyone knows that Loren Hale is a diehard Marvel fanboy, and Maximoff cares about hurting him.
Over a tattoo.
“I don’t know how you can care so emphatically about your parents,” I tell him.
Maximoff outstretches his arm. “They’ve given me everything. I don’t feel indebted to them, but I feel like it’s my duty to pay it forward somehow. Some damn way.”
I lean back on my chair legs again. “Like taking over your family’s companies?” Fizzle, Hale Co., Cobalt Inc. are multi-billion dollar family businesses that their parents inherited. Then they created their own conglomerations: Calloway Couture, Halway Comics, Superheroes & Scones, Cobalt Diamonds, Camp Calloway—the list goes on and on.
The Hale-related businesses could one day be passed down to Maximoff, and that’d be his life.
“If I could take over Hale Co., I would in a heartbeat,” he says, “but my dad, for whatever reason, says no on a daily basis.”
Good.
Loren Hale is keeping Moffy twenty-two and not aging him to fifty, and since Maximoff collects responsibility like it’s his favorite toy, I doubt he’d recognize that.
Maximoff sits up straighter, and I hone in on his confident demeanor that hoists his body like he’s ready to go. For a run, a fight, a competition, mind-blowing sex—anything. It’s not manufactured resolve or tenacity; it’s palpable.
24/7.
I lower my chair legs and shift forward. Shit.
I’m ensnared without a fucking trap even being set.