When he got close to me, I threw my arms around his waist, feeling myself enveloped in his strong embrace.
He kissed me on the forehead.
I looked up. “I’m sorry, but I have to know.” I swallowed hard as he looked down at me, a look of extreme concern on his face. “Tell me about Ty.”
Max’s eyes closed instantly as he let out a heavy, long sigh.
“I don’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that.”
He paused, then said, “It’s in the past, Olivia. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
I pulled him by the hand and we went over to the couch. Max sat and I lowered myself onto his lap, putting my arms around his neck.
“It’s a part of you,” I said. “I want to know.”
He shook his head.
“Is it too painful?” I asked.
“I told you, it doesn’t matter anymore. I worked through it and I’m over it. It’s like it was never part of my life.”
I got a chill down my spine when he said that. For some reason, I took it as coldly as one could possibly mean it.
“That sounds terrible,” he continued, correcting himself. “I don’t mean it like that. I had to move on, and the only way to do that was to not look back.”
Although the circumstances were different, that’s kind of what I had been doing with regard to Chris. There was nothing harsh about my decision to dismiss Chris from my past, and now I understood that Max didn’t mean it that way about Tyler Morgan, either.
And then, suddenly, without any prompting from me, Max reversed his earlier statement about not talking about her and he opened up. “She lived with me. It wasn’t quite a year. Did they tell you this already?”
“Some of it,” I said.
Max emitted a soft laugh. “Let me guess. Loralei slipped up.”
“How’d you know?”
“She’s always doing shit like that. Be careful what you tell her. I thought about telling you when Krystal was in real trouble.”
I hadn’t even considered a connection between the two. “Is that why you helped her?”
He nodded. “It happens all the time, especially in this town, but because she’s a friend of yours, it was too close to home and I knew if I didn’t try to help it would haunt me.”
“You saved her life.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
I pushed back from him, taking his face between my hands. “You did.”
I kissed him and we fell together — Max on his back, me on top of him. It wasn’t sexual, it was purely an emotional moment.
I lay my head on his chest, thinking about all that I’d just learned about him, and decided to let the silence continue for a few moments.
“I love this town,” he said, “almost everything about it. I’ve just seen that too many times, and with her…it was unbearable.”
I watched his face turn to stone as he stared at the window. I didn’t know what to say, which was fine, because I knew I needed to let him proceed at his own comfortable pace.
He looked at me. “I had a problem, Liv. For about six months.” He let it hang there without finishing.
“What do you mean?” I said.
He turned his head to look away from me again.
I put my hand on his chin and turned his head back toward me, and he offered no resistance. “Max, you had a problem…?”
“Coke. I had done my share of weed, but I eventually gave in to the temptation of coke. It was everywhere. Everyone had it, everyone was doing it, everyone was sharing or selling. I was at my weakest point in life. It was just after ‘Circus Daydream’ came out. A few weeks after, actually.”
He was talking about his one and only box-office flop. It was a script he had written hastily at the urging of the studio. Max had told me once that it was in the top three regrets of his professional life. He caved to their demands. They wanted to rush something else out that had his name attached to the project, and “Circus Daydream” was the only thing he had ready to go at the moment.
It was a script he had written when he was nineteen and had never gone back to do a rewrite on it. He made this clear to the studio execs, and they said they’d give him time to do a fresh draft. The time they gave him turned out to be two days. They rushed production, cast a relatively unknown actor for the lead, and the movie tanked upon release. It was one of the worst opening weekends for a highly anticipated summer blockbuster in the studio’s history.
“I was at a beach party in Santa Monica, and the stuff was everywhere. I was drunk and had hit a bong a few times, and then I tried coke for the first time. Before I knew it, that’s all I was doing. Staying up for days on end, missing important phone calls and meetings, lashing out at people — verbally, not physically — and I wasn’t myself. Carl and Anthony took me to a rehab center. I checked in willingly, by the way.”
“My God, Max. I had no idea.”
He huffed out a little laugh. “Yeah, almost nobody does.”
“Your mom?”
He put his head back on the seat. “No, I lied and told her I was on business for a while and that I’d be out of the country. She bought it. I was in rehab for 90 days. That first night was the loneliest night of my life. I stayed up visualizing my entire life being wiped away, everything I had worked so hard for.”
I lowered my head so our faces were close to each other. “You saved Krystal’s life like Anthony and Carl saved yours. Don’t you see that?”
“I just did what I could.”
SEVEN
A few days before flying to Ohio for Christmas, I went to see Max’s mother. Alone.
With things becoming serious between Max and me, I wanted to be a part of his entire world, and for me that meant making an effort to be closer with his mom, someone who was extremely important in his life.
I told Max that I wanted to make it a day trip, treat Paula to lunch, and give her the Christmas gift I’d purchased for her.
So I called Paula that morning and surprised her. I figured she wouldn’t have any plans, as she didn’t do much socially, and she said she’d be excited to see me.
I picked her up at her house and we went to a little restaurant tucked between a shoe store and a nail place in a strip mall.
The place had a wood floor that creaked with each step, and the air was redolent of grilled meat and steamed vegetables. A perky hostess lead us to a table near the front of the restaurant where Paula sat with her back to the window and I sat across from her, with a clear view of the sidewalk and street.