The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [63]
“Can I help with anything?” Fallon asked, approaching the counter. Max looked down to find he’d been standing motionless before the grocery bags for over a minute.
“No, thank you. I’m just trying to remember this recipe.”
She passed him and uncorked a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. There was a strain in her too. Fainter than his but there, nevertheless. Wine and sex—medication to help them forget these unspoken worries until the sun rose again.
Fallon sat on the counter and watched Max’s hands work as he prepared dinner. She fixated on them. Such wondrous things, strong and scarred and so talented it was unnerving. Those hands could render flesh so real it boggled the mind. They could make Fallon feel things her own hands were only just beginning to master. And they could save her childhood home. So goddamned powerful.
“You should get your hands insured by Lloyd’s of London.”
Max glanced up from the cutting board. “Like Keith Richards?”
“Ha—I hadn’t heard that. Yeah. Like Fred Astaire’s legs, I was thinking.” She sipped her wine.
Max shook his head and went back to chopping onions. “No amount of money would make life worth living if I could not use my hands.”
“That’s a bit melodramatic.”
“Well, it’s quite true. Maybe that’s why I have these thoughts about a family, sometimes. To fix my troublesome priorities.”
“A baby never fixed anybody.” A second too late, Fallon realized how callous her tone was.
Max held her eyes for a moment then began peeling garlic, seeming deflated.
“Sorry. I don’t mean you shouldn’t want those things.” Although she wished he didn’t.
“I know what you meant. I’m sorry I brought it up. We’re trying to have an illicit affair, and I’m ruining it with all this talk about families… I miss my family. Having you here these last few weeks is the closest I’ve been to anything resembling that in a long, long time. Nothing personal,” he added to the cat, perched on the fridge. “It makes me sentimental.”
Fallon nodded.
“And it makes you uneasy,” he said.
Fallon hopped off the counter before he could begin to question her. She gathered utensils and napkins and set the table, leaving Max to his sentimentality and vegetables.
She started a fire and drew a bath while dinner cooked, and Max joined her. As she melted into him in the warm water, her back against his chest and her wet hair draped over his shoulder, she wondered if this—if they—could ever work. That way. The two least qualified people she knew in some woeful attempt at domestic functionality. She looked into the window at their reflection, tricked for a moment by the firelight that it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
Beneath her, Max grew hard. Whatever melancholy had been visiting him faded, replaced by lust. She reached down to stroke his erection where it stood between her legs. He made seductive noises behind her ear and his hips tensed against her backside.
“You’re taking away my sanity,” he moaned into her temple. Before she could reply he slipped her hand from him and bade her to stand. “Dinner will burn.”
“Let it.”
“Up with you, temptress.”
She complied, smiling to herself as she toweled her hair.
“You never smiled like that when we first met,” Max said, studying her.
“No, probably not.”
“I like the person that you’ve become. And I liked you before, back when you still hated me.”
“I never hated you,” she corrected. “You just take a lot of getting used to.”
“And you take a lot of work, to break through all that crust.” He squinted an eye at her and mimed a hammer and chisel motion with his hands. “Chink, chink, chink. And just look what’s underneath.”
She surveyed his dripping body for a moment before handing him the towel.
As he dried himself he asked, “Is it true…when you said you’ve never loved anyone?”
She nodded. “That’s true. Not romantically, at