The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [70]
“How is this different from you wanting to preserve Erin’s worst memory, or any of the other painful things you’ve immortalized?”
“It’s different in a thousand ways.”
Her voice rose. “How?”
He shut his eyes tight, as though fending off a migraine.
“How, Max? Tell me how this is different. And don’t you dare say you’re not going to help me save her home—”
His eyes snapped back open. “I assumed this was about money. About you getting something out of the arrangement. Not you being exploited—having your own grief, or your family, used against you. This is different because you’re asking me to let some man take away your dignity in exchange for a scrap of human decency!”
“Bullshit.”
“This is different because I’m bloody in love with you and I can’t. Do. This.”
He was deteriorating before her eyes, every muscle and nerve strained to its breaking point. He picked the chisel back up, clutching the handle as though it held the key to his very sanity. “I can’t reward some piece of shit, heartless old man with my work and your body and let either of you think this is okay.”
“Goddamn it, Max, you don’t get it, do you? This is my only chance to save the memories of the three happy years of my entire, lousy childhood. Three good years out of eighteen! That’s all I got, and it’s because of her—”
“You think I can’t understand that? You think I, of all people, can’t understand how it feels to have your childhood ripped from you?” His eyes were wild, skin flushed, hand trembling.
“It’s not your business, Max. Why can’t you just stop with the drama and do your fucking job? What you promised to do?”
“You let me be a party to this?” His voice rose to a sharp bark. “You let me help someone blackmail you? And now that you tell me, you just expect me to go along with this?”
“It’s not blackmail.”
“Oh! A thousand pardons. What then? Extortion?”
“What do semantics matter? I came here for your help. I could have saved her home, and now you’re fucking it all up.” The tears arrived, streaming down Fallon’s face and making her words come out thick and sticky. Through her stinging eyes she saw his nostrils flare, some tiny attempt to muster self-control.
“This is what you’ve been keeping from me? About your aunt? You thought I couldn’t hear that? After everything I told you about my childhood?”
“I never twisted your arm—”
“Do you know how many people I’ve shared that with? In twenty years, under the influence of alcohol and drugs and infatuation and ego?” He grasped the neck of his T-shirt, as if fending off an invisible, strangling hand. “None. None until you! Until I came under your. Bloody. Influence.” The hand holding the chisel shook. He met her eyes with his blazing ones and with a lightning-fast movement he flung the tool across the room where it collided with a shelf and shattered some anonymous clay figure in an explosion of ceramic shards.
“Max—”
“Get out of my house!”
Fallon felt her eyes go wide and her mouth drop open. Her body shook as she grabbed her bag off the floor and strode to the door with affected calm. She dashed down the steps to the driveway, gasping for air. Behind her, the screen door swung back open and struck the side of the house with a reverberating bang.
“Get out of my head!” Max screamed, maniacal.
Fallon turned her head the smallest fraction, enough to see him standing on his front steps, his chest rising and falling so violently she could make it out from ten yards away. She hurried onward, clutching her bag like an infant, fleeing what felt like a house engulfed in flames.
She nearly reached the main road before she realized he’d said he loved her.
After Fallon was out of sight, Max crouched down on the doorstep and held his head in shaking hands. He hadn’t felt he was going mad like this in years. Not since his grandmother died. Not since he’d last lost the sole person left in the world who meant anything to him.
He hauled his quaking body back inside and grabbed a four-pound sledgehammer and went to his backyard, to his assembly of broken figures. He hissed at