Royal Pain (5 page)

“Give me that phone, you pig!” Bronte said, laughing as she wrenched the phone out of Max’s hand and continuing to laugh into David’s ear. “So what do I need to know about this Max Heyworth character, David? Mm-hmm… originally from Yorkshire, mm-hmm… well, that’s not a lot to go on, but I was really just trying to rule out axe murderer, so I guess your drunken acknowledgment that he’s a stand-up guy will have to do…” Bronte could no longer concentrate on the rest of what a very inebriated David was yelling into the crackling transatlantic connection (something about Anne Boleyn winning the Nobel Prize), what with Max’s index finger tracing the edge of her other ear and her trying weakly to swat him away. “Right, right, David; that’s all for now. Send my love to Willa.”

Max was grinning stupidly as Bronte handed him back his phone. “Any other flammable hoops for me to jump through?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

“Of all the bad omens…” Bronte murmured, her laughter fading.

“Are you kidding? What could be a better omen than the jolliest person we know being our mutual acquaintance? And if you know anyone jollier, I demand an introduction.”

“I won’t dwell on it, but I met my ex at David and Willa’s, at a huge party after some big concert a little over a year ago.”

“I was there!” Max said.

“No. You were not. I would remember.”

“Seriously, I was. Maybe that’s why I thought you looked familiar when I saw you that first time in the bookshop. That was a crazy scene—David’s apartment was thronged, right?”

Bronte nodded.

“My flight from London was delayed, so I didn’t get there until after two in the morning, but I swear I was there. I stopped in New York on my way here actually, after my spring holiday. Oh my God, I bet you’re the one Willa wanted to introduce me to. Too bad you went home with the wrong guy.”

Bronte covered her face with her hands. “You have no idea.”

He pulled her hands away so he could really look at her. “On the other hand, you wouldn’t be sitting here now, in possession of your Brutal Honesty Manifesto no less, so maybe I should be thanking that scoundrel for luring you to this dark world of wind and heartbreak, eh?”

“Don’t even think about it. I am not one of those people who stays friends with ex-lovers—a sad fate, I fear, that you will one day share… or maybe you will be the exception, since you do seem particularly… amiable.”

“Well, thank you, kind lady.”

“I am starting to adore when you go all
royal
on me.” Bronte was distracted by the loud siren of a passing ambulance and missed Max’s momentary grimace.

As they lingered at the café table, Bronte pressed her thumbnail against her lower lip and contemplated the reality that Max had been at Willa and David’s party. She wondered if this was a second chance of sorts. She wondered if, this time around, it was possible to be totally up-front from this very first day, to be honest to the point of crass, to avoid all of that crazy devolution into crushing hope that had ensured the failure of her previous relationship.

“Look, Max. Here’s the deal. I want to be all casual and modern and all that, but the reality is that I am not all that sure I can do it, unless we have a pretty ironclad understanding. I love the philosophical idea of entering into a sexy friends arrangement”—she smiled at him—“but the truth is that I will probably become cloying and desperate and… you’ll find me wanting. So I think if we deal with all of that from the very beginning, then we can, you know, make do.”

He looked at her as if she had two heads.

Then he smiled some wonderful ancient smile that could have soothed medieval kings and seduced daughters of foreign enemies. Bronte wavered in her conviction and thought, for a tiny moment, that she might dive into his arms and betroth herself to him right there on Division Street, intellectualized parameters be damned.

No!
her wiser inner-self screamed. She had sworn off gut instincts. Gut instincts had moved her into a shitty studio apartment in Chicago. Gut instincts sucked.

But this Max—he seemed to be well-versed in the language of blatant honesty. Bronte thought it may have been his sheer command of the King’s English. Something about the very primacy, the way he made use of each word of the language, made her feel that he had a clearer understanding of… well, everything.

“So let me get this straight.” Max smiled across the café table into Bronte’s sparkling eyes. “You think if we set out, from the very beginning, to be… I’m sorry, Bronte, but I cannot bring myself to use that tawdry phrase that is constantly bandied about… I shan’t ever be
anyone’s
fuck buddy…”

He said the last two words as if they had been scraped off his tongue. He would never utter them again in his life.

Bronte laughed and reached one hand across the small distance to grab one of his hands in hers. “Of course, that’s not what I’m suggesting. I hate the friends-with-benefits bullshit. I’m just saying, let’s try to be honest, realistic, and not try to pretend that there’s some grand future, some wonderful tomorrow that involves me… and your gentle British rains. It’s just so much easier for me—not that
that
is your job, you know, to make my life so much easier.” He smiled at her forthright enthusiasm, then she continued apace, “I mean, let’s just call it what it is. You are in town for, what? Eight more weeks? We are obviously—I mean, I suppose I should say
I
am obviously taken with you and look forward to spending as much of your free time with you as possible.” She smiled again and reached out her other hand to enclose his hand firmly in both of hers, as if they were making a pact. “But, I mean,
really,
what’s the point? Let’s just have
so
much fun! Don’t you think?”

Max looked at this incredibly beautiful woman and wondered what had happened to make her so skittish, so totally unwilling to just move forward at a normal pace with a (relatively) normal guy in a normal romantic relationship. But, as it was, he supposed it was worth it to play by her strange rules of engagement: no mention of lasting tenderness, no long-term plans, no future. And certainly no mention of his title. If an eight-week affair with a run-of-the-mill graduate student made her jumpy, he could only imagine what a potential future with the nineteenth Duke of Northrop would do to her precarious equilibrium.

“All right, Bronte. I accept your terms.”

He said it in a way that had Bronte worried he was going to add, “And I raise you!”

Instead, Max reached across the table and held Bronte’s cool cheek in the palm of his hand. “Let me head home for a little bit, then. Can I pick you up around seven thirty and we’ll go to dinner and a movie? Some people might call it a date, but we don’t have to call it anything.”

Bronte looked at him strangely. In the romance-novel part of her brain, she had simply assumed that she and Max would end up (that day, damn it!) in bed together in a tangle of false promises and condoms.

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. That sounds… great,” she said, recovering. “I’ll be ready at seven thirty. Will you pick me up at my place or shall I just meet you at the theater?”

“I’d rather pick you up, if it’s not too old-fashioned of me?”

“Too old-fashioned sounds ideal.”

***

Two hours later, Bronte was spending way too much time wondering what to do with her hair. If she put it up again, that would be the fourth attempt in as many minutes. She growled at her reflection and brushed it straight.

“No false promises,” she chided the overly optimistic alter ego who stared back at her—especially promises to herself.
But
he’s British
, her hopeful self protested.
He’s charming and dashing and gallant and… everything!

She turned away from her foolish self and switched the light off in the small bathroom.

She had showered and changed into her favorite pair of jeans and a long-sleeved French boat-neck shirt. She was wearing a new pair of huge gold hoop earrings that she had treated herself to a few weeks ago. Something about them made her feel all Foxy Brown. Even though her appearance was about as un–Pam Grier as possible—skinny, tall, and pale—good jewelry could work miracles.
And
every
woman
deserves
a
little
Foxy
Brown
, she’d argued with herself the moment before she’d slapped down her credit card and splurged.

The doorbell rang and she grabbed a lightweight khaki jacket from the front hall closet and opened the front door.

Max looked a little too big for the entrance, which was really the bottom of a stairwell. And then he smiled, a big, glorious smile that had Bronte repressing the briefest thought that he might not only be too big for her little apartment, but maybe too big for her entire world. She’d already burned through her lifetime supply of larger-than-life men. But her palpitating heart hadn’t gotten that memo, so on it hammered its happy beat.

“Let me see you,” he said, gesturing in a small circular motion as if he were choreographing
Swan
Lake
.

“You want me to spin?” Bronte laughed.

“Yes. Please.” He looked a little sheepish, maybe worried that he had already trespassed into forbidden, unnamed regions of the sexy friends road map.

Bronte let her arms come away from her sides and turned slowly, keeping her eyes on his over her shoulder. “Okay?”

“Very.” He leaned in and kissed her turned cheek, no hug or embrace, just a lovely, tender kiss that made Bronte want to fall into a puddle right there in the cramped entryway.

“Let’s be off then,” he said, then took her hand and spun her lightly back around.

After that night, and for four consecutive nights after, he picked her up at seven thirty. On the dot, as her mother would say. Not that she was telling her mother or anyone else that she was seeing someone… because she wasn’t. He was merely an interlude. And he was fantastically prompt.

Then, Thursday he called her at work.

“Hey, lovely.”

Bronte did not want to begin to contemplate what that little “lovely” did to her pulse—very accelerated—but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him to quit it.

“Hey, you,” she answered. “What’s up?”

“I was thinking tomorrow night we might go out for a proper meal.”

“What does ‘proper’ mean?” Bronte joked. She was sitting at her desk overlooking a small park. The tiny pink buds on the trees were joyful and life-affirming, making their annual triumph over grim winter, but she found her mind—already!—in a constant state of relating everything back to the weeks until Max’s departure.

Buds led to full-blown blooms, which in turn led to the thick, leafy trees of high summer. When he would be gone.

“You know, a nice bottle of wine… snooty waiters… you in a small dress.”

“Aaah, that kind of proper. I love that kind of proper! Do you want me to make a reservation somewhere? Should we try to be mindful of the cost or just live a little?”

“I’ll make the reservation, and I think we should just live a little. And I don’t want to go if we are going to argue about the bill. It was my suggestion; I want to pay.”

“I told you—”

“Fine,” he interrupted, “then we won’t go.”

Bronte had made financial parity one of the nonnegotiable demands of her sexy friends doctrine. All of that fiscally irresponsible jet setting with Mr. Texas—initially with her pretending she could keep up on her own comparatively small salary, sometimes with him paying exorbitant sums with openhanded generosity and love, and finally with Bronte feeling like a ridiculous circus clown pulling out her empty pockets and tilting her head with that exaggerated, freaky, grease-makeup frown—had made her vehemently opposed to any of that grand gesture crap.

Max had bristled at that part of their deal way more than she would have anticipated. She had seen his tiny studio apartment down in Hyde Park near the UC campus and it certainly didn’t look like he had a ton of dough to spare. His clothes were immaculate, but she assumed he was just naturally fastidious. He didn’t have a car. He was a student for chrissake. He didn’t need to be saddled with the expense of entertaining her.

“No need to get peevish,” she laughed. “I suppose it won’t kill me to let you buy me dinner. Just don’t get cocky.”

“Too late for that, I’d wager.”

Bronte laughed again then told him she’d see him the following night.
The
following
night
—she turned the words over in her mind after she hung up the phone. She was hoping that the intervening week of heavy petting at the movies and in the park and at Navy Pier and anywhere else they could get their hands on each other meant that she was no longer a flat-out slut for wanting to actually have
proper
sex with him after their
proper
meal.

What
would
Kate
Middleton
do?
The silly rejoinder popped into her mind. She’d been so immersed in all the royal wedding commotion the year before—for work, of course, keeping her finger on the pulse of contemporary culture and all that. At least that’s what she’d told herself. The truth was that Bronte simply loved all of the fairy-tale romance mixed with modern glamour and a real-life happily ever after. The footage she had seen of Charles and Diana’s wedding had seemed surreal, with the virginal Diana looking like a newborn calf being led to slaughter. Kate, on the other hand, looked like a woman who was about to get exactly what she’d always wanted—while wearing killer clothes.

Royal gazing had been one of Bronte’s favorite pastimes since she was a teenager. A harmless habit. But with the onset of her own happily
never
after, Bronte had forced herself to remove all the royal tabs from the top of her computer screen and all the royal watchers from her Twitter stream. She’d thrown in the towel on romance altogether. Tough-as-nails single gals in Chicago did not have time to lurk around the Internet checking the length of Pippa’s coat or whether Eugenie was wearing her hair down or in a chignon these days. (Three-quarters length and down, of course. Pertinent facts had a way of filtering into Bronte’s psyche, as if by osmosis, via the collective unconscious. Some things just couldn’t be helped.)