Not Dani and Val, though. They didn’t make any noise or bother anyone around them, but they kept looking at each other in delight and occasionally leaning over to whisper in each other’s ears. At one point, during the iconic “Waltz of the Flowers,” they clasped hands excitedly.
What must it have been like to enjoy one’s parent so much?
He found himself watching them more than the performance, and when it was over and they broke into happy applause, he let himself be carried along with them. And when Dani turned to him, smiled, and mouthed, “Thank you,” and he whispered, “You’re welcome,” he found he had never meant anything more.
Chapter Four
Dani didn’t remember The Nutcracker being so good. She hadn’t seen it since she was a girl, and she’d been wondering if her adult self would be too jaded to suspend her disbelief and enjoy a story about toys and candy and flowers come to life. But a few bars into the overture and she’d fallen right into the story, and Mom must have, too—she kept looking at Dani at the same time Dani looked over at her.
“That was lovely, Max, thank you so much,” her mom said when they reached the lobby.
It really had been. Even though Dani had had to be talked into coming, she was bummed that it was over.
“May I take you ladies for a post-show drink?” Max asked as they waited in line at the coat check.
Yes. Dani didn’t want to go home yet.
But her mom said, “Thank you, but no. It’s a long ride home, and my husband waits up for me even though I tell him not to.”
“Let me call the car,” Max said, holding their coats for them one at a time.
It was just as well. Dani took her mom’s arm. “I need to pick your brain in the car about gift ideas for Dad.” Though maybe admitting she hadn’t bought gifts yet was a dumb move—it might lead to a line of fruitcake questioning, and Dani had never been able to lie to her mother.
“Oh, no, you two go have a drink!” Mom shrugged out of her grasp. “I’ll enjoy the peace of a cozy ride home.”
Dani looked at Max, who had an eyebrow raised—the man had the uncanny ability to lift one eyebrow at a time—like he was daring her to do something as transgressive as have a drink with him. She wanted to, but without her mom as an excuse, she should refuse. Spontaneously going out to drinks with Max last night had been one thing. Doing it again felt like veering into list-violating territory. But really, there was nothing on it a drink with Max would be violating, except #6, and she had already violated that one by being here to begin with. And perhaps more to the point, Max wasn’t a “man” in Things I Will Never Again Do for a Man sense. He was a baron who lived on another continent. There was no danger of him upending her life.
“Stay, honey,” her mom said.
“It is the first day of the Christmas season according to the Daniela Martinez calendar,” Max said.
She made the decision by not making it, by not saying anything as she let them sweep her along.
At the car, as they were saying their goodbyes, Max said something to her mom in French. Dani recognized Joyeux Noël in her mom’s reply, but soon the two of them were conversing rapidly and animatedly—Max was such a flirt—and were beyond Dani’s limited French.
After the car departed, Max turned to her and said, “Negroni? Three negronis?”
“What were you and my mom talking about?”
“How much I hate Christmas.”
“You hate Christmas? What are you doing at The Nutcracker, then?”
He shrugged and said, “I’m a walking contradiction. So, negronis? Diet Coke? I admit I’m not really in the mood for a negroni myself this evening.”
“Me either. I was thinking it would be nice to walk a bit.”
“What’s our destination?” He held out his arm.
She didn’t take it. “I so rarely get to Manhattan, and unlike you, I actually like Christmas. I’m in the mood to stroll aimlessly and take in the holiday stuff.” She gestured at the big Lincoln Center Christmas tree, aware that she sounded like a dork, but what did it matter? It wasn’t like she cared what the Depraved Not-Duke thought of her.
“Let us stroll aimlessly, then.” She thought he might offer his arm again, but he did not.
“This is going to sound silly, but I feel like I sort of missed Christmas last year.”
“You mentioned that last night.”
She should probably be embarrassed by the amount of rambling—not to mention drinking—she’d done. But again, this dude was an Eldovian baron playboy. He wasn’t real. Well, he was. Obviously. He was right next to her with his cool good looks and his gray wool “fancy man” coat, but he wasn’t in the sense that he had any impact on her life.
“So you missed Christmas last year?” he prompted.
“Well, I didn’t miss it. I went to my parents’ house. We did presents and dinner and sugary cereal the next morning and all that. And I remember thinking how nice it was not to have to split the holiday with Vince’s family.” She had added #5 to her list at that point, in fact: Be away from my family for the holidays. “It was the run-up to Christmas that I missed last year. Decorations, carols, that kind of stuff. You know what I mean?”
“If you had ever spent Christmas in Eldovia, you would know just how much I am acquainted with the Christmas run-up.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about this from Leo. There’s a cocoa festival, right?” And a ball, at which Leo and Marie had made their dramatic declarations of love. She could sort of see where Max’s anti-Christmas stance came from. “I’m sure it’s overkill. I guess my point is that last year, I looked up and—bam!—it was Christmas.”
“Why was that? Working too much?”
“In part.”
“And what’s the other part?”
She wasn’t sure why she was talking about this with Max. Maybe because, as she’d just been thinking, he didn’t have any actual stake in her life or she in his. “I was probably a little too fresh off the breakup to enjoy anything. Too raw. That’s embarrassing to admit to someone who’s met Vince.” Now that she was out the other side, it was hard to explain what she’d seen in Vince. He was smart, she’d give him that, and she’d been flattered by his interest when she was hired into the department. But from her current vantage point, it seemed obvious that she’d let herself get too swept up in him. And not just him, but his interests, his career, his family—Leo and Gabby aside, of course. Hence the list. “I was working so hard because I had this project I’d put aside about a year previously because Vince thought we should do this other project together.”
“What was it?”
“Cubism in literature.”
“Ah, the Picasso obsession. I didn’t know cubism was a movement beyond visual art.”
“Yeah. Picasso and Gertrude Stein influenced each other. We were going to write a book about it. I was going to do the Stein, and he was going to do the Picasso. But then . . .” She shrugged. “He’s writing it by himself now.” With all her work feeding into it.
“Didn’t Picasso have a teenage mistress? It sounds as though Vince is taking the Picasso cosplay a little too far.”