Dani snorted, but it was so embarrassing. The breakup aside, knowing that you were the kind of person who would be with a man who would, in turn, date someone less than half his age was so gross.
Letting yourself be hurt by that kind of man was even grosser.
She looked at Max’s profile, illuminated by all the New York lights, of both the regular and Christmas varieties. Max was oddly easy to tell truths to, even uncomfortable ones. “That’s why I was working so hard last winter, to get back to my own stuff. To be fair, the Picasso-Stein project was a cool idea. But it wasn’t something I’d been inherently interested in. I let it derail me when what I needed to be doing was working toward tenure.”
She had, of course, created a list item to deal with any similar scenario in the future. It was #3: Work with him in such a way that his interests are advanced at the expense of my own. “I’m not sure how I let myself get so . . . seduced.” She meant it in the philosophical sense, but it was probably the wrong choice of word, because now the Depraved Duke would make a joke.
He did not. He merely made a dismissive gesture. “We all make errors of judgment when it comes to matters of the heart.”
“Do you, though?” Max didn’t seem like the kind of person who got his heart broken. In order to get your heart broken, stuff had to stick to begin with.
He smirked. “I do not. I was trying to be magnanimous.” He cocked his head as he looked into the distance. “But I do know what it’s like to have someone in your life who has more power over you than you can perhaps explain.”
As she was about to ask him what he meant, he pointed to a brass quintet on the edge of the plaza playing “Good King Wenceslas.” They slowed down as they approached the musicians. “Is this suitably Christmasey?” he asked.
She let the warm, rich brass notes wash over her. “Yes. It’s perfect.” They watched in silence for a few moments, and when the song was done, she said, “I guess my point is that this year I actually feel like doing the schmoopy Christmas stuff. Street musicians! The Nutcracker! I was thinking I might walk over to Bergdorf’s and look at the windows.”
“A fine plan.” He dropped a fifty-dollar bill in the open instrument case in front of the quartet.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she said, aware anew of the gulf between them. He was passing out fifty-dollar bills like they were quarters, and she was delighted by a ballet that was, essentially, for children. “I don’t want to subject you to any more Christmas-related torture. Or any more monologues about my poor judgment when it comes to husbands.”
“I’m going over there anyway. I’m at the Four Seasons.”
“Of course you are.” They set off, and after they crossed Broadway, she said, “You want to cut across the bottom of the park?”
“Your wish is my command.”
The snow crunched beneath their feet as they entered the park. “Did you grow up on Long Island?” he asked.
“No. My parents only moved there a few years ago, after my dad retired. I grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. My mom taught at my high school, and my dad commuted to Manhattan.”
“What prompted the move?”
“I don’t think it was any one thing. They both love the city, but they were getting tired of the stairs—we lived on the top floor of a walk-up—and tired of fighting for parking. And my dad wanted to be near the water—he’s big into clamming.”
“Clamming? Is that . . . fishing but for clams?”
“Yes. You dig them up, though.” She shrugged. “He kind of randomly got into it after he retired, and he was always getting up at the crack of dawn and driving out to wherever they were supposed to be good that day. My mom wasn’t quite ready to retire, but she got a teaching job in Huntington, which is a town on the North Shore, and that was that.”
“You’re close to them?”
He had asked her that last night, and he seemed strangely interested in the answer. “Yes.” He was looking at her as they walked, and he was listening so intently, it made her want to say more. “And I love the beach, so I’m always happy to visit them. My dad was always a beach person, too, though the clamming is a more recent development. We used to rent a place in Long Beach for a couple weeks every summer. And my dad grew up on the beach in Playa del Carmen, which is a bit south of Cancún. His parents owned a hotel—they still do, though they don’t do the day-to-day running of it anymore. Every few years over the holidays we all go there for a visit. The beach is big in my family, is my point, so Long Island made sense for my parents. Of course they’re not right on the water—that’s too expensive for us commoners.” She smiled to show she was kidding.
“And you have a sister, you said?”
“Yep. She’s three years younger.”
“And you’re close to her, too?”
“Yeah, but in that weird way siblings are without there being a lot to it objectively. We love each other, but we don’t have much in common. She’s a corporate lawyer for a mutual fund company, and I teach and write about literature. We don’t talk that much, but, you know, we’re sisters.”
“Funny how that happens. You can grow up with someone, spend all your time with them, and then . . .” He waved a hand in front of his face. “It’s all gone once you become adults.”
It occurred to Dani that in the space of two days, she’d told Max about Vince, her job dissatisfaction, and her family. He had a gift for drawing out information. He’d seemed genuinely interested, but maybe all he was doing was being polite. She, on the other hand, knew nothing about him.
“Do you have siblings?” she asked in an attempt to make the conversation more two-sided. He had sounded, when he’d talked about growing apart from a sibling, as if he’d been speaking more than theoretically.
“A brother.”
Was it her imagination, or did he purse his lips a little as he spoke? “Younger, I presume? Since you’re the future duke and all.”
She’d been trying to lighten the mood, but he just said, “Yes. Younger.” The terse, clipped tone sounded like it was coming from a different person than the carefree baron who had taken her to The Nutcracker on a whim. “Are you close?”
“We were until he went to boarding school in England.”
She was about to ask where Max had gone to boarding school when he stepped off the path and said, “Let’s make snow angels.” It had snowed most of the day, though it had tapered off while they’d been at the ballet. He took big strides until he reached a patch of untrammeled snow. He stopped and turned about twenty feet from her, seeming to realize she wasn’t following. “What? Is snow-angel-ing not done in America?”
“It’s done if you’re seven. And if you don’t hate Christmas.”
“Come on.” He beckoned her. “You just said you wanted to get into the Christmas spirit this year.”
“Why are you always suggesting silly, impulsive things like ballets and snow angels?”
“Why are you always resisting them?”
She almost gasped at the question, which felt like a thin, perfectly honed blade sliding effortlessly between her ribs.