She was about to add that Dog Max would be fine when a voice call came in from Human Max. Were they going to be talking-on-the-phone friends now? It wasn’t lost on her that this was the thing she was having trouble imagining herself doing with potential hookups. “Hello?”
“What’s wrong with my namesake?”
She smiled at the lack of greeting. Unlike her imaginary app-dude conversations, things weren’t awkward with Max because somehow they had skipped over the polite-pleasantries stage of most relationships. “He’s not your namesake, but he has an ear infection. He started antibiotics today, and he has to wear one of those cone things so he doesn’t scratch his ears.”
“Aww.” Human Max made a noise that was part sympathetic, part amused. “So you can’t leave him alone? That’s too bad.”
She thought about agreeing. Yes, I am so devoted to my dog I canceled my New Year’s Eve plans to tend to him. She looked over to where Dog Max was snort-snoring. “I could leave him alone—he’s fine. Honestly, he’s my excuse. The truth is, I’m committed to staying home in my pajamas and watching cheesy Christmas movies.”
She almost told him the rest, which was that she was sitting and staring at her computer, thinking about writing something. Something different from usual. And that it was his doing. His wild story about Karina Klein had ignited—reignited—the idea. But it was only a formless blob in her mind. It would probably go nowhere.
And she couldn’t shake the memory of last time she’d told someone about this idea. It had not gone well.
She rose from her desk and made her way to the couch to stretch out—she’d been hunched over for too long. “Where are you?” There was background noise on his end. “Are you at a party?”
“Paris, and I am. Or I was.”
“What do you mean was?”
“I am at a party, I suppose, but I came outside to get some air.”
“So what am I hearing?”
“I’m on a terrace, and the doors to the main room are open because it’s hot in there. There’s a band as well as a more generalized din.”
“What kind of party is it? Minor European royalty? Are you still wife-scouting?”
“Ha-ha. I wasn’t wife-scouting in New York, nor am I this evening. A friend of mine was having a New Year’s Eve party, and I wanted to . . . Well, frankly, I wanted to escape my family, so I jetted over.”
“Ah, took the private jet to the party in Paris.” She was teasing, because she didn’t quite know what to make of the baron who wanted to escape his family so he “jetted over” to Paris.
“I’ll have you know I flew commercial. I always fly commercial.”
“You flew commercial when you came here?”
“I did.”
“Huh.”
“That doesn’t conform to your image of me as a profligate wastrel?”
Tabloids aside, Max cultivated a certain image of a carefree-bordering-on-careless playboy. That person would charter a private jet. But as Dani had just been thinking, it didn’t seem like he was that person. But why pretend to be a less good person than you actually were? “Why did you want to escape your family?” He had dodged that question when they’d spoken on Christmas Eve.
“Why does anyone want to escape their families?”
By which she supposed he meant it was a long story, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to accept the deflection. She genuinely wanted to solve the puzzle that was Human Max. “I don’t know. Why do you?”
He let a few beats of silence elapse, but they weren’t uncomfortable beats, before saying, “Because my father is an asshole, my mother is complicit, and my brother is an idiot.”
That didn’t actually tell her anything, and she was gearing up to press him on the matter when the background noise on his end swelled. She pulled her phone away from her ear to check the time. “It’s ten minutes to midnight there, isn’t it? You have to get off the phone.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re going to miss New Year’s!”
“I’m reasonably certain that’s not true. Unless you have some kind of uncanny foreknowledge that I’m going to fall off this terrace and perish in the next ten minutes, I will, in fact, live to see the new year.”
“But you should go inside and spend New Year’s—”
“I’m spending New Year’s exactly where I want to,” he said with a quiet certainty.
She wasn’t sure what to say to that pronouncement, and she was even less sure she should be as flattered by it as she was, so she just asked, “Any resolutions?” There was a long pause, so she added, “I’ll tell you mine. Get divorced.” She’d meant to speak breezily, but her resolution had come out way too zealously. She felt a little sheepish, like she’d exposed more of herself than she’d intended to. She tried to lighten things up. “Also, related: I need to get going on one of the apps. I keep thinking about it, but I never actually do it. So I guess my resolutions are get divorced and have sex. Probably not in that order, alas.”
She expected Max to have an opinion about her second resolution, to jokingly offer up his services, but he said, suddenly, quickly, in a rush of words, “I think I want to try to get a job this year.”
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind.”
Maybe Max had inadvertently exposed more of himself than he’d intended, too? But too bad. She wasn’t letting that nugget go unexamined. “No. Tell me.”
“I’ve been flitting around since I finished grad school. But that was eight months ago. I have no purpose.”
“I thought your purpose was to be a man-whore.” As soon as it was out of her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. She and Max had spent much of their limited acquaintance bantering, but he was being uncharacteristically serious now—or trying to.
“Right,” he said.
“No, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. What kind of job are you thinking of?”
He was silent for a long moment, and she feared her flippancy had shut him down, but he finally said, “My family has a mining company. My father’s always after me to take a more active role.”
“Why have you never told me any of this?”
Although, why should he have? Even though it felt like they were old friends, they’d only just gotten to know each other. And hadn’t she noticed several times how good he was at not talking about himself?
“Because it’s boring,” he said in breezy way that made her suspect he was deflecting.
“What do you mine?”
“Copper and quartz, mostly.”
“Huh.”
“The one thing about marrying Marie that I was actually looking forward to was helping her with her refugee policy agenda. We’d even talked at one point about starting a foundation.”
“Is there not one already?”
“There is not.”
“Hmm. I always think of the royals as doing good works.”
“The royal family is actually in dire financial straits. Their family company, Morneau, makes luxury watches, and the market for those has been declining for a while.”