Page 23 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
"Maximo—"
He doesn't answer.
He just picks up his coat, and he walks out of his own home, and he leaves me standing in the middle of the living room with my mouth still warm and my heart still his and absolutely no idea what I did wrong.
The door closes.
I press two fingers to my lips, where the truth still is.
"That wasn't a lesson," I tell the door he just walked out of because someone in this apartment ought to be brave enough to say it.
Chapter Nineteen
MAXIMO TURNED UP ATTheseus's door without calling, which Theseus would later cite as the first piece of evidence.
The second was that he took the drink.
Maximo didn't take drinks. He held them, occasionally, as props in negotiations. He didn't stand in a friend's study at an indecent hour and drink one down like a man trying to put out a fire with a teaspoon.
"So," Theseus observed, refilling it without being asked. "You've either killed someone or fallen in love. And you don't have the coloring for murder."
"I came here to not talk."
"You came to the one man in this city who bills by the sentence. Poor planning." Theseus lowered himself into the chair across from him, the blue gaze already taking the case apart. "The actress."
"Leave it."
"Jassy, isn't it? She still thinks I'll be your best man. I've decided I'd like to be. I already have remarks."
"Shut up."
"Why not just admit the truth? You love her—"
"Don't be foolish."
The denial came out fast. It came out the exact wrong speed, and they both heard it, the way a jury hears a witness answer before the question is finished.
Theseus's brows rose, and he set his glass down with the small satisfied click of a man laying down a card. He had never once believed in love. He'd built a whole cynical fortune on the certainty it didn't exist. But he recognized it on sight anyway because it had just walked into his study and dismantled the most controlled man he knew.
"Maximo..." "Don't."
"You kissed the girl who has your sister's heart."
"I saiddon't."
Theseus studied his friend unsmilingly. He knew exactly what a man like Maximo did with a want he had branded forbidden, and it was never to reach for it. He would wall it off and call the walls mercy, and the girl carrying his sister's heart would be the one left to pay the interest on his restraint.
Chapter Twenty
MAXIMO HAD THE APARTMENTto himself, which he'd arranged on purpose, the way he arranged everything.
Jassy was on an overnight shoot. He'd sent enough security with her to invade a small country and had told himself it was about the neighborhood. It wasn't about the neighborhood. It was that today was the ninth of the month, and on the ninth of this month Mary would have turned twenty-one, and Maximo didn't want a witness for what the ninth did to him.
He did what he always did. He bought the terrible grocery-store cake with the blue sugar roses she'd loved without irony her whole short life, set it on the counter with a single candle she wasn't there to blow out, and sat across from it in the dark kitchen the way you sit across from a person.
And he tried to hear her laugh.
That was the ritual, the real one, the only gift left to give. Every year on the ninth he closed his eyes and called it up, the exact sound of it, Mary at the piano, Mary in the passenger seat, Mary shrieking at some joke only she found that funny. Every year it came.
