Of course, Lizzie’s life hadn’t been as charmed as he’d assumed it was. Once he’d gotten to know her, she’d revealed her deepest, darkest secrets to him, just as he’d told her his.
Supposedly during that time, when they were pouring their angst-riddled hearts out to each other, she’d actually formed a bit of a crush on him. But even till this day, he found that hard to fathom. In what alternate universe did prom queens get infatuated with dorks?
She peered at him from beneath the fashionable brim of her pale beige hat. Her bathing suit was a shimmering shade of copper with a leopard-print trim, and her meticulously manicured nails were painted a soft warm pink. Every lovely thing about her purred, “trust fund heiress,” which was exactly what she was.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
He casually answered, “What a nerd I used to be.”
She teased him with a smile. “As opposed to the sexy billionaire you are today?”
“Right.” He laughed a little. “Because nothing says beefcake like a software designer and internet entrepreneur.”
She moved her gaze along the muscle-whipped length of his body. “You’ve done all right for yourself.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Now who’s giving who the look?”
She shrugged off her offense. “You shouldn’t have become such a hottie if you didn’t want to get noticed.”
That wasn’t the reason he’d bulked up, and she darned well knew it. Sure, he’d wanted to shed his nerdy image, but he’d started hitting the gym after high school for more than aesthetic purposes. His favorite sport was boxing. Sometimes he shadowboxed and sometimes he pounded the crap out of a heavy bag. But mostly he did it to try to pummel the demons that plagued him. He was a runner, too. So was Lizzie. They ran like a tornado was chasing them. Or their pasts, which was pretty much the same thing.
“Beauty and the brainiac,” he said. “We were such a teenage cliché.”
“Why, because you offered to tutor me when I needed it? That doesn’t make us a cliché. Without your help, I would never have gotten my grades up to par or attended my mother’s alma mater.”
Silent, Max nodded. She’d also been accepted into her mom’s old sorority, which had been another of her goals. But none of that had brought her the comfort she’d sought.
“The twentieth anniversary is coming up,” she said.
Of her mom’s suicide, he thought. Lizzie was ten when her high-society mother had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. “I’m sorry you keep reliving it.” She mentioned it every year around this time, and even now he could see her childhood pain.
She put the sunscreen aside, placing it on a side table, where her untouched iced tea sat. “I wish I could forget about her.”
“I know.” He couldn’t get his mom out of his head, either, especially the day she’d abandoned him, leaving him alone in their run-down apartment. He was eight years old, and she’d parked him in front of the TV, warning him to stay there until she got back. She was only supposed to be gone for a few hours, just long enough to score the crack she routinely smoked. Max waited for her return, but she never showed up. Scared out of his young mind, he’d fended for himself for three whole days, until he’d gone to a neighbor for help. “My memories will probably never stop haunting me, either.”
“We do have our issues.”
“Yeah, we do.” Max was rescued and placed in foster care, and a warrant was issued for his mom’s arrest. But she’d already hit the road with her latest loser boyfriend, where she’d partied too hard and overdosed before the police caught up with her.
“What would you say to your mother if she was still alive?” Lizzie asked.
“Nothing.”
“You wouldn’t tell her off?”
“No.” He wouldn’t say a single word to her.
“You wouldn’t even ask her why she used to hurt you?”
Max shook his head. There wasn’t an answer in the world that would make sense, so what would be the point? When Mom hadn’t been kicking him with her cheap high heels or smacking him around, she’d taken to burning him with cigarette butts and daring him not to cry. But her most common form of punishment was locking him in his closet, where she’d told him that the Lakota two-faced monsters dwelled.
The legends about these humanoid creatures varied. In some tales, it was a woman who’d been turned into this type of being after trying to seduce the sun god. One of her faces was beautiful, while the other was hideous. In other stories, it was a man with a second face on the back of his head. Making eye contact with him would get you tortured and killed. Cannibalism and kidnapping were among his misdeeds, too, with a malevolent glee for preying on misbehaving children.
The hours Max had spent in his darkened closet, cowering from the monsters and praying for his drugged-out mother to remove the chair that barred the door, would never go away.
He cleared his throat and said, “Mom’s worst crime was her insistence that she loved me. But you already know all this.” He polished off the last of his root beer and crushed the can between his palms, squeezing the aluminum down to nearly nothing. He repeated another thing she already knew. “I swear, I never want to hear another woman say that to me again.”
“I could do without someone saying that to me, too. Sure, love is supposed to be the cure-all, but not for...”
“People like us?”
She nodded, and he thought about how they tumbled in and out of affairs. Max went through his lovers like wine. Lizzie wasn’t any better. She didn’t get attached to her bedmates, either.
“At least I have my charity work,” she said.
He was heavily involved in nonprofits, too, with it being a significant part of his life. “Do you think it’s enough?”
“What?” She raised her delicately arched brows. “Helping other people? Of course it is.”
“Then why am I still so dissatisfied?” He paused to study the sparkling blue of her eyes and the way her hair was curling in damp waves around her shoulders. “And why are you still stressing over your mom’s anniversary?”
She picked up her tea, sipped, put it back down. “We’re only human.”
“I know. But I should be ashamed of myself for feeling this way. I got everything I ever wanted. I mean, seriously, look at this place.” He scowled at his opulent surroundings. How rich and privileged and spoiled could he be?
“I thought your sabbatical helped.” She seemed to be evaluating how long he’d been gone, separating himself from her and everyone else.
He’d taken nearly a year off to travel the world, to search for inner peace. He’d also visited hospitals and orphanages and places where he’d hoped to make a difference. “The most significant part of that experience was the months I spent in Nulah. It’s a small island country in the South Pacific. I’d never been there before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Anyway, what affected me was this kid I came across in an orphanage there. A five-year-old boy named Tokoni.”
She cocked her head. “Why haven’t you mentioned him before now?”
“I don’t know.” He conjured up an image of the child’s big brown eyes and dazzling smile. “Maybe I was trying to keep him to myself a little longer and imagine him with the family his mother wanted him to have. When he was two, she left him at the orphanage, hoping that someone would adopt him and give him a better life. She wasn’t abusive to him, like my mother was to me. She just knew that she couldn’t take proper