When he’d first sat down, he’d hooked his cane on the arm of the sofa, and it now fell onto the floor with a clatter. Thank God. He bent to pick it up. After he straightened up, Rita was smiling at them, ready to begin.
“So,” the counselor said. “Where shall we start?”
Gina was still watching him. “Good question. What do
you
want to talk about, Max?”
“Basketball?” he answered, and she laughed as he’d hoped she would.
“I suppose that’s my fault for telling you to be honest.” She turned to Rita. “Here’s the deal. According to Max’s definition, we shouldn’t really be here, because we’re not a couple. We’re not together—we’re friends. Only there’s this thing between us. History. Chemistry. Oh, yeah, and the fact that I’m in love with him probably plays a part in there somewhere. Although Max will tell you that I don’t really love him, that after years and years and years, what I feel is still partly ‘transference.’ As I told you on the phone, I was on this plane that got hijacked, and Max saved my life—”
“You saved your own life,” Max interrupted.
“Apparently that part’s subject to interpretation, too,” Gina told the therapist. “I know he saved my life. He, no doubt, can argue that he didn’t. Factor in the age difference thing—which frankly,
I
don’t have a problem with . . .”
Rita glanced down at her clipboard, obviously checking their dates of birth. It wouldn’t take long for her to figure out that Gina was twenty-five, and Max was nearly twenty years older. But the woman was a highly trained professional, so she didn’t so much as blink. She
did
smile when she looked up and met his gaze.
“Love doesn’t always stop to do the math,” she pointed out.
Yeah, but everybody else did and most of them passed judgment, too. Debra, one of the nurses in the physical rehab facility, for example, sure as hell disapproved. If she could have, she would’ve turned Max into a smoldering pile of ashes weeks ago. But right now he just kept his mouth shut and let Gina go on talking.
“I can’t get him to talk to me,” Gina told the therapist. “Every time I try, we end up . . .”
Oh no, she couldn’t—
“. . . having sex instead.”
Oh yes, she did.
“I figured if we came here . . .” Gina continued. “Well, with you in the room, I thought we might actually be able to have a conversation, instead of, you know.”
As far as nightmares went, this could have been worse. He could have been transported back into his scrawny, undersized sixteen-year-old body, forced to wander the halls of his high school, naked, while searching for his locker.
No doubt about it, it was time for him to wake up. He grabbed for his cane. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
He pushed himself up off the couch, even as he realized how ridiculous it was to run away. He could leave the room, sure, but he’d never outrun the chaos that clamored inside his head.
Gina stood, too, and blocked his route to the door. “Max. Please. There’s so much that we just never talk about, that we just pretend never happened.” She took a deep breath. “Like Alyssa.”
Oh, Christ. Max laughed because laughing saved him the hundreds of dollars in dental work he’d surely need after damaging his teeth from excessive grinding. And even he, the teeth-grinding master—couldn’t manage to grind his teeth while laughing. He turned to Rita. “Will you excuse us for a minute?”
But Gina crossed her arms. She clearly wasn’t going anywhere. “This is the point of therapy, Max. To talk about things we can’t otherwise seem to talk about. Right here, in front of Rita.”
So okay. Now he was actually longing for the naked locker scenario. Or that doozy of a recurring nightmare he’d had as a child. Giant forks from outer space. He’d slept on his side for years, so as to slip between the tines and avoid death by impalement.
“Why don’t we come back to this a little later?” Rita suggested. “This seems like a particularly sensitive topic.”
“Okay, no,” Max said. “You’re wrong. It’s not.” He turned to Gina. “Alyssa Locke doesn’t work for me anymore. You know that. I haven’t spoken to her in . . .” Weeks, he was going to say, but that wasn’t quite true.
“I know she came to see you at the physical rehab center,” Gina said. “Don’t you think it’s odd that you didn’t so much as mention that to me?”
What was
odd
was talking about this in front of an audience, like participants in some horrible reality TV show. True, Rita was only one person, but it still felt as if she were somehow keeping score on that notepad. At the end of their fifty minutes, she was going to lean toward Max with a sympathetic smile and tell him, “Your journey ends here. You’re going home.”
God, he wanted to go home.
Not to the rehab center. Not to his pathetic excuse of an apartment. Certainly not to his parents’ homes—one on each coast.
So where did that leave him?
Gina was waiting for his answer. Didn’t he think it was odd . . . ?
“There was nothing to mention,” he told her. “Alyssa’s visit was work related. I didn’t want to . . .” He exhaled hard. “She’s a non-topic. I suppose we could make her one if you really want to turn this into a soap opera—” Gina flinched at that, and he cut himself off, hating himself even more than usual. “Gina, please,” he said quietly, “I can’t do this.”
“What, talk?” she countered, not trying to hide the hurt in her eyes. Hurt she usually was so careful not to let him see. It broke his heart.
“We talk,” he said.
“You know, I pick up your mail from your apartment every other day. You don’t think I could tell that the fancy envelope from Alyssa and what’s-his-name was a wedding invitation?”
Alyssa again. “Sam,” Max said. Alyssa’s fiancé’s name was Sam.
Gina turned to Rita. “It was really only a few months ago that Max asked Alyssa to marry him. She worked for him, and he fell in love with her, only he had this rule about getting involved with his subordinates, so he made sure they were just friends—at least that’s what Jules told me. Just friends—right up until the day he asked her to marry him.” She laughed, but he suspected she was laughing for reasons similar to his own, pertaining to dental care. “Here’s something I’ve never dared to ask you, Max. Were you
just friends
with Alyssa the way you and I are
just friends
?”
“No,” Max told her. “Alyssa and I never . . .” He shook his head. “She worked for me . . .”
“That wouldn’t have stopped some men,” Rita pointed out.
“It stopped me,” he told her flatly.
“So acting honorably is important to you.” Rita made a note on her notepad, which pissed him off even more.
Max turned to Gina. “Look, I’m sorry, but this is too personal. Let’s go somewhere private where we can—”
“Have sex?” she asked.
Max briefly closed his eyes. “Talk.”
“Like the way we talked after you got Alyssa’s wedding invitation?” she asked him.
God. “What did you want me to say to you? ‘Hey, guess what I got in the mail today’?”
“Considering we hadn’t so much as spoken her name since before you were shot and nearly died,” she retorted hotly, “it seemed to merit at least a mention, yes. But you said nothing. I came in and I gave you every opportunity to talk to me, and you remember what we did instead?”
Yes, Max most certainly did remember. Gina, naked and in his bed, was damn hard to forget. He glanced at Rita, who was smart enough not to need it spelled out for her.
Except, that night, Gina had seduced him. As she so often did. It was usually always Gina who made the first move. Although, to be fair, he never stopped her. Yeah, he tried, but it was never heartfelt. And he never succeeded.
Because if she was willing to give so freely of herself, who was he to turn her down?
And wasn’t he the biggest freaking liar in the world? The real truth was that he burned for this girl. Day and night. Their relationship was all kinds of wrong for all kinds of reasons, and he knew he had to stay away from her, but he goddamn couldn’t. So whatever she offered, he took. Greedily. Like an addict who knew that, sooner or later, he’d be cut off cold.
“Let’s back up a bit,” the counselor said. “This history you mentioned.” She looked at Gina. “May I recap for Max some of what you told me over the phone?”
“Please.”
“Correct me if I got it wrong,” Rita said, “but you met four years ago, when Gina was a passenger on a hijacked airliner. This was pre-9/11—the plane was on the ground in . . .” She searched her notes.
“Kazbekistan,” Max said.
“You were the . . . FBI negotiator? I thought the United States didn’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“We don’t,” he explained. “But we do talk to them. Try to convince them to surrender. Worst case, we stall. We listen to their complaints, pretend to negotiate, while rescuers—in this case a SEAL team—prepared to take down—take control of—the plane using force.”
Rita nodded. “I see.”
“The actual takedown happens in, like, thirty seconds,” Gina told the therapist. “But it’s intricately choreographed. They have to blow open the doors and kill the hijackers, while trying not to injure any of the passengers. It takes time to prepare for that.”
Rita focused on Gina. “And you were on that plane for all that time. All those . . . hours?”
“Days,” Max corrected her grimly. He sat back down. This was something that Gina needed to talk about, to work through—her harrowing experience of being held hostage. As much as he hated therapy, he would have stuck needles under his fingernails if it would help her find closure. “The terrorists who hijacked the plane got hold of a passenger list that said Senator Crawford’s daughter, Karen, was on that flight.”
“Except her ticket was stolen,” Gina interjected.
“The hijackers demanded she step forward. Of course, she didn’t, she wasn’t there. The gunmen threatened to start killing everyone on board so Gina stood up and pretended to be this girl.” Max had to stop and clear his throat. Her incredible, selfless bravery still impressed the crap out of him. “They brought her up into the cockpit of the plane, away from the other passengers.”
“Held at gunpoint, all that time.” Rita exhaled hard. “All alone?”
But Gina shook her head. “I wasn’t alone. Max was with me.”
Damn it, she always said this. “I was in the airport terminal,” he told the therapist. “I used a radio to maintain contact with the plane. Gina acted as the go-between, because the terrorists didn’t want to talk directly to me. So I talked to her, knowing they were listening in.”
“That’s not the only reason you talked to me,” Gina said.
She was right. He had been inappropriately attracted to her right from the start.
“Did she give you a list of the injuries she received while I was
with her
on that plane?” Max asked the therapist. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Broken wrist, broken ribs, black eye, a variety of cuts and contusions—”
“She mentioned the attack,” Rita said. “Of course.”
“No, no, we don’t use that word,” Max said. “We prefer brutal honesty. We call it what it was—rape.”
The word seemed to ring in the silence that followed, and he felt his throat tightened, his stomach knot. Ah, God . . .
“That must have been terrible, Max,” Rita said quietly. “To be able to listen in, to witness that violence as it happened. Gina said there were surveillance cameras. It must have been devastating to watch that.”
Why was she talking to him? “More so to Gina, don’t you think?”
“I’ve finally started to forgive myself for it, Max,” Gina said. “God, you were the one who told me it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t provoke them. Why can’t you do the same?”
The therapist turned to him. “Let’s explore this. Do you remember what you felt, what you—”
“What, are you kidding?” Of course she wasn’t kidding. Therapists didn’t kid. In fact, kidding with clients was in the therapist rule book’s Giant List of Don’ts, along with excessive use of whoopee cushions and plastic vomit, and wearing white coats after Labor Day.
But Max finally understood. They weren’t here today for Gina, they were here for
him.
As if this would help. As if digging and poking at his anger and guilt would do anything other than make him howl in frustration and pain.
He used his cane to pull himself back to his feet. “I’m done. I’m sorry. I can’t . . .”
“Then what are we doing?” Gina asked softly. “Is our relationship really just temporary? You know, I keep making deals with myself. I’ll only stay another week, until you’re out of the hospital. I’ll only stay until you get settled into the physical rehab center. I’ll only stay until you can walk without your cane. But really, I’m lying to myself. I just keep waiting, hoping that, I don’t know . . .” She laughed, a pain-filled exhale of air. “Maybe, I think if we keep making love you’ll wake up one morning and say ‘I can’t live without you . . .’ ”
Jesus. “What I can’t do is give you what you want,” Max whispered.
“Even when all I want is for you to talk to me?” Her eyes filled with tears. “There was a time when. . . . You used to tell me everything.”
Max couldn’t answer that. What could he possibly say?
Actually, no, I left out quite a bit . . .
Silence seemed to surround them both, stretching on and on.
Rita interrupted it. “Gina, if you could say anything to Max right now, anything at all, what would you say?”
“Stop treating me as if I might break. Even when we make love, you’re so . . .
careful.
Like you bring that entire 747 into bed with us every single time. . . . Aren’t you ever going to just . . . let it all go?”
Max couldn’t begin to put it into speech—his anger, his rage over what she’d lived through. Let it go? Let it
go
? How could he let go of something that had him by the balls? There were no words, and if he so much as tried, he’d just howl and howl and howl. Instead, he cleared his throat. “I can’t do this,” he said again.
He started for the door.
But Gina beat him over there. “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to think this would help. I’m sorry I wasted your time,” she told the therapist.