The end. Those words were so ominous, I feared the worst. That somehow Max had caught her using, or she’d been arrested, or simply bolted and left Max with a broken heart.
“It all happened so fast,” Loralei continued, “everyone was in shock. Definitely not as much as Max, but…she OD’d one night outside a club in LA. Max was on a location shoot in south Florida.”
The waiter came by, dropped off the check, and Monica grabbed it. “So I get the call. I’m still not sure why that happened. But Carl and I went to the hospital and were given the news. Carl called Max and he flew home overnight.”
“Jesus,” was all I could manage, as I looked away from them and watched a droplet of condensation slide down my glass.
“I’ve never heard him say a word about it since,” Monica said.
Loralei’s expression agreed with Monica. “That’s probably why he never told you.”
Yeah, I thought. That could be why. But this was an aspect of Max’s life I wanted to know about. Not just because it was another girl he had loved, but I wondered if he was really, truly over her, and what, if anything, all of it had to do with his need to protect me.
. . . . .
After lunch, alone in my car, I Googled Tyler Morgan. I didn’t want to do that at the table in front of Loralei and Monica. I just wanted the topic to go away at that moment, and it did, but I was still immensely curious about her.
I could only find a few pictures. I immediately started to compare myself to her. She was taller than me, and had lighter hair. Her face had angular features, while mine were softer. In short, we looked nothing alike, and I found some relief in that.
I got to the office and found Max sitting on the couch. Papers were strewn everywhere — next to him, on the table, on the floor — but all in neat stacks, no mess. I’d seen it before. He was in script deconstruction mode, a process he always did that involved actually physically taking a script apart and playing around with rearranging scenes. He had done it a few times with screenwriting software, but gave that up, saying this method made him think better.
He looked up as I stepped into his office. “I thought you were spending the day with the ladies.”
I closed the door behind me, freezing in place as I stared at him.
He moved the papers off his lap and stood. “What’s wrong, Liv?” He could always read my face in a microsecond.
When he got close to me, I threw my arms around his waist, feeling myself enveloped in his strong embrace.
He kissed me on the forehead.
I looked up. “I’m sorry, but I have to know.” I swallowed hard as he looked down at me, a look of extreme concern on his face. “Tell me about Ty.”
Max’s eyes closed instantly as he let out a heavy, long sigh.
“I don’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that.”
He paused, then said, “It’s in the past, Olivia. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
I pulled him by the hand and we went over to the couch. Max sat and I lowered myself onto his lap, putting my arms around his neck.
“It’s a part of you,” I said. “I want to know.”
He shook his head.
“Is it too painful?” I asked.
“I told you, it doesn’t matter anymore. I worked through it and I’m over it. It’s like it was never part of my life.”
I got a chill down my spine when he said that. For some reason, I took it as coldly as one could possibly mean it.
“That sounds terrible,” he continued, correcting himself. “I don’t mean it like that. I had to move on, and the only way to do that was to not look back.”
Although the circumstances were different, that’s kind of what I had been doing with regard to Chris. There was nothing harsh about my decision to dismiss Chris from my past, and now I understood that Max didn’t mean it that way about Tyler Morgan, either.
And then, suddenly, without any prompting from me, Max reversed his earlier statement about not talking about her and he opened up. “She lived with me. It wasn’t quite a year. Did they tell you this already?”
“Some of it,” I said.
Max emitted a soft laugh. “Let me guess. Loralei slipped up.”
“How’d you know?”
“She’s always doing shit like that. Be careful what you tell her. I thought about telling you when Krystal was in real trouble.”
I hadn’t even considered a connection between the two. “Is that why you helped her?”
He nodded. “It happens all the time, especially in this town, but because she’s a friend of yours, it was too close to home and I knew if I didn’t try to help it would haunt me.”
“You saved her life.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
I pushed back from him, taking his face between my hands. “You did.”
I kissed him and we fell together — Max on his back, me on top of him. It wasn’t sexual, it was purely an emotional moment.
I lay my head on his chest, thinking about all that I’d just learned about him, and decided to let the silence continue for a few moments.
“I love this town,” he said, “almost everything about it. I’ve just seen that too many times, and with her…it was unbearable.”
I watched his face turn to stone as he stared at the window. I didn’t know what to say, which was fine, because I knew I needed to let him proceed at his own comfortable pace.
He looked at me. “I had a problem, Liv. For about six months.” He let it hang there without finishing.
“What do you mean?” I said.
He turned his head to look away from me again.
I put my hand on his chin and turned his head back toward me, and he offered no resistance. “Max, you had a problem…?”
“Coke. I had done my share of weed, but I eventually gave in to the temptation of coke. It was everywhere. Everyone had it, everyone was doing it, everyone was sharing or selling. I was at my weakest point in life. It was just after ‘Circus Daydream’ came out. A few weeks after, actually.”
He was talking about his one and only box-office flop. It was a script he had written hastily at the urging of the studio. Max had told me once that it was in the top three regrets of his professional life. He caved to their demands. They wanted to rush something else out that had his name attached to the project, and “Circus Daydream” was the only thing he had ready to go at the moment.