She took a step toward me and opened her arms to hug me. “Olivia, it’s so nice to finally meet you.”
We hugged and I said, “You, too, Mrs. Dalton.”
“Call me Paula, I insist.”
She kept her hands on my shoulder as she pulled back to look at Max, then back at me. “He’s so secretive, I thought I’d never get to meet you.”
“I told you about Olivia months ago,” Max said.
“Well, when you’re this serious about a lady, you shouldn’t hide her from your mother.”
That’s when she looked at me, saying, “Don’t ever think you have to get his permission to visit me,” and then immediately asked if I wanted a “pop.” Ah, yes. “Pop.” Despite her newfound California style, Paula Dalton was still a Midwesterner at heart.
We spent a good portion of that Sunday afternoon at his mother’s house, eating roasted chicken with carrots and green beans and big helpings of rice. Paula, in true mom mode, showed me pictures of Max as a child, mostly school pictures, but also some from holidays. My favorite was one of him when he was seven years old, lying next to the Christmas tree, surrounded by wrapping paper. Paula said she had snapped that photo in the mid-afternoon, when Max had fallen asleep, exhausted from playing with his new toys for hours on end.
As she flipped through the pages of the photo album, I noticed that there were no pictures of his father. On the way home, I wanted to ask him about that, but decided not to. It was obvious why his mother had purged the albums of pictures of his father. And it wasn’t worth bringing up because the scars his father left on his life — and on his mother’s life — were of the kind that probably never fully healed, and I erred on the side of caution and let it go.
. . . . .
Over the next several weeks, I noticed a change in Max. There was a solemn mood about him almost all the time.
Sometimes I would watch him as he worked with a pen and notebook on the den couch, scrawling out ideas for a script he was working on, I supposed. I didn’t ask because as his manager, I’d be reading the first draft of his scripts when he was done. He liked my suggestions, but only after he got the whole story down first.
Occasionally, I would lie next to him, putting my head in his lap as he worked. We usually had the TV streaming something from Netflix or Hulu or playing a DVD. Neither of us liked much of what TV programming had to offer, except for a few shows on HBO and AMC, but that was about it.
One night, as I was lying there with my head on his thigh, drifting off to sleep and missing most of the end of a movie, he put the notebook in front of my face.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I had to blink a few times to clear my eyes.
Max had sketched a logo for his production company. For weeks, he’d been toying around with different names and couldn’t settle on one, even any that I suggested. It was important that he come up with something that would stand out, something recognizable, if not to the general movie-going audience then at least within the industry.
My eyes focused on the paper he held in front of me. The name of the company was in a simple, clear font with a curved line over the top of the name that ended in what looked like a flash — a shooting star of sorts.
“You aren’t serious,” I said, looking from the sketch up to his face.
His eyebrows rose on his forehead as his expression stayed serious.
I sat up, looked back at the paper, back at him, and said, “I love that.”
The name of the company would be: OliviMax.
“But,” I said, “doesn’t that sound too much like Miramax?”
He shrugged. “Who cares? This is what we’re going with.”
To think that my name — minus the “a” — would be part of a major film production company was as mind-blowing as anything that had happened to me since I arrived in L.A.
Well, almost anything.
THREE
One of the many perks of living with Max was that I no longer dreaded getting up in the mornings. I liked my sleep, always had, and the sound of an alarm clock was something I’d always hated. But now, being shaken out of slumber by that awful sound was becoming a less frequent occurrence.
Max liked to wake me up in other ways. Sometimes it was his hands caressing my back or my legs. I always slept with my back to him, snug in his embrace. So sometimes I woke up to the feeling of him circling a finger around my nipple as he pressed and rubbed himself along my bottom.
But my favorite — and apparently one of Max’s — was the mornings I’d wake up on my back, legs spread, with Max’s head between my legs. He would always have pushed the comforter and the top sheet off the bed to the floor, and it was just the two of us naked there on the bed.
“Good morning,” he would always say, stopping for a few seconds when I looked down my body and made eye contact with him.
But there was a morning, just a few short weeks after he renamed the company, a Monday morning when we were about to hire a casting director for Max’s new film, that I woke up as Max was turning me over onto my stomach.
“Good morning, dream girl,” he whispered into my ear.
I smiled in response, as I turned my head to the side and rested it on my folded arms.
Max moved my hair to the side and kissed the back of my neck. He was sort of hovering over me and I could feel his hard cock against the back of my thigh, then along the cleft of my ass, as he moved back and forth slowly, enjoying the soft friction.
Soft for him, anyway. For me, it was different. “You’re rough,” I said, sleepily, referring to the fact that he hadn’t shaved in a few days.
I lay still in that position, not getting a response from Max. Or maybe he did say something and I just didn’t hear it, because the next thing I knew I was waking up again, and about five minutes had passed.
I heard water running in the bathroom, so I got up and padded across the carpet to find Max in there, sitting on the edge of the tub, with his back to the door.
“I’m sorry I fell asleep on you,” I said.
“No worries, Liv. You were right. I was kind of rough.”
I walked over and sat beside him.
“I don’t know why I’ve never seen you do this before,” I said.
He turned his attention away from what he was doing, looked at me, smiled and said, “Me neither.”
The tub was filling up with water, and I was already naked, so I got in. I sat cross-legged in front of Max as he remained on the edge of the tub.
His groin was lathered up with shaving cream and he held a razor in one hand.