His eyes widened at the sight of greasy fast food threatening his hand-polished Italian marble. "Wait, you can't just..."
But I was already unwrapping the food, the paper crinkling against the pristine surface. Let him panic about his coffee table. Let him fuss over the presentation. That was Maxime, alwaystrying to impose order on chaos, always trying to control the uncontrollable.
He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with porcelain plates, sterling silver cutlery, and pressed linen napkins. I watched him slide a plate beneath my half-unwrapped burger, watched him place a coaster under the drink I hadn't even ordered.
"Of course you'd eat a Whopper with a fork and knife," I said, shaking my head.
I found his remote and navigated to Netflix, searching for the film while he continued his elaborate place-setting ritual. The familiar title card appeared on screen, and something loosened in my chest at the sight of it.
"What are you doing?" he finally asked.
I settled onto his couch, noting with satisfaction that it was more comfortable than it looked. "Having dinner with you. Watching a movie."
"But... Burger King?"
I patted the space beside me. "Sit. The fries are getting cold."
He sat, still uncertain, still off-balance in a way I rarely saw from him. I pulled the food from the bag and placed his burger on the plate he'd positioned, the paper wrapper crinkling as I set it aside.
"You remember the office we had when we first started?" I asked, unwrapping my own burger. "That converted storage space on Vine Street?"
"Above the copy shop." He nodded slowly. "We could hear the machines running all day."
"And across the street was..."
"Burger King." The memory surfaced in his eyes. "You used to get a Whopper every Thursday."
"The one day we let ourselves spend money on lunch." I took a bite and closed my eyes briefly, letting the salt and greasetransport me back three decades. "Three ninety-nine for the value meal back then."
"You'd always get extra pickles."
"And you'd pick them off yours and give them to me." I nodded at his burger. "Go on. It won't kill you."
He took a tentative bite, and I watched his expression shift from skepticism to something approaching recognition. The same transformation I'd experienced standing in that fluorescent-lit restaurant.
"Why are we doing this?" he asked.
I finished chewing before answering. "Because sometimes you need to remember where you came from to understand where you're going."
I turned my attention to the television and started the movie. The screen filled with a young boy reading a book while hiding from bullies.
I placed the paper crown on the coffee table, within reach but not forcing it on him.
We ate in silence for several minutes, the film playing. I noticed him picking the pickles off his burger without thinking, placing them on the edge of my wrapper. I claimed them immediately, adding them to my own burger with a small nod of thanks.
The gesture had survived thirty years. Some things, it seemed, remained constant.
"I've never seen this movie," he said finally.
"I know." I gathered our empty wrappers, tucking them back into the bag. "I have. Every time it played on the local station."
He looked at me more carefully. "When was that?"
"Oklahoma. When I was nine." I kept my eyes on the screen where the boy was entering a mysterious bookshop. "Shane would pass out drunk on the couch. I'd turn the volume down low so it wouldn't wake him up."
Shane. The name I never spoke aloud. The stepfather whose skull I'd crushed with a Louisville Slugger when I was seventeen. Maxime knew the story, or enough of it, but I'd never told him about the small moments that had made survival possible.
"It was like finding a door," I continued, dropping into a quieter register. "For two hours, I could be somewhere else, somewhere where kids actually won and monsters could be beaten."
