“And then you turned up at my office, looking sad and dejected, talking about having man trouble. He’s the man, right? Max?”
Bo nodded quietly.
Lisa exhaled deeply, opening her car door and stepping out into the sunshine. Bo followed her, stretching out her legs, which were still stiff after the long flights she’d been on. Lisa looked at her curiously.
“But you told me he wasn’t serious about you.”
“He’s not,” Bo replied, trying to keep the old hurt from before out of her voice.
“No? Then why did he send you tickets to his concert?”
Bo hesitated. She didn’t know why Max had sent her tickets to his performance. Maybe it was a peace offering. Maybe it was to show there were no hard feelings now. Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all. With Max, she could guess but would never be certain. “I don’t know why he sent me those tickets,” she told her sister. “I really don’t.”
Lisa shook her head. “You and Maximilian Fitzroy. I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.”
Bo opened her mouth to agree. She opened her mouth to say: “You’re right, he isn’t my type,” before she remembered Max and stopped herself. She thought about Max’s eyes and Max’s fingers and Max’s smile and couldn’t help but give a soft and wistful smile of her own.
“He is my type,” she told Lisa confidently. “He’s exactly my type, in fact.”
Progress.
Chapter Thirty
Bo was nervous before Max’s concert. So nervous that she regressed to biting her nails like an angsty fifteen-year-old about to sit a French oral exam. So nervous, that she opened a pack of gummy bears and skittishly ate half of them until Lisa knocked the bag out of her hands. So nervous that she nearly backed out of going to the concert entirely, standing outside the Sydney Opera House with her arms crossed petulantly over her chest, refusing to move.
“I’ve been waiting a long time to see Maximilian Fitzroy play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto,” Lisa snapped at her, pulling on her arm. “I am not missing out because my little sister shagged him and then had a lover’s spat afterwards.”
“That’s not exactly what happened,” Bo argued back, slapping her sister’s hand away.
Lisa paused. “Did you shag him?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Did you then argue with him?”
“Well,yes,but you don’t understand—”
Lisa proceeded to pull on her arm again. “I am not missing out because you shagged him and then had a lover’s spat. Come on, Bo, don’t be a baby. This is the Sydney Opera House, for heaven’s sake. There are six thousand seats inside. He’s not even going to see you. Not in the seats I booked, anyway. If you want him to see you, we could always sit in the front-row seats he sent to you . . .”
Bo paled. It was one thing to go to Max’s concert. It was quite another thing to go to Max’s concert and have Max know about it.
“I said no to that already. We’ll sit in your seats. You paid for them, remember? Hundreds of dollars.”
“Your free seats are better.”
“They might be better, but they weren’t free, trust me,” Bo bit back. “I paid for them in heartbreak and tears.”
Lisa sighed. “He sent you those seats for a reason, Bo,” she offered quietly. “Did you ever think that maybe he’s had heartbreak and tears of his own?”
Bo stared at her. “He wasn’t like that about me.”
“Like what?”
“You know.” Bo waved her hand. “In love with me or anything.”
“But you were in love with him?” Lisa gazed at her, and when Bo made no immediate answer, her eyes narrowed even further. “You’restillin love with him, aren’t you?”
Bo frowned, looking at the ground. “Where are my gummy bears? If you’re going to ask me stressful questions and drag me to stressful events you should at least let me eat my stress-relieving food.”
