Work Text:
Max checked his watch. 2:37 a.m. He’d been worried when he’d gotten Helen’s text an hour ago:
Dancing legless. fly home soon
But then Lauren texted seconds later:
She’s fine. Totally hammered, but fine. I’ve got my eye on her. I’ll bring her home by 3.
Lauren had finally stopped being passive aggressive about London, apologized (in her way) and insisted on taking Helen out for one last night of ‘drinking, dancing, and debauchery.’ Helen wasn’t sure she had time to go, but Max insisted she celebrate her new job and have a proper sendoff with her friend.
Luna was spending one last weekend with her grandparents, so Max found himself completely alone this Friday night. He looked around at their now nearly empty apartment—just boxes and a few scattered necessities—and saw a metaphor for what his life almost became. If Max had been holding Luna just a little less tightly in the ambulance, if he’d waited even a day longer to run to Helen, if Helen had loved him a fraction less or had an ounce less patience…his life could have been so very empty.
2:52 am. He needed a distraction. Max got out some work for the NGO he’d be consulting with on infectious diseases until his UK medical license was approved. He went in search of his glasses and threw himself down on the couch with a stack of papers.
Twenty minutes later, Max heard a loud bang in the hallway and boisterous laughter that was unmistakably Helen’s. He opened the front door and saw Helen rummaging through her purse for keys and Lauren laughing and shaking her head. “Did you ladies have fun?” Max asked with a smirk.
Before Max could register what was happening, Helen threw her arms around his neck and crashed into him. He was barely able to stay on his feet with the unexpected force of her. And then she was kissing him and it was all warmth and tequila, and his mouth was full with her. After a moment, he pulled back, staring down at her beautiful, flush face. “Hey you,” he said.
“Hi professor.” Helen had taken to calling Max professor in a low, sultry voice when he wore his glasses. So Max had started taking his contacts out earlier and earlier most evenings.
“Oh geez, am I getting a glimpse of some weird role play thing you two like to do? I mean good for you. I fully support it. But I’d rather not know the details.”
“Nice to see you too, Bloom,” Max said. “Do you want to come in?”
“Thanks, but I should run. I’ll see you both Monday. You…” she said, grabbing Helen’s arm and pulling her away from Max and into a bear hug. “I love ya. Thanks for tonight.”
“It was so fun! Love you too.”
Max guided an animated Helen toward the kitchen and filled a large cup with water, determined to lessen her inevitable hangover. “So what kind of trouble did you two get into tonight?”
“I danced on a bar!” She said, louder than was necessary.
“You mean at a bar?”
“No, ON a bar…like this.”
Helen started to climb onto the kitchen island, but Max rushed over, grabbing her by the waist and settling her back on the ground. “Whoa whoa, what do you say we do our dancing down here tonight?”
She smiled and started dancing against him. “You gonna dance with me?”
“I just might, but water first.” He handed Helen the glass and she took a drink. Then he crouched down and helped her out of her heels. “Sounds like you and Bloom had fun.”
“Yes. But we had a talk first. I told her to stop making comments about how you should stay in New York or she’d answer to me.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes! I told her it wasn’t my idea for you to go. That I’d never have asked you to come because I didn’t think you would and I thought you’d resent me.” Max was standing again, looking down at her as she continued. “But you offered,” she said, poking his chest with her pointer finger. “And I told her if you took it back now, I’d be done for. So she better mind her own business.”
She was saying a lot of things, Max thought. He knew after he’d pushed her to unfairly confess her feelings before, any big move forward in their relationship had to come from him. But they’d never talked about it directly and in her tipsy state, she was revealing she still feared he might not go. That he might abandon her yet.
“Helen, I’m going with you. It may take me a minute to remember what matters most sometimes, but I know where my life is.” Max bore into her with his eyes, trying to transplant the certainty he felt from his body to hers.
Helen felt her stomach flip and her mouth go dry. She pushed on his chest with the palms of both hands and then let her hands linger there. “You’re doing that thing again. Your Max thing.”
“What’s my Max thing?”
“That thing where you look at me like you’re inside me. Like you see everything. It makes me feel all warm everywhere…but also like I don’t know my own name or what I was doing a minute earlier. And it used to confuse the hell out of me.”
She’s saying so many things. He didn’t know how to describe what happened when they looked at each other. He only knew that from the moment he met her, he needed to know everything about her and he needed her to know everything about him. He’d felt that pull before he could name it. And when words weren’t enough to communicate, this is what they did.
His face broke out into a smirk. “You know, Helen, I’d have stopped looking at you that way if you’d have stopped inviting me in.” That was maybe the biggest lie Max Goodwin ever told.
Helen bit her lip and smirked back. “Lauren said tonight that watching us stare at each other at work felt more intrusive than if she’d walked in on two people having sex. Said it felt that inimate. Inimate. Int-a-mite.”
Max walked to the sink and refilled her water glass. “That sounds like Bloom, although something tells me she used more colorful language.”
“Yeah, but I told her it was nothing compared to how it felt when you looked at me like that when you were actually inside of me.”
“Jesus, Helen,” Max snickered, almost dropping the glass. “I don’t need Bloom walking around with that image in her head.”
Helen let out a wicked laugh. “Lauren is always walking around with those kind of images in her head.”
She moved around the island until she was standing right in front of him and ran a hand underneath his shirt, tracing the lines of his abdomen with her fingertips. The air around him became full with the smell of her. And Max felt his whole body respond to her touch.
“Do you know what I really want right now?” She asked.
“Hmmm?” He moaned.
“Pizza!” She said, bouncing on her toes.
Max shook his head, his mental whiplash apparent. “Pizza?”
“Yes, pizza, Max!” She slipped out of his arms before he could grab her. “Where’s my phone? I’ll order us a big old pizza. I’m so hungry.”
He reached for his phone. “Maybe I should do the ordering. What do you want on it?”
“Pepperoni and banana peppers.”
Max placed the order. “It’ll be here soon.”
She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Wanna make out on the couch til it gets here?”
Max was fairly certain that this woman would be the death of him, and he was absolutely sure it’s how he wanted to go out.
Twenty minutes later, Max and his swollen lips came back upstairs with the pizza. Music was playing and Helen was dancing with a complete lack of inhibition, filling every inch of empty space in their apartment. He stood taking her in for a moment, his eyes completely full with her.
They grabbed slices of pizza, but Helen kept dancing, waving her pizza with her as she went. Sober Helen would have been concerned about splattering sauce everywhere; tipsy Helen knew the mess didn’t matter.
“Max, when we get to London, we need to go on dates. Real dates.” It was said as a warning.
He chuckled. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Helen started listing off things she wanted to do in London and Max listened contentedly to her scattered ramblings and plans for their new life.
“You’re gonna love Christmas in London.” But as soon as she said it, her whole energy changed and she slumped down next to him on the couch. “We’re gonna spend Christmas with my mother. And she doesn’t understand or approve of my ‘instant family.’”
Max wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. “That’s okay. We’ll win her over.”
Helen’s eyes widened. “Max. She’s going to be ice cold or so judgmental. I don’t know which. But you’re gonna have no fun. She calls you that man.”
Max laughed. “Helen, I will be with you and Luna, and I won’t be with my own mother. So I’m happy to take whatever your mom wants to throw at me. And I’ve got a lifetime to prove her wrong.”
Helen ran a hand over the hem of his tattered gray hoodie. “I love this sweatshirt.”
Max found that odd. It was old and he hadn’t worn it in years. “I lost it for the longest time, but I found it crumpled up in the back of the closet when we started packing.”
There was just enough alcohol left in her system for a confession. “I had it.”
“You…what?”
“You left it hanging in your office the day I sent you home on leave with cancer. I wandered up there, and…stole it.”
She’s saying so many things. Max quietly contemplated the implications of her thievery.
“I didn’t know if you were coming back. And then…everything happened. And I wanted a piece of you. I slept in it for months. And then later…I just put it away in a drawer. But when I moved in here, I washed it in your detergent and crumpled it up and tossed it in your closet hoping you wouldn’t notice because…”
“I’m not that tidy?”
“Exactly.” They both laughed.
“You’d make a pretty good criminal, Helen Sharpe.”
Max wondered how many nights she laid in his sweatshirt thinking about him while he’d laid alone trying not to think about her amidst his grief and guilt. They’d been together even when they weren’t together. He knew now that they were always headed to exactly this place.
The sun was starting to come up, and Helen’s drunken exuberance had shifted into a slightly less drunken exhaustion. And when she’d finally danced and talked herself out, Max convinced her to go to bed with him.
“Maybe I should take a shower?” Helen said, sobering up just enough to know that she was a mix of tequila and sweat.
“We’ll shower together in the morning,” Max suggested. That satisfied her, and she didn’t fight it.
They exchanged gentle caresses and soft kisses as he helped her into her pajamas and again as he helped her wrap her hair for bed. He stood behind her and steadied her with his body as they brushed their teeth, smiling at each other in the bathroom mirror. Afterward, Max led her by the hand to bed. They snuggled into each other, Helen’s back pressed into Max’s front. And Max felt himself start to drift off, his arms full of her.
“Luna calls me ‘mum’ now.” Helen said out of nowhere.
Max smiled. “She does.”
“It’s…it’s…everything.”
He pulled her closer. “To me too.”
Max thought this was just another scattered thought as she drifted off to sleep. But Helen Sharpe had one more fear to lay at his feet tonight.
“If that went away, I’d…I’d…I don’t know.”
And then it hit Max like a ton of bricks that Helen wasn’t only scared that he wouldn’t go with her to London, but that he’d yank away the family she was finally letting herself build. He’d been so terrified that he would ask her to take on too much, too soon with Luna, but the whole time, she’d been terrified he wouldn’t ask enough of her.
He placed a kiss on her shoulder. “I think we should file adoption papers,” he said softly. “So you and Luna can feel safe in the knowledge that you have each other. Would…would you like that?”
She rolled over and buried her face in the crook of his neck, her hands pressed flat against his chest, and a leg draped over his. “Thank you,” she whispered against his skin.
And Max felt it happen. It was the exact moment Helen truly believed he was going with her, that they were a family. He smiled and enveloped her in his arms. “We’ll call the lawyer in the morning.” His heart was completely full with her.
It had taken them both a long time to realize that they hurt each other the most when they were trying to protect the other—from the truth, from the parts of themselves they thought were too broken, from their deepest desires. Turns out, all they ever had to do to stop the pain was to burden each other more, not less, and to ask for what they really needed. And what they both really needed was simply all of the other. Their lives were so very full because of each other.