Beautiful Stranger

to leave before he pressed me to answer. I could be curious about what he wanted between us, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit it.
    My beer buzz from earlier in the day was wearing off, and with the weight of the burger in my stomach I could have curled up on the sidewalk and gone to sleep. But it was only half-past eight, and I wasn’t ready for the night to end. The idea of waiting until Friday to see him felt impossible . . . unless he changed that rule.
    The East Village was crowded with twenty-somethingsout for Saturday night drinking and music. Max reached for my hand, slipped his fingers in between mine, and squeezed. Out of habit I started to protest that we were not going to walk down the street like this, but he surprised me by pulling me into the dimly lit bar next door.
    “I know you’re full, but sit in here, sip a cocktail, and you’ll wake up. I’m not nearly done with you.”
    God I liked the sound of that.
    Squeezed tight together in a booth, we sat in a dark corner, me sipping vodka tonics, Max drinking a few beers and telling me all about growing up in Leeds with Irish Catholic parents, and born smack in the middle of seven sisters and three brothers. They’d lived three kids to a bedroom, and it was so different from my childhood that I barely blinked the entire time he regaled me with stories of the time they decided to form a family brass band, or when, at eighteen, the oldest sister, Lizzy, was caught in the family Volvo having sex with their local priest, consensual sex. Max’s oldest brother, Daniel, left after high school to go on a Catholic mission to Myanmar, and had come home a Theravada Buddhist. His youngest sister, Rebecca, married right out of college and, at twenty-seven, already had six children. The others had stories just as riveting: the brother born just ten months after Max, Niall, was second in command atthe London Underground; one of the middle sisters was a chemistry professor at Cambridge and had five children, all boys.
    Max admitted that sometimes he felt mediocre compared to his siblings. “I studied art at uni and then got a business finance degree so I could sell art. In my father’s eyes, I was a miserable failure, both in my choice of career and in my failure to produce Catholic babies before I hit thirty.”
    But when he said this, he laughed, as if being an absolute failure wouldn’t have really mattered that much to his parents in the end. His father, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer the week after Max finished graduate school, and his “mum” had decided she needed a change, so she moved with him to the States.
    “Neither of us knew a soul here. I had a couple of indirect connections from uni, and some from my business program—friends of friends on Wall Street—but I knew only that I wanted to be involved in New York art ventures, and wanted to partner with someone who knew science and technology. That’s how I met Will.”
    He sat back and finished his beer. Seriously, the man could drink. I’d lost count of how many beers he’d had and he didn’t seem affected at all.
    “Well, I met him at a pub, admittedly, but we hit it off and almost the next day we started our little pet project. A couple of years later we brought on James tohead up the technology piece, because Will could no longer juggle biotech and IT at the same time.”
    “How do you not have a giant beer gut?” I asked, laughing. It was unfair. His body was what Julia would call “shredded” and he had muscles on his torso I didn’t even know existed.
    He looked confused for a beat before glancing down at his empty glass. “Are you taking the piss?”
    “Absolutely,” I said, feeling the effects of my second vodka tonic. My cheeks were warm and my smile seemed to keep growing. “I am absolutely taking the piss.”
    “Yeah,” he said, shaking his head, “that saying doesn’t really work so well in an American accent.”
    “Do you like American accents, or no? Because the whole British thing you have going on makes me want to do very wicked things to your mouth.”
    He licked his lips quickly, and actually seemed to blush. “American accents aren’t particularly sexy, no. Your little Chicago thing is cute, though. Especially when you’re tipsy. It’s so flat and like—” He made a horrific whining noise that I had to believe was like no sound I’d ever made.
    I cringed and he laughed.
    “I absolutely do not sound like that.”
    “Okay, that might