Harder We Fade by Kate Dawes

Morgan. I didn’t want to do that at the table in front of Loralei and Monica. I just wanted the topic to go away at that moment, and it did, but I was still immensely curious about her.
    I could only find a few pictures. I immediately started to compare myself to her. She was taller than me, and had lighter hair. Her face had angular features, while mine were softer. In short, we looked nothing alike, and I found some relief in that.
    I got to the office and found Max sitting on the couch. Papers were strewn everywhere — next to him, on the table, on the floor — but all in neat stacks, no mess. I’d seen it before. He was in script deconstruction mode, a process he always did that involved actually physically taking a script apart and playing around with rearranging scenes. He had done it a few times with screenwriting software, but gave that up, saying this method made him think better.
    He looked up as I stepped into his office. “I thought you were spending the day with the ladies.”
    I closed the door behind me, freezing in place as I stared at him.
    He moved the papers off his lap and stood. “What’s wrong, Liv?” He could always read my face in a microsecond.
    When he got close to me, I threw my arms around his waist, feeling myself enveloped in his strong embrace.
    He kissed me on the forehead.
    I looked up. “I’m sorry, but I have to know.” I swallowed hard as he looked down at me, a look of extreme concern on his face. “Tell me about Ty.”
    Max’s eyes closed instantly as he let out a heavy, long sigh.
    “I don’t talk about it.”
    “Yeah, I kind of picked up on that.”
    He paused, then said, “It’s in the past, Olivia. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
    “It matters to me.”
    “Why?”
    I pulled him by the hand and we went over to the couch. Max sat and I lowered myself onto his lap, putting my arms around his neck.
    “It’s a part of you,” I said. “I want to know.”
    He shook his head.
    “Is it too painful?” I asked.
    “I told you, it doesn’t matter anymore. I worked through it and I’m over it. It’s like it was never part of my life.”
    I got a chill down my spine when he said that. For some reason, I took it as coldly as one could possibly mean it.
    “That sounds terrible,” he continued, correcting himself. “I don’t mean it like that. I had to move on, and the only way to do that was to not look back.”
    Although the circumstances were different, that’s kind of what I had been doing with regard to Chris. There was nothing harsh about my decision to dismiss Chris from my past, and now I understood that Max didn’t mean it that way about Tyler Morgan, either.
    And then, suddenly, without any prompting from me, Max reversed his earlier statement about not talking about her and he opened up. “She lived with me. It wasn’t quite a year. Did they tell you this already?”
    “Some of it,” I said.
    Max emitted a soft laugh. “Let me guess. Loralei slipped up.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “She’s always doing shit like that. Be careful what you tell her. I thought about telling you when Krystal was in real trouble.”
    I hadn’t even considered a connection between the two. “Is that why you helped her?”
    He nodded. “It happens all the time, especially in this town, but because she’s a friend of yours, it was too close to home and I knew if I didn’t try to help it would haunt me.”
    “You saved her life.”
    “I don’t know about that,” he said.
    I pushed back from him, taking his face between my hands. “You did.”
    I kissed him and we fell together — Max on his back, me on top of him. It wasn’t sexual, it was purely an emotional moment.
    I lay my head on his chest, thinking about all that I’d just learned about him, and decided to let the silence continue for a few moments.
    “I love this town,” he said, “almost everything about it. I’ve just seen that too many times, and with her…it was unbearable.”
    I watched