Wes patted him on the shoulder.

“It’s not important how long you took to get to the party, what’s important is that you got here at all. And if I can give you some advice …”

“ ‘If,’ he says, like there’s any way I could stop him from doing it,” Max said to his water glass.

Wes kept talking like he’d heard nothing.

“Take your time with this. She doesn’t like snap decisions; be thoughtful on this one, as much as it kills you.”

Max grinned.

“Speaking of, I think I forgot to tell you I almost proposed to her on the spur of the moment when we went to Hawaii. Scratch that—I would have proposed to her, but she stopped me.”

Wes turned to face Max, his mouth wide open.

“Yeah,” Max said. “So. You’re probably right about taking my time with this.”

A few minutes later, the buzzer rang.

“And there’s our food,” Wes said. “I’m warning you, I got a salad and I’m going to make you eat at least ten bites of it before you have any pizza.”

Max ignored that. He’d just remembered something Olivia said a long time ago. He might have an idea of how to do this.

But he still had to figure out what to say to make her realize how serious he was about her, about them. And the biggest question was, would she be willing to give this another try, despite everything?

God, he hoped so.

Chapter Twenty-One

In the two and a half weeks since she’d broken up with Max, Olivia had tried to be angry. It was always easier to get over something—or someone—when you were angry at them. Pure, righteous anger, that’s what she needed. She thought of that moment when he’d looked at her across the auditorium with that patented charming smile, to try to get her to talk publicly about her arrest, and she hoped she’d feel that wave of fury she did at the time. But instead, all she could feel was sorrow.

How had she let herself fall in love with Max in the first place? He’d been determined to date her from the very beginning, but she’d known they wouldn’t work—she should have listened to herself. And now she just missed him so damn much.

Just to get it over with, she’d sent Alexa and Jamila identical text messages on that Monday afterward: “Max and I broke up, I don’t want to talk about it.” Jamila had obeyed her command and hadn’t asked her a single question about it, and so had Alexa … for the first few days. After that, she’d somehow gotten Olivia to spill the whole story to her. She was fiercely on Olivia’s side, but also kept beating the whole “don’t give up on love” drum, which Olivia ignored.