Melted: A MaxTul AU story

Chapter forty-four: Dinner at the Pakorns

While everyone greeted Max and introduced him to Plustor's wife, Tul was having an inner battle. He knew that he should be angrier at himself than at all those other unseen and unknown people who had seen Max that afternoon, but he wasn't. He couldn't help it. He had an immediate physical hatred towards all of them.

He could imagine what it must have been like, Max walking through the crowd, deftly talking to both the passing waiters and high-ranking government officials with equal aplomb. Max might not notice, but Tul noticed how people at Shilapath had warmed to his personality. Who wouldn't feel special by that bright smile or the way he seemed to listen and hear the better you speak?

Tul was so busy thinking about the growing number of possible people for him to hate, that he barely greeted Max when he greeted everyone. Instead, the Tul that the Pakorns saw was not the Tul that Pongpat and Itty were afraid they would see but the cold Tul that people knew from the negotiation table at work.

In fact, Max was actually a little concerned that something had happened when he first greeted the family because Tul  looked as if he wanted to kill everyone he saw. He had seen Tul angry and upset before, but those times were nothing like this. He wondered what they had been talking about before he arrived to put such a murderous look on Tul's face. Tul sat next to Max, and Max could feel his tension and felt both relief and concern. An angry Tul would not have "the look," so Max wouldn't have to worry about him revealing anything about their "sort of" relationship accidentally, but this didn't keep Max from worrying about Tul.

Max was not only seated next to Tul but also next to Tul's father at one end of the table. Directly across from him was Taina, Plustor's wife, with Plustor across from Tul, and Metinee at the other end of the table. The seating arrangement made perfect sense considering they were in the smaller dining room at a table that could only seat 8-10 people at the most, but it was probably the worst seating position for Tul. Max had worried about Tul forgetting and automatically putting food on his plate, but he knew he was was the one who was going to have to watch himself because Tul in this mood was more likely to pick at his food, waiting for his dinner nightmare to be over.

If it weren't for these underlying family dynamics, Max thought that dinner could have been pleasant. Channarong was genuinely interested in the historical information Max had unearthed about the company, much of which Channarong did not know himself. Max even suggested that the CEO of Shilapth may want to consider having a display of the some of the artefacts in the lobby. It seemed a shame to leave so many items in boxes in the archives where most people didn't even know they were there. The more he talked to Tul's father, the more he thought of his loss and what Tul had lost all those years. This man was warm. This man could have been the father that Tul craved.

In his conversation with Tul's father, Max was mindful to try to include everyone else as much as possible. This effort also gave him a reason to keep looking around the table as he talked. He wanted in particular to see how Metinee and Plustor responded to Channarong's keen interest. He also wanted to see how they would treat him. He already knew that Plustor disliked him because he couldn't bribe him, but he wasn't sure about Metinee. He had heard from Tul and everyone at the company about how much she adored her husband, but her relationship to the people that her husband favored was very mixed.

Metinee looked at Channarong with such love and warmth that Max would have liked her on sight if he had not known that any care for others seemed to be used up by Channarong and to a lesser extent Plustor. However, Max noticed that her love for Channarong seemed to be combined with a sense of indulgence, as if she thought it "cute" how interested he was in the information Max shared.

Plustor, on the other hand, looked like all the attention he was getting from Channarong was giving Tul's stepbrother more reasons to dislike him. His reaction—he was barely able to keep from rolling his eyes a couple of times when his father laughed at some story that Max revealed about Shilapath's past—made Max wonder what part of Plustor's childhood made him feel so insecure in his father's love.