Prologue #2
“What?”
“C’mere.”
Sloane glanced around. There was no one within earshot.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“Just tell me from there. Who’s gonna hear you?”
He sighed and looked like he was trying not to smile and turned the glass around in his careful hands that still seemed slightly too large for it, and Sloane had drunk too much because everything about that was…interesting.
“Please? My professional reputation is at stake here.”
Sloane tilted her head back and gave the biggest sigh she could, right up at the tree.
“Fine,” she said, righted herself, put her champagne glass on the ground where it would definitely not be a problem later, took her feet off the chair opposite her, and leaned in, hands anchored next to her thighs. “What?”
“I don’t think there’s actually a Newt Gobbler,” he said, voice low and hushed, his face somehow perfectly serious.
“Okay,” Sloane said after a beat.
“I think there were never newts in that cave, and I think Crazy Brian just likes getting to talk into a camera and then read the YouTube comments about it later.”
“So you’re a charlatan.”
“Come on, I’m not mixing up sugar water and claiming it cures cancer, for fuck’s sake,” he said, and now he was smiling.
Like it was funny that he was lying to people all the time.
“Some guy says there’s a Newt Gobbler; I go interview the guy, look for the Newt Gobbler, and when I don’t find the Newt Gobbler I say, Hey, so it looks like there’s no Newt Gobbler here. ”
“You’re still leading people on,” Sloane said, which got an eyebrow raise from Max, so she kept going. “You never say, There continues to be no evidence of any of these fucking cryptids; you say, We haven’t found these fucking cryptids yet. There’s a difference.”
“First, if I said fucking, I’d get de-monetized.” Sloane rolled her eyes at him. “And second, of course I say that. The yet is the whole point. Without the yet it’s just a weirdo and a cave with no newts.”
“It’s a cave with no newts no matter what you say about it.”
Max looked at her. It took a long time, the looking. He looked at Sloane with his copper-brown eyes and his hands too gentle on that old-fashioned glass, and Sloane looked right back because like hell was Max Golding going to make her feel rummaged through like this.
“You never hoped for more?” he finally asked. “You never heard the wind through the gorge and wanted to it to be something more than physics?”
“I like physics,” Sloane said, because why was he impugning physics? Physics held the world together.
“You know what I mean,” he went on and gestured with the glass. “More than this. Bigger.”
Now it was Sloane’s turn to look: at brown eyes and silver-rimmed glasses, at the live oak tree stretched over them, at the wedding party still on the dance floor surrounded by the tall, thick trunks of old pine, at the deep sky beyond and the darkness in the woods.
Last Chance was perched in the Sierras halfway between Tahoe and Sacramento, and it had one road in and that same road back out.
It had a population of eleven thousand and a newspaper that reported on lost dogs.
It had a high school, an elementary school, and a town hall a century and a half old.
It had never quite lost its boomtown feel, first thanks to the mines and now thanks to the tourists.
As far as Sloane could tell, that was all it was ever going to be.
“I hoped for more, but not like that,” she said, like Max had lost his mind or missed the point completely, or maybe both. “I wanted something bigger and better than Last Chance, not bigger and better than physics.”
“No imagination,” Max said, and made a face Sloane couldn’t quite parse. “It’s all a good story if you tell it right. That’s the whole point.”
“You’re still lying to people.”
“People love getting lied to.” Now there was a little smile playing around his lips. “They love that little thrill, the there are no newts in this cave, but maybe in the next one?”
The newt thing had gotten out of hand. Sloane was going to have weird dreams about newts. She’d also probably think of Max and his pretty eyes and solid hands the next time someone else brought up a newt, and ugh, why.
“That’s not a thrill, that’s betrayal,” she said.
Max rolled his eyes. “Come with me sometime.” Sloane had no idea what he was talking about, so she stared at him until he kept talking. “On a gig. Looking for Bigfoot is fun. Come see what you’re missing.”
“No, thanks.”
“What if I made it a bet?” Max asked, easy and friendly, leaning forward a little more. “If Sarah and Michael get married before Nicole and Gillian, you come record a video with me. If it’s the other way around, I’ll come carry your suitcases at a conference or something.”
“I don’t really need suitcase help,” Sloane said, because this was stupid and she had to say something.
“Then I’ll be your assistant who clicks the slide projector.”
“What? I don’t—slide projector? Like, with slides?”
Max started laughing.
“It’s a laptop,” she said, suddenly baffled and overwhelmed and feeling a little like there was a joke she didn’t get. “It’s all laptops, with a remote—”
“Then put me to work in whatever boring way you want. Jesus. Is it a bet or not?”
Sloane glanced over her shoulder. Nicole and Gillian hadn’t been dating that long, as far as she knew, but Sarah and Michael had been together since high school—half the people she’d gone to high school were married to their high school sweethearts—so probably, they’d get engaged first.
“Fine,” she said, and couldn’t help letting a tiny smile onto her face. “You’re on.”
“Excellent.” Max smiled in the warm, pretty light with his imperfect teeth, and Sloane had to look away for a moment.