Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Max woke up alone the next morning. Which was exactly what he expected, given that Sloane had politely declined his offer to stay over, pointing out that her room, which included her book, pajamas, sleep mask, and skincare routine, was about ten feet away.
He’d escorted her home nonetheless, which she seemed to find very funny.
If he hadn’t woken up alone, it would’ve either been very alarming or proof of ghosts. Or both.
Sloane answered the door mid-yawn, one hand covering her mouth, took one look at Max, and held the door open.
“Is that coffee?” she asked, like the paper cup in each hand was going to be something else.
“No, it’s rat poison,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Is it caffeinated rat poison?” she asked, taking one and pulling the lid off to peek inside.
“Should be.”
“Great,” she said, then glanced from the coffee to Max’s face in surprise. “Just cream, no sugar?”
“That still how to you take it?”
“Did you text me and I answered you in my sleep?”
Max grinned, glanced around, and settled back against the hotel desk next to the TV. Her room was a mirror image of his, just with more beds. “Nope. I remembered is all.”
Sloane blinked. She was wearing a T-shirt that said UCLA VOLUNTEER DAY on the front, so old it was nearly worn through in spots, and cotton shorts that looked comfortable.
The shorts weren’t very long, the shirt was pretty see-through, and she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Max made a heroic amount of eye contact while wondering how he was going to make it through the day.
“From Sarah and Andrew’s wedding last year,” he said. “Remember how a bunch of us wound up crashing at the house that her sister had rented and their great aunt talked us all into doing Fireball shots?”
“Oh, god,” Sloane said. Max sympathized. He’d also never done a Fireball shot again. “Yeah, that was…a night.”
“You wanted coffee with cream and no sugar the next morning when we all woke up,” Max said, shrugging like he hadn’t been half-dead the morning after the wedding, when he woke up face down in a recliner. To date, it was still the second-most uncomfortable place he’d ever slept an entire night.
“And you remembered that?” she asked, and a weird look crossed her face. “I don’t remember how you take your coffee. To be honest, I mostly remember, uh. Vomiting.”
He shrugged again, like it was a fluke that he’d remembered and not because—before the Fireball shots—they’d spent a while arguing about Bigfoot, then a while dancing, and if they hadn’t made those poor, Fireball-related choices, Max would have very much liked to leave with her that night.
“Sometimes I remember weird shit,” he said, and took a long sip of coffee. Thankfully, it was good coffee, which wasn’t always the case in hotels.
“Apparently.”
“I came over to give you coffee and say that breakfast is in my room whenever you’re ready,” he told her, standing up straight again.
“There’s breakfast?”
“I brought tiny boxes of cereal and milk,” Max admitted. “Fancy hotels always think they’re too good for free breakfast. There’s also yogurt and bananas.”
“Someone was prepared,” she said, and took a long drink of coffee, lifting her arm enough for Max to see the points of both nipples against the thin fabric of her T-shirt. Maybe if he rushed over to his room and jerked off as fast as he could, he’d have a chance at staying professional today?
When he looked back up, Sloane was watching him with one eyebrow raised. There went that plan.
“Give me ten minutes to put on something decent and I’ll be over,” she said, still smirking.
“Sure,” Max said. “See you in ten.”
Before he left, he gave up and checked her out again.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not a regular human language,” Sloane said when Max walked over, a short stack of books under one arm.
“Is it an irregular human language?” he asked, pulling up an armchair. He was careful not to drag it over the tiled floor of the Bellwether library.
“I’m so glad you’re here to ask these questions,” she deadpanned.
Max grinned, put his stack of books on a side table, and settled into the leather chair.
He was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a light blue linen shirt; he felt like he should be wearing a smoking jacket and top hat, or something.
Whatever men wore to look fancy in armchairs in the early 1900s.
“Someone has to,” he said, and Sloane made a noncommittal noise.
“It’s not a major language,” she said, and pulled up the photo of the wall with black light writing on it, turning her laptop screen slightly toward Max.
“It’s not Hindi or Farsi or Thai or Amharic or any of the common ones that don’t use the Roman alphabet.
There’re hundreds of lesser-spoken languages with different alphabets, obviously, but my photo searching didn’t turn anything up. ”
Sloane was half-sprawled on a sapphire-blue chaise, her laptop open in her lap, her back against the arm of the lounge as she gestured at the screen.
Before she’d shown up for breakfast in Max’s room, she’d changed from see-through pajamas to a rust-red dress that went all the way to the floor.
It hadn’t been until she’d sat on his bed to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch that he’d realized there was a long slit up one side.
Currently, one side of the dress was falling away from the chaise and pooling on the tile floor. Sloane’s leg was visible to her upper thigh. Max was having normal thoughts about it.
“And the Google photo search would’ve turned up the popular invented languages,” she was saying now. “Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki. I’ve got some more stuff to look at, but it’s probably nonsense.”
“Or a demonic alphabet that we can’t read because our human minds would be flayed open if we tried,” Max pointed out.
“Sure,” Sloane said. “Or it’s the language of demons who carefully melt candles in a safe environment and then take them to the attic full of old wood because they don’t want to burn anything down. I hear demons are big on fire safety.”
“They’d know.”
Sloane leaned her head back and turned her neck just enough to give Max a conspiratorial, amused look, then went back to her laptop. Max pulled the first book off the pile, crossed his legs at the ankle, and started flipping through it.
Twenty minutes later he was sitting sideways in his chair, with one leg over the other arm of the chair and one folded underneath himself, facing Sloane on the chaise.
“There were rumors that Belle was a witch,” he told her. “Apparently some tent revival preacher claimed that she made a deal with the devil for money and power, and the price was her husband’s soul.”
Sloane snorted. “That’s not even creative of him,” she said, scrolling down a webpage with squiggles all over it.
“Men have been calling their female betters witches since time immemorial. It’s dangerous to have something a man thinks should be his, because the next thing you know, you’re bound to a pole and your feet are hot. ”
Max flipped a page, because he wasn’t about to argue. “Also, if you get a coin from your lover and toss it into the koi pond—”
“You poison the koi?”
“Well, yes,” Max admitted, skimming the page. “Which is why they don’t let you do that anymore. But if you did throw your lover’s coin into the koi pond, they’d be smitten with you forever, or until you go back to the pond and throw your hat in.”
Sloane had her head back over the arm of the chaise again, the tendons in her neck flexing as she looked over at Max. “It’s very practical of the koi pond to allow for a reversal,” she said. “Do you get the hat back?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Are you supposed to steal the coin? Or does the lover have to give you the coin?”
Max sighed and flipped another page. “It says get a coin, Sloane. It’s a book of hotel lore that was published in”—he checked the copyright page—“nineteen thirty-five. It also says that if you take a lock of your hair and burn it on the promenade under a quarter moon, you’ll find your true love within the fortnight. ”
“Americans should use fortnight more,” Sloane said thoughtfully.
“Ooh, here’s a good one,” he said. “Write the full name of your beloved on a scrap of paper, tie it with string you previously wrapped around their wrist three times, consecrate it with your blood and theirs—”
“Damn, okay,” said Sloane.
“—and bury it under the northernmost paving stone in the library courtyard.”
He paused, and they both turned their heads to look out the window at the far end of the book stacks, where birds of paradise and palm trees surrounded a stone-paved courtyard.
“If you do that, your love will never leave you until the stone blows away…or until you remove the note and burn it.”
“You think there’re bloody papers under there?” Sloane asked.
“Maybe. I’m definitely putting a camera out there tonight, though.”
“I can’t wait for your incredible footage of palm trees in the wind,” she teased.
“I could get a ghost desperately trying to dig up a paving stone. You never know.”
Sloane made another noncommittal noise, and after a few more minutes she sighed, sat up, and turned toward Max, putting her laptop to one side.
“Okay,” she said, pulling her feet onto the chaise to sit cross-legged and arranging her skirt to cover both knees.
The slit fell open over one immediately, the fabric settling into her lap and leaving her thigh bare.
Sloane either didn’t notice or pretended not to.
“I’m pretty sure the glow-in-black-light writing is just scribbles on the wall that are supposed to look spooky.
Or it’s a cipher or something. I’m not a code-cracker. ”
“So it’s demons, then,” Max said reasonably.
“I will drive back to Los Angeles right now,” Sloane threatened, and he laughed.
“But you’re having so much fun proving me wrong,” he said. “Among other things.”
“Whose idea was it for you to come here?” she asked, ignoring that last bit, though Max could’ve sworn she was blushing. “Who contacted who? Almost all your other videos are in Northern California.”
“So you do watch my videos.”
“Yes. Obviously,” she said. “I wanted to know what I was getting into. I wasn’t going to come on one of your wild-goose chases unprepared.”
“You know, I’ve never actually chased a goose,” Max said thoughtfully. “There are some animal ghosts, but I don’t know about geese.”
“Probably because they’re all in hell,” Sloane said, straight-faced, and Max snorted.
“Which one’s your favorite?”
“Goose?”
“Video,” Max said, very patiently.
“I don’t know,” she said, and blushed. It caught Max off-guard for a second. “I mean, I liked the one you did about vengeful tree spirits in the Redwoods?”
“That was a fun one,” Max agreed. “I always love going to— Wait, is that the one where it’s pouring rain the whole time and I’m in a white T-shirt?”
“Maybe?” Sloane said. She blushed harder. Max closed the book around his finger and grinned at her. “I don’t remember your outfits.”
“I guess you haven’t watched the one about the interdimensional swimming hole east of Crescent City. I take my shirt all the way off in that one.”
“I’ve got better sources of eye candy than grainy night-vision videos,” Sloane said, which was downright insulting. Max’s videos weren’t grainy. “Anyway, whose idea was the Hotel Bellwether?”
Max sighed. “Theirs,” he admitted. “Originally we were going to going to explore an old ranch outside Fresno, but then Bellwether contacted me and asked if I wanted to come shoot here.”
“I think you got played,” Sloane said. She said it gently, for her, and Max laughed.
“Are you kidding? Even if it’s fake, it’s still a great story. There’s fake demon writing and a pentagram, and it’s all getting explained by my hot, feisty assistant. Are you making that face at hot or feisty?”
“I’m making this face at you.”
“I’m just saying: If you want to help grow the channel, go put on a swimsuit—”
“Why? You didn’t pack any white T-shirts?”
“It’s a different audience!”
“Right, the perverts in the comments,” she said, extended one leg—the bare one, her skirt draping in the exact way that kept it from being indecent—and pushed the arm of his chair with her toes.
Nothing happened.
“I thought that would rock back,” she admitted, pushing again. The leather dimpled, and before she could do anything else, Max sat up and grabbed her ankle.
“Quit it,” he said, and Sloane tilted her head against the back of the chaise and looked at him through half-lidded eyes.
“You gonna make me?”
Max glanced around the library: It was a weekday morning.
The light streamed in from the tall windows.
There were tables in the middle of the library and secret little lounges against the walls, between bookshelves, which was where they were.
Max had seen one other patron that morning, and he didn’t see her right now.
“How about we make another bet,” he offered. “If I win, you narrate the next segment while sitting in the hot tub in your bathing suit—”
Sloane rolled her eyes hard enough to cut him off. “I’m not catering to your drooling pervert audience,” she said. “But if you want, I can film you getting out of the pool.”
Max sighed and let her ankle go, then pushed himself out of the chair and settled next to Sloane on the chaise. “I can barter,” he said. “I’m a very reasonable man when it comes to exploiting a hot woman for views.”
“Look, you’re going about this the wrong way,” she said. “Your first step should be some slutty little shorts. I mean, what is that, even?” Sloane gestured at Max’s legs, which were covered almost to the knee.
She had a very good point, and as an appreciator of slutty little shorts, Max didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it.
“Yeah? How short?” Max had one arm slung over the back of the chaise. Sloane turned her head, rested her cheek against it, and gave him a long, slow once-over.
Max hadn’t found a chance to jerk off that morning, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d be half-hard in his non-slutty shorts either way.
Sloane leaned, close enough for Max to smell her hair—lemons or something—and then drew a line across his thigh that was not at all far from his dick.
“Maybe around there?” she said and, instead of removing her hand, rested it there, her fingertips a few inches from his dick, which was quickly heading for two-thirds hard. “You know. Give or take. Depending on the situation.”
“Quick question,” Max said. Sloane lifted her eyebrows. “Any reason last night needed to be a one-time thing?”
“I can’t think of anything,” Sloane said. She squeezed his thigh again, and Max wasn’t looking forward to the walk through the hotel lobby. “And there’re condoms in my suitcase.”