Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Obviously Sloane hadn’t been expecting to find a ghost, octopus or otherwise.
She hadn’t been expecting to find anything at all.
Some part of her brain insisted that Max had engineered the whole thing and then removed the evidence while he was alone in her room last night.
If she’d been more awake at three in the morning, she probably would have said something, but it hadn’t even occurred to her until about thirty minutes ago, which was well after she’d slept in his bed and then fucked him again.
It was possible, at least. Sloane hadn’t been sure it was probable. Yesterday—no, two days ago—he’d held her on the library mezzanine while she shook from claustrophobia, and she couldn’t quite square that person with someone who’d purposefully scare the hell out of her in the middle of the night.
“Is that…” Max was saying now, staring in total bafflement at the inside of the AC unit. “What the hell is that?” He sniffed gingerly. “Is that peanut butter?”
“I think so,” Sloane confirmed. It was mostly on the…whatever it was… But it was also dotted all over the interior bottom of the unit, like something had tracked it around. Max reached toward it, but Sloane caught his wrist, nearly tumbling them both into the unit face-first.
“Sorry,” she said. Her face was in his shoulder, so she sat up. “We should probably use gloves. You never know.” Sloane actually wanted a full hazmat suit, but she was pretty sure Max hadn’t brought one.
Minutes later, finally gloved-up, Max carefully removed the mystery cardboard, holding one corner between two fingers. Sloane would have preferred tongs or something—she had a bad feeling about rats—but she took what she could get.
“Nighttime in Spookytown,” Max read, once he had the object in his hands: a board book for kids. There was an illustration of a gothic mansion surrounded by spooky trees on the front and a row of buttons down the side slathered in peanut butter. He pushed one with a gloved finger.
A wolf howled, long and tinny and familiar. Next to the button, in a thin layer of peanut butter, was something that looked like a tiny four-fingered handprint.
“You know,” Sloane said, staring, “if you gave me a hundred guesses, I still wouldn’t have gotten it right.”
“I almost don’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble,” Max said. “They might be a genius.”
Sloane reached out, pushed a button with a wrought-iron gate on it, and was rewarded with a long creaking sound. “I got haunted by rats.”
“It’s kind of brilliant,” Max said. “We’re in a city. There’s always rats around. Leave out some peanut butter and Nighttime in Spookytown, and bam. Ghosts.”
“There were rats. In my air conditioning.”
“They didn’t get into your room,” Max pointed out.
“You know about the Black Death, right?”
“We have antibiotics now! Look, if you come down with the bubonic plague, I’ll drive to LA and make you chicken soup until you’re better, okay? Since it’ll be my fault and all.”
Sloane looked at the board book and thought about it: Max at the stove in her kitchen, carefully tasting spoonfuls of soup with a tea towel slung over one shoulder. The two of them, sitting down together at her table, talking about their day.
“I should get the plague just so you have to,” she said, instead of That sounds nice, actually.
“You would,” Max said, smiling and sunlit.
In the end, Sloane didn’t call the San Diego County health inspector.
After she and Max wiped it clean of peanut butter and put the cover back on, she did call the hotel’s maintenance staff about a hole in her air conditioning.
The woman who came to her room to check it out took one very professional look, declared it had been tampered with, and made a call.
She apologized to Sloane for the strange noises but explained it had probably been birds or something.
No one said the word rats, even though Sloane knew they were all thinking it.
When Sloane and Max left their rooms, the woman from maintenance was at the end of the hall, talking on her phone and gesturing furiously.
“You disappointed?” Sloane asked. They were strolling along the pathway that led to the poison garden, past the thousand-dollar-per-night bungalows. Palm trees waved overhead and birds of paradise lined the walk.
“God, no,” Max said. He looked taken aback, then glanced at her, and said, “About what?”
“All the trickery? The laundry-symbol pentagram and the rats in the air conditioning?”
“Oh,” he said, and now Sloane really wanted to know what he’d thought she’d meant. “Nah, that’s part of the gig. People like to try shit. They think that if some guy on YouTube says that their place is definitely, for real haunted, they’ll get flooded with tourist dollars.”
“Are the fakes usually this bad?”
“Absolutely.” He shrugged. He didn’t look at her again, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, gaze straight ahead.
“And what people don’t realize is that the internet is full of videos where people swear up and down that every ghost they try to find is completely, one hundred percent real, and no one is flocking to most of those places. ”
“So you’re never getting invited back to make a sequel?
” she asked. It was a little past one in the afternoon.
They’d checked out two hours ago, then decided to have lunch at the taco joint by the pool, then mutually agreed that they should probably take one last spin around the outside of the hotel just to make sure that no spooky shit had been missed.
Now they were on the opposite end of the property from their cars, and traffic was going to be stupid by the time they got to Los Angeles.
“Why, you need another vacation?”
“I’m asking out of polite curiosity, not because I’m angling for an invite.” It actually hadn’t occurred to her. It did now, though.
“So you’d turn it down.”
“I didn’t say that,” Sloane told him. They turned a corner around a bungalow, and the breeze off the ocean—still a thousand feet away—ruffled the brim of her giant hat, so she held it down. “We had a pretty good time.”
“Even if there were no ghosts and someone lured rats into your AC, I made the hotel look pretty good,” Max agreed. “Well, except for the rats. But there are plenty of shots of it looking like the lovely, relaxing resort that it is. Plus, a hot girl in a bathing suit.”
Sloane turned so fast she nearly fell over.
“What, you think I mean you?” Max was standing in the middle of the path, grinning, because above all else he was a shithead who liked getting under her skin.
“Oh, sorry—did you mean the swimsuit model you must’ve snuck off with while I was doing my hair?”
He just laughed. “I promise not to put any swimsuit footage of you in the video. I don’t think I even got any.”
They started walking again. Sloane pushed the idea of Max and someone else out of her mind, since it obviously hadn’t happened. If it had, he probably would’ve told her. No reason not to.
“Though if you wanted to send me some swimsuit footage, I promise to keep it safe,” he said. “It’s a long drive from here to Sacramento.”
“Yeah, which is why you’re not supposed to look at your phone,” Sloane pointed out.
“There are rest stops.”
“I’m not sending you a video so you can get arrested for indecent exposure somewhere south of Stockton.”
“I’ve got a jacket. I’d cover up.” He was grinning at her again, bright and lovely and just a little bit lecherous, and Sloane felt like it wrapped around her torso and squeezed.
She kind of wanted to do it: Send him a picture and then tell him to call her while he got off to it.
In a rest-stop parking area. In the middle of the Central Valley, nervously watching the headlights on I-5.
“I think if a cop can tell you’re masturbating, you still get in trouble,” she guessed, though it wasn’t like she’d ever looked up the law before. It probably said lewd acts, right? The kind of thing that was wide open to interpretation?
“Puritans,” Max said, and Sloane laughed.
They didn’t find any haunted areas they’d missed, but it was nearly an hour before they finally wandered to the parking garage.
It was barely two in the afternoon, but Max still insisted on walking Sloane to her car, as if she didn’t live in LA and walk from her car to her apartment at midnight all the time.
“Drive safe,” she said, standing next to her Jetta. “How long’s the drive?”
Max folded his arms over his chest and sighed like he was thinking. It bunched up all the muscles in his upper body—shoulders and biceps and chest. All things Sloane kinda wanted to sink her teeth into.
“Probably ten or eleven hours,” he said. “With traffic and everything. Not too bad.”
It sounded bad to Sloane. She made the eight-to-ten-hour drive to Last Chance once, maybe twice per year, and thought it was miserable.
“Sorry—I should’ve gotten you out of here earlier,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.” Afternoon traffic was going to double her travel time home, and she was already not looking forward to it.
“This was better than driving,” Max said, shrugging. He unfolded his arms and put his hands in his pockets, shifting his stance like he couldn’t quite hold still.
“We’ll see what you say when it’s midnight and you’re not even to Stockton yet.”
“I’m pretty confident I won’t change my mind.”
Sloane laughed a short, breathy laugh, because she wasn’t sure what else to do. “We’ll see,” she said, and then, “thanks for inviting me. This was fun.”
“You mean betting you?” Max asked, one eyebrow raised. “Thanks for coming. It was a lot more fun with you around.”
Then they looked at each other, and Sloane knew she should get into her car because they both had long drives ahead, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to open the door.
“You don’t usually fuck your assistant?” was the next thing that came out of her mouth, and Max snorted.
“I don’t usually have an assistant. And the last couple times it was my cousin Jeremiah.”
“Is he cute?”
“Did you hear where I said cousin?”
“There are plenty of cultures where it’s totally acceptable—”
“Jesus Christ, get out of here,” Max said, but he was still grinning at her. “And don’t complain to me if you’re in traffic for five hours because you talked about cousin-fucking instead of getting in your car.”
He could stay the night at her place. If he left early in the morning, he’d get out before traffic and probably be in Sacramento by noon, which made total sense from a purely logistical standpoint.
But he’d spend the night, and then what?
It would be the same thing all over again.
Besides, it sounded like he did this drive all the time. He knew what he was doing.
“Sorry for being an interesting conversationalist,” she said, instead of How about one more night? “Drive safe.”
“You, too. Text me when you get home.”
“Sure,” she said, and then they were just standing there, looking at each other, like Sloane had forgotten how to open car doors and Max had forgotten how to walk away.
Before she could overthink it, Sloane leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“See you around,” she said, opened her car door, and got in.
The first thing Sloane did when she got back to her apartment, after opening all the windows and flopping onto the couch, was text Max and then toss her phone onto the coffee table.
She took several deep breaths and then thought about what she was going to eat for dinner.
Was there anything in the fridge? Had Jess, her roommate, gone grocery shopping while Sloane was in San Diego?
Or had she done what she normally did when left alone and eaten crackers with peanut butter, Oreos, and olives straight from the jar?
Sloane wasn’t judging. Last time Jess had been out of town, she’d had a bag of baby carrots and a can of tuna for dinner. In her defense, she’d at least used a fork for the tuna.
She was still on the couch when Max texted back.
Max
Welcome home. I’m almost to Santa Clarita.
Sloane
Don’t text me while you’re driving!
Max
I’m using voice to text, chill.
Sloane
Don’t do that either, it’s still distracting
There are studies showing it’s still not safe
Max
Do the studies show how boring this drive is when there’s traffic and you don’t have anything to distract yourself with?
Sloane
You’re not supposed to be distracted!
Listen to a podcast, stop texting me, voice or not
Max
But podcasts don’t lecture me about road safety
Sloane typed I bet you could find one and then deleted it because she wasn’t going to encourage him, for fuck’s sake. Though if he got into a fender bender—nothing major, obviously—because he was texting, and then wound up coming back here because it was too late to…
She sighed dramatically at herself, sat up, and texted Jess to ask if she wanted in on getting shawarma delivered.