Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Max knew he shouldn’t have sent the pictures.
Not because they were unwelcome—he’d asked, because he wasn’t the kind of asshole who sent that shit without a clear invitation—but because shirtless pictures of him in bed had led to a picture of Sloane in a white tank top that was practically see-through, and things had escalated from there.
They hadn’t talked—hadn’t really even been texting—just sent back and forth snapshots that didn’t leave a lot of room for doubt.
Los Angeles already felt too far away when he talked to Sloane over the phone or FaceTime, something he’d been finding excuses to do more and more for the past few weeks. When she sent pictures of herself naked in bed, pleased, a vibrator still in her other hand, the distance felt impossible.
“There’s usually a meetup at Oddfellows on Wednesday night,” Max was saying as he inched forward, the streetlights already on even though he’d just left work. The first week after the time change was always a traffic nightmare. “Everybody who’s in town goes and gets drunk before Thanksgiving.”
“So you can be hungover around family? Sounds fun,” said Sloane, her voice coming through the speakers of his car.
“I mean, you don’t get that drunk,” Max explained. “Just enough to have fun and tell your secret crush that you have a crush on them, and then you walk home, and if your parents are still up they give you that look and you go to sleep in your childhood bedroom. It’s tradition.”
“Is this a thing?” she asked, and Max rolled his eyes. “Does everyone do this?”
“Yes,” he said, achieving nearly twenty miles per hour. “Everyone but you.”
“I told you, it’s a billion-hour drive and then a billion-hour drive back.”
They’d had this conversation before, each time a little different but along the same lines: Sloane gave all the reasons she couldn’t possibly come up to Last Chance for Thanksgiving, all thoughtful and logical and perfectly valid, and Max told her all the fun she’d be missing.
He told himself that he wasn’t trying to talk her into it.
He told himself that it didn’t even matter when he’d get to see her again.
He told himself that a couple of casual hookups were exactly that—casual—and that was fine.
Unfortunately, Max knew when he was lying to himself. It was a curse.
“So listen to a podcast. You’ve already got more than enough dirty pictures of me in your phone to make the rest stops worthwhile,” he said, grinning at nothing and frantically stomping down his wayward thoughts.
“I’m not—” she started, then swore, presumably at another car.
It was a habit they’d gotten into over the past week: talking as they both drove home from work.
Max had started looking forward to it earlier and earlier every day.
“You’re the one who uses them at rest stops.
I save them for the privacy of my room, thanks. ”
Max had never actually jerked off at a rest stop, on I-5 or anywhere. “It does make the drive feel shorter,” he claimed anyway.
“I bet it feels longer if you get arrested,” Sloane said.
“Live a little.”
“I’m nearly positive there’re better ways of doing that.”
Max looked over at a Safeway parking lot, people rushing in and out, and told himself not to say the thing that had been on the tip of his tongue for days now.
“Spend Tuesday night here before you head up to town,” he blurted, failing.
“Here in Sacramento, I mean. If you want to.” Silence on the other end of the line.
Shit. “Just in case that last hour up the mountain was a deal breaker. You could drive it Wednesday morning instead. It’s just—just, you know.
A place to crash and make the drive shorter. ”
The silence grew even longer. Max gripped his steering wheel and took a deep breath and mentally swore up a storm, because what did he think?
She was going to drive all that way just to see him?
It was only an hour or so from Sacramento to Last Chance—an hour up a twisting mountain road in the dark, probably, but Sloane had grown up there and she could most likely drive that road blindfolded—and Max thought that his presence was gonna sweeten the deal?
“I know you’d—”
“Okay.”
Silence again. When the fuck had Max forgotten how to talk?
“Okay, meaning—”
“I have to make sure I can get both days off,” Sloane said quickly.
There was the sound of a horn from her end of the line, and she muttered It’s a turn lane, dumbass under her breath.
“As long as I can get Tuesday off, yeah, I’ll come up.
But it’ll be fine—the office will be a ghost town that week anyway. ”
Shit, Max needed to clean. Deep clean, probably, and stock his fridge with the fancy seltzer and probably buy new sheets because his sheets were perfectly fine but he’d had them for years and the thread count was probably an embarrassing number like twenty.
How many pillows did he have? Was he assuming she was going to sleep in his bed? Maybe she’d just want the couch—
“Great,” he said, and sounded surprisingly calm.
“We can even drive up the mountain together and save on gas. There’s a Mexican place east of town that has great chicken mole burritos, and about twenty minutes later the Devil’s Hills overlook has a nice picnic area if you walk down a little way. It’s a good lunch spot. Great view.”
Several seconds too late, Max realized that he’d just described a date. Probably. Not, like, the world’s best or most romantic date, but Eat burritos with me in a pretty spot was a date-ass-date and he was going to have to deal with it.
“Devil’s Hills doesn’t have a picnic area,” she said. “The one with the plaque about the general store?”
“You’ve never seen that picnic area?” he asked. “Both sides of the road have one. You have to walk along that stone wall, and then at the end there’s a little path—”
“That’s Grizzly Tooth Flats,” Sloane said, cutting him off.
Max rolled his eyes and grinned, and felt like a total idiot. “When’s the last time you were there?”
“That’s beside the point, because I’m right.”
“Sloane,” Max said, flicking his blinker on. “I live here—I know where the picnic area is.”
He could hear her sigh, all the way from Los Angeles.
“I don’t think you do,” she said. “Because Devil’s Hills definitely doesn’t have—”
“I’ll show you when we eat burritos there,” he said. “And maybe, for good measure, we can get a Newt Gobbler sighting in while we’re at it.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sloane muttered, but Max could hear the smile in her voice, and he laughed.